I'm on the southern border of Western WA (Columbia River/Cascade foothills) but my climate is probably not much different than yours.
My 0.5 acre backyard food forest is about 15 years old and overall is producing really well. Always a work in process, of course. I have about 200 varieties of edible perennials, including 96 varieties of apples and 19 varieties of grapes, across about 30 species of shrubs, vines, and
trees. Produces WAY more than we can eat or even harvest. I'm happy to trade plant materials and lessons learned.
We got a 10.6 kW Tesla
solar roof + PowerWalls in 2021. Since then we have spent a total of $15 for electricity (including the monthly connection fee). i.e. we produce quite a bit more than we use. However we just got an EV so that won't be the case going forward. But will be way cheaper than buying
gasoline.
I've done quite a bit with
mason bees, including "raising" them with a large
volunteer group as a fundraiser. At the peak I had 160 mason bee houses deployed all over this area. Covid killed that off so I am slowly ramping back down to just my
yard + a handful of friends and family. Difficult to do since hundreds of people now know me as a local "mason bee guy". I don't have any other animals in my system other than a pet dog and wild birds. I have somewhat "trained" the birds to remove pests and fertilize for me. Otherwise I don't spray or fertilize anything, and I only
water if a plant is showing signs of drought stress. I am glad to let a plant die if it is unhappy or if it makes me unhappy.
My general overriding goal is to be able to go into my backyard every day of the year and harvest something. I am very close to that goal.
I do still have a day job (1 year from
retirement) but that doesn't stop me from spending time in my food forest. It really isn't that much work once everything is established. I could of course annually prune every tree & shrub for maximum production, remove every invasive, harvest and preserve every single fruit/berry/nut, brew and apply
compost tea, chop every pruned branch into tiny pieces, etc. but I don't
have to do any of those things, and I usually don't. I do take full advantage of my headlamp to work even in winter evenings. That is also the best time to kill slugs, which I do with an old pair of scissors :-)
My main short-term goals right now are:
1. Figure out what to do with all the pruned branches (I prune most things annually). I don't want a gas chipper. Currently I pile them up and let them decompose, which the birds and
rabbits LOVE, but takes up space for about 4 years.
2. Lower the height of everything. I have planted pretty densely and thus as things grow, everything wants to be tall and skinny, and things that are shaded have slowed their fruit production significantly. Also I don't want to have to use a ladder to harvest.
3. Finish building a raised
hugelkultur veggie garden. The larger
wood chunks are going into that.
4. Add more
native flowers and
beef up my plant guilds. I have tried MANY guild plants under my apples, most have failed. Only comfrey and native strawberries have thrived.
5. Remove nearly all the native trailing blackberries (Rubus ursinus). I tend to allow natives to grow when they show up (and I have planted dozens). Most are well-behaved. Trailing blackberries are NOT well-behaved and have spread over the entire space. I will however let them grow over my branch piles to make them look a bit nicer, and because trailing blackberry is my mason
bees' favorite flower.
A longer term goal is to get connected with some person(s) who would want to come harvest my surplus. I think there could be a "roving harvester" role in
permaculture - a person who harvests surplus from people like me and sells it to local restaurants and farmer's markets, and uses it to make value-added products. Their main value-add would be knowing when and where certain things are a) available and b) in demand; and building up a large, seasonally-aware, local trading network.
I also do a lot of volunteer work at some nearby wildlife refuges (habitat restoration etc.), and many other wildlife-related projects with/for native
bats, turtles, pikas, Vaux's swifts, pollinators, and more. I have been doing that work since 2006.
I won't be able to meet up, but I'm happy to participate remotely.
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