A few years ago, while I was doing some maintenance in my food forest, I saw an old, sick-looking tree.
Excitedly, I thought, “It’s time to get some firewood.”
I took my chainsaw, and since the tree wasn’t that big, I started cutting it without considering how things might play out.
As I was making the final cut, the tree suddenly fell on my head. All while I had my chainsaw in my hands.
Luckily, the tree was small, and I got only a few bruises. More importantly to my ego, nobody saw my failure except a few birds chirping in excitement, probably “admiring” my human arrogance.
Now, I’m not an expert lumberjack, but I’m not a total rookie, either. I was hurrying to get things done and felt overly confident about what would happen with the tree. According to the cut I was about to make, it only had one way to fall.
Well, at least that’s what I thought.
If I took the time to look at the tree crown and do some basic observations about which side of the crown is bigger, I would see where it wants to fall naturally and realize that my assumptions were wrong.
But I was too smart for my good, and nature bashed me on the head, giving me a wake-up call to pause, observe, and think things through before trying to do anything in her playfield.
I’m certain I’m not the only one guilty of doing things on a homestead this way. It’s very common for people to rush with their property development or management and then overlook what nature is trying to tell them. Making whatever they are doing much harder and potentially more dangerous.
For example, someone might decide in a rush to plant a veggie garden on a sun-drenched hill because it seems like a good location, but only later realize it’s too exposed to strong winds, the soil is shallow and it’s too rocky for the veggies to grow well.
All the signs that this might be a bad idea were there; it was just a matter of noticing them.
As Sepp Holzer once said:
Of course, reading from nature’s book requires skill, but let me assure you it’s one of the key skills you can have as someone trying to grow anything out in the open.
Once you understand the ‘rules of the game,’ you can grow food with less effort and avoid potentially life-threatening situations, like felling a tree on your head.
Now, reading the landscape like an experienced outdoorsman will require effort and practice. Each of us who grows anything should continually practice this and get better at it.
Still, there are many other ways of gathering the ‘intel’ while sharpening your ‘reading the landscape’ skills. There are online tools where you can get all sorts of information about your site, locality, or region with a click of a button.
Given that I constantly work with clients whose sites I need to assess quickly from a distance, I’ve been collating the most useful ones in a central database so I can access them quickly while I’m doing my remote assessments.
You can get access to my list here.
I suggest you explore what these tools might offer you in trying to understand your site better.
Note that I’m always adding new tools as I find them online, so bookmark the page to stay updated with my recommendations.
All right, so much for the issue of the Permaculture Apprentice newsletter.
Let me know if you have any recommendations about what to add to the list.
Talk soon,
-William
