Hugo Morvan

Hi Evie. I'm a man so probs not well postioned to comment, but i migrated as well, so there are some similarities.
I share a lot of seeds with people and plants, started to graft trees with my mate who taught me.And now we've been giving them away and that opens up talk. And they didn't pay so every time they see this tree in future a little thought goes out to this crazy foreigner they got it from.
I've been to my hometown and people are really suffering now. Many people are lonely and feel isolated, just like work, eat, sleep, do some other stuff, but connection seems missing. And everybody chasing dollars.
I think connection is important. Because we lack that. We're tribal animals and it can impact health.
I use permaculture as a means to connect people and get them interested in nature. Say i'm happy they have that late flowering apple tree, because i am , but stuff like even if it's old and dying maybe even, it gives them sense of having something, being important to someone. I'm not like faking that shit, well you Scottish, no bullshitters up there, tell it like it is. But as society is going down, people see prices going up, and worry, so interest in nature returns, they want those trees/shrubs/seeds.

Cherry trees can get very big and shade out a lot of stuff. So take a good look at how the sun moves if it's one of those bigger ones. The frist year is essential to water quite a bit if it gets hot. Usually the evenings are good for that. I like to give a lot in one session so the water runs deeper into the soil where it's less likely to evaporate and the roots dive deeper sooner than like water every day and then the trees get used to that. But it does take some monitoring which usually is not the thing people are busy with when just moving house. Because then making the house really to your taste usually gets priority.
So working with watering cans  can be challenging if you're tired. Ideally one can get these hoses with timers attached. But if there's no money than i would plant in a way that the walk with a watering can isn't too much. Peach trees are hardy where i am. Goji can get big and bushy and even serve as a bit of a wind brake which can be really advantageous.
Sometimes planting north to a shady big tree can work quite nice in hotter climates, cause then you get less scorching drought problems and once the tree is established one can cut down the big tree or prune it back and use it to feed the soil.
So it depends a lot on what you find there! But remember never despair and keep putting pits in the soil and seed local plants that do well. Maybe plan for a pond attached to gutteringsystem.  

Hello Yin. Please do make a simplified drawing of how you do it and maintain it. Is there a time when a tractor comes in and sucks out the composted waste?

I think it's important you tell us all, because you have a long time experience with it. As well many green minded people are not very happy about dry toilet systems and would not dream to install that on their property. Yours is like an in between it seems. Or am i confused and do you not use water to flush waste away?

Bit of a stretch, but for me in the same line of weird perception habits people tend to have about edible crops. Animal fodder.
I'm close to a farming community and my neighbor just laughs about me eating corn. That's for animals he says. Just because it grew so well and they had it in abundance they started to give it to animals and then it creates this like distance. We're not animals, we're better than animals, animals eat the weirdest dirtiest things, they eat waste, so we cannot ever eat whatever they're having.
Ever heard of cow peas? I mean come on. My permaculture friend grew tons of them, he didn't tell me what it was. He just had me snacking on them. I loved the things. Might be me being a bit of an animal, i will not deny.
Hope you get my jist. Same thing for invasive species. Oh it grows really well here. Then human psychology makes it that it must be bad. it cannot possibly be in the grey zone of it has some good, but some bad properties. It's growing! Where i live nothing ever grows, so it must be taking over the world. And then we focus as humans on this thing. Same thing when you get some hip shoes or a moped or an electrical car, then you see them evrywhere. Then this 'invasive' species is suddenly everywhere. It's taking over and we must by all means warn all the humans to kill this. Nothing can ever grow where i live and it must stay that way. That's just how sad we are. Two people cannot be right. No one is wrong and the other is right. And probably the one who we agree with is always right on everything else as well and the other is always wrong and evil while we're at it because he/she lies. Duality.
But back to invasives, they usually just build soil and capture tons of carbon and sometimes even produce lovely produce.
So a lot, lot goes with that question is BIGGER better.

They're literally breeding strawberries to be super red before getting sweet, so critters avoid them but people want them badly. They breed varieties of tomatoes for transport resistance, they couldn't care less how they taste or how many nutrients they contain. People want the best for their buck, which is the biggest and shiniest. While modern research has proven that the little spots /scabs insects cause on apples and what have you are full of anti oxidants keeping the big C away. WHile every time i travel by train i hear people talk about someone in their surrounding succombing to cancer or getting operated or treatment. It's so common now. But keep going for that biggest, supershiny, spotless stuff flown in from the other side of the world where they make big ones. much cheaper, much better!

I met a rose fanatic with almost a hundred varieties. She wouldn't stop giving me cuttings. Hopefully they take, otherwise i only have 4. I'd love to have a rosegarden.

Kids usually react like you describe. They're mourning for what they lost for a while. Incapable of believing things will become normal again. How long this lasts depends on the character of the child a lot and the surrounding.. If they are seen as interesting to be with they make friends quickly to replace the loss..
My daughter and her mom moved many times after the split. One time was very bad, she was really down and really didn't like the new place, but soon she felt better than before. Then she had to move back from where she came from and really resisted that.
I know a friend who migrated to another country (state i guess is the same). One kid was sad for a long time, but he's still here in the countryside the adapting kid moved away.
Be there for the child, speak with them, talk about why you had to, maybe show you also have a hard time leaving things behind. But don't let it get to you too much either, because they will bounce back before summer normally.

I'll just reply to myself, because i do not know how to get text-picture-text-picture format.

The soil is so expensive nowadays. My farmer friend has acces to fantastic big scale machinery. So he asked me to come up with a formula that we could make our own. Maybe deserving of it's own topic, i don't know.

So i did some research and came up with a third sand, a third cowdung and the last third a mix between soil from under Acacia trees and soil from under Alder trees.  He has got all this stuff on his farm, and then we mixed it in some big assed farmer mixer that goes behind a tractor.
It was disastrous it became one big mess of clay like stuff we had to scoop out. Then we decided to add wood chips to the mix and it became very nice soil.

The wood chips were fresh and the manure was a bit too fresh also, it posed some interesting problems. But noproject ever was complete without problems and we learned and i try to share that here so people do not make the same errors maybe, but we can make new ones together.

That was done this summer and he brought me a bag and i used it and to my surprise many acaia trees started growing, which never had worked before! So this bag we used in the propagation squares/boxes got weathered and is hopefully a bit matured. Because the experiments between shop soil and ours showed ours was better in the start, but later ran out of steam because the seedlings got robbed of nitrogen because the decaying wood consumed all... Anyway, that's another story. Here some pix of us experimenting making good and cheap composted microbial active soil.

i made one of these because Shane of youtube came up with this idea. It made sense, it featured all kinds of fancy electronics, like warming cables , that i bought and implied and that broke and turned out not to be that important.

It's basicly four planks connected and a sheet of plastic keeping evil tree roots looking for water and nutrients out.
Then fill the inner space with compost. Get cuttings in, big ones small ones, fat ones and thin ones, to see what will take (mostly fat ones).

Oh yeah. Very important. Cuttings need very little sun. They got no roots but they do have leaves if everything is normal, so they evaporate , but cannot drink water as of yet. So north side makes sense. For most people in the world (except south America and Australia). On the north of a building or tree line little sun comes there and normally it's not very popular to be planted, because stuff that needs a lot of sun like figs and doesn't like a lot of frost is planted on the south side of a building.

This is my second set up. Two squares sitting aside an IBC connected to the roof and guttering.
The farmer i made the soil with helped me with his handy tractor. Thank God for that, what are we going to do without our farmer friends!

Once i had chickens, but no time to maintain the electric fence. The chicks learned to forage outside the big chickens remembered the juice and stayed in. Until only two were left then the big chickens followed the chicks. I learned to protect seeded beds with prickly branches. They were good scratching and picking insects doing little damage. They started to live in the trees. They went over to the neighbor that had a builders crew and they dissapeared every friday one by one. Really weird. Every friday the fox came and i had one less. My neighbor said he thought it was a two legged fox that brought his honey chicken in the weekend.
When they were gone i realised i couldn't really care for the animals and never had new ones. Now i'm looking for a big breed that sleeps in trees and eats foxes and bird of prey then i'll try again.