Joshua LeDuc

The past few years I have been experimenting with a new process to preserve tomatoes that I call "tomato bombs".  First, I will cook down a batch of tomatoes for several hours to evaporate much of the water.  Then I will take the tomatoes and put them through a cone funnel sieve, in order to remove all of the seeds and peels.  The result passing through the funnel should be a thick liquid.  I then continue to cook this tomato liquid down at a slow simmer for several more hours until the liquid thickens into a tomato paste consistency.  At this point I cool and pour the paste into ice cube trays.  When the tomatoes are frozen in the trays I take them out and store them in a freezer bag in the freezer.  The "tomato bombs" at this point are a very concentrated tomato flavor which can be added to soups, stews and vegetable dishes if you are in search of a quick way to add lots of umami and flavor to your dish!  Enjoy.  

William Bronson wrote: For your visual screen, I would plant things that will grow from cuttings.
Elderberry is my current favorite, but josta berry is equally vigorous, in my experience.
If you grow grape vines, you will get a lot of cover, and they are also easy to start from cuttings
If you string a cable from point to point, you can grow vines along it, with minimal infrastructure.
Jerusalem artichokes can form a tall thicket, pretty quickly.
Native reed

For the low cover, I agree that flowers will be welcome where other plants are scorned.
Yarrow fits your criteria.

Yarrow is a great example of a rhizomatous spreading native perennial.  I have been having great success with obedient plant in providing a thick mat of rhizomes that doesn't allow other plants to establish as well.  I planted some obedient plant in a tree ring around a young oak in my front yard, and it is providing an excellent "soft landing" while keeping crab grass and other "weeds" at bay.  Something for you all to consider at an edge habitat like a ditch.  

Where I grew up, in West Central Wisconsin,  there always seemed to be ample asparagus growing in the ditches.  I'm not sure why.  I remember a lot of the old timers driving around on the country roads and picking asparagus in the spring from their favorite "patch".  This is all to say that asparagus likes to grow in ditches.  And I like asparagus.

Hey Sarah, this is a wonderful concept, and it sounds like a lot of thought has gone into your planning.  I have a 6 year old food 1/8 acre food forest, and similar to your vision, I like to keep mine "manicured."  A few thoughts that I had are as follows:

- Here in Virginia, we have issues with cedar-apple rust (CAR).  Assuming this is also an issue where you live, look for CAR resistant apple varieties.  
- I have also had issues with fire blight infecting my methley plum and Asian pear tree.  Be vigilant of this disease.
- Be sure to space your trees and shrubs properly and leave lots of room for growth.  Spacing your plants too closely when putting them in the ground is an all too common mistake that people make.
- I am using Bocking #4 sterile comfrey as a border around the edge of my food forest.  It seems to do a pretty decent job in keeping grass and weeds from creeping into the mulched areas.  Every spring I try to go around and divide some of the comfrey and keep spreading it around the edge.  Even a little root fragment can grow into a new plant.  
- Strawberries are proving to be a great ground cover in my garden.  Other reliable groundcover/herbacious plants in my garden are bergamont, mountain mint, yarrow, oregano, lemonbalm, catnip and valerian.
- I opted for thornless blackberries, and I'm glad that I did.  These are much less painful to weed and mulch around
- You may want to consider a patch of elderberries.  I enjoy growing these and they are disease/pest free.  They DO spread over time.  

It sounds like you are planning to undertake many of the same permaculture/homesteading activities that we started doing when we moved to our "piece of paradise" 7 years ago.  It's definitely a labor of love.  Good luck!!

P.S. - you can never have too much cardboard and mulch!

I just purchased a 16 quart Presto pressure canner from Tractor Supply for around $150.  Not cheap, but it should last for my time here.  I canned 12 quarts of green beans last weekend because we had run out of room in our freezer.  After reading through the instructions a few times, I found canning the beans to be quite an easy task.  Somewhat time consuming if you are making more than one batch though, because you have to wait for the canner to depressurize before you can open the lid.  This took 20 minutes or so.  I'm looking forward to canning all sorts of other things like soups, stews, and other veggies!  Also, I'm banking on my 2+ year old forest garden to really start pumping out fruit in a few years and will be canning fruit as well!

I have lacto-fermented daikons.  They transmute into a crunchy, funky condiment for Asian dishes like ground turkey lettuce wraps with fish sauce!

Lo Biddle wrote:Thanks Joshua, yes, it's going to be a several year process. I found that a chainsaw tends to get caught in the fibrousness of the bamboo, so I've been using a sawzall with pretty good effect. If I can get through all of the surface bamboo and then stay on top of any sprouts for the next few years, I'm hoping that will do it.
I'm also looking up recipes for pickled bamboo shoots, bamboo kimchi, stir fried bamboo...

Yes, bamboo as food!  We put the young tender shoots in stir fry a few times as well!  And our puppy liked chewing on the young shoots too.

Hi Lo.  I would start by getting a few panda bears.  Seriously though, we had a roughly 1000 SF patch of bamboo growing on our homestead when we bought it a few years ago.  Luckily, the following winter we had a nasty ice storm that actually bent all of the canes over and made it a lot easier to get in the thicket and cut the canes down with my chainsaw.  Because all of the stubs that were left sticking out of the ground would have raised holy hell with the lawn mower, I then went over the patch several times with my rotary cutter (bush hog) and tractor.  Now two years later I still see bamboo sprouting up in this area, but with mowing, it is slowly starting to turn back to lawn.  My point is that with persistence over the course of several years it CAN be eradicated!  Good luck!

I have seen videos on building home made propagation chambers on the Edible Acres YouTube channel.  Brie Arthur also has information about bare root propagation on her sites.  I am interested in building one of these as well, to mess around with in my upcoming retirement, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

I have been experimenting with planting a row of comfrey at the edge of my forest garden.  The comfrey leaves tend to choke out any grass at the interface with the lawn, and it looks quite tidy when mowing up to the edge, without having to weed-whack.