Gardening - The Off-Grid Build-Along Video Vault

Composting: The Four Ingredients and the One-to-One Rule

A three minute animated explainer that reduces composting to four ingredients, one ratio, and a forest smell

3 min

Composting attracts opinions the way a pile attracts flies. This three minute animation cuts through all of it: four ingredients, one rule, and a finished pile you check with your nose.

Every pile needs the same four things. Nitrogen arrives with your kitchen and garden waste. Carbon comes mainly from shredded wood. Air goes in every time you mix, and most of the water walks in with the scraps.

Then the rule that spares you the chemistry: one volume of shredded wood for every volume of scraps. That habit alone lands the pile near the ideal thirty to one carbon ratio, keeps it airy, and keeps it from packing into a smelly mat.

Management is a quick mix after each deposit and a turn every three months or so. Usable compost from six months, finished around nine, and done compost smells like a forest floor. Narrated by us over the original animation.

Our edit, with new English narration replacing the original music track, from "Composting 1 - Basic principles" by Graineahumus (de la graine à l'humus), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Family Vegetable Garden, Season by Season (1940, Restored)

Two kids plant a garden from seed catalog to Thanksgiving table in ten minutes of restored 1940 film

From the archive 194010 min

The simplest gardening film in the vault, and maybe the most complete: Betsy and Bill plan a garden from the seed catalog, test the soil by squeezing it (crumbles means ready, sticky means wait), spade it deep, buy seed and onion sets, and plant in straight furrows behind a stretched cord.

The whole growing season follows: radishes first, potatoes cut so each piece keeps one eye, thinning, weeding, watering, beans climbing their poles, and the harvest counted in an account book, because this garden had to pay for itself.

We restored the film, gave the narrator and the family new voices, and made one change worth knowing about: where the 1940 script sprays lead arsenate on the potato beetles, the new narration says exactly what that was, and what to do instead.

Worm Composting in a Stock Tank

A homestead walkthrough of an outdoor worm bin, kitchen scraps in, finished compost and tea out

8 min

When bagged fertilizer is gone from the shelves, fertility has to come out of your own backyard. One homesteader turned a stock tank into a worm bin that eats every kitchen scrap, meat and bones included, without feeding the raccoons.

The setup is simple enough to copy this weekend. Fill the tank two thirds with manure, leaves and straw, let it sit two weeks, add the worms, then feed scraps about twice a week.

Holes drilled low in the tank drain off worm tea, about 30 gallons over one winter, for direct and foliar feeding. The first year on this system his tomato plants hit about seven feet before fruiting.

No power, no store runs, no smell done right. Just a tank in the yard quietly turning garbage into next season's harvest.

Build a PVC Hoop House for Winter Greens

Full hoop house demo from a 2011 community garden show, plus cut and come again lettuce indoors.

28 min

Frost does not have to end your growing year. This community garden show hoops a real November bed step by step, with materials off any hardware store shelf.

The build: half inch PVC cut down to eight feet, clips made free from the offcuts, and 4 or 6 mil plastic stretched tight enough to shed snow and rain without puddling.

Then it moves indoors for cut and come again lettuce. Trim each plant just above the fifth leaf and the growth tip keeps throwing new salad, week after week. Bottom watering keeps the tops dry so damping off fungus never gets a start.

Cheap pipe, two pieces of lumber and a roll of plastic buy you fresh greens past first frost, whether or not the grocery store is an option.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0. From the original source. Full attributions on the credits page.

Build a Movable Hoop House for Winter Greens

PVC hoops, 2x2 lumber, homemade clips, from a February episode of a community TV garden show

28 min

A cold frame you cannot move only ever protects one bed. This build is a freestanding hoop cover light enough to lift and carry, made from 2x2 lumber and half inch PVC.

You cut your own plastic clips from the pipe offcuts, corners rounded so they never tear the sheeting, with a bit of drip hose inside for grip. Figure about five clips per end.

There is a seed math trick worth keeping too: weigh ten peas, run the numbers, and you know a 96 inch row at one inch spacing takes roughly 30 grams of seed. No wasted packets, no bare gaps.

If your food plan includes eating through winter, this is how hardy greens keep growing while the soil sits at 38 degrees.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0. From the original source. Full attributions on the credits page.

Build an Aquaponics Starter Unit From a Half Barrel

Half a food grade rain barrel, a secondhand 60 gallon aquarium, and a homemade automatic siphon

26 min

Fish and greens, raised indoors, on salvage. This garage build turns a 60 gallon aquarium from an estate sale and half a food grade rain barrel into a working aquaponics unit.

You watch the real work: finding the center line and cutting the barrel with a fine tooth blade, plumbing an automatic siphon from three quarter inch PVC under a capped sleeve, and running the loop on a 140 gallon per hour pump.

The troubleshooting stays in the footage on purpose. The first siphon would not start, the white barrel let in enough light to grow algae, and the floating clay pebbles shifted the plants as the water rose. You learn from the fixes, not just the wins.

Built once from scrap, it is a repeatable way to raise protein and greens in the same loop, no soil and no growing season required.

License: CC BY 3.0. From the original source. Full attributions on the credits page.