Kaleb Hanshaw shows his 0.03-acre Appalachian backyard homestead and focuses on comfrey, a plant that accumulates nutrients, speeds up compost, and can be split into twenty new plants from a single root ball. He explains why his greenhouse sits on the highest contour line to capture rainwater by gravity.
Chapters
Hey everybody, Kaleb Hanshaw at the Wild Country. This is the first episode we're releasing, uh, teaching people how to homestead, especially on a small space. We're highlighting our 0.03-acre backyard homestead. We've grown 50% of our own food, we've raised pigs, we've raised chickens right in Appalachia. So the first video I'm going to focus on the start of our greenhouse build and a cool trick on how to build organic matter using my favorite homesteading plant, comfrey. Come jump in! Two biggest things that you need to worry about in terms of designing a landscape is one, water. Two is how do you build organic matter. So we're building a lot of organic matter with the livestock that we have, with the compost factory that we have. Now we want to move towards harvesting as much rainwater in the right spot so that gravity is our friend. So At the back corner, through our miniature food forest, secret garden, we are building a greenhouse. Why are we putting it right here? It's the highest point of elevation on our property, and it's beneficial that it's on the boundary line of our property. So we got really lucky on the location. What'd you find? You found a rock?
What you got? This? This?
So if we harvest water at the highest point of elevation the highest contour line on our property, we can then move water along every part of our home with a focus on our garden beds. I don't know about you, but we have used water from the city and you can smell the chemicals as soon as they come out. So we want to move away completely from relying upon that infrastructure when we can harvest just as much water here to take care of all of our needs. So because we're building a greenhouse, we're going to raise these beds up to where we don't have to bend over. Because of that, we have to move our comfrey plant, and that gives us an excuse to talk about how wonderful comfrey is. So comfrey can be used for many things. It's an accumulator plant. Why it's called an accumulator is that it is mining all kinds of nutrients from the ground and bringing them back up to feed the soil around your plants. Be minerals like potassium, phosphorus, calcium. This is also a living mulch, which means that I can harvest this and then put it right on my fruit tree guilds or even on the ground, and it will then die and decompose and release all those minerals that it was mining back into the the soil. This has a nickname which would make my grandmother, rest her soul, very, very proud. It's a Native American nickname called knitbone. This is a— it's packed with medicinal purposes. You can use this for a salve. It was known in Native American traditions to put these on broken bones and they would heal. So what you could do is If you had a cut, you could wet this and put paste right on the cut, and it would heal that cut. You can make it into a salve and put on bruises, abrasions, really small cuts, and watch it heal that. You can also make this into a toothpaste. You mix it with clove, and it is known to restore the enamel on your teeth, which they say is impossible. But one really powerful reason that I like to use this is it's an activator for your compost pile. So what do I mean by an activator for your compost pile? We can put this in the center, and as it decomposes, it's going to release again all the nutrients that it was mining deep within the ground, but it's going to attract all the beneficial bacteria that love to feed on this plant, creating an explosion within your compost pile. This is going to supercharge it, so it's going to start breaking down at a faster rate. So all you do is just put it right in the center, and that's it. What is it, baby? River got her car. River got her car. I thought she broke her face. Hey, you need to sit down in the red chair until you calm down a little bit, okay? Just sit there until you calm down a little bit, okay?
Okay.
I don't need milk, thank you. All right, homesteading.
Okay.
All right, so what we're gonna do is we're going to transplant this comfrey plant. You should have this plant on every homestead because it benefits all of the plants that are around it. You can use it for, again, all the medicinal purposes that we talked about. This is a chop and drop. That means chop it, you put it right on our fruit trees. It also, again, mines nutrients that other plants benefit from. So it could be a part of all your vegetable guilds. And that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to show you how we can dig this up, one plant, and to have 20 automatically. This is how you're going to dig this up. Now, comfrey roots can go pretty deep, and believe it or not, I'm probably not going to get all of it, which means we're going to grow forever even if we bury it. So I'm gonna go deep down and slowly start bringing that up. All right, take my pitchfork and go on the other side. Now where it's loose, we've got it. Come in here, Abby. Just look at this ground. There's all kinds of roots in here. There's a good comfrey root ball. Now again, we're not going to get all of these, so it's going to grow back. The beautiful part about this plant is all this will separate, and you can stick this right into the ground and it's going to grow you a brand new comfrey plant. So there is about 20 new comfrey plants in this one plant.
That's awesome.
So what you want to do is you want to stick these in the ground as soon as possible. If you can't do it right now, you want to keep these really, really moist until you can plant them. We're going to go ahead and plant them today.
Look at that little guy.
Here's our comfrey transplants. They're indestructible. Look at that. Love it. What is it? You peed?
