Jt Olio

> What are your hopes and dreams for this land?  A market garden or just something to feed your family?

Just the latter. We're not looking to make income (though that's always nice), but we would like to skip most of our grocery store trips. We've discussed chickens (mostly eggs but also meat), we have a small 20ft by 20ft vegetable garden started already, but my naive assumption is that with most of the land our options are maple syrup, mushrooms, or cutting trees down. True? untrue?

> Does a food forest sound like something you are interested in?

I have a new thing to Google! I will go read about this. It does sound quite interesting.

> Maybe you are wanting to cull the smaller trees and keep the larger ones?

Yes, we're mostly interested in keeping the larger trees, you're right, though given their height and size I worry that those are the ones most in the way of other projects.

Thank you for your reply!

We recently got 5 acres of hardwoods in Northern Michigan (not UP). Hooray! They're 80 ft tall sugar maples so we're excited about tapping them for maple syrup, but as you might imagine the tree cover adds lots of shade. Our neighbors are also all hardwood, so there's just trees everywhere.

If we wanted to aim to be self sufficient in the next 5 years, realistically how many trees can we keep? Is this possible on essentially forested land? We'd like to keep the most trees we can, but of course, clearly understand that small scale farming needs sun. What would you recommend?