Cleaning up the farm, and the future of permaculture

We have missed all chances of rain the last few weeks so I started irrigating. It is amazing how overly wet it was in late winter/early spring to how dry it is in late spring.

Been doing a lot of cleanup lately but did even more this past week since we had a farm tour on Wednesday.

I now have the majority of my crap on pallets so I can move them around easily with the front-end loader on the tractor and got most of the farm mowed and bush hogged.

Now, instead of our place looking like an abandoned, overgrown farm, it now looks like a neat and tidy junkyard.

That’s OK, I can see the future vision of this place in my mind so it does not really matter what it looks like now.

I have been reading up on permaculture (the idea of working with nature). It has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the farm. That small area of triangle-shaped land that always gets overgrown and weedy. Stick a few fruit trees in that area with an understory of blueberry bushes and support species and boom – a mini food forest in 3-5 years!

The 60-by-350-foot grass waterway running through our farm is there to slow down the water and prevent erosion as the water exits our farm. But I have to maintain it by bush hogging and it provides no food. It would be so easy to go in and build some swales to capture the water so it stays on our farm and percolates into the soil. Build some hugelkulture berms behind the swales and now the area is a food production area.

This story was originally published May 19, 2015 at 10:43 AM with the headline "Cleaning up the farm, and the future of permaculture."