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Posted by Craig Miller about 9 years ago
My family and I have moved from San Antonio Texas back to Georgia. After moving I began networking as heavily as possible and finding all sorts of great permaculture homesteads and small farms. Through volunteering and learning from so many different people in such a short time, I have been gaining information and experience rapidly for the past year(visiting over 25 sites within several months, and returning to more than half, a few as often as once a week for several months). This lead me to offers to live on other peoples properties, since we were sadly living in an apartment. So, last October we bought a travel trailer (RV) and moved it onto a 10 acre homestead in the mountains in very northern Georgia, a beautiful place, lake across the road, breeding kinder goats (a cross between Nubians, and pygmies, a good dual purpose slightly smaller breed), ducks, chickens, dogs and cats, and now we have added rabbits (new zealands, and mainly silver fox breeds, with plans to add some angoras for fiber production). The homestead is about 2/3 slight sloping, and 1/3 fairly steep (just too steep for swales, barely), a mixed species orchard with about 250 occupants has been planted on swales, things like berries (10 or so species) several nut trees, and mixed fruits (peaches, hardy lemon, apple, pear, plum, a trial almond, things like that) and several others species, such as willow. Our soil is beautiful dark brown, good texture, and about 1 meter deep topsoil, only problem is mineral content, as the property has been cut for hay for a long time by the previous owners, under our topsoil is highly concentrated red clay (nearly 100%).
We have plans in spring to add some geese(to the orchard), guineas(to rid us of the massive tick population) and turkeys. I will be expanding our chicken population from the current 25 to about 100, in tractors, reclaiming ground for planting grains, vegetables, and hay(hopefully an alfalfa/grass mix will take without issues). Sadly the property is contaminated with Marek's disease, so for the time being our new chickes will have to be vaccinated, until we can figure out some type of solution. Also, we will be adding a small pig tractoring system with two American Guinea Hogs, to be kept until the following winter when judgement of their usefulness vs food value will determine whether they stay and get a mate or meet the smoker.
This year our goals include slight species diversity increase (I also want to trial quail), full force annual production (currently chickens are reclaiming the garden, a trial bantam tractor among them), grain production, hay production, starting a medicine garden, and in concept, growing food storage for ourselves, and forage for the animals. The whole property gets full sun and so should not be too challenging in that regard, also our rainfall is consistently higher than 50 inches a year between 1 and 2/3 - 2 meters in other words.
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Geoff Lawton Online PDC |
Type: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course |
Teacher: Geoff Lawton |
Location: Online |
Date: Jun 2014 |