Overall Goal: Turn an unused pasture into a food forest guild with nut producing trees as the anchor.
New members to my local community group asked me to come over to their property and do a property walk – give an assessment and a design plan for adding a food forest and regenerative practices to their unused pasture.
Property walk and assessment
Prep: I had never been to their land before, so I used the address and performed some initial prep work. Come along with me and I will show you the permaculture design steps that I use to prep for a Property Walk.
First I pulled up their property in Google Maps:
The area near the house is farmed. There are pastures to the North that are partially grown in with Osage Orange, Black Locust, and other trees.
Goals:
- They want to add a food forest (nut and fruit trees and shrubs) to the pasture between the house and the pond to the North.
- They want to add paddocks to the other pastures to the North of the pond.
- They want to add some trees around the pond.
Contour Map of the Property
Focusing on the main area, I see that it slopes down to the North and Northeast into a gully area. They want to have the food forest north of the pasture fence, north of the barn.
Why not apples or other fruit trees?
They originally wanted apple trees, but that would not be recommended for this area, being the top of the hill and slightly on the north face, with no windbreak. The last five years we have had three late frosts, and consistent early blooming before the traditional last frost date.
Last year I had apples on only one side of the tree, and many of my friends and associates with no windbreak lost their entire apple crop. This year, the pears and peaches bloomed early and were lost to freeze on the “normal” last frost date as well.
Soil Map of the Property
Next I generated a soil map, using the USDA Soil Survey site.
Soil Type 7501 is the more flat pasture area. This tells you a lot of info. I am mostly concerned with the Typical profile – what kind of soil it is: clay loam down to 6-9″ and then clay. It tells you how much it will drain – it will mostly run off.
The slope is 4 to 8 percent, which may be too much for swales.
Soil Type 4752 is the hillside area and the gully into the pond. The soil is: silty clay loam and very channery silty clay loam. Note that this is not very deep and there is rock not far beneath the surface.
It also has a steep slope, which will likely not work with swales.
So we want to stay near the top of the hill, just on the other side of the fence from the barn.
Chestnut Guild Design
