posted 5 years ago
Thanks Roy and Ben.
It's good to hear that an east-facing slope can work. And in relation to training trees taller/shorter, I have about 8 different chestnut varieties (grafted trees) in pots in my back yard, and it might be feasible to position them on the slope with the shorter-growing varieties in lower rows so as to block less light for the upper rows.
We're in a bit of a rain shadow from western winds but eastern winds pick up moisture crossing the water from the mainland. That said, there is very little moisture here during the growing season. It all comes down as rain during the winter. We plan to install a pond to capture winter rain and pump it back up to a system of swales and berms using a solar pump in summer. I'd forgotten about planting close to shade the soil and retain moisture in summer, so that is something worth thinking about in this process of determining exactly how much acreage we need to meet our goals and how it needs to be configured.
Ben, Mark Shepard's book is what started me on this journey and then I read H. Russell Smith's 1929 book Tree Crops and was completely hooked.
Re goals for the property and plantings, it will be a mix of homestead and a few cash crops to pay the bills, which will be perennial tree crops. I am going into business with my daughter who is 21 and wants to farm as a career choice, but at a scale that is more like an expanded homestead, not big ag. Initially I'll be supporting the mortgage and farm costs by continuing to work in my present job, but we expect to have some farm income established by the time I retire in a few years and eventually the new farm will need to be self-sustaining. So a certain minimum acreage of perennial cash crops is part of our planning to provide an income.
Right now we have close to 1000 pots of perennial food plants growing at my present 3 acre place, mostly species we're growing up from seeds or cuttings to get some size on them before we transplant them to their permanent home. She's booted my geese out of their paddock into a smaller pen and has started turning their former space into a spot where she will plant a market garden this year. We're also planning on selling plants at the market, including some of the propagated perennial food plants. That's assuming there is a farmer's market this year with coronavirus...but if that is too much potential contact for people, we can sell from a farm stand. There is a well established honour-box system here and I suspect buying food from a farm stand in an open air venue where the food is local, has been handled by only one or two people, and you don't even have to see the seller will be even more popular going forward.
Of the 1000 or so pots out in the yard, 400 are grafted chestnuts of European x Japanese named varieties. These are going to be the backbone of the cash crops on the new property. Because they were rather pricey to buy, I am hoping to be able to give them plenty of space and keep them all (except for some that we might sell at market this year) rather than crowding them and then keeping the ones that do best according to the Shepard STUN method of natural selection. I can see that being a viable method for seedlings, but since these are grafted trees of commercially grown varieties the performance should be reasonably predictable.
Along with the main crops of chestnut to be underplanted with hazelnut and elderberry, we have a bunch of other things already growing in our pots that will get planted in the rows - raspberries, tayberries, loganberries, red and white currants, goji, haskap, basket willows, pussywillow, figs, old roses, asparagus, Egyptian onion, horseradish, lots of perennial herbs, and a lot more I can't think of just now. We also have some Northern pecans, heartnuts, persimmons, pawpaws, apples, cherries, plums, linden, a shipova, and Korean pine. And 2 baby giant sequoia, just because :) Lots of other things that are presently cold-stratifying and hopefully will come up in spring, like mulberry, more Korean pine, cherry-plums, honey locust, etc. In the alleys between rows, we're going to run laying hens (expanding my existing flock which currently number 23) in chicken tractors, and in alternate rows will grow annual or perennial crops including flowers for bouquets. The idea is to keep every other alley (the one that can be grazed) accessible by truck and tractor so trees can be reached on one side, the other side is in market garden crops. As the tree canopy starts to fill in, which realistically is 10-15 or more years, non-shade-tolerant vegetables and flowers will be grown only in a vegetable area near the house and the alleys can be switched over to grazing, but by that time the trees will be producing and market gardening will not be the primary income stream. Once the plants go in the ground we'll be mulching with wood chips and will plant stropharia mushrooms and once there is some shade will start inoculating logs with oyster mushrooms.
Lots to do, and I think I had better go do some of it now! It's a busy time of year and once things slow down a bit I think I should take some photos and start a thread to document the process.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. - Ralph Waldo Emerson