What is your Permies ambition?

I thought I'd start a little support thread for those of us who have a little personal goal they are aiming at. Whether it is the next step on your personal eco scale, or a long term aspiration - what are you trying to achieve?

I'll start!

First at home, I'd like to grow more of my own food and have enough to share and sell. At this stage it is just vegetables. I have been working on my natural farming area and so far I have achieved a glut of Rutabaga (Swede/Neeps)! But I have high hopes for this year as the soil starts to improve, I learn what works, and I have a better chance of achieving optimum sowing times. I'm so excited I'm even making some more plots to grow more this year!

crimson flowered fava bean

There are lots of other things of course in different aspect of my life. For example I have another secret ambition on Permies, which is that I have been working on my post to apple ratio. In April last year it was 2.42, at the moment it is 2.09 (or thereabouts) I'd dearly love it to be less than 2!

My currant goal is the read The Wahls Protocol by Terry Wahls.

I got the book in the mail yesterday.

Maybe there will be some understand of why I have a balance problem since health professional cant seem to figure this out.

It seems I cured what the first doctor suggested by drinking lots of water and doing breathing exercises.

The current health profession doesn't have a clue since all tests were good.

Oh, what fun. Listing out my hopes and dreams.

Short term:
- finish the raised Hugel bed I built for my wife's pumpkin patch
- assist her in other various permie-ish gardening projects on our property this spring and summer
- put my unsightly pile of scrap lumber to use
- turn more rooms in our house into places where plants are visually dominant
- get elected to the board of my HOA so I can bring about the immediate cessation of paying some company to spray poisons on our neighborhood's common green spaces, hopefully instead turn those areas into maintenance-free native wildflower/butterfly habitats or similar
- kill more of my lawn

Long term:
- build the passive or barely-on-grid house of my dreams (in which the living room is a greenhouse fed by a greywater system) on enough forested land in the mountains to have my own nice little hiking trail
- become a specialist inspector of natural/green buildings

First I would like to turn my town into a Garden of Eden. Fortunately it is already halfway there by virtue of Nature’s presence, but to that end I would like to grow and spread as many healthy fruiting plants and edible perennials as is practical. The life here is also under assault from careless, profit-seeking logging and big lawns. The neighboring town however is Eden, with currants sprouting from every stream, grapes on every fence, cherries and serviceberries from every roadside, excellent plums and mayapples, wild apples everywhere, milkweed… and on… all it could use are some more ramps and another century of forest maturation.

Secondly I would like to wear clothes made of homegrown, handspun, and handwoven fiber, and also to use money as little as possible, relying more on gift economy and being less tied down to specific possessions than to the land itself.

And thirdly to be a bit more self-sufficient in food: growing enough grains, roots, and pulses to last the winter.

Ambitious certainly! But through wisdom there is a chance.

I have a simple goal. I just want to become more independent of the “system”.  If each year I can achieve a greater degree of independence, I am satisfied.  Of course, sometimes it feels as if I am shoveling water with a pitchfork, but the goal remains.

Pretty much what John said. Independence, as much as possible. Also, on the more specific side of things, a bunch of mad-scientist-ish projects, many of them plant breeding related.

My goals for this year are to get my herb spiral planted, start the installation of a natural willow fence, attract a swarm of honey bees to my new hive, get a family of purple martins to move into the new digs I placed in the center of the back yard, start two keyhole beds right off the back porch, and try my hand again at a three sisters garden (I didn't let the corn get high enough last time), and finish sheet mulching my fruit tree guild under the two apple trees, pear tree, peach tree, and cherry tree.

If I have any energy left, I may try David the Good's grocery row gardening in one area, and experiment with mixed seed scattering in a 10x20 foot section just to see what thrives and what dies.

j

I want another species that collaborates with my garden (rabbits or quail) instead of trying to destroy it (dogs) ;)
I already have fish and it was a great decision.
And I want to keep cool when dogs or humans or pests do destroy my garden anyway...

So I'll practice mindfulness and get more thorny raspberries... because getting more plants is always the answer :))

Flora Eerschay wrote:
And I want to keep cool when dogs or humans or pests do destroy my garden anyway...

Hmm, I have the same problem (dogs of destruction) do we have a thread on that?

So I'll practice mindfulness and get more thorny raspberries... because getting more plants is always the answer :))

:))

My plans for this spring/summer are to finish setting up my annual garden and start working on making guilds in our orchard. We already have laying hens but we are getting more and will be moving them through different paddocks in the summer with moveable fencing. We're also getting chicks for meat birds. Then if we get a good apple harvest, I want to make sure to can and put away a lot more applesauce this year. I'm also building a little free library/little free pantry!

Overall, in the future I want our orchard to be a permaculture food forest with several varieties of fruit and nut trees (right now it's just apples) and berry bushes, I hope to get sheep (Shetland ewes, and a Gotland ram) to help take care of the fields so we don't have to worry about the forest taking over the patches of meadow and so we can harvest wool, milk and meat. A couple pigs too, but we have some work to do on our barn before we get there though!

The end goal is to have a farm stand to sell our homemade sheeps milk soap, our eggs, baked goods, and to give away our extra produce for free. I want to produce enough meat for ourselves to live year round without having to buy any (though I will trade some with a local farm that has beef). I want to learn how to make cheese, though just for ourselves. I also want to learn how to spin our wool (just received a huge load of wool from the Canadian Co-Operative of Wool Growers to practice with!) and sell skeins of naturally dyed hand spun yarn online and at local craft markets.

So many ambitions.
1. Leave a living legacy.  My garden and my children (including daughters in law and grands).  
2. Develop a relationship with the land and plants.
3. Collaborate with said plants and make healthy people.  Currently we (My daughter in law and i) run a small herbal business.   We enjoy crafting herbal products, and especially thinking through the process to create individualized preparations.
4. Collaborate with our community in making our world a beautiful place.

At this particular point in time, I'd be happy to get repairs done on my 4 baby shelters (4'x8' bottomless for Momma ducks and ducklings when Hubby's chickens haven't invaded... which they have at the moment. I guess I'd better get eviction notices ready, since they aren't paying rent!)

I've also got a larger shelter that's desperate to be rebuilt. The Geese could really use it.

Then there's my collection of trees that need their forever homes. Does anyone know if deer are partial to mulberry?

This will be my second full spring in this house.

Last year’s project was to destroy my front lawn. Check! It was pretty small so it was an easy first start while I sorted out how to tackle some bigger issues in the backyard. Now my, used to be a patch of spotty lawn, has two columnar apple saplings, two blueberry bushes, two smallish raised beds (for the most sun-loving vegetables), and a rosemary bush. I’m going to try growing chamomile in the space left.

This year’s ambition is to tear up at least part of the lawn/moss in the backyard and plant a few vegetables back there. I did manage to get some elderberry bushes planted back there already. Oh, and continue the contest against the blackberries in the corner. Maybe start training some of it up some lattice.

The ultimate goal (some day): To completely eliminate all the lawn; maintain a large garden that I can start preserving from for winter; get a smallish nut tree; keep chickens; and maybe add couple more small fruit trees. Also, water it all completely from rain barrels (should be totally doable here in the PNW).

Great topic!

For this year, my ambitions are:
1.  to identify what food plants and useful herbs are already growing on my little piece of land in Bulgaria
2. get more food plants growing by planting/ scattering lots of seeds and seeing what survives STUN
3. manage the water on the land better, especially setting up rainwater collection, rain basins, and swales
4. work to get the house more livable, using natural or recycled materials wherever possible (the "natural and recycled" part has been a big fail so far - I'm not able to spend the time I need there to do the work myself and the builders used loads of cement)
5. start a small coppice for firewood

Wow! Thanks for creating this amazing topic - VERY inspiring reading these dreams and ambitions!

I too share many of these, so I'll keep it simple...

- Build soil organic matter

- Successfully double the sweet potato production

- Speak less, listen more

- Sell off more of my electric and gasoline powered tools

Jay Angler wrote:At this particular point in time, I'd be happy to get repairs done on my 4 baby shelters (4'x8' bottomless for Momma ducks and ducklings when Hubby's chickens haven't invaded... which they have at the moment. I guess I'd better get eviction notices ready, since they aren't paying rent!)

I've also got a larger shelter that's desperate to be rebuilt. The Geese could really use it.

Then there's my collection of trees that need their forever homes. Does anyone know if deer are partial to mulberry?

For the mulberries, bushes or trees, the deer will browse them if they are not fenced.  
Are you training them as trees or as bushes? I decided to have both, so on some, I remove all but one leader, and on the others, I bend down the branches so they will be easier to access. The berries are small though.
The deer browse my basswoods mercilessly. my basswoods seem to just not get ahead at all: they jump on top of them, eat the top, roll on them until there is nothing left. 3rd year now, and they just are not letting the basswood live.
For the geese, do you know if there is a kind that doesn't fly? I'd rather not put all that work into them only to see them fly away.
There are bigger ponds in the neighborhood.

For my 85th year, share more of my years of permaculture experience
Spend at least 2 hours of vigorous activity getting my land to produce my food.
To live forever so that I can build my fly sail to circumnavigate the earth twice to see what grows from the contents of my compost toilet planted on uninhabited islands.

I’d love to make our 1/2 acre a super beautiful, lush forest garden refuge. That’s, let’s say, the mid term goal I have.

In the meantime, the little steps include learning as much as I can by reading and doing, growing as much of our fruits and veggies as I can (or trading work for fruits and veggies at my friend’s farm down the road), and learning to graft, save seeds, and propagate woody plants from seed, air layering, cuttings, etc. And learn to identify all the plants I want for my forest garden year-round so I can make note of wild plants I see to come back and save seed from them!

It’s my hope that eventually (we are in our 20s) but hopefully not too long from now, we’ll be able to find a bigger piece of land to call our own, and I’ll already have the makings of my next forest garden here—in all the plants and seed I’ve saved and cultivated.

Will I join in, will I dare??
Thank you for all contributions - a beautiful encouragement.
Lots of catching up to do after spells away from the land I’m stewarding, some exciting wild developments and some aspects require reining in. A bit like me really.

So the plan is that we help each other by looking, seeing, listening more attentively.

Stopping to take in the brilliance of a rainbow.

On grey days, the feel of the earth under bare feet is soothing.
Best to avoid areas where roses and friends have been pruned. We are in the real world.

To enjoy the grand show that is before me, whilst I do my thing outside, and to share my experiences, did you see ….?

There is so much that can take me into a very dark and uncomfortable abyss, over which I have no influence so ****** to that.
I’ll vote with my purse, give my attention where I can contribute and celebrate and sigh verrry deeply at my neighbour’s chickens destruction in my garden, mulch profusely, sweat, laugh.
All that before breakfast.
Well somebody did use the word ambition and now I must take up the spade, there is stuff to do.

Good health and blessings to us all
M-H

R West wrote:I’d love to make our 1/2 acre a super beautiful, lush forest garden refuge. That’s, let’s say, the mid term goal I have.

In the meantime, the little steps include learning as much as I can by reading and doing, growing as much of our fruits and veggies as I can (or trading work for fruits and veggies at my friend’s farm down the road), and learning to graft, save seeds, and propagate woody plants from seed, air layering, cuttings, etc. And learn to identify all the plants I want for my forest garden year-round so I can make note of wild plants I see to come back and save seed from them!

It’s my hope that eventually (we are in our 20s) but hopefully not too long from now, we’ll be able to find a bigger piece of land to call our own, and I’ll already have the makings of my next forest garden here—in all the plants and seed I’ve saved and cultivated.

Good luck with all that! I see you've been doing some of the SKIP PEP badges, that's a good way of demonstrating the skills you have learnt.

Everybody has great goals!
Mine is: grow as much edibles as I can, both annual vegetables and perennials, including fruit shrubs. And to use what grows in my meals, and in jams, ferments, etc. If it's more than what I need: share with others.
Except for the annuals I don't think I need to plant more, only I need to make more use of the edible parts of the perennials.

Welcome to Permies T.

It is good to see a fellow upstate New Yorker! We have a few others at this thread - https://permies.com/t/225418/York-Permie-Rollcall

Hope to see you in more threads.

Welcome to Permies, T Bienz.
What an exciting time this must be for you! Let us know about your progress. We'd love to know you are doing well there.
Wishing you the very best in your new digs, in NY.

Welcome T! As a former NYC gal (now a western NC homesteader) I spent a lot of time up in the Catskills. Absolutely magical & stunningly beautiful! Enjoy!

My intentions this year:

1 My husband built a wonderful tiny house & id like to figure out how to use it for storage of some sort, maybe so of my harvest, maybe plant starts??? I need to get creative!!

2 I want to play around with intercropping & succession planting this year.

3 Grow more wild flowers, medicinals & herbs!

This is the outside of our tiny house. Didn’t attach before!

I'm headed into fall, so my short-term goal is to repeat last year's massive bumper crop of daikon radishes! also to put my baby asparagus seedlings into their new home.

My ambition is to find an area where there are many like minded folks , buy a few acres of land with no restrictions and create a small self sufficient homestead. Mild winters ,woods and creeks. I guess you could call it a dream until it occurs.I was nearly there here in NY, but it just wasn't the right place due to the way things are here. I have a small home to sell and skills. Arkansas looks like it would suit me, any thoughts or opinions are welcomed. Thanks and God bless.

Two keyhole beds started off the back porch.

Jim Garlits wrote:My goals for this year are to get my herb spiral planted, start the installation of a natural willow fence, attract a swarm of honey bees to my new hive, get a family of purple martins to move into the new digs I placed in the center of the back yard, start two keyhole beds right off the back porch, and try my hand again at a three sisters garden (I didn't let the corn get high enough last time), and finish sheet mulching my fruit tree guild under the two apple trees, pear tree, peach tree, and cherry tree.

If I have any energy left, I may try David the Good's grocery row gardening in one area, and experiment with mixed seed scattering in a 10x20 foot section just to see what thrives and what dies.

j

This year, I am going to try to grow sweet potatoes for the first time.  We started with three sweet potatoes held up with toothpicks in a cup of water.  I think we now have more than 20 jars holding a half dozen slips each.  We will fire up the season extender (rmh in a hugelkultur) so we can plant early.

Good luck with those Paul! I've not have much success yet with sweet potatoes, every few years I try again....
It only occurred to me recently after reading something on here that I could try and grow them as houseplants (they are of course perennial). I think it was one of Pearl's posts not this one but one about decorative indoor plants. I think my house is as yet too cold, but they may still overwinter as tubers and then regrow.....

paul wheaton wrote:This year, I am going to try to grow sweet potatoes for the first time.  We started with three sweet potatoes held up with toothpicks in a cup of water.  I think we now have more than 20 jars holding a half dozen slips each.  We will fire up the season extender (rmh in a hugelkultur) so we can plant early.

Last year I had a sweet potato plant. An acquaintance of me had a bunch of slips he gave away at our 'plant-swap-day'. He brought some sweet potatoes too that started making slips and I got one of those. I planted it and it grew a nice amount of leaves. At the end of the season I was hoping to find some new sweet potatoes under the ground. But alas, there was only one, a very thin one. :-(

I'm actually kinda blown away by the sweet potato plants I have going, right now. I've never harvested a single one of these tiny sweet potatoes, but I have been eating the greens from the exact same plants for almost 2 full years, now, just growing them in 5gallon buckets, and overwintering them in a south facing window. They seem to thrive on neglect (the only reason they're still going!). The first time the temps decide to drop below freezing, I bring them in, set the 2 buckets in a big shoe tray. In the spring, I start hardening the off while we wait until after the last freeze, and out they go, again.

As far as ambitions... we're planning to bring in a couple more sheep to breed for meat; another buck(goat) to freshen the gene pool, in the ongoing national effort to reach full breed status, with the Nigoras (dual purpose dairy/ fiber); add to the infrastructure to support those new additions, as well as the new lamb that was born (quite unexpectedly) this week, and the 2 or 3 new goat kids were expecting in early May; harvest our first honey; bring in round 2 of raising Muskovy 'ducks', a small flock of guineas (to help control the tick, scorpion, and copperhead populations), and hopefully encourage a couple of our ducks and older chickens to go broody.

Beyond the livestock, I'm going to try again, on hazelnuts and figs, add some wildflowers for the bees and(I hope) some Nanking Cherries for the bees, us, and the wildlife to share, and get some harvesting hand tools, to make wild blackberry & peach harvesting safer, faster, and easier.

Construction & repair projects on the board are deck repairs, sealing the pond, learning metalworking (so we can do more of our own work, here), building a modular, portable rocket stove/ pizza oven (!?!?!?), and the aforementioned livestock infrastructure improvements & expansions...
We might be looking for wwoofers!!!

Carla Burke wrote:... another buck(goat) to freshen the gene pool, in the ongoing national effort to reach full breed status, with the Nigoras (dual purpose dairy/ fiber);...

Carla, this caught my attention. Do you have a Permies-thread  on those goats? With photos?

This year, I will try to fill up my pantry cabinets for autumn.
Two years ago I had a good tomato harvest, last year was a little disappointing.
This year I have started lots of peas and fava beans, which I hope will give a decent harvest too. Then the other vegetables will follow.
We are a little late after late colds in february ; still waiting for the starting signal from my snowball tree.

And building soil. And a better place to live for anyone growing - creeping - walking - flying by.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Carla Burke wrote:... another buck(goat) to freshen the gene pool, in the ongoing national effort to reach full breed status, with the Nigoras (dual purpose dairy/ fiber);...

Carla, this caught my attention. Do you have a Permies-thread  on those goats? With photos?

I don't think I do? I know there are pictures of them scattered around, but for some reason, it never really occurred to me to do a thread on my goats. I'll see what I can do to remedy that, soon, but I need to get some more pictures, first. It would be a great way to help other understand the breed, better, even if some of my ways of managing them are a little unorthodox... Come to think of it... isn't that kinda what permies is all about? Teaching the world there are many ways to cross a river? Yup. I'll do it.

Ack! To turn more clay into soil, to finish my Hugel bed, to turn more lawn into garden, to grow more vegetables with my flowers, sooo many projects!

My Permies ambition is to create a sustainable and harmonious living environment where I can grow my own food, minimize waste, and live in harmony with nature.

Muhammad Khan wrote:My Permies ambition is to create a sustainable and harmonious living environment where I can grow my own food, minimize waste, and live in harmony with nature.

Welcome to Permies!

Great theme, Nancy.  I love seeing what brings other people happiness and fulfillment.  This helps to get back into the space of creating a clearer and more focused vision for what I genuinely want for myself.  

Here is a short and incomplete list I quickly put together:  

To make an income and be supported for doing permie stuff.  

Start a landrace project that includes at least a dozen different species.

Clean up, organize, and design my families inherited properties.

Plant lots of fruit trees by direct seeding.

Take our existing apple trees that are either non productive, or produce spitter apples, and turn them into frankentrees.

Shape some terraces and build a few larger hugels.

Make a berm shed, or two.

Make a Holzer style root cellar.

Make a few Holzer style animal shelters.

Make a few natural log hives for honey bees.

Make some ponds, without liners.

Build a half dozen smaller houses and structures that fall below the permitting guidelines, and interconnect them in a way that it can feel like a bigger house, even though they are technically seperate. Not connected to "the grid."Lots of "Rockety" contraptions included.

Build a passive solar greenhouse where we can grow semi tropical fruits and herbaceous perrenials, with RMH

Did i mention Rocket Mass Heaters? Lots of them.

Produce enough of our own sustenance that we are no longer dependent on questionable store bought stuff, while having enough to share and sell.

Create a syntropic style silvopasture system that includes European Bison and is able to support other visiting wildlife, such as the Eurasian Lynx, which has already been spotted on our property in the past.

Establish a water cycle from home, through greenhouse, then garden and series of ponds, and back to house.

Create a natural biological water filtration system. Be able to drink water from our land without buying fancy filters and systems.

Build a compost powered water heater, and energy source.

Write a book and/or start making educational media.

Become both PEP1 and PEM1 certified.  

Reach at least a level 7 on the wheaton eco scale.

Help do my part to inspire others to live in more harmony with Nature.