My wife and I just bought a piece of property that has about six acres that could be used for growing food at some point in the future. To my knowledge this hasn't been used for farming of any kind in the past, but it seems it was bush hogged a few times a year to keep the land usable for recreation, or perhaps at some point it was mowed. Over the last two years it has not been maintained until this past fall when they bush hogged about 1/2 - 2/3 of the roughly six acres. This portion is now full of small tree stumps (2 inch diameter or less) and weeds/grass. The other half is full of pine and privet that needs to be cut. The soil is either rocky or red clay.
This weekend I planted four apple trees and four plum trees, which was getting the cart ahead of the horse, as I haven't done any soil testing yet, but other than that nothing has been done yet.
Right now I primarily want to focus on building the soil up. As I said, I don't know what shape the soil is in yet - I plan to take soil samples from six different regions this weekend. After that, I'd like to just put some cover crops on the land. We aren't going to move there for 2-3 years, but I'd like to be doing the right things now to prepare for that time.
I'd like to do something this spring if possible, but the problem is I don't have a tractor yet. We are planning to buy one from the previous owners soon, but this is moving a bit slow due to COVID-19.
From what I can tell from reading here, it seems a good mix of annual cover crops that would produce biomass would be best regardless of what soil sample reports say, but I'm just not sure if this is practical since we're doing this without any equipment right now. I'm hoping someone has some suggestions on how we can make the most of this right now as we prepare for better use of the land down the road.
