posted 2 hours ago
Hello Permies!
I’ve been a long-time lurker/dreamer of rocket mass heaters and hügelkultur, and I now find myself with an amazing opportunity to bring these technologies into being.
I recently found 54 acres of land in upstate New York between Rochester and Elmira. I had a digger up a few months ago to explore putting in a large pond, but it seems like there is bedrock or hardpan 3-5 feet down most places. The parcel is on top of a hill around 2160 ft, 4-5 acres are meadow with full south sun, the rest is relatively diverse hardwood with lots of maple, oak, and beech, as well as a lot of quaking aspens. It is completely off grid with an 1800 ft access road-currently no well.
We’ve been taking down the quakes and doing some thinning of forest around the meadow over the last few months and probably have around 200-300 ~60ft trees between 1 and 2 ft in diameter. The plan is to build as many hügelkultur mounds as we can fit in the meadow-the 7 ft high variety emphasized in Paul’s “Hugelkultur Smackdown” video. There will also be a partially buried ~39x15 passive greenhouse in the sun-scoop of one of the mounds, featuring a large batch box RMH with pex tubing running through its exterior as well as the slab, with a water reservoir for additional heat storage.
I have little concept of what is possible in a day moving this much material and would love some guidance from anyone who has worked on a large project such as this. My plan is to have a horse team, a tractor with a winch, and a digger with a thumb working simultaneously, and I’m hoping we can get most of the logs out of the forest and stacked in around 3 days. I will post some drawings and photos soon-I appreciate any advice you all might have!
Thanks,
Tyler
9
