John Rains wrote:I am currently clearing out the wooded area of overgrown pioneer species of trees, mainly sweetgum and pine, so I can open up the understory for planting food forest species.
Hmm, sweetgums are great for hugelkultur (and not much else). If you see pioneer species like that dominating it's usually a sign of low soil fertility, unfortunately. The good news is that it's fairly easy to improve soil fertility, and the sweetgums and pine also provide lots of material for biochar, which is badly needed in southern soil. Once mineralized, you don't have to do much else to it for a very long time, too.
John Rains wrote:Wildflowers is one thing I would like to introduce into the pasture as well.
There are many companies that offer wildflower mixes for the southeast, some completely natives (which I hear don't grow so well) and some that are proven to do well in the SE, that will give you crazy blooms all year long. The only thing I'd look to avoid is lupins which some of them contain, as they're fairly noxious, hard to get inoculant for, and poisonous to livestock.
I also have a neat list of dynamic accumulators, many of which are also edible, sometimes multiple parts. I think I'll make a sticky for that, since I can

. I probably won't be planting many of them for my current project, though, simply because I have a limited space, time and money for that many species.
John Rains wrote:Are you planning on documenting your backyard remediation?
Definitely

. There's nothing really to document at the moment except a pair of hugel mounds that are collecting leaves, but when I start building up to plant I'll take a whole lot of pictures. I'm also using the wildflowers and grasses to do an experiment of inoculated vs uninoculated seeds, with pictures for that too.