Succession teaching best practices
I am imagining I might take over a farm, permaculture-inspired farm with fruit and nut
trees etc.
I will ask if he has a manual that he's written up already, but I am guessing he hasn't found that a priority and it's the sort of thing that people tend not to document, being busy doing the work rather than writing about it. But I'll ask first.
I imagine that the best way for me to get the hang of things is to follow the farmer around with a notebook and write down a list of the tasks that he does during the day.
Anything that's unusual about how the task needs to be done I'll probably remember, because it makes an impression by being unusual (for example, he transplants his starts into the corners of the planting tray cells, so that it's easier to mulch along the middle: __.|.__ instead of _o_|_o_—I'm not going to forget that one).
Things that are more mix-up-able I might write down. Chestnut trees you want to let grow big, only pruning the inner sucker-y bits, whereas peach you prune everything and every few years you lop off the top at about 10 ' height so that it fills in at a level you can reach and doesn't make more fruits than it can ripen. I probably would remember this, since you expect chestnuts to be overstory and peaches to be more reachable, but my mind is likelier to reverse two different things than to forget a single thing. So I might note those down.
Then at the end of the day, I'd go over the list and jot any more notes.
I'd also note the date, so I have a sense of when in the cycle of the year these things need to happen. Tunnels up in late March, seedlings transplanted.
Then i'm thinking there are things that I'm going to want to do differently, to innovate or simply to take a page from someone here on Permies who's innovated or has a different family practice of something or whatever. But I'd hold to the rule of no new suggestions for six months.
Any other ideas about ways to have information get passed on with as high quality as possible? (not accuracy only, but quality). Knowing what you don't know is a big value. Why do we do X? we've always done it that way. What happens if you try Y instead? good idea, for another day when there's room to do a small, controlled experiment and keep track of the results.
Thoughts?
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