Making Landfall

I know it's been a loong time but please indulge me as this kind of updating takes a special kind of effort on my part.

The plan of attack has evolved, as far as this season goes. It has mercifully simplified a bit, as follows:

The general layout remains the same. The major change is that it seems likely that in general the planting of trees will probably be delayed a season or so. This is to allow us to focus on the more immediately-productive annual crops, and the fertility-generating combination of pasture/cover crops and livestock. I have taken the lesson that it may be possible that a fruit or nut tree may end up bearing better and earlier after allowing a full year for site preparation than just putting it in the ground at the beginning of that year. We'll still plant some trees, but it probably won't be full-farm scale. Plus it will give us time to learn trees, their varieties, and propagation.

This means that we get to focus much more on improving fertility, and on highly productive pastured poultry. We've started ordering seeds, and have enough corn to plant about 1/4 acre. This is probably lowballing our needs a bit but it's just one grain so far. It's one of my goals to eliminate the need to buy feed for the chickens, perhaps excluding mineral and probiotic supplements and the like. To meet this goal we'll probably have to plant a good amount of some other grains. This is hardly disappointing to me. I see brisk bread sales in our future.

We have also hatched plans to experiment extensively with the three sisters planting scheme (pole beans grow up corn stalks as squash shade the soil). This venerable native polyculture promises amazing results when properly executed. The search for old, explicitly suitable varieties was challenging but I think we found some promising candidates.

We are currently experiencing the highest snowfall in recorded history in the DC area. The third once-in-a-decade snowstorm this winter has us under a few feet of snow. This makes it tough to go dig compost. This is annoying because we got in one good load before I fell ill and the snow followed. But this old horse manure was jet-black, smelled great, had excellent texture even though it was soaking wet, and there were yards and yards of it...just at one stables. This, to my mind, bodes very well indeed, especially when John Jeavons says you can only add one inch max of compost when starting vegetable beds. He also says to sow grain seeds in flats and prick them out by the thousands, so like any good (former) Catholic I expect I'll pick and choose my labors a bit.

The other side of hauling stuff in will be (I hope) directing willing tree-trimmers to dump their chipped trees on our hillside, the site of our future high-diversity forest garden. This zone appears particularly worn-out, having a kind of sanbox look under the scraggly vegetation found there. My hope is that a few inches of (free) wood chips and the ensuing fungal action and decomposition will provide excellent food for ongoing plantings of nut- and fruit-bearing trees on that south-facing slope.

So to summarize I think that our big chores ongoing this year will be to work the garden, move the chickens in their tractors (for the shorter-lived males) and mobile, moving-fenced coops for the layers. We will also continue our research and design apace, and be ready for some thoughtful planting next year.

In other news it has been fun making contact with other no-chem producers and retailers in southern MD, an activity which for me basically all took place several days ago when I went on a field trip to the hippie-food-retailers in the area. It was great to meet all the people who will no doubt all get mentions on this page in the future, and I'm grateful to Frank and Christine for the information they've already given me: a whole community, chugging along.