I’m Alon. I grew up, and lived half my life, in a big, dense capital city, and it was only after long stretches out in nature that I understood how much I needed that connection. The decade since has been travel, hands-on experience, research, study, education and certifications. When I put down roots in Ann Arbor five years ago, I knew it was time to put it all together and build it to last.

What’s running here

An insulated hot composter fed by the kitchen. Biochar, burned in a kiln from woody waste and soaked until it is ready for soil. An aquaponics system built in an IBC tote, whose water ends up feeding half of the others. A nettle patch for fermented plant feed.

Each one is on the systems page with how it has actually done here.

How it fits together

Very little here works alone. Each system runs on something another one throws away:

• Kitchen scraps go through an electric food recycler, and the dried output goes into the hot composter as a nitrogen charge when it starts to cool.
• Water from the aquaponics tank is the base for worm tea, the liquid that charges the biochar, and what wets a fresh load of compost.
• Diluted urine — the most nitrogen a household makes — charges the biochar and restarts a stalling compost load.
• Cleared buckthorn, an invasive, becomes char instead of a burn pile.

That is the main idea behind the whole yard: the inputs are things you already have, which is why none of it has to be expensive.

Keeping score

I also built a planning tool that models a yard over a full year: sun and shade cast by the actual trees and fences, fifteen years of measured Ann Arbor weather, and what every system needs and produces. Every system in it is marked by how sure we are that it works, from “someone wrote it down somewhere” to “I watched it happen in my own garden.”

When something works here, it gets marked as working. When it fails, that is recorded too. A failure is the one thing no book about someone else’s garden can tell you.

What went wrong

In August 2026 the first nettle ferment and the first banana peel tea both floated, grew a mat of mold, and went onto the compost heap. The second batch of each was weighted under the water and worked. The fix was a weight. It is written up on both systems, because it is the most useful thing I learned all summer.

The aquaponics tank had its own early scare: an ammonia spike in the first weeks, the usual problem in a new system before the bacteria that turn fish waste into plant food have caught up. Big water changes and a dose of beneficial bacteria brought it back, and it has been stable since June.