faith alkire

ok do you think it would be doable to do a raised bed forest style? all of us have bad knees so plants need to be at a level that doesn't require us to bend down to pick foods. i was thinking 4ft by 4ft beds that sort of surround a dwarf fruit tree. again knee problems make ladder climbing problematic but not sure if this will work the way i want it to or not and i want some opinions.

I have no plan to stick to only natives as I like the exotics a little to much, but i love hearing the opinions on it. it is a good thing to think about though when doing one i think what does one do to a sustain there family and the ecosystem at the same time. I admit my plan includes a lot of diversity because with out it we all get board. though yes it does seem to surprise a lot of people to know that some plants are not natives.

alex Keenan wrote:I see alot of talk about price when looking for sources of plant material."

I actually wasn't asking about price i was asking for an opinion on where to look for the best trees not the best priced trees. a tree is a 25-100 year investment so i want good reliable sources

thank you all i appreciate all your advice and knowledge now to start marking trees to clear. ie the hard part. lol

Hi ok I have been reading a lot of the different things about there food forest and i keep reading about people having a lot of their trees fruit trees . now i like apples and pears as much as the next gal but in North America there were not a lot of fruit trees present before the euopeans so I was wondering are there people trying to do their food forest with mainly native plants? or are they using adapted exotics. i figure what ever works for you is what you should do but i just wanted to here what others were doing and what peoples opinions were on how you should do it.

Terri Thank you i was planning that big german word for my raised beds i just can never remember what it is called. Oh and when wood rots in the ground the carbon is returned to the ground to nourish plants not all at once to the air where it won't get absorbed fast enough. we originally were looking for something already cleared to build on but since my parents are willing to deed over part of it early I figure that starting for free is better then starting with a loan. permiculture on a budget and trying to be responsibly green that is our goal as we want there to be things for our kids when we leave this world and i don't want that to be a gmo processed pop-tart.

ok this may be a silly tip but as the person planing a food forest with some livestock. when i think survival i think how will I decontaminate my rain water supply and how to build the house in such a way that if a dormant fault line decides to get undormant my house will survive a mild to moderate earth quake and how do i protect my solar and wind power system in case of an emp. not sure why it would happen but those are my worse case thoughts as the place is already being designed for the normal disasters that can hit we are cash flowing it so the employment disaster is taken care of. I know what it is like to get stuck with out a way to the store for a few months at a time so I am trying to plan our food forest to not only provide food for a season but enough to last through the next. it may not happen with all foods. having milk and wool on the hoof and walking egg and meat factories is also in the plan. so now our family has started talking about not what we need to survive but what we need to thrive. what comfort foods do we want that we can't grow. what books and other pieces of entertainment would we want for a long snowed in period of time. I watch survival things and i think oh that's great you have food and water but what about entertainment. books boardgames maybe a solar powered cd player. How are you planing on warming up that food you have stored. the most likely survival thing your average american will face is job lose. then comes the natural disasters like tornado, flood fire, hurricane and disses. then come the unlikely ones like pandemics, government collasp and nuclear war.

thank you all again. one question we were planning to use cob walls between the animal area and the garden I am guessing that it would be a bad idea to do this at 4' high like I originally planned if chickens like to hop that high. we are trying to avoid using thing not found on site. I will have a good supply of wood to use as post as we will need to remove some black locust from the building site but we wanted to avoid traditional fencing for a more organic feel. as for the goats I believe we will be needing a milking stall to house them at night so they are easy to find for milking and I will let my dad use a billy to help him. he has 20 clients all of whom have him do all their landscaping and lawn care needs and he is firmly against chemical weed killers and bug killers. he always said if it could hurt a pest or weed it can't be good for the useful bugs and plants. As a matter of fact when we explained permaculture and food forest to him. he laughed and said heck people all over WV had been doing it for as long as they have been there. I have to admit most of my friends grew up on farms that looked an awful like the new food forest ones I see on youtube.

now for a coop wood or cob? (we have practically perfect soil for cob as in just ad straw) also any plant I should make sure are not in the animale area as I don't want to poision my food supply by accident. the more I research the more questions I start to have.

to both John's thank you as I had completely forgotten about the forestry's program and I had never heard of bio-char. I admit that we have a lot to learn as we try to go as green as we can. heck you should see our notes on a grey water system. which the county we are in allows for use as irrigation as long as you are more then a certain yardage from a ground level water source. I'm half way up a mountain and the closest stream is at the bottom so we are golden on that one.

ok we have the land. we have the house plans. and we are ready to start clearing the part that has to be cleared to build the house and a few other site options. Also due to serious allergies we will be removing all conifers from the site. Now I want to replace these trees with fruit and nut trees partially to add to the food supply but also so we are not losing an oxygen source. so my question is where would be the best place to buy trees should i go to a big box store a local greenhouse or use an online source like the arbor day foundation. also should i go with dwarf semi or full size. they will be on the west side of the house to provide shade in the summer but i want them to allow light in the winter. Also since we will not be using any of it for firewood though we will be using some of it in the places we need timbers in our framing of our earthbag house (Roof and 2nd Floor) what should i do with the rest of the wood there is only so much to mulch and compost on an acre of land. And i know it may seem wrong to some but i refuse to sell it for firewood as i don't want the carbon released into the atmosphere.