pascal billford

here's my situation:  I'm going to buy a small house in the suburbs of the portland region, on hopefully 1/2 acre or more, if i can find it.   No Bleepin HOAS!, that's for sure).  I want to make all my own compost but I"m going to need a lot of biomass to do that.


Since food production is mostly in the backyard, i was thinking of planting comfrey in the front yard - the 10 or 20 feet closest to the street since that area gets hit with a little bit of the street pollution.  but, i can't move into the house for the first few years, so we'll have renters.  I'd like to plant about 500 cuttings or so at 2 ft spacing that would produce about 10K lbs of biomass per year.  Would comfrey be fairly low maintenance in the first few years?  Will it become too unsightly without regular pruning?   how high is it gonna get and will it be too much for the suburbs?

After about 1 to 4 years, we'll be moving in and I'll be able to harvest regularly.

i understand comfrey will always be whereever i plant it.
anything else to consider?

I would recommend going to a good nursery and buying a tree or several trees from there.  The reason is, you'll get fruit much much much quicker that way.  And it's not just because the tree is already 2 years old.  It's mainly because good nurserys will graft their trees onto a base and be able to select for traits that encourage early fruiting.  Which means, you can get fruit in 2 years vs waiting 6 to 10 years for a non-grafted seed raised variety.  This advice generally also applies to other fruit trees as well.  this is why so many nurseries will graft their fruit trees.


Personally, I've purchased 2 jujubes from a nursery about 1 year ago and one of them already had over 1/2 lb of harvest here in zone 9b CA.  But jujubes can work in much colder climates as well!  I try to save money where-ever I can and don't really spend much money on anything.  But, the one thing I do spend lots of money on, is going to nurserys and getting high quality fruit trees (just getting a seed raised tree from you're average joe isn't going to cut it).  A good nursery can give your tree better disease resistance and much earlier fruiting.


I was recently at a jujube farm in brentwood where they had 8 year old jujube trees and everyone of them was loaded with more fruit than we could carry.  but it was expensive 9$/lb (organic) so it might be a great business to get into for growing jujube especially since they're so storable.  Jujube are very popular in the chinese community.

I hope that helps!

Here's a super easy idea that basically does itself!

Get yourself a nice Jujube tree and then forget to harvest the jujubes.  the jujubes will naturally dry out.  and once they're completely dried you can store them for up to a year!!  this is amazing!  no other fruit i know of can dehydrate itself in this fashion - and it's 0 labor.  you just pick them off the floor or from the tree when their dried out or pick them first then let them dry themselves.  the taste might seem a little foreign at first.  but they're quite delicious once you get used to it.

You can do this at scale too.  Get like 10 or 20 or more lbs, if you have a bunch of these trees and you'll always have fruit over winter.

So, I'd like to move up to the seattle, WA area and find a nice lot at least 1/2 acre, preferably 1 acre + and start a homestead there.

The problem is I don't want to end up in another suburb where neighbors are going to freak out if I apply some steer manure to my garden.

For me, heaven would be if I find neighborhoods filled with people like us, you know the homesteading types, with ducks, bee hives, tomatos growing everywhere, gardens, compost, chickens running around.  the kind of neighborhood where people understand the value of horsemanure!

Anyways, Zillow hasn't added the horsemanure per capita filter yet, so I was wondering if someone could point me to some towns, or specific neighborhoods, where there's both homsteaders and empty lots to build on.  Oh and it needs to be within1 hours drive of seattle

Ideas?

For everyone that's in the southwest areas like CA and arizona, west coast and anywhere else dry, has your well ever gone dry in a drought?  

Were you able to resolve it?  if so how?  and how much did it cost?

I'm a little worried about choosing a homestead location in a dessert climate because I need stable access to grow food for home use.

Thanks!

Thanks for all the responses!  So many great ideas here.

I really like that idea of blasting a whole in the ground to catch more water.   It seems, you could probably make that really big and just make your own little pond, or a big pond!  that's a really fantastic.  If you have the space, i guess there's no limit to how big it could be right?  


as for water catchment from the roof, It's somewhat effective.  It helps a little but doesn't get you all the way there.  if you run the numbers. 1500 sq foot roof * 24 inches of rain yearly only yields 3000 cubic feet which is about 20,000 gallons, about one months worth of water.  and the west coast is dry usually anywhere from 4 month all way up to 9 or 10 months in some parts of california.  Even Oregon is dry for at least 3 or 4 months.

Hello everyone!  I'm new here.  I'm a big time off grid/permaculture wanna be!

Anyways, I'm currently in the burbs with my nice muni water connection.  But, I wanna go off-grid and be surrounded by nature.  And most of those places do not have a water connection.  I'm a big time grower.  I want at least 50+ fruit trees and 50+ nut trees and a huge amount of berries and a big vegetable garden.

So, fairly large amounts of Water is REAAALLLY important to me.  The droughts in most of the US, are just getting worse.  I've heard of wells going dry.
You can't really truck in water for a garden or a bunch of fruit trees.  

I want a stable water source, even in the worst drought.  and storing it in a tank isn't going to be enough: I mean a 20,000$ tank holds about 20K gallons which is about enough for 1 month of watering at the most.  Sure, I know all the basics of mulching really heavily, etc.

Assume, I have some flexibility in choosing the location of my future homestead.  But I can't go anywhere really humid/hot in the summer: east coast won't do.
So how does one go about getting a stable water source?  do you just do a well and roll the dice?  if it goes dry, just drill another?  how do you make sure it's a good well?     or pick a place with a high enough water table that makes it easy to drill another well? is that even realistic on the west coast?

I mean, even places with a decent amount of rain here on the west coast still get very dry for about 4 or 5 months.

Thanks for any insights you may have!