Six Million Ways To Farm. Choose One.
The right way to farm is the one that's suited to the place the farm is. What's perfect in one bioregion may be unsuited to another. While we take our guiding principles from permaculture, our methods will remain a work in progress. We've done a lot of reading, watched a lot of YouTube, and have some experience growing lots of food in small urban spaces... but this land will tell us whether or not what we're trying will work here. Nature will tell us how best to coax abundance from the soil here by how it responds to our methods.
Here's where we're starting from. Click the images to learn more.
Vegetables
We grow in the "Back to Eden" style of deep mulch gardening, pioneered by Paul Gautschi in the Pacific North-West region of the USA. A 15-20 cm layer of wood chip mulch smothers weeds, retains water, and fertilizes itself as it gradually composts into humus.
Eggs
Our hens spend spring - fall on pasture, protected by a movable electric fence, and with a mobile coop for shelter. In return for their certified organic feed and kitchen scraps, they recover overgrown pasture, fertilize, and clean the pasture, orchard, and gardens of rotting fruit and insects. Oh, and they give us delicious eggs too.
Fruits & Nuts
We grow our fruit, nuts, and perennial food crops in a modified "Permaculture Orchard" or "Food Forest" style, mimicking a natural forest with edible species.
Meat Chickens
Our meat chickens spend their first three weeks on deep wood shaving bedding, and their last six weeks in a "chicken tractor" on pasture, moving every day when they're small, and twice a day as they get larger. They convert their certified organic feed into delicious, delicious meat.