nickolaus richard

Hello fellow Mainers.  I'm down in Penobscot County trying to carve out a homestead lifestyle on 37 acres.  

A bushcraft school sounds really useful!  I'm particularly interested in learning more about local wild edible or medicinal plants and fungi.  

Books and youtube are great resources for learning.  Although, my advice is to just dive in and start growing!  Don't get overwhelmed with fantasies about all of the different methods, just picked something suitable for you and your capabilities, then go for it.  I've tried just about every method there is, and I've circled right back to traditional row crop gardening that my grandparents taught me.  It works best for me personally because it can be done on a small scale with hand tools or scaled up with mechanical equipment while the math, spacing, watering etc., doesn't vary too much. The only limits are my personal ambition or fuel.  I still practice some hugelculture for perennial landscaping and raised beds for containing vigorous spreaders.

If you are looking for in person hands on lessons then perhaps try:

Local extension office.
Local community gardens.
Local social media garden pages.
Farmers markets.

I'm growing a few acres of various flint corns this upcoming season in order to select and breed varieties suitable for my farming goals.  Producing a higher protein feed corn for myself and my chickens was one of many initial motivators, now I'm also mindful of the higher anthocyanin content in some varieties.  

Some corn from this study had 13% protein content.  Along with many other varieties, Abenaki aka Roy's Calais flint is one corn suitable for my region of Maine zone 5 that I will focus on preserving and improving.  I plan on crossing a variety of ''old world'' flint corn with some more modern types that are more suitable for mechanical farming and hope to develop my own lines.  

When feeding my rabbits branches or bark chews in the winter, I do feed some spruce and pine in moderation, while being mindful of when I read briefly about pine induced abortion in cattle.  I admittedly didn't read deep into the studies regarding the specific species of evergreen or whether it can occur in other animals.  I don't breed my rabbits in the winter months anyway and have never noticed any side effects from feeding spruce boughs.  By the time I start breeding in springtime (Maine z5), other trees are budding.

According to Bunnymeadow spruce is safe.