Does anyone have any perennial crop ideas? I live in climate zone 4 in a valley bottom. I get apples and pears once every 3-4 years. I have never gotten anything from my apricot, peach, cherry, and plum trees. I have some pretty good asparagus beds that produce well, and I just planted Jerusalem artichokes this year that I am told will be like a perennial because it is nearly impossible to harvest all of the tubers. If anyone has advice on other things I should try, I would appreciate it.

Great episode – a “forest market garden” is what I started working on this spring so I am just getting started. North Florida things grow pretty well – my issue is clearing land to be able to plant more fruit trees. Here is a link to some research someone did for my region — http://www.meetup.com/PermacultureJax/messages/boards/thread/35126872#107884732 – I hope to be able to have year round fruit / nut / berry crops in a few years.

started this already this summer…emphasizing a lot of native shrubby fruits as well as more traditional fruit so as to maximize the possibility of survival with the least worry. Planted almost 100 plants of various varieties this summer, heavy on seabuckthorn and hazelnuts and I have several dozen honeyberry started from seed which I’m trying to figure out if I should plant out now or keep over the winter. There would have been more but wasn’t sure if this would work the seeds are tiny. I have seed for possibly 200 or so more to start for next year. The hazelnuts were also started from seed as they are hybrid, we have local hazels here but they are very small, so hoping these will be equally hardy with a better sized nut.

The plants fruit consecutively from June through to (possibly) late fall although admittedly the bulk will be in the July/August. Starting out with honeyberry and strawberries through saskatoons and aronia on through with sour cherry, elderberries and seabuckthorn to hazelnuts, butternuts and possibly chestnuts.

Next year I will be adding a whole lot of honey locust trees started from seed as well as expanding the fruit trees and adding hawthorn ..can only do so much each year. The locust will also provide a fuel wood possibly as a cash crop (if I can find someone who wants to do the work on a share sort of arrangement, I couldn’t do it, and in the meantime it’s providing fuel for me AND adding to soil fertility.)

This turned out to be a response to my mobility issues which makes standard market gardens out of the question as well as these plants will deal with this somewhat yucky sandy soil much better with less input than veggies will.

I’ve been thinking about the possibility of raising a very few cattle sheep and pigs on a sort of CSA system so that I don’t have to hold them over winter. People buy (or get me to buy) an animal for themselves and I care for it for a minimal cost and raise it through the summer. That gets me the value that animals can offer on the land with the minimal cost.

I’ve also got plans for chickens, considering ducks and possibly geese but those two last would be for home use primarilly.

Chestnuts are an experiment…we can’t grow the same range of plants you can and chestnuts may not survive, or even if they do may not yield nuts as our season is so short, but even if they only survive and don’t give a nut crop, the trees themselves are valuable for coppicing or at timber. Although they aren’t native to the area, deer took a bunch out and ate them the very first day they were planted.

Also managed finally to get three comfrey plants to grow from seed and those will go into the field and hoping they will indeed get to be thoroughly invasive as I’ve got plans for them. BTW did you know there is a native plant of a totally different species also known as comfrey which was used by the native Americans pretty much the same way that what we are calling comfrey, which comes from Europe?

I have a couple of questions though..if the variety of a plant are hybrids from two different patented varieties are they still subject to patent? What happens if the plants you’ve grown come from frozen berries so you really don’t even know what the story was behind the seed, such as if blueberries were started from a frozen bag of blueberries from the market?

Persimmons are another late season fruit. Depending on climate, they can be harvested very late in the year. I have gotten American persimmons in Iowa in November. And they are delicious.

There are issues now most places in selling any food which has been processed in any way, so people need to keep that in mind.

Selling strawberries fresh is usually fine but as soon as you make them into jam or syrup or whatever there tends to be all sorts of restrictions slamming into place.

I think but am not positive that it’s a federal thing in Canada, but in any case in at least the three western provinces you have to have a dedicated and inspected kitchen apart from your home kitchen if the food has been processed in any way. Certainly many States seem to have similar laws.

It adds a whole lot of cost to what should be a simple and straightforward enterprise. Just something to keep in mind and possibly check out before plunging into full scale jams and fruit leathers and so forth.

Great show. The first time I listened straight through 3 times to completely process the ideas because they are so close to what I’ve been working on for 6 months. First let me say, unless I hit some unforeseen hurdle, I am making a forest market garden in PA. The only question is timing as for now I am still trapped in NJ.
Second despite what you said, I think this idea is very close to the Permaculture Orchard in Quebec. His scale is slightly larger, but not extremely so as he mentions how only a portion of his orchard is setup this way. I think yours will be larger than initially posed, once you’ve run the numbers, but I will withhold any judgement until you have completed your process. In any case he has phased rows by ripening dates to create what he calls a supermarket aisle approach which I think is similar to the direction you seem to be going.
For my attempt I will be starting by converting my mom’s 25 acre hay field into 21 silvopasture paddocks on 45′ keyline separation mixing the PO ideas with Shepard’s to add in nuts and will replace PO’s honey locusts with rotational coppiced black locusts. If cows are never integrated, or phased out, then I can later go back and split the paddocks, but I’ll build soils till then.
I will send you more details in a separate email, but I assume you will be more than inundated with similar emails, that it may get lost in the crush.
But know this that whatever information you release on this theme will be massively appreciated and probably integrated.

It’s funny that you mentioned The Market Gardener – I bought that and devoured it this weekend as well. It really made making an agricultural living on five or less acres seem possible.

He does mention that plowing kills the soil microbes and encourages compaction. So instead he uses a flail mower to cut down old plant debris, and then turns the first two inches of soil. My question is doesn’t this still kill the soil microbes and encourage compaction, but just in the top couple inches? Isn’t this where the roots of many vegis live, and wouldn’t this greatly slow down the decomposition of your mulch into humus? What is the correct/alternative permaculture method? Would you just cut the old plant debris at soil level, and use a rake to open a 1/2″ deep channel where the next round of seeds will go? Alternatively, I was wondering if you would have to add half an inch of compost every time and plant into that? In that case, that would be a little over a cubic yard of compost for every 30″x100′ bed that he talks about. That doesn’t seem reasonable either.

Something else which is fairly common and often used in conjunction with a upick operation is a maze, apparently a highly profitable draw for people. I have been considering a variation, a labyrinth as a sort of meditative situation as I think that fits better with trees and peacefulness. Mazes can get to be a bit frenetic. A labyrinth is unlikely to be AS popular but a lot easier to deal with and much much cheaper to establish..some in Britain have only limewashed stones to designate the paths.
Another possibility I’ve been looking at, is using aquaponics in the greenhouse and then having a much bigger pond and stocking fish as they grow too big for the indoor tanks in the pond for people to come spend some time fishing. This can also be a very profitable possibility and there are always hatcheries around to get other fish from to stock the pond.

This show and the one before it capture what we’re working on here in NC–a market garden focused on tree and berry fruit augmented by such enterprises as herbs, produce, eggs, etc. We have a 1/2 acre where we’ve planted cherry trees, apple trees, muscadines, and blackberries, a tenth acre where we’ve intensively planted apple trees in what is referred to as a tall-spindle orchard system with raspberries planted in the alleys, and another tenth acre where we have blueberries. On top of that we have a smattering of chestnuts, hazelnuts, persimmons, and mulberries. Planted the first phase last year. Did the second phase this year. Plan to complete the final phase of planting next year or the year after. Some of what we’re doing involves permaculture design principles, some of it’s polyculture, and some of it’s mono-cropping on a very small scale. For the apples, cherries, blackberries, and raspberries we selected cultivars to give us a staggered harvest over an extended period of time. I’ve done the math and I think it’s possible to NET $17k to $20k from just an acre of this stuff.

Jack this is really cool. I have been trying to grow 90% of my fruit and veggies on a 1/7 acre lot (6,000 sq feet). I have planted about 2,000 to 2,500 square feet of actual growing space and am 3 years in, just getting nice yield from the smorgasboard of fruits and berries. I think you can combine the forest garden with the market garden at least initially. I’ve surround my trees with small wood-core berms and swales/paths. The wood is buried just below grade of swale to capture store water for trees. I can cultivate the top of the berm with things like chard, kale, butternut squash, tomatoes, lettuce, arugula, etc. and grow some cover crop at least once a year to keep things fresh. These are about 3 feet away from the tree trunks. So the trees get the hugel breakdown down deep and a deep mulched basin. But I have a 2-3 ft wide bed near the tree to cultivate annuals. My trees are about 3 years old and don’t seem to mine the annuals on the berms. Chickens are also paddock shift through to clean things up and fertilize. Like Mike Shepard, I think it would be possible to market garden in your forest garden while it gets established, so they you don’t have a time lag before you start producing. If my numbers of 2000-3000 sq feet per family of 4 hold up, 90% of fruits/veggies, that would be a pretty robust CSA. I have a diagram I could send that could illustrate the concept of what I’ve been doing.