Permaculture Plans 2023
The kids and I are working together on the #freepermaculture Yearlong Course available here. https://courses.ecodesignhive.com/
Everything is offered free of charge, but if you can make a monetary contribution I recommend it. So far the resources have been well worth what we voluntarily paid for them.
As part of the process Heather Jo Flores talks about interviewing the stakeholders in your project. For us that is mostly our family. The course also considers neighbors, but we are already designing our property to fit into our suburban neighborhood as well as possible. Although I’m sure there are neighbors shaking their heads at our methods as I type, I still think the yard looks pretty organized and normal.
- We set the (fairly ambitious) goal of being able to run the summer garden without using the town water supply. After discovering the town’s reimbursement program for rain barrels I immediately ordered two of these. https://upcycle-products.com/upcycle-factory/
Since the town is willing to pay us back $100 per barrel, up to two barrels a year, this gives us another 110 gallons of capacity for free. Being a repurposed container mattered a lot to us, and also made them very affordable.
- Our second goal laid out by the kids was to set a target for pounds of produce in a year. We grabbed an old grocery receipt and figured out how many pounds of fruits and veggies we buy in a week (spoiler: the answer was a lot)
We figured we probably eat 50lbs of produce per week for our family of 5. It sounds like a lot, but if each of us eats an apple a day it comes out to something like 17lbs of apples. Our goal for the year is to produce one quarter of the produce we eat which works out to 650lbs of food produced on our property in a calendar year. That includes fruits, veggies, greens, etc.
If that also sounds like a lot, I guess that’s because it is. This year we should have our mature standard apple tree and grape vines bearing fruit as well as a small unknown harvest from our semi dwarf stone fruits that have been with us for two years so far. I don’t expect much, if any, from our semi dwarf apple and pears, since they are a year younger. As always, I’m hopeful about the annual veggie gardens, but this will be our fourth year planting here and the yield has been disappointing so far. Fingers crossed that three years of intensive soil building pays off.
We have starts underway for onions, cabbages, collards, borage and kale in the sunroom now and I’m trickling more out every few days as we get closer to the last frost. I’m typing this listening to the rain which is supposed to switch over to snow this afternoon. We’re expecting up to 6 inches. Our average last frost is May 1st, but along with plants I’m cultivating patience and trying not to start too early.
- The third goal is about structure building. There are three kinds of squash and three kinds of cucumbers going into the garden this year, so I’m hoping to build three tent shaped trellises that are hinged at the top so they can be collapsed and stored in the winter, but will provide four feet of vertical trellising for each of those.
In addition the grape trellis is in desperate need of upgrading. At this point I think the grapes are holding it up instead of the other way around. The plan is to build a larger trellis around the existing one that will extend out further from under the tree covering and give the vines more space to spread.
The last and arguably most fun project is to build a set of monkey bars large enough for the kids to use. The 14 year old twins are 6 feet tall now, and every time they try to use playground equipment they are disappointed by how short everything is!
