The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Part 3: Imagining the Future Forest Garden Canopy

Eventual canopy coverage

My rough base map needed some on the ground measurement before I moved on to the next stage.  Here's my revised version, showing more accurate distances between fruit trees, an approximation of their eventual canopy cover, and a few more primary paths.  You'll notice that the brush pile miraculously disappeared --- I hope I'm able to make that happen.  I also decided to move the baby persimmon to a gap in the woods once I read that it can grow up to 50 feet in diameter!

Wetland locations

I also jotted down locations of created ditches/wetlands (known as "swales" in permaculture parlance.)  My goal is to use a judicious ditching system to create wetland patches while drying up the surrounding soil.  This is a big question mark, but I'm adding it to the map!



This post is part of our Planning The Forest Garden lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:




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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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