I realized I'd never shared how the future pig pasture fits into the bigger picture, so here's a map for those of you who enjoy them.  The aerial photo is from around this time last year, before we took down the yurt.  What's hard to see is that our core homestead, the pig pasture, and the yurt are all on little semi-flat plateaus, separated by gullies, but elevated a good distance above the floodplain.  I'm hoping the semi-flat part will mean less erosion from pig feet as they tear up the Japanese honeysuckle.

For map-phobes, here's a photo instead.  I'm standing in front of the trailer and looking southwest over the front garden toward the pig pasture.  (Yes, Thursday was a very gray day.)

Entering the pig pasture from the blueberry patch, Mark had already cut down a few little trees at the time of this picture, but not very many.  You would expect more growth than this for an area that's been vacant for three or four decades, but I suspect over-farming combined with invasive Japanese honeysuckle held trees back.  The vines also make it tough to cut and clear the trees, but we persevered.

Here's the result of an afternoon's work.  Trees in this stack will become next year's firewood and include sassafras, box-elder, sourwood (which I would have kept for the bees, but missed IDing until it was already cut), and black birch.  Mark also cut some of the saddest-looking black locusts I've ever seen, but I saved a few nicer-looking ones as nectary plants.  There's one big oak who will also be saved for the acorns, along with some little nut trees I planted here a few years ago.

I always feel a little guilty making brush piles because I know that in some parts of the world, this would be the only wood available for cooking and heating fires.  For us, though, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, so I piled branches up on the edge of the plateau, past where the fence will run.  In a perfect world, the brush might rot down in five or ten years and provide a rich terrace for fruit-tree planting.  Or maybe it'll just keep the songbirds happy.

Mark cleared about a third of the plateau in a couple of hours Thursday afternoon, but we've got some big decisions to make today.  I've started eying the hillside just above the pig pasture for orchard expansion --- it flattens out into a little ridge before heading back up the main hillside.  But if I want to clear this area, some of the biggest trees will need to come down now before fences go up downhill.  I've regretted it in the past when I've rushed and left trees like this in place, so I suspect we'll go ahead and take them down, even if that makes it less likely we'll get all of the work done in time to buy pigs this spring.

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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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