Ben Vieux-Rivage

I listened to the essay this morning and stored some eggs in my neighbor's belly this afternoon :) Thanks for posting!

@Nathaniel

The consensus east of Houston is that the very best paid resource is a book titled Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster. He begins with site assessment and methodically touches on the high points for planning your relation to resources like sun, rain, wind, soil, ... There's little info about plants or animals. This is mostly about roughing your site in so that there are places for plants and animals, including advanced primates, to thrive.

The book references free resources on Brad's website, harvestingrainwater.com.

Like Sepp, I've nurtured a lifelong obsession with ponds and flowing water. Good, clean fun! A ball pit of acorns for these three docs.

December 2020

In this edition:

orchard trees

Christmas tree windbreaks

biomass

terraces

swimmies

orchard trees
We selected orchard varieties with an eye toward project management. This was inspired by the Gantt chart of a harvest calendar that Dave Wilson Nursery produces every year. With the overarching goal of limiting harvests to cool months, we planted the following:

late-producing pomegranates and Spanish olives which hopefully hang on til October

satsumas and maybe avocados for November

Christmas trees for December

crawfish from solstice through spring

early early peaches and late late mayhaws for May

Christmas tree windbreaks
We took a trip to a Cutyourselfa Tree Farm one year ago and we realized what a wonderful, multifunctional windbreak we could have in the various evergreens that pass for Christmas trees. Use 1: windbreaks. Use 2: Christmas tree revenue. Use 3: Marketing. People cut Christmas trees in November and December and very soon after that begins the crawfish harvest. This is an excellent opportunity to meet crawfish customers!

biomass
It was clear from the start that tallow trees would dominate the plant mix. I left the orchard for dead this past summer and returned in October during our first cool snap. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the things we planted seem to thrive alongside tallow trees. Early observations lead me to believe that all appreciated the tallow trees' shade across the hot, dry summer. I snapped foliage off the tallow trees and terraced it around the orchard trees.

terraces
We spent time this spring nailing tallow tree saplings to the hugelmounds and then piling hardwood mulch on the high sides. These terraces will hopefully ease erosion and sink water into the mounds.

swimmies
I introduced Gambusia a while ago. That's all. Nature added turtles, herons, crawfish, and a lazy water snake who reminds me of our favorite kitty.

@Rebecca

I began studying finance a year ago with the intention of advancing my day job career. A course in real estate finance led me to the realization that my relation to permaculture has been dominated by the real estate problem. (tl;dr is that I needed land to farm and I needed income to buy land and my entire life shifted toward that end about seven years ago.) I'm really interested in the sorts of income mixes which would allow permies to bring undeveloped land under stewardship at a rate which would be compatible with real estate investment. In other words, what would it take for permaculture development to compete with more popular land uses like single-family housing?

The need for income is a design constraint which would be defined a little more rigidly in a real estate context than it might be in a homestead or a "hobby" farm (yuck, that term!) Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) are one vehicle for acquiring land. There are indices which guide investors' expected returns for a REIT Sector. There is an ag REIT named Farmland Partners (link below) and there are a few timberland REITs, so the sector basically exists. I envision a scenario where a permie REIT would partner with a farm management group. This group would already have a plan to establish revenue streams and generate competitive returns. What would that plan look like? It takes a few years to establish productive things like orchards. As a land development project, the management group in this scenario would probably have to find other ways (beyond their core long-term revenue plans) to generate revenue in the early years. Perhaps some of the land must be developed and sold as residential lots. I dunno. These questions are somewhat tangential to the central purpose for this thread, but they are certainly related to the necessity for identifying income streams, whether they be agile, residual, or something else.

https://www.reit.com/investing/reit-directory/farmland-partners-inc

Purchase land which contains a pipeline corridor. Sell easements. It can be quite profitable. The Hlavinka family does this. They just won a landmark eminent domain appeal which establishes the practice of buying land for the purpose of selling easements as the highest and best use. I'm no lawyer. See Hlavinka v. HSC for details. This link discusses the case within an agricultural context.

https://www.orangeleader.com/2020/03/06/the-hlavinka-case-and-the-importance-of-judicial-engagement/

As soon as I step off the beaten path and into the woods, mosquitoes make a mosquito-colored whiteout like a bloodsucking blizzard. They were so bad last week that I sprayed deet in my mouth and nose. I don't recommend it.

The grand tour is not possible outside of the December-March window. That's when mosquitoes are down and snakes are groggy. I would gladly give you the "here's what we did in phase 1" tour now. It's quite nice and breezy after the sun goes behind the trees. We can walk the whole soggy paradise any ol wintertime you're in the neighborhood.

Hi Wayne. Zach and Ben must've dug your pond right before they dug mine. I've done some light googlin and there aren't quite a whole ton of folks doing natural and organic crawfish just yet, although I've heard whispers of it catching on. I'm committed to figuring it out. Last night's youtube hole led me to this here video. There's mention of rice for constantly-flooded land (and a variety called ecrivisse in particular) and sorghum for ephemerally-wet land. I have forever wet ponds, so rice may be an option. The video says that right about now is the time to plant rice because it's just about too late in the growing season for it to go all the way to grain. I have to decide soon.

LSU has an Austin alumni group. They hold their boil early May. I think that you'd be set up real nicely if you could break into the market with them. By the time their May boil comes around each year, they've probably had several hundred pounds shipped into town.

I gather that you initially seeded with some Native American Seed mix(es), as did I. If you are interested in figuring out the rest of it, let's put our heads together.

After doing my research, I think that juggalones are misunderstood.