General question: how much forest can I keep?

We recently got 5 acres of hardwoods in Northern Michigan (not UP). Hooray! They're 80 ft tall sugar maples so we're excited about tapping them for maple syrup, but as you might imagine the tree cover adds lots of shade. Our neighbors are also all hardwood, so there's just trees everywhere.

If we wanted to aim to be self sufficient in the next 5 years, realistically how many trees can we keep? Is this possible on essentially forested land? We'd like to keep the most trees we can, but of course, clearly understand that small scale farming needs sun. What would you recommend?

What are your hopes and dreams for this land?  

A market garden or just something to feed your family?

Does a food forest sound like something you are interested in?

Maybe you are wanting to cull the smaller trees and keep the larger ones?

So many options so it would be great to hear what you have in mind.  Even small scale farming could mean several options.

> What are your hopes and dreams for this land?  A market garden or just something to feed your family?

Just the latter. We're not looking to make income (though that's always nice), but we would like to skip most of our grocery store trips. We've discussed chickens (mostly eggs but also meat), we have a small 20ft by 20ft vegetable garden started already, but my naive assumption is that with most of the land our options are maple syrup, mushrooms, or cutting trees down. True? untrue?

> Does a food forest sound like something you are interested in?

I have a new thing to Google! I will go read about this. It does sound quite interesting.

> Maybe you are wanting to cull the smaller trees and keep the larger ones?

Yes, we're mostly interested in keeping the larger trees, you're right, though given their height and size I worry that those are the ones most in the way of other projects.

Thank you for your reply!

I believe that true self sufficiency is largely a myth.  I believe small communities can be self sufficient, possibly even a large extended family, but not a couple/small family.  Your definition of self sufficiency may differ from mine.

If you mean, the ability to grow all of your own food within 5 years, I think you have major obstacles ahead of you.  I believe you can grow a substantial portion of your food, but to convert a hardwood forest into a food forest and annual gardens, which is the route I would take, you will need more time.    I would start by clearing at least an acre of land.  Depending on whether you can do this full time or you still have jobs, and what type of equipment you have, clearing an acre might take you a year in itself.  Food trees take quite a while to be producing well, if indeed you want food producing trees at all.  Annuals gardens will get you producing food much more quickly, but to be really productive, they take time to develop as well.

The answers to Anne's questions are important, and your question is probably impossible to answer adequately with the information given.  Fill in some of those blanks and the lovely people here will be able to give you answers that will hopefully get you on your way to what you are looking for.  And congratulations on your land acquisition.  Northern MI is beautiful country.

Here are some threads about a food forest:

https://permies.com/t/178574/Advice-starting-food-forest-permaculture

https://permies.com/t/180423/show-food-forest-pictures-pictures

JT, I will give my personal thoughts, but please understand that while these are my ideas, it’s your land and your call.

My personal goal would be to save as many of those trees as possible and this seems to be your goal as well.  With that in mind and considering that you will have no livestock aside from chickens, I would use the land like this:

1/4 acre (maybe less) for a house and yard if you want/need one.

1/4 acre for outbuildings, again, if you need them.

1/4-1/2 acre for a food forest—fruit/nut trees and bush/bramble fruit patches.

1/4 acre large garden.  I think that a 1/4 acre garden is the largest garden I could reasonably maintain by myself and only if I could devote significant time to its maintenance.

So all-in, this looks like a maximum of 1.25 acres out of your five.  Obviously I have not been on your site and 80’ tall trees can make some pretty intimidating shade so maybe you would have to clear a total of 2 acres, but personally it would hurt me to think about clearing so many trees just to clear them.  Hopefully, 1.25 acres would be the most you would need to clear.

And then maybe you could get by on less.  Maybe your house, outbuildings and yard could all be squeezed into 1/4 acre, have a 1/4 acre food forest and a 1/4 acre garden.  This would be 0.75 acres cleared, leaving 4.25 wooded and that.75 acres of timber would be a LOT of wood! This could be great for hugel mounds which might be a better option than a traditional garden in your case.  You could get mountains of woodchips, something I personally live to use.  You could have a lot of firewood or you might even be able to get some lumber/cash for all that wood.

Actually, approximately 1ish acres is a lot of land for your purposes so by all means, think creatively here.  And again, these are all just some of my ideas and if they help, great.  If not, modify or discard as you see fit.

Good luck and please keep us updated.

Eric

The first thing to do is observe! Watch the position of the sun. It's basically at its maximum height right now (June 21 is the solstice). You can see in your open space the maximum number of hours of daylight you will get, and the obstacles (trees) interfering with that. Seed packets list the hours of daylight the plants need.

I found an amazing online tool for calculating sun position and hours of daylight through the seasons. It's intended for solar power calculations but then plants are solar powered too. You just enter your lattitude and longitude in the search field and it lays it all out for you in graphs and tables.

https://www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tools/pos_sun.php

Hello,

I don't know an exact answer, because I am still figuring that out for myself, how much area should be kept open for grains and some vegetables versus trees. However, I have some knowledge I hope might help.

Are there any streams running through the land? Maybe wood nettle would work there-- for us they are a staple vegetable throughout spring and summer, and they love shade, rich soil, and water.  The seeds are edible too, although I have not collected many; the fibers from the stem are of a very good quality. Or possibly wild ramie (Boehmeria cylindrica), their stingless cousin? Ramps are another delicious spring vegetable who benefit much from growing under sugar maples; if they are not there in great quantities already, perhaps there is some sowing to be done. There is good food to be had in a maple forest. Toothwort is a good enough green vegetable, a spicy forest mustard who loves depressions and wet places. You may also find garlic mustard; in the sunnier places, stinging nettle and Virginia waterleaf might proliferate. Fruit trees often like the edges of places; perhaps blueberries gooseberries, or currants could grow.

In the next five years oak trees are not going to be terribly much help, but maybe clearing a more sloped or higher area and planting red or bur oaks, or chestnuts, and fruit trees would help with further-future goals. Acorns can take a long time to cook, but cracking them before boiling, rather than leaving them whole or making them into flour, may have them ready within the day. Within such a clearing, milkweed may appear, and provide good vegetables during late spring through early autumn. They are tolerant to many adverse soils and environments. I planted rye last autumn, and they are coming up well in a relatively shady place; they, potatoes, lily (Lilium or Hemerocallis), and maybe other grains, could grow amongst the trees in a natural way along with green manures, wild herbs, and vegetables.

It depends on what you mean by self sufficient.  You likely can not get it growing enough directly to feed you in that time.  But you already have an established crop in the maples so if you can produce enough from that to sell them buy other foods maybe.(or trade)

So lets take an example(not how I would want to live but something I can at least put some roughly fair numbers to)  If each person needs roughly 400 lbs of grain per year to live and grain is say $0.50 a lb you are looking at $200 a year worth of grain per person.  Now will how ever many acres you will have of forest produce that in syrup each year to get that grain?  What else do you need for self sufficient?  Home heating and cooling?, cars for transport? property tax payment?  Etc?  My guess is that unless you mean self sufficient at the most basic level it isn't possible in 5 years unless you have practically unlimited resources.

But what else do you need to reach for that goal?

1.  You will be cutting down trees.  
     A.  Some will be used to keep construction costs down,
     B.  smaller branches will be used for a hugelkulture pile along the north edge of your cleared garden.  Why north edge?  Because it lets you tap more of the sun light by shading forest floor behind it rather than land you can use to grow something
    C.  You will have crotches and roots etc that are bigger but not good for construction material.  Get the spawn treated wood dowels and grow mushrooms with these back in the trees somewhere.  This one you can on a smaller scale longer term by cleaning up dead branches etc.

2.  Another thing you can do with the forest is growing some sort of forager that can survive in the forest.  Chickens, turkey, guineas etc.  They don't need huge amounts of light.  And if you raise them seasonally little or no feed to carry thru the winter.  Likely you will want a few laying hens that you do partially feed thru the winter and a larger number of meat birds you raise seasonally when they can mostly forage for food.  That means 2 coops.  The coop should be roughly in the middle of the property to hopefully allow them to free range without anything but a small coop fence for the laying hems for mornings ideally(5 acres is marginal for those but choose the right species and likely you won't need chicken property fences)  Since ideally you want to move manure as little as possible ideally likely puts cleared garden area near middle too.

3.  Will likely need out buildings.  To minimize loss of forest they should be on skids so the ground under them is left exposed so the tree roots can get oxygen and the roof should be designed to carry precipitation back under the building to water the trees.  And then the buildings moved back in the trees.  Since they need to go between trees likely the building will be narrow one direction.

4.  Honey bee hives.  Built into an out building or on a roof of an outbuilding to reduce raider damage?  There again both food and something for trade or sale.  Can you add some sort of vines that flower to the mix to grow up some of the trees?

5.  You are going to need a steady fuel wood source possibly for home heating and most definitely for boiling the sap down so something you can copice and grow for fuel needs to be on that list.  Some of this you will be able to get from branch debris, dead trees etc cleanup but likely not enough and this is one you need to locate early in the process so has harvestable by your 5 year point.  Willow maybe?  

6.  Cleared garden area.  If you can do greenhouse or high tunnel here and increase the growing season so much the better.  The more productive each square foot of ground is the better and one way to do that is more growing days.  Longer term you will likely want nut and fruit trees and because they get taller they will likely be located most on the southern edge of the garden space.  Brambles and other shade accepting crops you can probably hide out in the forest or the edges of the forest.  

7. home.  ideally right on a road edge to minimize land lost to road,  Probably a tall building on the northern edge of the garden area to maximize light caught.  Ideally with a greenhouse built in.  Ideally with solar thermal heating built in to heat everything and also do the first stages of the sugaring of the maple syrup.  Because you want to able to use waste heat both ways the house should be near the lowest location to so your sap lines can all run to it.

This also depends on how you envision your diet.  How much you want to recreate your current diet, vs. learning to live and eat differently.

I don't eat grains, or other starchy carbs like potato, etc.  

For ME,  enough room to grow and can leafy green veg and some squashes, etc. is good.    Nuts and fruits can round that out well and ideally grow on forest edge.   Animals that can browse can utilize forest edge as well.   Rabbits are pretty easy to forage for,  and ducks will do that for themselves in a shady run with somewhere to dig and search for bugs and slugs and things.    

I would not need FIELDS of grain and starches for me.    If some hunting and fishing were possible as well as eggs, rabbits, maybe a couple of hair sheep lambs each year,   I could do well on that much acreage while keeping most of the forest too.   Mushroom foraging as well.