I mentioned we are moving woods from the back of our property to the North-east side in the previous post. To say “moving the woods” is somewhat deceptive, as trees are not easily moved. Read more
Moving the woods – understory
At the back of our yard, we have the “woods”. When Charlotte and Josephine (our girls) were small, these were a mysterious place, in which grew the “Witch Tree” with a twisted, hollow trunk, and where one might find treasures, such as an ancient china figurine of a man. Read more
Applied Permaculture Lesson
One of the things I am really excited about this Spring is another class – Applied Permaculture with David Homa near Portland Maine. This course is eight Saturdays, once a month, going out to sites and doing real work – pruning, grafting, planting, soil building – all the practical skills one needs for building and maintaining a food forest. Read more
Some Real Work
On Saturday, we started our first Real Work in the food forest to be: taking down lots of saplings and brush. We don’t like to take down trees and bushes, but we also want to create the space for our intentional plants, ones that are really good at producing food for us or for wildlife, or super providers for the soil in our little micro-ecosystem. It was exciting to get outside and use some muscle power to move a lot of stuff around. Read more
Scrum board
The scrum board is a tool to help a team go through a project efficiently and effectively, with flexibility, while having fun. Often, in projects, people make a huge project spreadsheet with rows of tasks, organized in order, and time, in weeks or days, going across the top. They fill in the week or days for each task, one following the other, so you get this nice cascade of going down your task list over time. This is called a Gantt chart. The problem is it never works out as planned. Read more
We have a design!
And finally… after taking a design class, after writing a synthesis document, after getting to know our land, and making time, and going through the Process …. we have a design, a paper version of our vision! It is very exciting! Read more
Mark’s curvy paths
Have you ever seen a drawing of a garden design? The swoop-y paths, and the green circles that mean “this is where you put X”. How do they get there? Read more
