Jim Parker Jr

Thanks Trace, I love hearing about this! Our very first comfrey plants are sitting in pots on the kitchen counter right now. We started them from seed a little over a month ago. Out of the packet of 50 we got ten plants that will get planted out in our raised beds. I was a little disappointed at first to only get 10 plants but your post gives me hope that we will have comfrey abundance as the years go by!

Thanks =)

Today I carved a spoon with which to eat my lunch!

I started with a green ash branch cut from the front yard:


Here is the branch after rough shaping with the hatchet. Moving on to the knives.


The finished product!


A delicious meal =)

Wow! This is exciting! We are still designing and making lots of trials and errors. I can’t wait to learn from your book Acadia!! Thank you :)

In our backyard garden, we built brand new beds this spring and filled them with topsoil and the junky clay we have in our backyard. We sowed a heavy (probably too heavy) cover crop of clover and peas in late March. We now have a dense green carpet covering the raised beds! This year we are transplanting annuals started inside into the garden beds.

As I transplant, I just dig/cut away the area and use what's been cut out as mulch around the transplant. A little extra straw or leaf litter mulch reminds me where I've put a new plant in and I can hand pick any cover crop that threatens to take over.

Easy on a small/backyard scale. =)

This fall we will plant cover crop again and probably rake or chop and drop everything come next spring.

I stumbled on this thread looking for a netting solution for our backyard birds. We have six chickens on a small suburban backyard.

Currently, we are using green galvanized wire fencing laid down over our raised beds to keep the girls from scratching in the beds (they still get in there to forage though)

I'm going to venture to the home store later today and see if I can find some of the black plastic netting someone mentioned in an earlier post. I'm thinking of creating mobile day paddocks with this.

The girls go to "Chicken Fort Knox" in the evenings and get locked up. We have huuuuge raccoons here in Colorado!

Zeek, Matt et al,

Amazing, I just joined these forums as I am doing a deep-dive into permaculture education for ourselves while we are social distancing at home. and my sixth-grade-teacher mind naturally goes to how to teach this to my children and my students! =)
I'll be following this thread with great interest!

Thank you Burl and Devin!
The forums are a bit intimidating and having a few places to start off on have been great.
Now if it would only stop SNOWING so I can get back into my garden....

Well hello there, my soon to be new friends!  

I've bounced off of Permies.com a few times over the years as I've researched various and sundry things but this is the first time I've actually created an account.

We are suburban lot owners here in the Front Range of Colorado, further, I'm a middle school teacher at a school blessed with an abundance of land!

Right now we are incubating a few experiments (for us, it's probably old hat for many here)  pasturing chickens and building soil in the backyard. In our next school year, I'm hoping to run an introduction to Permaculture class with our middle schoolers. The idea is to start running the experiments we are trying at home on a larger scale with the kids and to introduce them to Permaculture principles. The end goal would be to be able to feed our entire school community off our land and to share out the abundance with our greater communities.

Dreaming big dreams is kinda my thing...I'm looking forward to learning from you all so we can make them come true and then sticking around to share with those that come after.

Cheers,
Jim