Peak Moment TV

Tour a permaculture back yard garden. Visit a tiny home. In each episode of Peak Moment TV, Janaia Donaldson hosts practical grass roots entrepreneurs who are exploring locally reliant lifestyles to meet these challenging times. Peak Moment TV is cross-pollinating the most challenging shift in human history - an energy transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable living.

Topics include local food production, permaculture, sharing, renewable energy, building community, natural building, and economic, psychological, and personal resilience.

Most of the programs were taped along the west coast of North America. This program may not be about your specific community, but it's about everybody's communities in our global community. Stations and viewers tell us they love this show: it's personal, engaging, very local, inspirational, and informative.

And with the economic downturn -- it's timely. The heart of this program are stories told by people about their ideas and actions to live with a smaller footprint, to be connected to the earth and each another, to be more self-sufficient while they protect themselves and their families in the downturn.

The series (326 episodes as of early 2017) has aired since 2006 on about two dozen community access stations nationwide including Manhattan NY, Portland OR, Maine coast stations, and many smaller communities.

It was the winner of the 2007 and 2009 Western Access Video Award for Excellence in local Cable Programming in the "Talk Show - Issues/Professional" category. (Alliance for Community Media Western States Region).

Peak Moment programs are sponsored on PegMedia thanks to the generous contribution of Leo and Marj Immonen, who bring the program to their Wrentham, MA station.

http://www.peakmoment.tv/

Details

Peak Moment - The Resilient Gardener — Surviving and Thriving

This episode is currently not viewable online.

“We’ve had 50 years of unusually stable weather… What do we need to do now, to garden in times that are less predictable?” Plant breeder Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, suggests growing a wider variety of crops adapted to conditions where you are; crops needing minimum inputs; and varying gardening patterns with the year. “Short season crops are a premium,” she asserts. She discusses seed saving, and storing enough seeds so everyone in your neighborhood can be gardening if need be.

Peak Moment - For Humans, Bugs and Beauty — An Urban Food Forest Demonstration

This episode is currently not viewable online.

“This place is famous. People loving coming by here because at any time of year you can get something to eat.” Architect Mark Lakeman, co-founder of the City Repair project, gives a tour of the corner sidewalk outside his Portland office building, where a food forest is bursting with life. A diagram shows where over 80 plants are located in six or seven vertical layers. Tall fruit trees, flowers, a grape arbor, herbs, berries, small vegetables, and ground cover are abundant.

Peak Moment - Share-It-Square - Creating Neighborhood Gathering Spaces

This episode is currently not viewable online.

Every year for the past two decades, the neighbors near Sherrett Street in southwest Portland repaint their colorful street intersection. Resident Mighk Simpson gives us a tour on painting day. On the sidewalk corners are spacious cob benches (with roofs), a children’s playhouse woven from tree branches and found materials, a beehive-shaped dispensary for the monthly neighborhood newsletter The Bee, a 24/7 Tea Station, and the first-ever “Little Free Library”, an innovation which has now gone viral around the world.

Peak Moment - The Open Source Seed Initiative - Protecting Our Food Commons

This episode is currently not viewable online.

Plant breeder Carol Deppe is passionate about making seeds available for all growers, rather than being in the control of a handful of corporations. “If we want to control the kind of food available and the kind of agricultural system that we want, we have to do our own breeding,” she explains. “What Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) does is create a pool, a protected commons, of germ plasm which will always be available for breeding. The OSSI pledge goes along with these seed varieties, but also if you breed new varieties.

Peak Moment - Ecovillages - A Leading Edge for Sustainability

This episode is currently not viewable online.

What might ecovillages show us about living sustainably? Political science professor Karen Litfin visited fourteen ecovillages in both developing and developed countries. The author of Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community looked for commonalities among such communities, whose intention is to live sustainably. Looking through the lenses of ecology, economics, community and consciousness, she found they share a common worldview: The web of life is sacred, and we’re part of that web.

Peak Moment - Grow Your Food in a Nook and Cranny Garden Pt2

This episode is currently not viewable online.

"We're here to help form things. We have a food forest mimicking what the natural forest does." Ann and Gord Baird's edible gardens make use of less-than-ideal growing spaces on their rocky knoll. Nook and cranny gardens optimize micro-climates -- water catchment for perennial plants, rocks that retain warmth to extend the growing period, and trees providing fuel, food and shade. They are transitioning away from the annual food plants. As more perennials get established, they're becoming foragers rather than cultivators.

Peak Moment - Grow Your Food in a Nook and Cranny Garden Pt1

This episode is currently not viewable online.

"Chickens are naturally forest birds." A tour of Gord and Ann Baird's edible landscape starts at the off-grid chicken house and yard, containing fruit trees that provide a protective canopy against flying predators. Roof rainwater becomes drinking water for the chickens, whose “rototilling” has prepared land now being planted in grains — for themselves and people. Don't miss Hannah Hen catching a berry in mid-air! Then visit a Hobbit-ish above-ground root cellar built of cob, where cheeses, vegetables, and beer stay cool and dry.

Peak Moment - Beyond Cabbage - The Fermentistas Show Us How

This episode is currently not viewable online.

Let’s cultivate fermented food not only because it’s healthy, but for the wonderfully rich diversity of flavors! That’s what Kirsten K. Shockey and Christopher Shockey encourage. These food entrepreneurs show us how easy it is to make sauerkraut: slice and salt cabbage, scrunch it to get brine, press into a jar, weight it down, let it sit for a few days.

Peak Moment - The Bean and Grain Project - Outperforming Chemical Agriculture

This episode is currently not viewable online.

The Southern Williamette Bean and Grain Project is exploring bean, grain, and edible seed varieties which can be added to those already grown in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Oregon Tilth co-founder and farmer Harry MacCormack shares wisdom and stories about farms transitioning from chemical to organic farming. His book The Transition Document: Toward a Biologically Resilient Agriculture is a compendium of organic practices, like using compost tea to feed soil micro-organisms.