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I bought this place in Maryland with 2 acres that was mostly just an empty lawn. The far end of this picture is now used as a hose pasture, and I’ve been making slow progress on other small areas here and there over the years, but this year I hope to get the entire middle area set up for growing crops.

A decent portion of this will be for fruit and nut trees, but the plan for those right now is to wait for late winter/early spring and plant bare root trees.

The second picture shows the beginning of the rows I am making. The area is very compacted and acidic (5-5.5), so I applied a bit of lime and am tilling. I’m forming 4′ wide mounds with 2′ wide walkways in between, and the slopes of the mounds will be on the walkway side of things.

I am seeding clover in the walkways, and will add a light layer of wood chips once the clover has grown in a bit.

Toward the end of each year I plan on sowing radish, oats, and peas as cover crops, and then before planting the next year I plan on adding about 2-3 inches of wood chip heavy compost to the walkways, then cover them with dirt from half of one of the adjacent mounds – the area where the dirt was removed will become the new walkways, which will receive the same treatment at the end of that season.

The goal of this is to get the compost relatively deep into the existing soil, which seems to be fairly low in organic material (about 2%). The soil texture has been difficult to nail down, but I would place it somewhere between sandy loam and clay loam. Phosphorus and calcium levels are a bit low, magnesium is moderate, and potassium is high.

Hi Permaculture,

I recently cut down a Tree of Heaven that was about 12 feet tall. At the time, I didn’t realize what it was—it was growing within the ficus hedge on my property.

Since then, I’ve learned it is a Tree of Heaven, and every 3 to 4 weeks I’ve been pulling up shoots that keep sprouting around the base of the small stump.

I’d like to fully eradicate this tree. If I decide to use a herbicide, is there a risk that it could damage the roots of my ficus while targeting the Tree of Heaven?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hello all, I’m a 3D and software developer looking to step away from the corporate, capitalist, technocratic machine. I want to do something more grounded, regenerative, and connected to the natural world. I’d love to meet people who are into blending technology with ecology — especially through passive, non-intrusive sensors to help observe and care for ecosystems. My goals are supporting preservation, increasing biodiversity, reducing reliance on pesticides, and helping build natural resilience. I’m not an expert in this space (yet), but I’m eager to learn. I’m looking for friends, mentors, collaborators, resources, inspiration — anything that helps me move in this direction. Looking forward to connecting!

This is over 8 metres of thin, strong rope made from Cordyline australis. Just going at it casually in the evening whilst watching youtube I managed a rate of about two metres an hour. An ideal thing to occupy your hands if you’re prone to fiddling or scrolling on your phone. I’ll probably end up using all of this in a few days training the raspberries back and running a new line down the fence for the hops but I have so many fronds tied up in bundles that I must have enough for hundreds of metres.

For some reason it’s a very popular plant around here and I see garden waste bags put out constantly filled with the dead fronds so even if I didn’t already have a few trees in the garden there would be no shortage of it. The fronds were always a pain to dispose of as they fall in large numbers during wind, don’t degrade very readily and are time consuming to cut up for mulch. Fortunately however they are absolutely ideal to make rope from. Even the stuff I used in the pond last year to tether a log to the side remained intact for a year whilst submerged. I cut the hard ends and middle portions of the fronds off as they are no good for making rope and use them instead of straw under strawberries.

I started experimenting with rope from blackberry primocanes the other day too. Just peeled the outer green skin off and twisted it together whilst fresh. Nowhere near as strong as the Cordyline but would work fine for tying plants to canes.

Hi,

I planted to a bunch of grapevines 2years ago and this spring I was away and just got back…and grapevines have gone wild! What should I do, prune them and keep them as freestanding grapes ro make some kind of trellis?