Chris Clinton

Hello All, I'm Chris. I started working Skip in late 2024 and have recently reached bb60 so I thought I'd introduce myself here. My wife Isia and I started a small farm and eventual community called Crack in the Sidewalk Farmlet in a periurban area of Atlanta, Ga back in 2008. We formed our farm across multiple properties with relationships to multiple landowners but we cultivate roughly 2 acres of vegetables, herbs, and flowers not counting the areas of fruit and nut trees, on around a 5 acre landbase. Since starting out I have made my living pretty much entirely from farming/market gardening in combination with lots of foraging, and a bit from crafts and teaching. I have gained a lot of experience in this process while being guided by principles of permaculture, resilience, and supporting biodiversity. We started from scratch and have always tried to do things to a high standard of quality but cheaply with a DIY mindset, which usually means projects take time as well as care to complete. Farmers have to wear many hats and make do so I've learned at least a little about a lot. 

   In addition to growing things I also have deep and wide interests in most traditional crafts and skills, from primitive skills to blacksmithing, hide tanning and leatherworking, woodworking and natural building, herbalism etc etc. I have lots of tools and a large library with hundreds of practical volumes devoted to such matters. I am currently in the earlier stages of starting a tree nursery and a letterpress print shop.

    Isia and I have been dreaming of moving to the mountains since the night we met. We started the farm here because we were here and wanted to dive into what we were pursuing. We didn't intend to stay as long as we have but after the first couple of seasons we wanted to find a way for what we started to to continue once we eventually left and spent years working and thinking toward the concept of a binary community, with locations in both the urban and rural environment. We spent a year in conversation around this ecovillage proposal before the events of 2020 unraveled the effort. We then spent 4 or 5 years attempting to pass on our growing operation which was a significant investment of our energies that was going well but ultimately did not work out as hoped. As a taste of an Otis-like experience I can say that I understand that such processes are hard and come with no guarantees. We continue to grow and sell at the farmers market but to a lesser extent as we try to give more time to our more portable crafts and ready ourselves for the next phase of life.

    As far as land goes, we are pretty committed to being in or near the Katuah bioregion, lower Appalachia, generally in the area where Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina come together. Ideally we would have enough mixed acreage to do the things our current scale has limited us in doing, such as more broadscale agroforestry and rotational grazing approaches. As well as room to have numerous dedicated workshops and to hopefully build out a community. We were looking at properties from 60-150 acres before the post-covid jumps in real estate prices, but would be grateful for any opportunities to consider. We were going through my mom's cancer journey and hospice care in our home during that time and were not in any kind of condition to move swiftly in that period of grief and uncertainty. We are open to the possibility of purchasing the right property if someone would consider selling at pre-2021 prices. Otherwise it feels like we are waiting for a correction that may not come or settling for less than we've worked towards. I always thought of our farm as the incubator for the farm we'd one day create, and now we have close to 20 years of trial and error under our belt.

    This is getting longer than I intended so I'll wrap it up. I don't have a focus on quickly progressing through the PEP levels but I try to remember to check if a given task I need to do fits a BB and to get pictures when it is in alignment. Elective projects tend to happen more around the winter months when I have less daily responsibilities on my shoulders. Seeing the program come to fruition would probably motivate me to speed up the process. If anyone is interested to know more about me please peruse my BB's and other posts and feel free to reach out here or at "crack in the sidewalk farmlet" with no spaces at gmail dot com
Thank you for your consideration!

I'm also in the southeast like Aaron above and am rather aggressive in my pruning of Albizzia for biomass. I've always been fond of the tree since childhood, and though I remove many saplings in unwanted places I want them in all my tree zones and near to hand to vegetable gardens. I have trees that I've coppiced to the ground multiple times and several that I harvest mulch from in an ongoing way during the active growing season, like twice a month or something. I'm treating it more and more as a syntropic mainstay for this region. If I cut large trunks down I do it while active and peel the bark for nitrogen rich mulch also and use the wood for charcoal feedstock. I also tincture the flowers as a product, which I need to find time to do in the next week or so. If they get big and old (10-12" diameter) they appear to get much more rot resistant heartwood than the younger wood would suggest. I haven't used it for a fence post or anything ( I have plenty of black locust available) but it's an observation worth noting.

During the hot season I get into drinking a quick concoction that I just refer to as haymakers, whether or not that's accurate...  I splash a little apple cider vinegar (or any homemade vinegar I might have or alternatively any kind of fruit juice) add a pinch of Himalayan salt and sometimes but not always blackstrap molasses or maple syrup then top the glass with water. It's easy, cheap, tasty and refreshing. Easy to make all kinds of variations.

This is a submission for harvesting the small wild black cherry, Prunus serotina. This is a very abundant wild cherry and is having a good year. As it is highly variable in quality I look for both trees with fruiting branches within reach for harvest and hopefully largish and tasty fruit. I think I like the taste of these more than most other people I know. I haven't found a good method or food mill to remove the pits so I usually dry whole whatever I don't eat straight from the tree. I'm guided by the advice found at the following link to deal with the cyanide precursor amygdalin. I have infused it in liquors in previous years and hope to try some of the other recipes in the future. https://foragerchef.com/eating-the-whole-cherry/   I'm still gathering more but pictures show a harvest of 2.75 lbs.

I picked these wild blackberries (dewberries)  to take to market for a few weeks, this submission is for one weeks harvest. I'm pretty sure I tared the weight of the bowl for the photo but at 10.18 lbs it's well over the needed 1-2 lbs regardless. Keep riding the fruit wave, there's always something else coming into season.

These are my glue pots, aside from a little one I carved out of soapstone for more primitive activities. I haven't actually used the electric one, I bought that cheaply from a print shop auction thinking I was going down the rabbit hole of casting composition rollers for a letterpress press. It still has remnant composition in it which is primarily hide glue. I went with getting some new rubber ink rollers made by an experienced person for now, realizing I didn't have enough experience with letterpress to know what a good performing roller would be like and my setup is in a place that may experience high heat and humidity which necessitates adjustments to the recipe that are not entirely spelled out in sources I've looked at. I haven't had a need arise yet that would call for that kind of volume or more frequent use of hide glue, the little cast iron double boiler type tends to be enough for small projects. I do want to try making glue in the electric pot at some point, by which I mean cooking the rawhide (or whatever) at the stabilized temperature this thing should operate at.

Here's my submission for drying lemon balm. We always have more of this around than we can keep up with but it's nice to keep a jar full on hand for tea blends and such. This harvest made some tea when fresh and the dried remainder topped up the gallon jar.

I gathered cottonwood buds with the intention to make a salve, but first comes the oil! Got a jar full and topped with olive oil, then left the jar on or around the wood stove to infuse. Strained into a new jar when I got around to it. Then into the cupboard for another rainy day to make salve.

I taught a beginners class on spoon carving at the first installment of the spoon carving club I've started. I made and hand printed a flyer that I posted at the farmers market and shared online. I had at least 10 attendees but didn't get all of them in every shot, I was teaching so wasn't behind the camera. I demonstrated roughing out a spoon from a section of split log for around an hour and then gave guidance individually as people started chopping at their own piece. It all went on till dark but I have some photos with another phone to document about a two hour passage of time (not the best, will have to figure out something better for future bb's with this requirement). I think some attendees might have never used a hatchet before so there wasn't a lot of spoons brought near completion on this day but everyone seemed to have a great time and we've had another meet up since. I'll be submitting that for the start a club bb once we've had enough meetings.

I made soup to use up some leftover broth from making a beef roast. I harvested some nice lambsquarters which I needed to weed out of one of my air prune beds in my nursery, in this case planted to Bigleaf Magnolia. Yielded much more than a cup and I also used some fresh nettles amongst other ingredients. Cooked and pureed and served with cornbread. yum yum