Greetings!
I'm intending this
thread to serve as a journal for my new piece of
land. Feel free to comment or give advice, but I also won't be bothered if it is just a place where I talk to myself. I didn't see a category for journals so let me know if this would be better placed elsewhere.
I've been looking for a few years now for a piece of land (5+ acres) near my family in western washington and finally found something in my price range. My first visit was in early June and I finally got it into my sweaty little palms toward the end of July. The land is funky, it is actually ~19 acres (the county claims 20 but I'm pretty sure it got shorted decades ago, I was able to find two of the original survey markers and make a rectangle).
Anyway, 19 acres is still plenty of land for my purposes, which are:
* Growing a food forest (~2+ acres)
* Providing a safe haven for
local pollinators (so, growing appropriate
native plants and providing living areas for their whole lifecycle)
* Growing a million tomatoes for my personal consumption, god I love that fruit
* A little off grid cabin and some day a
wood fired hot tub
* Which means managing a woodlot for winter (and hot tub!) heat
* Moving there full time in ~5 years (for now my job means I can only be there about 1 week per month. The primary problem with this is I can't partner with livestock any time soon.)
Geography:
* ~2 acres of mostly clearned south facing slope, cleared of
trees but being invaded by everything else, also very poor soil
* ~15 forested acres with a wavy elevation profile (it was last logged in the 80s and doesn't appear to have been managed since, a good thinning of shorter lived alders/cottonwoods to give more space for the big cedars and ferns and I think it could be really nice back there)
* ~1 combined acre of full on skunk weed marsh in some lower ares
* 1 year round creek - small though, and toward the back of the property (but hello secret micro-hydro operation...)
Structures:
* An existing small cabin, it has a permitted septic and working
solar panels, but the home inspector said "I can't decide what scares me more; the wiring or the framing". So... that'll need a do-over.
* A
greenhouse (~20 foot x ~30 foot, very weathered poly cover, but good steel bones)
Flora in the front 2 acres:
* A small orchard (2 big blueberry, numerous tiny blueberry, 6
apple, 2 small plum, 3 asian pear all of unknown origins but so far delicious!)
* A wildly aggressive hardy kiwi with a handful of little fruit trying to eat the cabin jumanji style
* No less than
8 different kinds of bamboo, at least half of which are runners
* Butterfly bush literally everywhere (even growing out of the 6 inch thick gravel parking pad) and
* Blackberries, because of
course there are blackberries. And so many kinds too! The himalayan invaders are there, but also some absolutely delicious evergreen brambles that I'd like to keep and the tiny almost grayish local vines, oh those were good. And a bunch that look like nothing I've ever seen but are presumably crosses of all three.
Flora in the forest:
* Many trees and
mushrooms, sorry my identification skills just aren't good
enough to name them all yet
* Many healthy ferns
* A handful of areas that look to have been cleared which are now solid salmonberry thickets with a
nettle understory
Fauna:
* at least one neighborhood bear (probably why all my blueberries disappeared one night, pretty sure I found the bed walking through the forest one day, thank god it was empty)
* bobcats (previous owners said they ate all their
chickens every time they tried to keep
chickens)
* migratory elk herd
* a lot of bunnies
* and of course the true menace,
deer. Lots and lots of deer, I can see the damage to the fruit trees, and there is no fencing or discouraging barrier.
So, if any of this is interesting to you feel free to follow along, it's going to fun!