Building a ‘Land Binder’: Tracking Everything on My Property

Earlier today I got one of those Big Ideas that won't go to sleep quietly. This is part of my strategy to help Paul Wheaton in his quest for World Domination. Infecting brains with Permaculture.

And it starts with infecting your own brain, systematically.

I started a binder. Part scrapbook, part seed catalog, part history, part reminiscences, really whatever you want it to be. And I expect that it will expand exponentially in the colder months, but today I got started.

A couple of years ago, I went to my county's property tax GIS boundary website. Yes, those things exist. It shows your property, its boundaries, and how much you owe each year for the pleasure of staying where you are.

I printed a couple dozen of them onto letter sized sheets of paper, three-hole puncheced them, and put them in a binder. Then I got to work with a red marker. Drew a circle on my property where a certain plant or project is. And added personal notes and documentation, receipts and pictures. Whatever your heart feels like including.

I'm going to do this for everything. Every project. Every seed that sprouted and thrived. Every tree. Every plant. Every beehive. Every pond. Every perennial plant. Every annual crop. Well...the annuals will have to be updated every year from newest to oldest. But that will tell me what to plant and what NOT to plant in that spot the following year.

I am hoping this will become a keepsake. An instruction manual. A history of the land. A way forward to the person or people who inherit my little permaculture paradise.

Maybe you might think about building your own binder?

I'll keep posting here as I get more involved with the project.

Jim

I know, I know! Some of y'all have 40 acres or more. I don't know how to do that. But with my pert-near-an-acre, I think it is going to work. Maybe for bigger properties, you break it into a series of maps and go from there.

Jim

I have a similar project but for my biomes. If im going to build a native food forest I need to know all the native plants and what they're good for, both to other plants and to me.

So ill be listing native plants, whats edible, whats a source of weaving fiber, what fixes nitrogen, what supplies shade, what lives at the ground, what lives as a bush, what becomes a tree, what is good companion planting, what is fire tolerant, etc.

I know almost nothing about plant needs and interactions, so i suspect this list will get a lot longer as a become less uneducated.

Then i do the same with native and current animals.

Then i draw out on your printed GIS maps where they live and what changes I need to make.

If I'm going to own a forest, I'd better know the forest.

This started with some recent things ive learned about fire and how in my area, the douglas fir forests i thought were natural are actually highly unnatural biomes built by our human need to suppress fires. As a result i need to know which trees should be there and how to thin the fir trees the way a fire would, or else I end up with a broken ecosystem that endangers me and the plants i rely on to live.

Here are the first few pages I included, after a brief history of the property.

Jim

Outstanding. That's a consideration that wasn't even on my radar. I think binders like this could prove to have a lot of value.

Jim

Daniel Andy wrote:I have a similar project but for my biomes. If im going to build a native food forest I need to know all the native plants and what they're good for, both to other plants and to me.

So ill be listing native plants, whats edible, whats a source of weaving fiber, what fixes nitrogen, what supplies shade, what lives at the ground, what lives as a bush, what becomes a tree, what is good companion planting, what is fire tolerant, etc.

Then i do the same with native and current animals.

Then i draw out on your printed GIS maps where they live and what changes I need to make.

If I'm going to own a forest, I'd better know the forest.

This started with some recent things ive learned about fire and how in my area, the douglas fir forests i thought were natural are actually highly unnatural biomes built by our human need to suppress fires. As a result i need to know which trees should be there and how to thin the fir trees the way a fire would, or else I end up with a broken ecosystem that endangers me and the plants i rely on to live.

This is basically what got me started building a digital version of the same thing. I kept losing track of what I planted where, when things fruited, which varieties did well in which spots. A physical binder is great for the history and maps side of it, but for the ongoing tracking stuff (pruning dates, harvest notes, what failed and why) I found I needed something I could update on my phone while I was actually out there. Ended up building leaftide.com for exactly that. The combination of both might actually be the sweet spot though, binder for the big picture and reference material, app for the day to day notes you'd forget otherwise.

That's great, Joao.

I'm a tactile person, so I lean toward paper. But I've been around enough to know the power spreadsheets, WIKIs, etc. play in the business of keeping everything straight.

Your program reminded me of a joke I heard years ago about the chicken farmer who sent his son to college. He majored in business and when he came home to visit he told his dad he was going to organize his business so he could enter everything into a computer and print reports to keep everything straight, he'd know how much of which supplies to purchase, how productive the chickens were being, and ensure deliveries to customers were on time. "What are you going to call this thing?" Dad asked his son. "Egg Inventory and Orders Input and Output" the son said with a smile.

EIEIO for short...

Jim

Joao Winckler wrote:This is basically what got me started building a digital version of the same thing. I kept losing track of what I planted where, when things fruited, which varieties did well in which spots. A physical binder is great for the history and maps side of it, but for the ongoing tracking stuff (pruning dates, harvest notes, what failed and why) I found I needed something I could update on my phone while I was actually out there. Ended up building leaftide.com for exactly that. The combination of both might actually be the sweet spot though, binder for the big picture and reference material, app for the day to day notes you'd forget otherwise.