Complete Beginners - Any Guidance?

Hi Folks,

New to this forum and to permaculture.  Me, my wife, and our 3 daughters have been living at our new property for about 2 years, and decided we wanted to start growing our own food.  We live in southern Maine and get lots of rainfall in our area.

I've done research on permaculture techniques and we've started to put some plans into action, but I feel like we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg.  I'm hoping that if I post a few pictures of our schemes, we might get some guidance on anything we're doing horribly wrong.

The first picture is the triangle of scrubland we wanted to repurpose.  Nothing but place for our dog to pick up ticks.

The second is about what we've done so far - 2 hugelkultures and a terrace.  The hugelkultures are piles of mostly oak, covered with smaller diameter trees.  We stuffed the gaps with twigs and leaves, then covered it with a layer of upturned sod that we cut from where the terrace is.  We then covered the whole thing with a few inches of soil.  The terrace is supported with two large birch logs and a twine fence. We filled the base with more small trees and twigs/leaves before covering with soil.    

I haven't had the soil tested, but I did DIY tests with baking soda and vinegar - no noticeable reaction for either, so I'm laboring under the thought that we're pH neutral.  Otherwise, the soil seems loamy, moist and well drained (this is a guess, I really don't know!).

Our next moves - plant good critter-attracting flowers around the base of the small hill.  In the beds, we're looking at tomatoes, onions, garlic, etc. as well as beans and peas for nitrogen fixing, and a lot of herbs to hopefully keep pests away.  We're also looking at clovers or mustards for green manure, though I've read mustard can interfere with other plant growth.  We may even try to plant a dwarf fruit tree on that small hill in the back!

Anyway, this is our first garden, so we really have no idea what we're doing!  Any comments, guidance, or directions would be very much appreciated!

Hi Steve and Sara. You've already done a really important step. .. and that's to get to know your property. Observing what happens and how to work with, rather than against, the natural inclination and systems of your land is where most people get rushed, and go wrong.
I am by no means an expert or a PMC teacher, Here's what I did:
Observe the water. Where does it come from, where does it run to. How can you best use it before it leaves?
Observe the light. Where does it come from, what work does it do. How can you get it to work for you?
Observe the air. Where does the wind come from, what damage can it do, can you sculpt it?

You know this already because you started with hugelculture which combines all three of these elements, and you are alreday looking at dirt and thinking about turning it into soil. Awesome!

Now the work is in designing and building a natural machine for doing work: growing food, enriching your soil.
Your machine will be unique to you and your biome I recomend touring other people's operations in your area. Just looking around will give you a ton of ideas, and given a chance most system developers will talk about thier land all day long.

Good luck, have fun, fail forward!

Thanks for the feedback Chris.

We did try to take those components into account, and I should have spoke to those areas more.  You are right that we chose the hugelkultures primarily because of their water retaining properties.  
Apart from that, our house and yard are on a plateau of sorts, and the rest (~9 acres) is surrounded by swampy lowland or forest.  The spot we're gardening in is between those elevations, so it does get plenty of water, but then drains to the swampier areas you can see off to the right.
Most of that spot gets direct sunlight for the majority of the day, though there will be some shade as leaves grow in.  
For wind, we're somewhat shelled in, as the entire property is surrounded by woods.  Once leaves grow in, we don't generally experience strong winds apart from summer storms.

Enriching the soil is where we're currently investigating.  We've started composting, and hope that all the dead wood/leaves/sod+nitrogen fixers/green manure will do a lot of the work for us.  We have a fire pit on the hill, and I've been looking into sprinkling in some ash for potassium, but I'm concerned that the potassium salts will drop the pH too much.

You make a great suggestion at the end, but I'm not sure I can get on to anyone's land right now.  When the quarantine lifts I'll be asking around!

Thanks again.

With the woods nearby, I would look into making biochar as well.  You already have a fire pit.  If you have water available, you can make charcoal right in the pit, quench it, get a compost heap going to inoculate it.  It looks like you are doing a great job so far, it's beautiful.

We do have plenty of material and water for biochar.  I found a video from RED gardens on doing it with with a simple cone pit, which I could do in our fire pit.  We don't have much compost yet, but I'll give it a try this weekend!

Thanks for the advice.

One specific question - what do we do about critters?

The back ~9 acres of our land is untamed woods and wetland.  We've spotted squirrels, deer, turkey, rabbits, etc. .  We have a big, loud dog that keeps things out of our immediate area, but my wife and I are concerned about the wildlife eating our plants and getting into our compost.

I don't think a physical barrier will work for that spot.  I've read that strongly scented herbs and animal scents can be used, but does anyone have any advice on keeping wildlife out of the garden?

Steven Gallo wrote:One specific question - what do we do about critters?

The back ~9 acres of our land is untamed woods and wetland.  We've spotted squirrels, deer, turkey, rabbits, etc. .  We have a big, loud dog that keeps things out of our immediate area, but my wife and I are concerned about the wildlife eating our plants and getting into our compost.

I don't think a physical barrier will work for that spot.  I've read that strongly scented herbs and animal scents can be used, but does anyone have any advice on keeping wildlife out of the garden?

If you don't fence it, you can pretty much forget producing anything.  I've tried pretty much everything and nothing works other than a dog in the immediate area that kills everything that moves, or a fence.  Just my opinion of course.

Unfortunately, my experience in a rural area of NJ with my mother's garden (heavy deer, turkeys, squirrels, rabbits, bears etc) was the same- even a simple fence was not enough, we needed double fencing for the deer and in the end we ended up just making the garden very narrow strips, otherwise the deer would jump everything we came up with.

Darn.  We were afraid of that.  Our old boy isn't aggressive enough to do the job then - the most he's good for is an occasional howl.

I don't know how we'd go about fencing that area, being that it's such uneven terrain.  Time to do some research.

Thanks for the info.

There are volunteer organisations like wwoofing where you can volunteer on farms for a few hours work a day and stay and eat for free. People usually stay a short time, say about week or so. These farms are usually intended for travellers, but they could also feasibly be used by you to learn more about how permaculture farming works in your area. You'll also receive free expert advice from people you volunteer for. If I ever manage to live the dream of living on a large property like yours, that's what I'll be doing first: travelling around the state asking farms to take me on for a little while for my free labour so that I can avoid making mistakes on my own property and pick up good ideas to try.

Steven, if you haven`t already you might want to reach out to your local cooperative extension (i`m seeing southern maine has some resources out there at the SMCC) and see if they have any publications or etc, you also might end up finding out that there are people near you that you could connect with. I know here I'm always happy to show people around my little farm and talk plants/pests/etc.
I'm hearing that many public agencies that are not responding by phone are being very quick on FB (libraries, particularly), so that might be a good way to reach out. Maybe that will save you from having to completely reinvent the wheel.

This shows that there are (or were, not sure if they are continuing) zoom meetings with master gardeners and town hall type meetings with other farmers, and I didn`t even get through half the list. https://extension.umaine.edu/serving-maine/

Good luck!

I spend a lot of time watching you tube videos of this stuff, and it seems like the people having most success developing land for growing are using livestock to do the work. I particularly like Justin Rhodes videos.

Things like electric fencing pigs in an area to clear scrub, and flocks of chickens in chicken tractors moved on after a week or so. The pigs are great at digging up perennial roots, the chickens clear ground, fertilise and eat weed seeds.  A powerful combination, and you shift the effort of land clearing to them while producing a valuable product (meat, eggs etc...).

Use them to get a small area really well established and then expand gradually.

Maybe junkpole fencing would be a cheap interm solution?
Paul's 'freaky cheap' fencing