Reading Time: 5 minutes Sometimes, finding the right plants for your food forest can be frustrating. What types of trees should be in your canopy layer? What N-fixing plant should you use? What types of shrubs will be suitable for your site? In my earlier post, I outlined the ‘habitat mimicry’ approach to selecting plants for your food forest. […]
How to design a Food Forest with Swales layout
Reading Time: 6 minutes In today’s blog post, I want to showcase the exact design process of creating a layout for a food forest with swales. But before we start with the process, you have to understand one crucial thing about your site: the slope of the land. You see, you can only install swales on gently to moderately […]
How to Choose the Most Suitable Plants for Your Food Forest
Reading Time: 4 minutes When it comes to growing plants in your food forest you always have two choices: Option 1. Adapt the plants to your site conditions; OR Option 2. Adapt your site conditions to the plants. The option of adapting your site conditions to the plants is definitely one where you’ll need to continuously put extra effort […]
How to prepare for climate extremes – my site observation method
Reading Time: 5 minutes What now seems normal would have been considered highly abnormal just a few years ago. I live in a continental climate with traditionally cold winters, hot summers and plentiful precipitation that’s equally distributed throughout the year. That probably best describes the weather we used to enjoy. But today the winters are not cold, the summers […]
7 Smartphone Apps That’ll Make You A Better Permaculture Farmer and Designer
Reading Time: 14 minutes Can you imagine your life as a permaculture farmer without a chainsaw… electric fence… plastic pipe… battery-powered tools…?Or can you imagine your life without being able to Google something when you have a burning question about your chickens, trees, various plant problems…?Well, it wasn’t all that long ago, and some of you can probably remember […]
Creating a Food Forest – Step by Step Guide
Reading Time: 16 minutes One of my earliest memories of visiting my grandparents’ farm was playing on the dry stone wall, tossing stones around, and just generally fooling around. Then, looking down, I came across a small seedling sticking out the side of the wall, growing in nothing, with barely any soil between the stones. Out of childish curiosity […]
Water Management For Every Permaculture Farm
Reading Time: < 1 minute When I was a kid, my brother and I used to enjoy the winter weather at my grandparents’ farm in the mountains. In a beautiful interplay of natural forces, throughout the winter and early spring we would play in half a meter of snow, walk on frozen lakes and then run from the floodwaters once […]
How to Read the Landscape
Reading Time: 19 minutes Let’s be honest, farming is hard; it’s one of the most difficult careers one can undertake. It’s hard physically, it’s hard mentally, there is a great deal of uncertainty and, if this wasn’t enough, people are constantly judging you and questioning your life choice. So, how can you succeed as a farmer despite these pressures […]
