May 25,2013
Andrew:
Given that we live in such a such a marginal environment, with long cold winters, and long, hot dry summers without preceipitation, and hard shallow dense clay soil, it is no small feet to successfully plant and nuture a fruit and nut tree based system. It often feels as if we have to fight tooth and nail for every square foot we seed.
Over the past three years, we've been working in various capacities and in different areas to open them up to more intensive, perennial, permacultural food/forage production. Thankfully in this process we have learned quite alot about what our land needs, and how to turn over a native ecosystem into a much more dense and diverse, food production ecosystem.
One of the major things we have done is create terraces, weither by hand or with machine, in various places on the property that we're working to develop into forest gardens.
Another major tactic has been to stock animals on a piece of highly degraded land in order to build up soil fertility and humus in preperation for planting an initial spread of hardy leguminous plants.