Your suggestions please

Hey! You stole my topic! 
I was just coming here to post my first thread, and found you here already... but here is my story!
We are about to take 17 acres of abandoned and mostly cleared apple orchard (that is a tale to make you weep!) in Idaho and try to transform it. When I first learned about permaculture, someone suggested I offer to host a training there as a way to help get it done and done right. Does anyone have any idea if there are instructors who might work with us, or other suggestions?
Thanks - and good luck to you in PA!

not sure of anyone in the PA area that might be helpful.

I will be interested to see how you convert the old apple orchard. A few questions, are the apple trees still producing good apples??

I might suggest that you keep them alive until you can get some new ones growing if you want apples and then you can graft some branches from the good ones onto some newer trees before you replace the old ones?? Or possibly if the old ones can be renovated you might want to leave some or most of them up..lots of times you can renovate older apple trees a little at a time ..generally no more than 1/3 of the tree at one time..by cutting out first a lot of the old suckers and scraping off old bark..and then prune them a bit at a time to open up the interior of the tree..but don't go gung ho, give them some gentle tender loving care..try planting some dynamic accumulators and nitrogen fixers at their bases also to feed them some new nutrients, mulching over any grassy plants that might be growing below them..

good luck

Here brand new, incomplete but growing source for finding permaculture professionals and enthusiasts:

http://www.permacultureglobal.com/

fishyculture wrote:
Hey! You stole my topic! 
I was just coming here to post my first thread, and found you here already... but here is my story!
We are about to take 17 acres of abandoned and mostly cleared apple orchard (that is a tale to make you weep!) in Idaho and try to transform it. When I first learned about permaculture, someone suggested I offer to host a training there as a way to help get it done and done right. Does anyone have any idea if there are instructors who might work with us, or other suggestions?
Thanks - and good luck to you in PA!

Hi fishy, from a fellow DPer.