Chris Marshall

I'm not s fan of monocultures even in small zones like that.  By using comfrey this way you lose out on a lot of it's strengths and also have a challenging front yard for curb appeal.  But if you took this same approach but added a couple nice looking fruiting shrubs like haskaps, and some smaller fruit trees into the mix perhaps a couple apples, cherries, plums or pears.  Depending on size of the yard you could do a couple pairs of trees.  

So maybe 4 trees, 6 shrubs, comfrey around each planting, paths, and then comfrey or perhaps something else that would be a nice addition in the gaps, you've made your front yard beautiful, productive and the comfrey benefits the fruit trees, helps the soil, produces some mulch, produces biomass for compost.

Rob, Michelle and Takota are all upstanding people and happen to be local as well.

What are your recommended favourite first 3 to 5 actions steps to building your permaculture property after your vision one pager and a basic design.

Lots of people say one or more of the following: zone 1 garden, plant some fruit trees, swales, chickens, rabbitry. Others say observe and interact for a year - who the hell can take no action for a year.

I’ve actually done all of the above in the last 3 months minus rabbits and now is time to slow down and manage these systems and watch for successes and failures as well as general learning about the property and what is growing.

Matt Powers wrote:I <3 my wood chip swale paths & swear by them.

They are an opportunity to stack functions: inoculate the wood chips as you put them in with soaked layers of cardboard or paper with the substrate between them & then the woodchips on top. I put edible fungi in places, so I don't miss them: they're already in the path!

This looks great! Keep going! Swales rule!

MP

Hey Matt,

Love your work.  I'm thinking of trying this ...

Details:
-dug 3 swales total approximately 200 ft at approximately 8 inch depth by mini excavator that was doing other work on my property
-heavy clay soils
-wife doesn't like the look of the ditches in the yard with young kids in our house
-was planning on wood chipping the mounds and around the plantings anyway ....

so ... why not fill the whole thing full of woodchips as a path (function stacking)?

Do you have any videos where you've done this ... I looked at your channel and there is so much information

Cheers,
Chris from Canada
Zone 3A
Alberta