Incredible Permaculture and Homesteading School – A Complete Tour of Wild Abundance!

Hi, I'm Natalie Bogwalker and I'm the founder and director of Wild Abundance. Wild Abundance is a school that teaches skills for living with earth. It's my home and the home of my family and many others. It is part of a neighborhood of magical people and it is a permaculture demonstration site. Here I have built this cabin with my own two hands and with a ton of help. And you will see this along with a bunch of other really cool things. We're gonna see a cob oven, we're gonna see an outdoor kitchen, an amazing garden, large-scale terraces, rainwater catchment, and way more. So please come along. Here goes. This is the original part of the cabin. So the original build was 12 feet by 16 feet. I want to point out a few features because when you're building a tiny house, it's really important to pay attention to details. As you walk in the door, you're straight to the kitchen and that's really important because for me, that's where I spend a lot of time in the house. This is a sink. It's made out of soapstone and I carved in these drainage points. This windowsill is also soapstone and this is south facing. So when it is wintertime, the sun comes in, it hits this windowsill, it heats the sink and it heats them up and then it releases that heat into the room. This wood stove, when this is really roaring in the wintertime, that also heats up the soapstone and then that heat is slowly released, even if the fire goes out from the wood stove. The leaf-shaped garden is a living laboratory for our online gardening school. Throughout the year, we grow 33 different types of vegetables using a wide array of techniques that we've developed to be perfect just for this area. We grow so much food that it's way more than my family can eat. So we get to share the bounty with a lot of different people in our community. We've planted over 300 fruit trees and bushes here at Wild Abundance, making it into a permaculture paradise. We've planted apples and chestnut trees, raspberries, blueberries, gummi berries, service berries, marion berries, mulberries, and a lot more. And it's really beautiful to see how they're all interacting and to see people who come here being so inspired and excited about what they can grow in their own backyards. Here's some large-scale terraces that we built using the appropriate technology of some heavy machinery. The amount of food that we're going to be able to grow here is enormous compared to what we could have grown growing on the hillside that was here before. And it really took just probably 10 gallons of gas to make all of these terraces. This is one of our three-season shelters where apprentices, guests, and all sorts of folks have stayed in a place that's very close to nature. You can see there's no screens and the walls come high enough to keep all the rain out, but don't keep out the sounds of the bird song. This is just an amazing way to live. And luckily, we don't have many biting insects because we have cultivated all these ponds so that the frogs keep the insects down. And we can sleep out like this and not get bit. Our outdoor classrooms are incredibly unique. They protect you from the wind and the rain, but you're still totally immersed in nature as you're learning from amazing teachers. The classes that we host do really well in these spaces. They range everywhere from wildcrafting and permaculture to tiny house and women's carpentry classes. Our rainwater catchment systems catch water from the roof of buildings and store that water as high as possible so that it can be used with pressure in our gardens and in sinks and all sorts of places. We have these systems on several different buildings. And so in times of drought, we have as much water as we need. This cob oven is made of clay, sand, and straw. The inside of it is super dense. It's thermal mass. So when we build fires, the heat gets trapped in there because there's another layer outside of that called a thermal break. And it's made of mostly straw with a bunch of clay surrounding it so it doesn't catch on fire. And finally, we have this beautiful earthen plaster on top. So we make the fire, the heat gets trapped in there, the fire dies down, and then we cook delicious pizzas in there. We sometimes have them at the ends of classes. And we also have them for community gatherings where we make a bunch of pizza crusts. And everyone, the kids, the old people, everyone in between, put all the toppings that we want on them and then put them back in to make delicious pizzas. This round pole timber frame and wattle and daub outdoor kitchen was built with logs that were harvested by me and friends right here on this land. And then the wattle and daub was made by taking saplings that were growing overcrowded in the forest, weaving them together into like a big basket, and then covering them with cob that's made with clay, sand, and straw. This technique has been used by indigenous people all over the world, and it still works awesomely today. This kitchen is used by participants during classes. And one perk of living in the mountains is that you can drink right from the top. Here at Wild Abundance, we share skills for living with the earth and for smashing the patriarchy through empowerment and learning how to actually do the things that you need for survival with your own hands. We teach classes on wildcrafting, permaculture, and gardening, on tiny houses and natural building, and on women's carpentry. This place is an institute that is integrated into the landscape. And we really care about our students. We want to nurture them to be able to take what they learn here and do awesome things in the world. And we do this not just here on our campus, but by taking these classes online so that they can meet you where you are at. And we sincerely hope that this tour can inspire you to take pieces of what you've seen and apply it to do some good in the world.