Giulia Kane

My partner and I recently bought some land, and even though we're not able to move there quite yet, we've tried to get a head start on a few projects.

One of them is getting the garden plot ready. The previous owners had their raised bed garden in the same spot, but no one has lived at the property for at least 5 years, so everything was overgrown with grasses and brush. We fenced it off and made it into a summer camp for our friend's pig, who has been rooting and digging for the last couple of weeks. The area is pretty large and so far the pig hasn't even got round to digging it all up (almost there though!). I don't have photos of it on me but I can get some if it would help. We've had a relatively dry summer, so the soil hasn't turned to mud, there are no big holes to speak of - generally speaking it looks like Mr Pig is doing a fine job.

What we're wondering about is what steps to take next. I have been reading posts here & elsewhere recommending to follow up with chickens to even the soil out, eliminate weeds and bugs. I'm not sure if we will be able to do that - is the next best option for us to rake it evenly? We're trying to only use human or animal power.

After that, what about the winter? We are in Maine, and in the next few months temperatures will drop and we will start to get snow and frozen grounds. What would be recommended to overwinter the area successfully? A thick layer of mulch/woodchips, or will the pig manure be enough?

Any comments or suggestions on the topics are appreciated! We are still somewhat new at this :)

Thank you and much love!

coastal Maine - zone 5b/6a

We recently bought a property in coastal Maine (zone 5) and are planning its conversion to a permaculture homestead. We are super excited but it's also our first time working on such a large-scale food-growing project, so we have lots of questions and doubts!

The property is 36-acres in total, the majority of which is a well-established forest that we plan to keep as such. We have an area of about 1 acre that we want to convert to a food forest. It is west-facing, slope of about 8%. There is a small stream crossing it. The stream flows year-round and is usually only a couple of feet wide. However, we just had some major rainfall and it swelled up pretty significantly - the widest point was almost 20 ft. We have been waiting for the soil to thaw enough to do a soil test, but by the looks of all the standing water, I'm guessing it's pretty heavy in clay and with really bad drainage. Most of the trees growing in this section of the property are (unsurprisingly) apple trees, elders, and a few maples.

I think we need to do give our soil some major love before we can even think of successfully starting a food forest. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with all the options out there, and I was hoping someone could help me straighten them out in my head! These are some strategies I came up with, and I don't know if 1) they make sense/would work/are the right approach and 2) should I apply them all, or only a few? Are there other options I haven't come across yet?

1) Improve stream channel and banks. Right now, the small channel is full of material (twigs, rocks, leaves, but also trash left behind by the previous owners). There are virtually no grasses/shrubs by the banks. I have been thinking that if I created better conditions for the water to flow (remove some material from channel, stabilize banks), there would be less flooding during medium rain events. Any suggestions for species that would help stabilize the banks, or other interesting methods to do so?
2) Build rain gardens in the areas with the worst standing water conditions around the stream.
3) Support the soil by heavily mulching and building up the topsoil with manure/compost/woodchips, in preparation for food forest planting.
4) Potentially build hugelkultur beds? Is this feasible on a 1-acre scale? Or at least in the areas closest to the stream and most likely to suffer from flooding? Should we combine it with 3), by heavily mulching the area we are dedicating to the food forest and building a couple of hugelkultur beds where needed?

Also, would it be a reasonable timeline to get some of this work done over the spring and summer, and start planting some trees in the fall? We have been clearing some of the elders out, and I'm now realizing it might have been a mistake. We didn't realize the soil situation was so bad until we had this big rainfall and we thought it wouldn't have been a true newbie mistake to cut the elders down. But maybe their root system was actually improving the drainage ?If so, I wouldn't want to leave the soil bare for too long ... and I'm hoping we could get it ready for some planting in the fall.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much!

Giulia

Thank you! As for the streams, they are small. 1-2 ft wide. More of a ditch than a stream I guess :)

Hi everyone! This is my first post on permies.com, although I've been avidly reading many forum entries over the last few months. My partner and I recently bought some land here in coastal Maine (zone 5), and we can finally realize our life-long dream of building a homestead. We have been reading and learning about permaculture and are particularly interested in food forests.

We have a south-facing area of about 1 acre that we would like to transform into a food forest. It already has 10-15 mature apple trees, about 20 ft tall. It doesn't look like they had been planted in any specific pattern, they're sort of interspersed in the 1-acre area, some very (or even too) close to each other, others as much as 100-150 ft apart. We would like to salvage at least a few of them, and also add some pear trees, and potentially plums, cherries, and peaches. I would love to have chestnuts and oak trees, too, and I know that we would have to carefully plan where to plant them given their height.

Now, my question is probably a very obvious one to most of you, but I can't seem to piece together the information I need from the books and online resources I've been reading - I have seen info both in favor and against of what we'd like to do. Are we supposed to plant our tall tree layer on the northern side of the area, or is it ok to have at least the smaller fruit trees scattered around (so kind of similar to how the apple trees were planted)? I understand that taller nut trees might have to be all the way to the back to avoid excessive shading, but I wonder if the area we have is large enough to allow for fruit trees to be spaced out and scattered around while still allowing enough sunlight to penetrate in the understory. We are also open to planting semi-dwarf varieties if it helps in this sense.  

I hope this makes sense - if not, I can try to sketch some examples of what we'd like to do and of what we've been reading about.

Thank you so much in advance!

EDIT - I should probably mention that there are two streams in the area, one on its western edge and one crossing it E-W (and eventually joining the other one).