Thanks folks - great to be on here with you all.
"Do you offer services for planning and choosing land in the more desertish areas? I'm looking in central eastern, CO simply due to proximity to where I work and live. Would I be better off holding out for another decade and just buy a smaller parcel in an area with higher precipitation?"
We mainly work in our cold humid northeast but refer folks who connect with us to people working in other areas. There's some great projects and work being done in CO as far as I hear but we do not have contacts in the area. I'd check in with local permaculture groups there about it. Try to find some inspiring sites and go from there. Higher precip. areas have their advantages but if you're water systems are very well setup you can achieve a lot of resilience in arid areas. You run higher risks of course, on the water front. I can't tell you in a few minutes, the most approp. areas to live in the nation though - too many variables there. Try spending time in some other regions and visit sites - that might help clarify.
"I wonder whether in your book you will be dealing with cold climate farming techniques. There is quite a bit of information out there that pretends to deal with cold climate, but most of this is temperate climate. With 4-5 months of winter, where I live is a completely different cattle of fish. Any suggestions on how to create microclimates (like Sepp e.g.) or how maybe farm through the winter would be helpful."
Yes, great point. Mollison once called Tasmania "cold." Sorry, but it's mild. Sepp is in a pretty cold place but as far as I can tell is still much warmer than true zone 4 or colder continental climates. We are solid zone 4 and have the setup aimed at zone 3 and to some extent zone 2 resilience. We are assuming that the zones could shift two numbers either way and want to be prepared for that: i.e. have the infrastructure that can deal with it (deeply buried water lines, super warm buildings, season extension, microclimates outside and in, species diversity, water capture, shade. The whole bit.) But mostly trying to capture heat. Shade is easy to come by - our black locusts which we have planted about 1,000 can be let go, instead of constant pollarding, to provide quick shade should the climate warrant it. Our emphasis on species and microclimates should be useful for you in the book. We don't play up plants that just don't work well in zone 4 for us - like persimmon (they've all exploded), paw paw, some others. And we share what surprisingly do seem to work well, some cherries (even a sweet variety), a peach variety (reliance). We de emphasize farming through the winter - it just seems to energy intensive for what you get out of it. And non resilient as a result. Plus, the light gets too limited and artificial lighting seems to have no place in a resilient setup. We find overwintering and simple passive cool storage (this climate is great for it!) works amazingly well. The colder, shorter your season, the more easily you can store.
"What will be new in this book? "
A lot - the easiest way to see is to checkout our site where we sell the book - there's a Table of Contents there. Mainly a major emphasis on homesteading at large - not just plant species focus, including buildings, heating systems, wood burning, animal systems, passive water systems, fertigation is a big one, paddy rice for zone 4 climates, dealing with toxicity, and a lot of on the ground design emphasis from our work doing this for clients. Here's the link:
http://www.wholesystemsdesign.com/resilient-farm-homestead-book/
"Can you discuss more of the crops/perennials that you grow?
Do you harvest all the hay for your sheep off your property too? What is the total acreage that you have?
We also have a lot of cradles and pillows with maples growing atop them This is from a wind or Nor'easter event. What would be your best use suggestion for all the 'in - between' spacing? "
There's too many to go into here but we have great success with elderberry, seaberry, honeyberry, blueberry, rubus, currants (sometimes), gooseberry every now and then. Whereas strangely, we have no success with saskatoons and the like. Apples are coming on strong as are pears, cherry and peach. Much more on this in the book. We buy in about 20 bales from a neighbor for the sheep and see this as a way to help build the systems - very little of the site - maybe 1 acre in 10 makes hay now - it's being converted from scraggly old field. So, it's goldenrod, fern, sapling, bramble, poplar. The hay we scythe from pathways in zone 1 and 2 goes into some duck bedding and our
compost piles, and as perennial mulch. 10 acres total, of which 1 is zone 1 and maybe 3 is zone 2 ish. Half of the site is zone 4 right now. But that gets smaller every year. In between mounds is harder in this climate that on top. We always plant perennials on top and sow clover, vetch and other n-fixers and other beneficials between and then we graze it all.
1
This is from a wind or Nor'easter event. What would be your best use suggestion for all the 'in - between' spacing?
