Zoe Wroten

Grant Schultz wrote:Ben, you mentioned the biggest crime in Vermont is taxes.

Can you compare and contrast Vermont and New Hampshire (the 'liberty' state)

Landforms, government, and taxation.

Grant, to jump in here...I'm relatively new to New Hampshire, so I can still see it from an "outside" perspective, despite experiencing it day-to-day. Unfortunately, I don't know much about VT, so I can't do a great comparison, but I can give you more NH-specific info. I'd say that while we don't have sales or income taxes, the property tax is high. My partner and I own our land debt-free, but we still pay monthly "rent" in taxes comparable to what I was paying to rent an apartment in Boston. That can feel pretty frustrating.

There seems to be pretty strong community feeling, at least in the small towns like mine (~2000 or so folks?). We have community events and potlucks and town plays and stuff like that. I think there is definitely, as Ben pointed out, work to be done in NH to get the local foods/transition/buy local type movements really gathering steam here, but I think that if we can do that, the way NH is set up in terms of small local govt (people seem to be really into town politics -- town meetings are important and well-attended) could work really well.

Welcome Ben! I'm stoked about your book -- been following your work on Facebook and your website for a while. As someone in another thread pointed out, we have a real need for genuine *cold*-climate work.

I'm interested in your experiences that might shed some light on my particular homestead establishment roadblocks/mind-blocks:

1) was there an existing house on your property when you bought it? Do you still use that structure? If so, how old is the building, and what, if anything, did you do to retrofit it?

2) How wooded was your land when you first started? I'm sure that being on a hillside as opposed to a river valley like I am gives you many more opportunities for good sunlight, but if you did have a lot of "excess" trees, how did you choose what to clear when? I have heard Dave Jacke talk about making small clearings in existing woods to plant crop trees into -- would this be a method you would recommend, or would a one-time clearcut of a particular area end up being easier to work with in the long run without causing too much damage?

The piece of land I'm working with has a cleared area around the house, but it buts up against tall pine/oak/maple forest with basically no edge -- someone has mowed right up to the treeline for decades. This means I'm kind of in a fortress of shade, but I'm a little stuck as to how to start tackling this.

Thanks for being here and for any input you may have!

Thanks for all your input.

Tyler, I am still conflicted -- I totally understand your desire to steward and fix past mistakes, but I guess sometimes I can't help but wonder if maybe nature would be better at doing that than me. I probably will "do something" with some of the acres, but I think ultimately I will leave some, partly to let nature do what it wants to do, partly because I simply don't have time or energy to intensively manage 9 acres on my own! This is one of the reasons I am so curious to hear how others approach their zone 5s -- it seems to me like some sort of zone 5 probably just "happens" on a big enough property simply because there is too much else to do, too intensively, in all the closer zones.

Kari, exactly, I am thinking along those same terms, even if I'm not being clear...I don't want to "bump" succession too much. This part of New England has been farmed so much that there is very, very little left in terms of reference ecosystems. Before that it was intensively managed by native populations, sometimes in ways that we may not have records of. And of course several of our important species (chestnut, elm, ash and hemlock in the future if things keep going the way they are) have been wiped out or severely damaged. Much of it has returned to forest, though, and so part of me thinks that nature is certainly smarter than me and can probably figure it out on her own if I just leave her alone....

Brenda, I love the idea of trails. I think trails will at least help me observe better without having to decide whether to cut down a lot of trees just yet. I do walk over there every few months, but maybe some sort of defined trail (with maybe some basic bridges, there are some very marshy spots!) will encourage me to wander around more often. Even if I don't know what I'm doing, I feel like there has to be some balance between "leaving nature to do her thing" and "totally ignoring these acres of land".

I've been lurking on these forums for an embarrassingly long time (years, probably), but I guess I'm feeling loquacious lately! Hi, everyone!

I live with my partner on ~9 wooded acres in southern New Hampshire, zone 5. We live on a small river in a 250-year-old farmhouse. He has lived here for almost 20 years, but I just moved in this May. Since then we've planted several fruit trees, cut down many weed trees, started a garden with raised beds, grown a few pounds of rice in a mini-paddy, constructed a hoophouse, raised ducks and guineas and built them a nighttime coop from local lumber, inoculated mushroom logs, not to mention all the repairs/projects we've started to get the house itself in better shape (on tap for this weekend: more insulation for the roof). Most of the time, I'm working on my own here during the week, with frenzied bouts of four-handed labor on the weekends. I admit that I am really looking forward to snowfall and time to rest and read and actually finish unpacking my things!

This year in my mind was a big year for experiments, observing, and learning about this piece of land. We have the typical acidic, mineral-deficient New England forest soil, and I need to really work on correcting that in the garden next year. On the plus side, we have some 40+ year old blueberries that yield like crazy with no attention paid to them at all.

I love growing mushrooms and have already had success here with winecap stropharia and oysters (shiitake logs look great so far, too), so I want to expand.

Our resources seem to be wood and water and I think there are lots of ways to get better at using them. Permies has been an incredible source of inspiration, and I look forward to contributing/sharing/learning more actively.

Hi, Anna! Your blog is by far one of my favorites and biggest inspirations. And the Egyptian walking onion topsets I won from you this summer are doing great. Nice to see you here at permies!

Thank you, Tyler. This is the kind of reply I was hoping for. I am still waffling about whether I want to/should do any restoration of native species or thinning. Part of me thinks it's pretty cool to get to see a piece of succession in action -- I wonder what it will look like when I die, where it will have gone by then? On the other hand, it's a clearly damaged piece of forest, and a little intervention might be what it needs to guide its succession to somewhere good. I have more to learn before I feel ready to do that, though!

Hi Tristan,

I do have a cat and he's a great mouser, but he does not go near the garden! I guess this is probably for the best, because it also means he doesn't think it's his litterbox.... The main shame about the potatoes is that the mice/voles/whatever left me the shells and ate out the middles so I could see all the lovely potatoes I *would* have gotten. So I'm not giving up just yet!

To answer your questions about the hugelkultur content, I used a base of really rotted pine with fresher stuff on top. This might be the problem -- maybe I need to pack those smaller twigs more densely to keep from creating perfect hidey-holes as they rot!

I have seen pictures of ducks playing in the snow, so I have good hopes for them in the winter. I sure hope so, because I really adore them. They love water, they love bugs, and I have plenty of both!

Hi Patrick (and everyone else!),

As my main outdoor busy season here in NH comes to an end and I start thinking more about firewood, my mind turns to the outer zones of permaculture design. I have ~9 acres of mostly wooded land, with a small river cutting it into two pieces, one 2-acre-ish corner with the house and barn on it and ~7 acres of woods. I have more than enough projects to occupy me on this side of the river, so I have no intentions of doing anything like clearcutting the 7-acre piece. I do wonder, though, whether and how to incorporate it into my overall design? I tend to either ignore it altogether or envision it as a future firewood source (again, plenty of trees to cut down on this side to make room for food forest projects, etc).

How do you recommend approaching the farther edges of permaculture design? If zone 5 is meant to be just wilderness with no human intervention, how should we consider past human impacts? For example, my 7 acres has certainly been clearcut in the past, perhaps as recently as 30 years ago. It does not seem to me to be a healthy ecosystem -- it has a lot of white pine and swamp maple, little understory, dense unhealthy-seeming trees. Do I just let a piece of this be and think of zone 5 as an experiment?

There are many questions embedded in this topic, but I guess the one I'm most interested is this: How do you approach designing zones 4 and 5 (if they are "designed" at all), and what do they look like for you?

Hi Tristan, I'm also working with pretty wet land in NH -- some seasonal high water table, some just plain muck. On just a hand-labor scale this spring I was able to have a productive early garden by creating beds/paths that basically work like berms/swales. I admit I did not understand swales until I did this by accident...the paths, even when full of woodchip mulch, will fill up with rainwater/water table water and slowly sink back down. I had to water three times this dry summer but I think most years I would not have to at all. Some of these are hugelkultur, but I am waiting to see how the hugelbeds do in their 2nd year before I spend hours transforming all my beds to hugels...this year a lot of rodents decided to live in them and eat my potatoes.

A low wet spot in the yard became a rice paddy. The marshy area has wild blueberries that are not very tasty, but maybe a named variety might be good. There are also rootstocks meant for wet spring conditions...Antonovka for apples, I think?

We'll see how they fare over the winter, but so far I am in love with ducks for this climate. They have been happy no matter the weather!

Welcome, Patrick! I very much enjoyed the videos linked in this thread. I look forward to checking out your book -- I had heard of it, but didn't realize what a great resource it seems to be. Thank you for joining us here!