Hi Folks
It's encouraging to hear from young peeps. Start young. From my hindsight and fairly extensive experience outdoors, gardening, and permaculture (PC) I'd say buy your own land and plant trees then go to work at a decent paying career to save to build while the trees grow. Then you have a place to go on your working vacations and invest your money in mprovments. Something to dream about and practice design ideas on. You may have enough for a down payment.
Here is one approach I've considered: Don't worry too much about the perfect land. Instead I look for abused, neglected, apparently useless parcel of land. The regenerative power is one of the greatest attributes of the PC approach. It's potentially very regenerative and one can demonstrate this through bump starting the ecological processes. In the PNW, Oregon, plant hundreds of nitrogen fixing pioneer species such as Red Alders, Cottonwoods, scotch broom (if it's not already there), Sitka alder, etc. and have free wood chips dumped there. Spread them out. Or straw. Leaves are one of my favorite. One can get payed to collect leaves and use them to heal abused land. Now that's win-win. I would think twice about free garden refuse after dealing with invasive plants such as field bindweed. I've been told several times garden refuse was weed free when it wasn't. One spring I had a garden thick with poison hemlock from a truckload of "clean"
compost. Then one might need animals to help control them. I used a flame grower to avoid chemicals. It was a lot of work I labeled Rake Water Burn (chop down the weeds, rake, water, burn the new young weed sprouts. Do this all over and over until no hemlock sprouts). Trees can take care of themselves very well after 1 year. Idea is to plant or sow thickly the trees then thin later. Cocreate a healing cover on the land while one sows wild oats in the city.
I've been looking for a rock quarry. Several examples are out there. Id love to design a amphitheater permaculture garden. With constructed wetlands.
The easiest is to spread the organic mulch then scatter seeds. If you want to start growing food it's easy: mounds and hugelkultur gardens. There will be lots of space and light between the young trees for a few seasons. I like to grow squash mounds because they spread fast and produce a lot of yummy food that keeps. One could survive a winter on squash lol. I suggest waiting and observing a while before planting perennial gardens everywhere willy nilly. I found the "relative placement" is not as simple as it seems and a lot of things got moved or were permanently in the way.
Oh, and in the mounds introduce earthworms and healthy soil from various places. For me this was the funnest kind of permaculture but may not be for everyone.
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