I wish that all your dreams materialize!
50 acres - 20 hectares it's a lot of land, it is going to be incredibly difficult to manage. As time passes you will figure out what better fits the quality of life you desire.
Have you thought of a tea business (dehydrated fruits and herbs)?
- You build a solar power greenhouse/ dehydrator (down draft ).
- You use 90 % perennial plants.
- use electric nets and put sheep to graze the grass before picking the fruit.
- dehydrate everything and sell boxes that contain all the tea produced in that year. This way if something goes rong with the apples you still have herbal tea, blackberry tea, blueberry tea....
- 20 meters spacing between the rows of trees
- you put rows of forest berries between the rows of trees
- put the nitrogen fixing plants ( not shrubs ) and nutrient accumulators on the north side of the row
- plant mint,hardy lavender, roses used for jam, marigold, and other perennial herbs used in tea on the south side of the row
- use a bcs with a flail mower to periodically chop de plants on the north side of the rows
- do dense and close together windbreaks.
- use the heat reflected by the ponds to make a microclimate for the seabuckthorn otherwise they will grow very very slow.
- and so on
I really hope i was helpful.
Richard Perkins - commercial permaculture designer
He lives in Sweden.
https://www.youtube.com/user/mrintegralpermanence
The last model of dehydrator in this video is the one i'm talking about
Online PDC it is free if you do not want the diploma. If you want to be certified you have to pay and take the final exam.
https://www.regenerative.com
Buy frozen sea buckthorn berries, collect the seeds, plant them and use the shrub as a nitrogen fixer. Every 3 years you are going to prune the branches to freeze them in order to harvest the berrys. When you prune a nitrogen fixer , some roots are going to die, and the nitrogen nodules are going to be detached from the plant, and are ready to be consumed by other plants.
I know of roots dying back when the top is pruned. Still you are very knowledgeable and I appreciate your input.
Believe it or not Sea Buckthorn berries are not easy find in Canada. I have never seen them for sale. I would be able to harvest berries from the trees I had pictures of in the post I did on them.
I am assuming you started Seabuckthorn berries from saved seed then?
Yes I have started sea buckthorn from seeds. In my climate it takes 3-4 years till they produce fruit. Starting them from seeds will produce a lot of male plants, end every bush will be genetically different, end because of you're cold climate a lot will die ... but starting 400000 plants is easy and if you are left with 100000 it is still cheaper than buying them.
In august we will harvest the berries in Romania if you want I can send you a couple of kilograms of seed.
In the next weeks i'm going to make a article about germinating the seeds.
I'll be looking forward to that article!
Thanks for the offer on the seeds. I think I'm OK though. I know a few places around here where I can harvest some from city property and I have several plants of my own already. One of them started producing berries last year.
Thank you for the links ☺️
We have not considered growing fruit to dehydrate for tea. Certain elements of what you laid out we have thought of, for example using sheep to clean the ground up around the trees. Your plan has definitely given me something to think about.
We know it is a lot of work. We will probably leave most of the bush wild and graze most of the pasture. 4-5 acres will be more intensively managed.