Birgit Soer

I am at the moment ¨having to¨ work a 40h work week and sometimes feel quite stuck with no energy to spend on a side business and getting out of the situation. The advice in this thread is valuable and reasonable.

Grace is a keyword. In my own routine it has been helpful to get out of bed that half an hour earlier and have a moment of silence, centering and meditation in the morning. It changes my whole day, as then I get into the observer point of view, instead of being becoming absorbed in my thoughts.

Nina Surya wrote:Hi Birgit,
Welcome to Permies, and congratulations on your adventure!
You have a lot going on, and its wise to let go - even if just for now - of that what feels overwhelming. Autumn is a better season for planting trees and shrubs anyway
I'm enjoying reading the good and friendly advice from those who replied before me, plus your reply on theirs just now.
Even though it's tempting to repeat some things, I won't, but instead add something we're adhering to here in our own renovation-and-starting-situation: Go with the flow.
Trying to be sensitive to our own energy levels, the mood, the vibes...it becomes a second nature at some point, not to listen too much to the demanding Mind but more to the gentleness of the intuition within you and in nature. There's an innate wisdom within nature, balancing out the energy flows.
Good luck, take pictures of the developments and remember to celebrate the little wins in between!

Thank you for your kind message Nina. I do resonate with what you are saying about the Mind, it really is a constant process of remembering to be in the moment, in the midst of all planning, researching and doing.

I want to post more on here to keep a kind of journal for myself, to share info, and to connect with others interested in the same things. I have had a long aversion to getting engaged on the internet because it didn't seem 'real' to me, but somehow I've gotten over it now.

Have you seen this other documentary from the same channel?
A nut tree farm example in Skåne, Sweden. The farmers here also work in an art collective, very cool: https://gylleboverket.se/

I've read in the Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben that the longer a tree sits and spends waiting, the longer they tend to live even after that, the stronger their wood. But it may only work for some sorts of trees.

Oh! Interesting! Maybe there is a reason to everything outside of our human understanding. I've been wanting to read that book.

How does your partner feel about all of this?

He is actually very supportive and understanding of my overwhelmedness. Before my breakdown/breakthrough yesterday I thought it was all my fault, as if I couldn't manage this life, the dream that we are building. But through talking to him it made me understand that there are limits to what/how much I can do within my time. We are also doing this as a couple, not as a community of 10 where we can all help each other out... We are humans, not superheroes

I am a little bit grieving that I will probably need to cut back time and energy that I spend on the garden this year, to be able to finish one project before starting another. But making compost is one of those things that is fundamental and I want to prioritize more.

Hello permies!

I had kind of a breakdown yesterday evening.

A sketch of my situation:
My partner and me moved to Sweden in 2023, we bought a small plot of land (1,6 hectares) with a house from 1927 on it. Since then, we have been renovating slowly, trying to learn the language, making some income in low paying jobs, and trying to implement some aspects of the permaculture design I made in my PDC. Somehow, I forgot one of the first things I learned in the PDC, that you start small and close to the house.

Every year when my father comes over for a month or so in May, we get so excited and we start to implement some parts of the design. Now I have a 100 m2 garden and an unfinished pond that needs to be sealed. We were almost about to bring over 20 trees and 40 bushes to plant a not well thoughtout orchard on one of the oldfields on the plot out of our drive to move on, and to see things grow.

But I cannot do it. By working 40 hours a week, keeping a household, helping my partner with the renovations, and having some time left over for gardening and self care (in the form of knitting).... there is not the time to reliable and responsible take care of this orchard idea right now.

I did feel like a failure. I want to do something worthwhile with my life, and these dreams and visions of turning this plot into a permaculture haven brings me energy and honestly, gives my life meaning. But I think one should also be aware of one's limitations, and sometimes put a stop to wanting to start project after project. Those trees on the 'orchard' would have not been the healthiest, and I think all the money and energy would have been wasted.

Yet it feels hard to slow down sometimes, the culture we live in just pushes and pushes to do more stuff and be 'productive'.

I don't know if there is a point to sharing this with the internet here, but I'm sure there's others in a similar position.

Hello permies!

I am rethinking the design I made in my PDC in 2023. I had designed an orchard on an (what I now realize is an) oldfield habitat, in fairly straight lines serving as a wild break. The trees I was going to put in were a mix of fruit and nut trees, supported by Elaeagnus and other nitrogen fixing bushes.
I feel now that that idea was not really thought through, as for example chestnut trees prefer to be with other trees and not be stand alone in the middle of a field. I learned this through watching a documentary of a nut farm permaculture site in Skåne, where they have introduced many clusters of chestnuts with other species onto a new field.

So now I am thinking about possibilities of species that grow well on a oldfield setting. In Volume 2 of Edible Forest Gardens, they suggest shrubs that are running or thicket forming plants that then form nuclei. Then you could choose to at the same time grow trees in the middle of these scrub clusters or introduce them later into the forming nuclei? (I am assuming here.)

Our plot is in zone 6b, and has quite some southwestern wind.

I would love to hear anyone else's experience with starting food forest plantings in a oldfield setting!