David Puttle

Thanks, thorns are something I hadn't taken into consideration, especially with neighbors. Osage orange isn't a plant I was familiar with either.

So far I think I've been able to identify one maple on the west side of the house.

Hello! Long-time lurker, few-time poster. I'll do a proper reintroduction somewhere else, but right now I am noodling through a planning question and I'm hoping you will noodle with me....

I recently bought a house. It is a double-lot, .4 acres, in an urban-ish neighborhood of a small rural town. It is USDA zone 4a. It has lots of yard space, but right now it's mostly a lot of wasteful lawn, a house, a way-too-big garage, three sheds, and a few really pretty flower beds from the previous owners. So far, I've seen squirrels and rabbits and neighbor's dogs, a few songbirds I can't identify, and some flies in the flowers. We get good sun right now, and some trees or shrubs growing on the east side is going to shade our morning sun a bit, but for the most part it's all full sun.

I'm thinking about the trees I want to plant now and in the near future. These are some of my objectives:
- firewood (I'm going to try to reinstall the wood stove previous owners had in the basement, to reduce moisture and diversify/localize heating costs)
- bird habitat (probably song birds, but if I can lure a predator into the neighborhood to deal with notoriously pesky squirrels, well....)
- shade (something deciduous on the south side to help summer cooling costs)
- food (less important, but still a consideration for a local and sustainable diet, surpluses can go to the farmer's market)

Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone else in zone 4a? What observations should I be making to take into consideration?

Thanks for your time  :D  I'm so eager to pick everyone's brains on my new property.

i wonder if i could try something like this on my urban .4 acres? maybe half the size, of course. but then i wouldn't have to worry so much about hiding it from the neighbors ... it's "art"!  :D

We get a lot of wind in our New Mexico city. In our yard, which is shared with three other tenants, there's just one tree that drops leaves, and those leaves don't drop in my quadrant. The neighbors bag up the leaves but I've convinced them to hand the leaves over and let me use them as mulch  :)  Some small fraction ends up blowing back into their quadrants (I'm ok with that and they don't seem upset) but a few features seem to help keep the leaves in place.

The perennial plants help a lot. I have rosemary, some flowering bushes, and a year-old apple tree sapling that seem to keep the leaves anchored. I planted the apple tree in a depression and that stays nice and full with leaves.

My next line of defense especially this year are all the dead annuals I left in place. I get a lot of sunflowers and this year I mostly left their dead stalks. A lot of them I pushed over or they fell over and that might be helping a bit.

My third line of defense includes rocks and posts around my quadrants. The rocks were already there. Last year I tried putting up posts and wove lines to create a trellis for vine plants that never took. But I left the posts, and some generic grass or other grew around them, and they keep the leaves in place. Definitely a case of "weeds" serving a purpose - probably the most effective line of defense!

On the day-to-day, these defenses seem to work fine. If it gets particularly windy and dry, I'll definitely water the mulch because as was mentioned earlier the mold is key in weighing it down. But it takes a long time here and consistent watering to get the mold to form.  It dries out pretty quickly and it gets too cold to water often - I don't want the water freezing in the ground.

Far and away the best solution is the snow  :)  The leaves catch it and keep it shaded and cold in microclimates and my mulch is always the last place to thaw, so that is nice.

That's my situation and the approaches that have worked for me.

Another early 80's millennial. I'm a graduate student pursuing an advanced degree in American literature. My dad is now retired but he was an electrician with a union job and, as a hobby, really great at woodworking. He made decent enough money that while me and my sister were growing up, my mom could stay home and raise us. They wanted "smart" kids - didn't teach us to cook, didn't  teach us to do laundry, didn't teach us to do woodworking or gardening. They taught us how to shop and that "your home is your best investment." I can't tell you how many times I heard that phrase come out of my mom's mouth. We lived in California. As a California resident, college tuition was super cheap. I graduated high school in 2001, and I can remember when tuition prices first started to creep up. Everyone was shocked when the local community college started offering courses for $10/credit.

$10/credit.

I can't even imagine that now, just over 10 years later.

I graduated with my Bachelor's degree with zero debt because my mom went back to work when I started college. They paid for all of it. Even when I dropped out to "find myself," the confused and directionless brat that I was, and came back after another year, they just went on paying my tuition. I got a BA in Creative Writing. I wanted to be a history teacher but then remembered how desperately I hated attending public high school - why go back? I went to Minnesota, did some political activism, got involved on an organic, permaculture farm. But it was a long drive from the Twin Cities out to the one lone permaculture farm I knew of.

As much as I enjoyed the farm, there came a time when I had to decide what to do with my life. I was working in the security industry, which was unethical in a variety of ways, and I had a little stash of money set aside. I decided to go back to school. It was the only thing I knew I was good at. It was awkward being on the farm; the farmer didn't have a lot of patience and I was kind of this bumbly intellectual trying to help out and doing almost as much harm as good. He finally just put me on the woodsplitter machine. I was good at that.

Seven years later, I'm almost $100,000 in debt. I could have bought houses, plural. I could have bought farms several times over. I'm up to my eyebrows in work, unpaid labor actually, graduate students are exploited to teach bottom-rung classes and universities are being run like businesses until they'll be run into the ground. The next big recession will be that education debt bubble.

I have a lot of regrets. And if we're being honest, a lot of anger. Anger at my parents (love em, of course, but in this topic, anger), anger at my teachers, anger at politicians who let the university model turn into an education industry, even a little resentment at the farmer who didn't have the patience for me. I have read so much about permaculture now. But I can't afford a PDC; I can barely afford my rent month-to-month, especially in the summer while I'm planning courses and not getting paid at all. All I can do is browse the hell out of the internet and stay in the one sensible apartment I've found in my whole life where a little piece of yard (shared with three other neighbors) is mine to do with as I please.

So: urban gardening. Small living. Trying my damnedest to eke out a bit of permie principles while my finances are in utter disarray. Better little by little every month. I have some student loan money socked away in a high-yield savings account and I use the interest for micro-loans to renewable energy companies and my plan will be to use those divdends to keep down the student loans.

And most importantly: I'm a teacher. With a lot of mistakes to share. I love the upcoming generation. Gen Z really has its stuff together. They want to be farmers and live zero-waste. I teach my business students about the cooperative business model and my scientists about trade unions and my farmers about permaculture and just cross my fingers hoping it won't be too little, too late.

Hi all. I am an English teacher by trade - a graduate student pursuing my PhD - and teaching college writing courses. In my "professional opinion," I agree with everyone who says language is flexible - and those who say the rules depend on your field.

Let's start with the dictionary. How do lexicographers decide on the definition of a word in English? They look at how English speakers use the word! Other languages, like French and Castilian Spanish, have centralized authorities who decide what is and what isn't official in their language. Not so in English. Folks who want an authority go to "the dictionary" without realizing they are chasing their own linguistic tail!

I cannot in good faith recommend The Elements of Style. I attempted to teach it once but I do not see the logic in its rules. I suspect Strunk and White were among the scholars who insisted English follow the rules of Latin. It's inappropriate in the sense that English is largely Germanic and Latin is, well, Latin. Of course, we might be flexible abou this, too  ;-p

Finally, a word about fields. I am a big fan of MLA, but English is my field. Many publications use Chicago or MLA or even their own in-house style, like the Economist or the Wall Street Journal. These latter two resonate with folks enough that many publications follow their in-house style ... which I suppose makes it less "in-house," ha! The most important factor in printed communication is probably consistency. It becomes confusing for the contemporary reader when there seem to be no rules - because we expect there to be some. Less so in, say, Shakespeare's time, but we have come to expect some measure of consistency.

Audience, then, becomes the main guideline for style.