Farming the Woods

Farming the Woods PDF Author: Ken Mudge
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585079
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Learn how to fill forests with food by viewing agriculture from a remarkably different perspective: that a healthy forest can be maintained while growing a wide range of food, medicinal, and other nontimber products. The practices of forestry and farming are often seen as mutually exclusive, because in the modern world, agriculture involves open fields, straight rows, and machinery to grow crops, while forests are reserved primarily for timber and firewood harvesting. In Farming the Woods, authors Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be an either-or scenario, but a complementary one; forest farms can be most productive in places where the plow is not: on steep slopes and in shallow soils. Forest farming is an invaluable practice to integrate into any farm or homestead, especially as the need for unique value-added products and supplemental income becomes increasingly important for farmers. Many of the daily indulgences we take for granted, such as coffee, chocolate, and many tropical fruits, all originate in forest ecosystems. But few know that such abundance is also available in the cool temperate forests of North America. Farming the Woods covers in detail how to cultivate, harvest, and market high-value nontimber forest crops such as American ginseng, shiitake mushrooms, ramps (wild leeks), maple syrup, fruit and nut trees, ornamentals, and more. Along with profiles of forest farmers from around the country, readers are also provided comprehensive information on: • historical perspectives of forest farming; • mimicking the forest in a changing climate; • cultivation of medicinal crops; • cultivation of food crops; • creating a forest nursery; • harvesting and utilizing wood products; • the role of animals in the forest farm; and, • how to design your forest farm and manage it once it’s established. Farming the Woods is an essential book for farmers and gardeners who have access to an established woodland, are looking for productive ways to manage it, and are interested in incorporating aspects of agroforestry, permaculture, forest gardening, and sustainable woodlot management into the concept of a whole-farm organism.

Farming the Woods

Farming the Woods PDF Author: Ken Mudge
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585079
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
Learn how to fill forests with food by viewing agriculture from a remarkably different perspective: that a healthy forest can be maintained while growing a wide range of food, medicinal, and other nontimber products. The practices of forestry and farming are often seen as mutually exclusive, because in the modern world, agriculture involves open fields, straight rows, and machinery to grow crops, while forests are reserved primarily for timber and firewood harvesting. In Farming the Woods, authors Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be an either-or scenario, but a complementary one; forest farms can be most productive in places where the plow is not: on steep slopes and in shallow soils. Forest farming is an invaluable practice to integrate into any farm or homestead, especially as the need for unique value-added products and supplemental income becomes increasingly important for farmers. Many of the daily indulgences we take for granted, such as coffee, chocolate, and many tropical fruits, all originate in forest ecosystems. But few know that such abundance is also available in the cool temperate forests of North America. Farming the Woods covers in detail how to cultivate, harvest, and market high-value nontimber forest crops such as American ginseng, shiitake mushrooms, ramps (wild leeks), maple syrup, fruit and nut trees, ornamentals, and more. Along with profiles of forest farmers from around the country, readers are also provided comprehensive information on: • historical perspectives of forest farming; • mimicking the forest in a changing climate; • cultivation of medicinal crops; • cultivation of food crops; • creating a forest nursery; • harvesting and utilizing wood products; • the role of animals in the forest farm; and, • how to design your forest farm and manage it once it’s established. Farming the Woods is an essential book for farmers and gardeners who have access to an established woodland, are looking for productive ways to manage it, and are interested in incorporating aspects of agroforestry, permaculture, forest gardening, and sustainable woodlot management into the concept of a whole-farm organism.

Restoration Agriculture

Restoration Agriculture PDF Author: Mark Shepard
Publisher: Acres U.S.A., Incorporated
ISBN: 9781601730350
Category : Agricultural ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Around the globe most people get their calories from "annual" agriculture - plants that grow fast for one season, produce lots of seeds, then die. Every single human society that has relied on annual crops for staple foods has collapsed. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel and many other needs - in your own backyard, farm or ranch. This book, based on real-world practices, presents an alternative to the agriculture system of eradication and offers exciting hope for our future.

How to Farm Your Forest

How to Farm Your Forest PDF Author: Leon Sherwood Minckler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description


Paradise Lot

Paradise Lot PDF Author: Eric Toensmeier
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584005
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Book Description
When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and brick. The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a "permaculture paradise" replete with perennial broccoli, paw paws, bananas, and moringa—all told, more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden—intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression—also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and even silkworms. In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process. Packed full of detailed, useful information about designing a highly productive permaculture garden, Paradise Lot is also a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.

Manage Weeds on Your Farm

Manage Weeds on Your Farm PDF Author: Charles L. Mohler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888626209
Category : Weed control
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Manage Weeds on Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies provides you with in-depth information about dozens of agricultural weeds found throughout the country and the best ways of managing them. In Part One, the book begins with a general discussion of weeds: their biology, behavior and the characteristics that influence how to best control their populations. It then describes the strengths and limitations of the most common cultural management practices, physical practices and cultivation tools. Part Two is a reference section that describes the identification, ecology and management of 63 of the most common and difficult-to-control weed species found in the United States.

Domesticating Forests

Domesticating Forests PDF Author: Geneviève Michon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789793198224
Category : Agroforestry
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description


The Woodland Homestead

The Woodland Homestead PDF Author: Brett McLeod
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1612123503
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Put your wooded land to work! This comprehensive manual shows you how to use your woodlands to produce everything from wine and mushrooms to firewood and livestock feed. You’ll learn how to take stock of your woods; use axes, bow saws, chainsaws, and other key tools; create pasture and silvopasture for livestock; prune and coppice trees to make fuel, fodder, and furniture; build living fencing and shelters for animals; grow fruit trees and berries in a woodland orchard; make syrup from birch, walnut, or boxelder trees; and much more. Whether your property is entirely or only partly wooded, this is the guide you need to make the best use of it.

The Forest Garden Greenhouse

The Forest Garden Greenhouse PDF Author: Jerome Osentowski
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584269
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
With a revolutionary new "Climate Battery" design for near-net-zero heating and cooling By the turn of the nineteenth century, thousands of acres of glass houses surrounded large American cities, becoming a commonplace symbol of the market garden and nursery trades. But the possibilities of the indoor garden to transform our homes and our lives remain largely unrealized. In this groundbreaking book, Jerome Osentowski, one of North America's most accomplished permaculture designers, presents a wholly new approach to a very old horticultural subject. In The Forest Garden Greenhouse, he shows how bringing the forest garden indoors is not only possible, but doable on unlikely terrain and in cold climates, using near-net-zero technology. Different from other books on greenhouse design and management, this book advocates for an indoor agriculture using permaculture design concepts--integration, multi-functions, perennials, and polycultures--that take season extension into new and important territory. Osentowski, director and founder of Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI), farms at 7,200 feet on a steep, rocky hillside in Colorado, incorporating deep, holistic permaculture design with practical common sense. It is at this site, high on a mountaintop, where Osentowski (along with architect and design partner Michael Thompson) has been designing and building revolutionary greenhouses that utilize passive and active solar technology via what they call the "climate battery"--a subterranean air-circulation system that takes the hot, moist, ambient air from the greenhouse during the day, stores it in the soil, and discharges it at night--that can offer tropical and Mediterranean climates at similarly high altitudes and in cold climates (and everywhere else). Osentowski's greenhouse designs, which can range from the backyard homesteader to commercial greenhouses, are completely ecological and use a simple design that traps hot and cold air and regulates it for best possible use. The book is part case study of the amazing greenhouses at CRMPI and part how-to primer for anyone interested in a more integrated model for growing food and medicine in a greenhouse. With detailed design drawings, photos, and profiles of successful greenhouse projects on all scales, this inspirational manual will considerably change the conversation about greenhouse design.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

The Resilient Farm and Homestead PDF Author: Ben Falk
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
ISBN: 1603584447
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose permaculture-research farm has drawn national attention. The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies (relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading. The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings. The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

Water for Any Farm

Water for Any Farm PDF Author: Mark Shepard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781601731463
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Written as a companion to the bestseller, Restoration Agriculture, this book will help farmers capture water in areas they want to, and avoid having water flow immediately to the low point. The result? Less water expense, healthier crops and livestock, and less erosion ... just to name a few. What you will read in this book is a distillation of over 25 years of on-the-ground experience working with and modifying the Yeomans' Keyline Plan. From the back yard suburbs to 10,000-acre ranches and everywhere in between, from permafrost mountainsides just shy of the Arctic Circle, to equatorial boulder fields of East Africa, areas with 300 inches of rain per year to those with less than 3 inches, I have personally installed systems based on the Keyline design methodology and its modified forms.What you will read in this book is tried and true. It is intended to give a sufficient background to any landowner so that they can optimize their water resource for higher site productivity, have greater drought resistance and just as importantly, to know deep in their heart that they have made even one little piece of earth a little more life-filled, livable and green.