Dave's post is another example of how different places require different management--a place where fire hazard is high and pines are the tallest trees.

On the brush: we typically burn one brush pile a year, but I also have half a dozen around my one-acre clearing. We have a composting toilet outhouse, and the proceeds of that go on fruit trees. We have what I call a pisseria in the house, and I dump that bucket on all my compost piles in turn--the ones in the woods composed of fallen branches and such, and the ones next to each garden. Most of the nitrogen and phosphorus humans excrete is in the urine, so this way I capture those nutrients and help spur the decomposition, It still takes wood piles years to decompose, though. I could see the utility of a woodchipper if you have holdings of sufficient scale and if you don't have a source of woodchips. I wouldn't eliminate all conifers, especially if they're dominant locally.
On community, I agree with Paul that his vision of a person every two acres living mostly off the land would be much more realizable if they cooperated. For example, keeping dairy goats can be expensive and time-consuming, but if the herder trades with several neighbors, everyone would have milk and cheese, the goatherder would not need to keep chickens or do a big garden and orchard and  could take occasional trips knowing s/he/they had a reliable person taking care of the goats. Someone mentioned the idea of tiny side jobs to supply cash and I think that's definitely the way to go.
To find examples of thriving communities, check out the intentional communities site at ic.org . I live on a land trust, founded 51 years ago on a ridge in West Virginia. It has only four leaseholds, yet most have been empty most years. This year we got a new blended family taking over the two empty leaseholds, and I have high hopes it will become a real community with lots of internal trade and a model for the larger community. I think what makes this place work is that each leasehold is largely independent, choosing its own projects--so we don't have to have endless meetings arguing out what we want to do. I think this approach is much easier for Americans, as our culture is way out at the extreme of valuing individualism over community, so we're not used to compromise, we don't have the social skills.

I just want to say--you can be fully natural and let all your weeds stay and feed the soil, just as nature intended. You won't get much of any food out of that garden. Let's face it--gardening is inherently disturbing, co-opting nature, to redirect its energies into our desired crops. I do lots of weeding, and usually put the weeds in my compost pile so they can work together to decompose, and then be put into my garden where I think the nutrients are needed.
But this doesn't mean I try to remove all weeds. I leave a few butterflyweed, mullein, yarrow and Flower-of-an-hour because they're pretty and feed beneficials. and there are weeds that take over my beds in winter: purple dead nettle reliably in fall and again in March, when it is reliably joined by chickweed and bitter cress, These are weeds I like because they hold the soil and are easy to pull when I'm ready to plant (their flowers also delight the bees and are pretty--the dead-nettle anyway). I would like information about their utility as a cover crop but all I can find is reports from the all-weeds-are-edible-and -medicinal ideologues. The weeds I'd put in the rogues gallery are not the ones named by others, but mostly what comes in on manure (horse nettle) and mulch hay (clover and various grasses). Yeah, clover fixes nitrogen (and I'm fine with it having taken over most of the lawn) but it takes over--I've had to rip out strawberry beds twice after they got infested with clover. The grasses are hard to remove from my clay-based soil without losing lots of soil, and are especially obnoxious when coming up under (both sides of) a fence. I have one patch of flat ground for corn and sorghum, and a rotation of tomatoes. That ground gets tilled, usually once a year, then I put cardboard down between the (relatively wide) rows, with just a little hay on top. Some years it works to pull up that cardboard in September and plant winter rye and hairy vetch, scritch it in with a rake, toss compost atop any patches too hard to scritch in, and get a good winter cover going. In my 30 raised beds (slightly raised, no sides to these beds) I use just vetch or winter peas, as the rye is too hard to remove in spring--but I do plant a couple beds every year where I plan a late planting--the rye dies back if you cut it when it's shedding pollen around the end of May here...and by then it's done lots of good rootmass growth for organic matter. Often I let a bed go to maturity too, in my quest to to figure out a protocol that works for flour production. I also sometimes grow sunn hemp, if I can get seed and get it in early enough--but it dies when it frosts. And I often add daikons if I can get them in early enough, for subsoil work. Trouble with those is, instead of that 12 to 18" root diving deep in my soil, half of it extends above the soil--where it freezes and rots.
A lot of this comes back to that adage--what works for one garden may not fit with another, depending on exposure, climate, soil type, slope and your intentions.

seemed too soon to fall back on spaghetti our fave--especially since I like to put a little sausage in it and it seems like we've been eating a lot of meat lately, just finished off the last package of sausage. But I was advised to eat fish once a week, so I opened the last can of tuna fish, stirred in some mayonnaise and celery seed and finely minced onion and my husband is going to make tuna melts with it (I just made bread yesterday so fresh bread will help.) So maybe tomorrow I'll make spaghetti, and then a little more of the pound of sausage will likely go on a pizza soon, probably with leftover spaghetti sauce. Here's another leftover trick--open a quart of venison and add carrots and potatoes and onions and garlic and spice and celery, make a good stew. Also make enough dough for a two-crust pie. Then the next day--or a subsequent one--roll it out, dump in the leftover stew, adjust the liquid level if necessary, and bake. Two good meals that are both pretty easy.

Just gotta say--I disagree with a number of things in the last couple posts. I think it's a matter of geography (climate) and likely soil type as well. My carrots have done a lot better since I started planting them in rows--I used to just scatter seed in a block, which made thinning way more tedious. And planting them here and there among other things would make it far more difficult to keep them watered in the first weeks, which they need more than anything else. I've tried growing carrots in fall and got a good crop once, little or no germination the other two times--probably because in MY climate, it tends to be dry in late summer and early fall, wetter in spring and early summer. I forgot to mention in my earlier post that one key is to choose planting time with an eye on the long-range forecast; ideally you plant before a week of cloudy, rainy weather. And carrots can tolerate very cold temperatures, often surviving the winter, but a really hard prolonged freeze may cause the upper part, more exposed to the cold, to rot. A little mulch may prevent this. But you can't expect plants to actually GROW in winter--if they've gotten enough growth before hard winter sets in, some protection can allow you to harvest hardy crops all winter, or dig up root crops in spring.
What I'd like to know is why my carrots are often pale. I might try that Bolero someone recommended.

I had trouble for years--usually they did germinate, but weren't fit to harvest till fall and then would mostly be very small. Often pale as well. Here's what I do now: first of all I once read that if you plant your onions and carrots in alternating rows, each inhibits the fly that bothers the other. I tried it and it seemed to work so I keep doing it. The downside is that this means I don't plant the carrots till April, when the onions are up so the carrot rows are well marked. No wait--that's not first, first is soil prep, which I mostly do in the fall prior to planting in spring. I have clay soil, and I too have found that adding sand--I have added it to ALL my beds but especially for sure those that will have carrots. I add that after turning the soil with a shovel--I don't agree with the "tilling is a crime" idea, though I think it best to keep it to once a year. Then I add compost or preferably, leafmold, and probably sand. Then I work it with my hands till it's soft and smooth, no sizable lumps (I do this also for lettuce and spinach--other crops don't need a fine seedbed). Next, I grow Danvers or Red Cored Chantenay, two varieties that do well in clay. Then I have to water a lot because as others have said, it typically takes two or even three weeks for the dang things to emerge (yes I put a radish seed every foot or two to mark the rows) and they're planted shallowly. For me, they grow very slowly even after emergence--but when I yank the onions the first week of July and put down mulch between the now one-foot-apart rows, they seem to take off and grow faster. By then I've thinned them at least once.Mty best crop was last year, and I think it was because of the longest drought we ever had, from the beginning of June till the first frost in mid November. I watered them a thousand times or so, so they got ENOUGH water--but it was only in the rows, and probably didn't last long. So the worms or flies or whatever it is that makes those black tunnels in the top part of the carrot, barely hit at all--and therefore I was able to leave the carrots past early August, and they got bigger.

I clicked on this one for inspiration from reading others' posts, since I'm not looking forward to winter, now my least favorite season. And I second whoever said they enjoy the beauty of the first couple snows but then they want spring. I once wrote a poem about that, about how a February snow might look like a December snow but it doesn't get the same appreciation from me.
But now that I'm inspired, I'll name the greater energy I have when temperatures drop, and everything about wood heat--well, my husband does most of the work but I enjoy stacking firewood on the porch and then in its spot in the house, kindling and feeding the fire, having hot water that doesn't require burning propane, the smell of woodsmoke outside, and also using the oven a lot without feeling apologetic about the extra heat in the house. Looking through seed catalogs is another winter pleasure.

She said dent corn is primarily grown in my region, and that it had the culinary advantages of neither flint nor flour corn but the agronomic virtues of both Since yield is important to me and I mostly feed my corn to my chickens, that was my choice.

I think I should wait and see what my own mix does, first. I have generally stuck with dent because of what Carol Deppe says, though I imagine I COULD grow flint okay. One thing I'd like to breed for is resistance to the thing that causes moldy tips in a wet year. I've read that corn mold can cause, I think cancer. I still use some of those after chopping off the ends but maybe there's a genetic solution--ears tipped down, maybe?

Wow, Timothy, that's my plan too! Last year I grew Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage in alternating rows; I didn't grow corn this year except a tiny bit of Green Oaxacan which can go in late, mostly to refresh my seed supply. Next year I plan to grow a lot of the BB X  BC mix and see what it does--I'm hoping for hybrid vigor and shades of purple.

I live on a land trust, so we technically don't own the land--we have a lifetime lease. We do own the improvements, like the house we built. We  could afford it because we didn't have to pay for the land, because it's in West Virginia where the cost of living is low--so are wages but we are both frugal people so we were able to save enough to build the house, and then my mother left me an annuity of $23,000--which paid for the off-grid solar system (also cheaper because my husband understand electricity and planned and installed it himself) with excellent timing as we were able to take off 30% of the cost in both federal and state taxes, which I would have had to pay on the annuity--now there's no state tax credit and the federal one is about to expire. My adult kids are self-sufficient so no expense there

Leigh--I question the "ripens before frost, therefore astringent" part. I think frost is irrelevant to the question of ripening and astringency, and that astringency means it isn't ripe. For the wild trees, even the ones in the open that have branches closer to the ground, most persimmons need to be picked up off the ground--and USUALLY their being on the ground means they're ripe. Not all, but you can generally tell because the ripe ones are orange and soft. For me, I have gotten the runs after eating persimmons off the ground, so now I use persimmon only cooked--baked actually, as my three recipes all involve baking. The grafted ones are significantly bigger and have fewer or no seeds. This is one of the things I'm wondering about the Asian ones--do they have similar seeds? I also wonder if there are any hybrids with much larger fruit than American ones but hardy to zone 6.

This is getting a bit off topic, as I question whether you can make a decent jam from persimmons...but my two cents on this question is that current wisdom is that fruit and others that are sufficiently acid may be water bath canned, but less acidic items must be pressure canned. I do both, depending on the item. But I agree that USDA is very conservative--I think the idea is that rather than one case of botulism resulting from someone who thought they followed the guidelines (but shaved a bit), they'd rather millions of housewives and househusbands putting unnecessary time and fuel into canning. When I can tomatoes--which to my tongue are less acid than they used to be, and I've been searching for a tomato that's both sweet and tangy--I do a 15 minute water bath, and also add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each quart. I also do a 15 minute water bath for jams and pickles. But this is partly because my understanding is that it takes 15 minutes of boiling to sterilize the jars--so might as well have them already filled. But 45 years ago, local women here in West Virginia told me they just canned tomatoes and jams "open kettle," meaning you got the contents boiling, the jars in boiling water, filled the jars and sealed them and you were done. And I did it that way for years with no ill effects. But like I say, if you have to boil the jars for 15 minutes to sterilize them, might as well fill and seal them first.
Here's my question for this thread--does anyone have experience with both Asian and American persimmons, who can compare them?

I had the experience as Carla, only trying to can pawpaw pulp. So I've never tried to make persimmon jam, as I figured it would turn out the same. What I do is pick out the seeds, then freeze the pulp till I want it for a recipe--muffins, cake and cookie bars ate my three persimmon recipes.

So, six years ago I said I couldn't see a reason to put anything under the leaf bins. Now I do. I moved my leaf bins to a place under a big maple, and put plastic mats under them so the tree doesn't filch out all the good leaf mold. The reason I moved them was that I finally realized that they were harboring the roots of bindweed, which I now realize I will never get rid of. I wish I'd realized this sooner, when it might have been possible to eradicate the bindweed without poison.
And, in response to the "Why be in a hurry?" question--I want my leaf mold in one year because I never have enough compost and manure--I NEED that leaf mold every fall! And when I clean out the bins, they're ready to receive the next fall's leaves.
Also. In response to the one who said that if leafmold were gold he'd be rich, and the one who said she or he had 100 cubic yards of the stuff, and the one who has a contraption to just drive down the road and it sucks up the leaves and deposits them in the trailer...and elsewhere, someone getting multiple dumptrucks of wood chips--sorry to say it but I read these things and I burn with envy.

Now I'm going to have to learn how to bookmark permies posts--especially since I got a good harvest this year. I've said potatoes are the number one crop to grow because they're fairly easy to grow and store, nutritious and maybe more versatile than any other vegetable...and here we have a massive load of new recipes. Barbara Manning alone contributed so much information, including details and correct spelling, that I hope she got bushels of apples for her posts.
I have a couple tips, maybe off topic slightly--the first one is what I did yesterday and this morning. I store most of my potatoes in a root cellar. They're harvested as early as early July, when it's 70 degrees F in there...far above ideal temperature. They seem to mostly keep well despite this, but nonetheless I want to get the temperature down as soon as I can. It was supposed to go down to 43 last night (actually 45) so I hauled all my potatoes a short distance to the greenhouse overnight and left the rootcellar door open (have to remove all contents so I'm not inviting mice into the rootcellar). I stopped on the way to spill each vessel onto the ground to  check for rot, which was due anyway.
On recipes, I don't have much to offer other than half baking whole potatoes, than scooping out a lot of the insides to mix with say fried burger and onions, garlic, maybe peppers, then briefly bake again.
But I will mention one of my two vegan recipes: make mashed potatoes the usual way, and meanwhile fry a whole pound of crumbled tofu, onions and garlic, and mushrooms if you've got them, the whole time the potatoes are boiling. In a small cast iron frying pan (that's what I use anyway) put in a mixture of 1/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast into a hot pan. After a minute of so, when you smell nuttiness, add a small splash of oil and 1 1/2 cups of water, and whisk to remove lumps. When it begins to bubble, add 2 or 3 tablespoons of tamari (you could probably use soy sauce or salt). Whisk most of the time until it has thickened adequately, then grate a little pepper on top, turn off the heat, and cover. Meanwhile steam some vegetable--green beans and greens both work well. Serve the mashed potatoes topped with the fried tofu mixture, topped with the gravy, and the veg on the side or mixed in.
Another one is potato chowder--I boil chopped potatoes with grated carrots (if you just chop the carrots they won't be done when the potatoes are.) Meanwhile I saute onions, garlic, a little sausage and maybe bok choy or chard stems. When the potatoes are mashable, I do that, possibly using an immersion blender if the potatoes are peeled, stir in the fried stuff, then if the texture is right (if it isn't necessary to boil off excess water) I add some milk and a bunch of grated cheese, usually cheddar. Serve with thick slices of buttered bread.

A few thoughts. I'm jealous of people who get dumptrucks of leaves delivered. And, if you put your leaf piles in the shade to turn into leafmold, there is a hazard you may not have thought of...I tried that experimentally, to  compare it with bins in the sun. Which composted faster I dunno but when I went to use the leafmold from the woods bin, I found the greedy trees has infiltrated it with a network of roots--it was very difficult to gather any leafmold. I didn't want to just rip through their roots...I recently moved my leaf bins because I realized they were harboring the totalitarian menace, bindweed roots. They went under a maple tree--but sat on thick plastic mats, so the tree can't reach any thieving roots up into the leafmold. Conversely, I question the idea of raking up leaves from the woods--or even from yards-- whether to sell or use the leafmold, because don't those trees need the compost of theirt own leaves? What I use I rake out of the mile-long gravel lane--we don't want friable soil there.

Deedee, one of my gardening goals is to avoid relying on outside inputs--which is partly pushed by my favorite gardening book, Cindy Connor's Grow a Sustainable Diet. But I think when you're establishing a new place, that's impractical, and you should feel free to import manure or compost or whatever good organic matter you can get. Then you can use cover crops and your own compost, leafmold, manure, to maintain the fertility and tilth. I also use sand, which is controversial--there is a thread here about that--but it has worked for me. You want coarse sand. And you don't want to rob your own woods of leaves, too much, but I rake up most of our mile-long gravel lane--we don't want good tilth in the road--and chop it, usually with the lawnmower, and keep it in wire bins--a year later I have lovely leafmold, which is especially good, they say, for carrots and cole crops (brassicas).

Some asked about topping a tree. Here we have only American persimmons, it's zone 6B, just a little too cold for the Asian ones I think.  But most of the trees we collect from have been grafted. You can cut a sizable tree at three or four feet from the ground, then do two grafts in a cleft and have a good chance of at least one taking. I think we have several varieties but have not been good about keeping track. However, they are mostly twice the size of the wild ones, and have few or no seeds--whereas the wild ones--well I have not found a better way to remove seeds (and that little tail at the blossom end) than to go through them with my hands, a messy process. And then I have equal quantities usable pulp and seeds/ caps. (Which I have learned not put in the compost as these seedlings are a pain to dig out of my garden). And often you miss one--so then you have to eat the results carefully. I read that the reason (some of) the grafted ones are seedless is that they result from a cross between out native Diospyros virginiana and a D texensis, and that these have--surprisingly--different numbers of chromosomes. But it seems my trees will drop some fruits that do have at least one seed. I wish I new the role of male trees--should I get rid of most of them, or do the females need males around to fruit well? Persimmons are one of those trees that come in male and female individuals.  Incidentally, if you are disappointed that your growing tree has turned out to be male, you can graft it to accomplish a sex change operation. My main two wild trees are relatively tall and slender compared to the grafted ones, and while I'd call the fruit inferior because it's smaller and seedier (same taste), one of them has often had hundreds and hundreds of fruits--the whole fifty foot tree turns orange in a good year.
My three main recipes are for a muffin, a cookie bar with lemon icing and a cake. Since I do have gastric issues and have identified persimmons as a factor, I don't often eat any raw, but I save the pulp in the freezer so I can make one of these whenever I want.

I just use ordinary cheapo scrunchies. If I double it, it holds all day; but I discovered this year that it gets less tangles if I don't double it, tho then I have to keep redoing it as it loosens and starts falling out on one side.  The tangles might have something to do with showering (but not washing my hair) with the scrunchy still in place, which I have to do after a gardening shift from late May to early September because of chiggers.

I clicked on this one because it's a quandary for me. I used the green plastic scrubbies for years--till it got concerned about the shedding of microfibers --I'm working to eliminate plastic. I live in zone six and had no trouble growing luffas--to the green stage, which is good enough, there is a good Youtube video about how to cure them (using the oven). The problem is that they are not as abrasive as the green scrubbies, even when new--and after some use they get soft. Letting them dry helps some. I use washcloths, not for dishwashing--thing is, I prefer to let dishes accumulate for 2 or 3 days and then wash a big load in very hot soapy water-but for counter wiping. I use the same one for a week or more. After use I rinse it and drape it over the faucet to dry. When it get gooey I dry it and throw it in the laundry. I do plant grow more luffas, but will have to buy more seed--my own didn't germinate, probably because the gourds weren't fully mature. Come to think of it, the oven roasting might not have helped either...

On heat: firewood makes so much sense, if you have a good cast iron wood stove, or a rocket mass heater. Someone brought up the gas and oil a chain saw needs. My husband told me he needs about a gallon of gas a year to get in our one to two cords of firewood. Compared to what a car uses--that ain't much. But some day we will have to get by without this convenience (and the woodsplitter we share with two other families), just as people got by without chainsaws for centuries in this country, and as someone pointed out, the natives managed it without even having metal tools for cutting trees. Then there's insulation, and modern energy-efficient windows. Fiberglass and foam insulation have environmental issues in their production and disposal, but it seems mycelium is a promising alternative, which one of the permies staff has been experimenting with.
Also, people used to let houses get very cold at night and sleep under a lot of blankets, then first one up would light the woodstove in the kitchen downstairs. I remember half a century ago when I spent a couple of falls living on a schoolbus, being given a buffalo skin, with the hair still on it, as a blanket on really cold nights. That thing was HEAVY--but boy did it hold in warmth.

Carla--yes, the notion we all have that it would be offensive to jump in a stranger's face to admire their garden or ask how they do it so well, is wrong 90% of the time. Most people love to teach what they know. And we need to overcome the distrust of strangers that has so weakened our culture.
And- Tim--your neighbor's peach tree that's loaded while squirrels have made off with all yours--could it be that your neighbor's beautiful peaches spring from a vigorous spray program, and that the squirrels can smell the toxins and prefer your organic fruit? Or else they have dogs who are sometimes loose in the yard.
And finally, Carla--I bought 200 of those organza bags last year, hoping they'd protect my fruit from the squirrels, and I think it was PARTIALLY successful. Those bags are marketed especially for protecting the fruit from insects, are made by multiple companies mostly in China, and all I have seen are green. Once the squirrels--or bugs--are honed in on your tree, they'll find the fruit regardless of color camouflage, but it slows them down. I used the bags that weren't damaged again this year--not on peaches, which didn't set fruit, people say because of a frost, but my pear didn't even flower, only one of my four  blueberries did--I think last year's prolonged drought, in a year when everything set fruit heavily, took so much out of the trees and blueberry bushes, that they took this year off to recharge. But I did get some apples (early apples, and there are still apples on Goldrush and Enterprise).

j, you're describing hugelkultur, which is supposed to be particularly good for drought.

My main garden is composed of raised beds that cost little or nothing but that's because by "raised bed" I mean a permanent bed that's higher than the pathways between the beds, but doesn't have wooden sides, and is anywhere from 3" to 8" higher than the pathways. The main source of dirt is just what's robbed from the pathways--I don't want them to have good growing ground. But it's necessary with my clay soil to add compost of some sort and sand. I wish someone would give me too much wood chips! Not for soil building but for mulch (which does eventually feed the soil).

I did not fertilize--I never do--but I try to keep my already fertile clay soil healthy with compost, manure, leafmold and sand, and cover crops--I don't always have enough of those things.

Dee dee--ha! Welcome to West Virginia. No flat ground here, no straight roads. Gardens and homesteads are usually either on the ridges or the bottoms, because that's where the only semi-level ground is. 95% of every farm I know is steep wooded hillside, which needs to remain wooded because it's steep. That's why WV is not a farm state. Although Cabell County is more flat... as for raccoons, you need a fence but maybe they climb those? I have not had a problem with them. Unless they're who got my sunflowers, when that patch had a crap fence...

I've been trying for years to grow wheat and rye, in small plots. Threshing is the hardest part. This year it occurred to me that the problem might be the seed--I buy cover crop wheat or rye seed, then let some of it go to maturity. But maybe seed sold for cover crop use is not the best for grain? Mine were much closer together and full sun, neutral pH, so those are not issues--but while they were all about the same height, I do have some bending over, and I thought it might be harvesting by mice or birds, so maybe I need to get it out of the field before it's fully mature. So I did that this year. I think it did dry adequately on my greenhouse shelves--fairly shady in midsummer. But it still didn't pop out readily when whacked against a board in handfuls...I suspect a lot of seed went into the stalky stuff I used for mulch.

Deedee--where are you? I'm in Roane County. I am also on the ridge, and have clay soil, but my neighbor with a garden 700 feet away, on the highest point, has sandy soil. When I lived in the next county I was in the holler and had clay--but on the ridge there, was a sandy place. So maybe this isn't a matter of elevation. As for corn growing, i grow it in a flat field; most things do better in my raised beds but for corn and sorghum I prefer flat ground that can be tilled, and this garden has heavy soil. But corn grows well there anyway--it needs good anchoring and rich soil, and clay retains nutrients and moisture better than sand--even if it's harder to work and dries into concrete. Mulch is a must. I collect cardboard from local hardware stores that sell appliances, and lay that between the rows under the mulch--the mulch is always hay, which always is full of clover and grass seeds, and the cardboard slows their germination as well as allowing less hay to be used.

I live in West Virginia, a region suited to dent corn, and have grown Bloody Butcher as well as Blue Clarage and Green Oaxacan and a couple of others. I've been told my corn is not really BB as it looks more like the image above, almost entirely that deep red color--BB, I was told, should be red-streaked white. Yields were decent but perhaps would have been better--more stalks with two ears--if I put my rows further apart. One thing I can tell you, which may apply to any corn--is that it isn't true that corn seed is only good for one year. It's good for at least two or three. But I think it's probably true that you need to save seed from at least a couple dozen different plants--corn is an obligate outbreeder. Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage need over 100 days, so I grow the green Oaxacan in circumstances in which I don't have that long--or need shorter plants. It doesn't yield as well but can produce in 80 or 90 days. And it's a beautiful green, complementary to the deep red of BB and the dark blue of BC.

This is going to have to be a two-part post--my own experience in West Virginia, and the philosophical bit.
Here, I've found invasive bugs settle in after a few years--Asian lady beetles and brown marmarated stinkbugs were very annoying for awhile--both overwinter in houses--but have nearly disappeared, I assume because predators found them. Plants have been more problematic, especially Autumn and Russian olive, multiflora and galinsoga. And bindweed and gill-over-the ground (I believe that is AKA Creeping Charlie). The multiflora and olives have thorns and gobble up large areas; I found you can get rid of multifloras by removing the crown, but eradication of the olives, bindweed, also ailanthus trees, requires removing every bit of root, an impossible task once you let it get out of control. Galinsoga is an annual but it goes to flower so fast, you can diligently pull them all before they flower, do it again a few weeks later, then again, and again and again, and still they set a lot of seed if you miss any.
On the philosophical front: I think it depends. Probably most of the food I grow is not native to North America and I have no problem with that. SOME invasives are problematic and it's good to stop them before they create bigger problems and are impossible to eradicate. The autumn and Russian olives are a problem, but their relative the goumi I planted deliberately and am trying to propagate. (And the birds would definitely not call this one useless). I also have to point out that far and away the worst invasive problem in North America is actually a mammal, one which arrived here from Europe a few hundred years ago, has multiplied a great deal and displaced a native subspecies that was not causing any problems; meanwhile it has displaced countless species, reducing their numbers, polluted the waters and air, altered the climate dangerously...and then has the chutzpah to fuss about aggressive plants and bugs. So do we set up an eradication plan?

I like David Schmith's idea of a microcar. I think this may be the direction we need to go when it becomes difficult to source gasoline, or too expensive for most. Two solutions short of switching to horses are to have a fullsize car that is used by several families for, say, weekly town trips where reps from a couple families go in, also carrying a list from the others. And a one-family microcar--I think this is the way electric cars should go, instead of this notion that they must have a huge range and be able to go at least 70 MPH uphill, and that a family that nearly always has one or two people in the car but once a year hauls six family members should be sized so all six  can ride in comfort.

We used to have a Ford Aspire, when we were building (but also had and have an 88 Chevy truck for serious hauling). Then we got a VW Jetta, and for the last few years it's been a Fit. I use and abuse them all, using them to haul up to 22 bags of leaves, which I clean off our gravel lane and bring home to make leafmold. And I haul bags of goat manure and hay. It's only my husband and me, usually only one of us., so I don't put dirty stuff on the passenger seat but haul all manner of stuff in the back, usually with the seat folded down. Couple days ago I managed to get a bundle of five eight-foot T- posts in the Fit, along with two fifty foot rolls of five foot welded wire and six bags of goat manurey hay. IWhen Ihad the Aspire, and the Festiva before it, I was often amazed by what I could squeeze in there. But then--think of what Third World people manage to do with limited access to vehicles. In my hitchhiking days in the 70s and early 80s, I noted that the more room a passing car had, the less likely it was to stop. I figured I hitched 100,000 miles, mostly alone but sometimes with a second person and once with three of us--and never once did a car stop, and have to leave without us because it couldn't squeeze us in. Even when it seemed impossible, we always managed.

We have an attached greenhouse, and I highly recommend it. Because it serves a number of functions beyond being a place to start plants in the spring. It also provides a little heat on sunny winter says, sometimes enough that we don't need a fire on a marginal day. The shelves along the south wall are where I dry things like peanuts, beans, sunflower heads and grains. I also put a towel there after a shower, alternating between two towels. And it serves as a mudroom. It has a stone floor, and on winter mornings, that's where we empty the ash tray from the woodstove into a coal bucket.
It's made with conventional two by four construction, using salvaged tempered glass. We built our house against tall trees on the west side, so it's in shade all summer; It gets urgent to get the seedlings planted out in May as little sunlight gets in that close to the solstice. It has a small openable window on the north side and a vent in the roof, as well as a screen door, so it actually doesn't heat the house in summer. But most of the trees are hickories, which drop hard, sizable nuts, so we can't have a glass roof. But my husband thought of a clever trick to let a little more light in. There is a lower roof under the tin roof and the southernmost part of this inner roof is glass. In winter, with low sun angles, additional sun comes in through there. There are three 50-gallon barrels full of water along the back wall, for thermal mass, with a shelf above them that is in constant use--for example, that's where I cut potatoes to dry before planting and right now it has three buckets of poppy heads, a clipper, my gardening pants which stay outside the house all summer because of chiggers...all in all, I find it so useful I wonder how a serious homesteader can get by without one.

Having read over posts since mine, i have a couple of additional remarks.
Someone mentioned that an east-facing orientation helps--yes, that's another thing we did right here, chose a leasehold facing east, because i'm a morning person and wanted to watch the sunrises, and because putting the house where tall trees on the west side ensure shade from noon on on all parts of the house in summer helps a great deal.
Second, I believe one of the books i mentioned said EXterior shade was more helpful that curtains inside, because you want to keep the heat from entering your house.
And third, I'm going to make the case that AC IS dastardly, at the the risk of being banished to the cider house. It uses a lot of electricity, much more than fans; generating electricity creates environmental harm, not limited to  climate heating, to some extent even if you have solar since creating, shipping and disposing of the panels and batteries has environmental costs--so the more panels you need the higher that cost. And, there is the security issue, that  various reasons including depletion of fossil fuels and the minerals needed to make parts for renewable systems suggest that AC may simply not be an option much longer. Planning for that includes finding ways to not need it, whether the toughing it out and adjusting approach some recommend or the various tricks to lower the temps in your house. And in the outdoor environment you work in, for that matter.
i now live on a ridge, but once i lived in a half-finished old barn while building a cabin nearby, and there was a small pond near the barn, on hot days, I'd come back for lunch and jump in that pond and in two minutes I'd be sweat-free and comfortably cool, ready to go back to work. At the end of the afternoon, I'd jump in the pond again. What a lovely resource that was.
Finally, local context matters. i once read about a house in Atascadero, California that had a hinged roof. the entire roof would be tilted away from the house on summer nights to let the heat quickly dissipate, then it would be lowered back into place at dawn. this is a place where summer days get very hot but it does not rain in summer guaranteed--obviously most places it would be crazy to invest in a liftable roof, you'd be inviting in various vermin as well as moisture and mold. I was gobsmacked when i read about that house in a book on smart house design, because in my mid teens i had lived in Atascadero, and never knew about that house.

We don't have AC in a place most people do--but this is partly because we're on a ridge, which gets more breezes than the hollers. but we also planned the house intelligently--I'm amazed that some people recommend being outside when it's hot. It's always cooler in the house on a hot day here, except in the evening...sometimes it takes hours for the house to cool even with all the windows and both doors open. But then it takes most of the day to heat up again too. So, good insulation and situating the house where it's in the shade nearly all day in summer; an open plan, two story with a cupola which pulls air in the windows on the west side, the breeze side, which faces a wooded hillside so that air has risen through acres of woods that cool it by transpiration, then it rises up and out. creating a little air movement. We used to have box fans which had the problem of soon being too much, even on low speed. then my husband made a bunch of fans out of pairs of old desktop computer fans (he used to do electronic repair). They use like 6 watts and are adequate almost always. i don't remember the name or authors, but there are two books, perhaps out of print, full of tips on how to use landscaping to keep your home warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

Last year one of my trees (the PF 19-007 (YES, it needs a better name!)) had so many set--on what's still a small tree--that I picked off 250 little fruits and still had about fifty left to go to maturity--I might have gotten half of those, despite bagging them all. I didn't bag all the apples and pears, just as high as I could reach standing on a stool--the squirrel swipes them from the top down. My one mature peach had a lot of good fruit despite the drought but--no doubt because of the drought--for a while when they were ripe I couldn't get at them because a cloud of bees and wasps were guarding them. They also kept me out of my raspberry patch through most of the harvest. Only time that's happened. I used to think peaches were dicey here as they bloom early and we get variable frosts, But I find since I've been living on the ridge, they seem to set fruit well even--one year it hit 12 degrees when they were in full bloom, and they still resumed blooming and set fruit when it warmed up.

Carla--I tried that last year. Don't remember which brand, turned out there were several, all green, all made in China out of "organza" which could be silk or nylon--no doubt the latter and I'm trying to get away from using plastic but--I used all 200 bags that came in my order, on apples pear and peaches, and it seemed I got more fruit than in most years, and only found about 30 bags on the ground dirty and usually torn. But my neighbor, who told me about the bags, said they found most of the bags on the ground. Thing is, these bags also protect, to some degree, against insect and possibly disease damage. And unlike using "whatever bags I could find" (I initially used halves of old socks), they're easy to apply (they have a drawstring) and don't fall off. I called this a partial success last year but there is a complicating factor: we had a prolonged drought last year--which might have only encouraged the squirrels, or maybe it knocked down their numbers before the pomes were ripe. But it's probably the reason my trees have set almost no fruit this year despite no frosts at bloom time--they set heavily last year, all of them, and ripened fruit through that drought and it took a lot out of them so they;re taking this year off to recover.

to Ben--I lived in California in my teens, several hundred years ago, and I remember the invasive fennel, remember once sleeping in a bed of them. Here in West Virginia, the invasives are multiflora rose and autumn olive. I sure wish we had invasive fennel, and that it would outcompete those thorny, nasty things!

Long ago, when I was 17 and hadn't yet figured out that I needed to find a way to live in the country, I lived in Middletown, Connecticut. I would walk through the park--I needed to--and I would see squirrels and think, THEY don't have jobs, and they get by fine, don't they? So I credit them with that inspiration, and I have a photo on my wall of a nest with baby squirrels looking out and they're so cute. But now squirrels are at the top of my shit list--well, maybe under chiggers--because they steal most of my tree fruits every year. I haven't found a solution. There've been times I threatened to rip that photo off the wall. But I haven't.