This is a picture of Sepp Holzer's Krameterhauf, where he used his brain to fix problems of erosion and drought with natural landscaping and wildcrafting all of his vegetation into his tree canopy. It has taken him a lifetime and now he make his living sharing his knowledge with others. There are tours on his property every week and he makes a huge difference in the world of sustainable agriculture education.
This is our fourth year here. Five years is what it takes to have a real understanding of your soil and the start to a complete food chain system for the wildlife on your property (which includes you of course). This means that some big money and effort will be spend this year to get the last kinks worked out and fulfill any little needs that have been put on the backburner. The backburner to this point has been fixing watering and getting a safe greenhouse that is big enough to feed us in the winter. Once these two 'kinks' are fixed I want to start having classes and meals here at our home to teach people how to be homesteaders without having to break the bank on keeping animals, preparing soil with the aid of livestock, foregoing special mixed feeds and creating your own designer cages out of materials you can get for free.
By having the greenhouse from our current KickStarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1620673518/winter-garden-in-a-greenhouse we could speed this process up. Why? Because what we don't spend on feeding ourselves can go into improving the watering system and buying wildcrafting trees. This year I want to plant more: hawthorn, osage orange, wild black cherry, mulberry, apple, peach, grape, rugosa rose, witch hazel, pussy willow, cold-hardy cherry, honeyberry, wild strawberry, and black walnut/butternut trees.
I need to plant these trees before the other trees I have planted get to big to inhibit the new trees or damage the roots when I dig holes for them. Come spring I am going to rototill trenches along the lines of our trees and fill them with old rotten wood to form dykes. The dykes will direct the water along the line that I want as well as capturing and holding water for the trees long after the water have drained away. I am receiving many loads of wood chips a month in the growing months of the year and now included in that is blocked firewood. What is unfit for firewood due to the type of tree or age I will use to form these ridges of wood and earth to improve on our flood irrigating system.
This is the last year that I intend to make large monetary inputs into the system. Everything we have used to this point has been of good quality and should last us for years. The greenhouse we want to get has a 15 year warranty. While nothing is certain but death or taxes I believe that by staying out of debt to do these things we aren't getting in over our heads and will be able to make the most of what we have been blessed with and be able to move forward. Please share our KickStarter with your friends and family!
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