This first year establishing the swales, my goals are to build soil and try to leave no niches for noxious weeds to get started. If I don’t keep out the noxious weeds, I could find myself at odds with all of the state, the county and my neighbours. The officials can demand you spray, and if you don’t, they can do so and charge you. Neighbors don’t much like neighbors that harbor noxious weed seed banks. To try to cove all niches, I have a large variety of peas, beans, vetch, clover, alfalfa and peanuts, plus some buckwheat to sow on all fresh soil on the hugelbed and upslope swale and berm. I have also bought curlex mulch blankets 8′×120′, to roll out over the new berm and hugelbed. Lots of experimentation here as there is enough variety to see what works well together and in this area. In addition to the green mulch, I will plant individual tree seeds of species that are either naturally short or which I can keep short by pruning. This kind of implies that in one or two years, I will be ‘forced’ to buy a 2nd hand cherry picker (another toy!) to use for pruning. At the moment, the tree and shrub species I have for planting in this experiment include, elderberry, black and white mulberry, service berry, hazel, goumi, wolf berries, sea berries, thornless blackberries, beach plum, 3 types of pear (including sand pear), Saskatoon, pawpaw and I will be using thornless honey locust as a nurse tree for a proportion of those to see what effect it has. Everywhere that I plant tree seeds. I am going to mark with a bamboo stake and labels so I can see what happens. What will probably happen is the deer, elk and moose will think I’ve set a party table with tasty cuisine for them! But the wildlife will do what they do, they are a huge part of the charm of this place. Hopefully the cover crops will provide diversion for them. As soon as trees poke heads above the cover crops, I will get them into tree protectors. Out in the pine forests, I will be planting blueberry seeds, but will try a few in the new low line food forest as well. At different heights on the hugelbed mounds, depending on moist or dry loving, I have these seeds to plant: varieties of quinoa, chickpeas, lentils, flax, spinach, stevia, anise, sunflowers, turnips, St. John’s wort, Indian corn, sorghum, and towards the base of the hugelbed, I will plant some of the more sturdy, normal garden species – pumpkin, watermelon, squash in several varieties just to see if I can get a first year harvest without too much work. I have a local stable willing to give me for free all the manure I can haul away. Which I will start shoving into the swales along with wood mulch to start breaking down and provide nutrients to the hugelbed.