09/01/2025
Just off a site consult trip through Vermont, NH and Maine, and while some of the perennial lessons I see on these visits are clearest, I wanted to share a few of them with you:
¡ Start in zone 1. Donât get too spread out too quickly. Just because you âownâ it doesnât mean you need to do anything with it. Your time is very limited and you might never have enough of it to do all you want. So honor the zones of use â they represent one of the few rubrics that carry from site to site across all contexts of climate, goals, scale, etc. E.g. donât locate your compost or your salad greens 150â from your kitchen unless you are forced to. The area between your vehicle and your home is of supreme value. Utilize it deeply. The outdoor area immediately in the vicinity of the door which leads into your kitchen is also of intense value â itâs the zone 1 of your zone 1. Hopefully itâs sunny. Put a kitchen raised bed or two there â or something equally as desired. This will become your primary outdoor living room in many situations. Weeding can happen while youâre on the phone or having coffee. Bring your life as much as possible outside. The best most functional beautiful sites are the result of the inhabitants being outside on the land â âthe best fertilizer is the footsteps of the farmer.â
¡ Get the south (equatorial) (or SW or SE) side of your house in order, start there, not having a lot of value happening there is like driving around with a flat tire.
¡ Triage: Address your limiting factors with the biggest benefits first. E.g. Make sure you have a small well-tended vegetable garden dialed before you start prune that old apple in zone 3, etc. etc.
¡ Donât impinge your access. If you canât get to it easily you canât manage it. Define access early and often.
¡ Remember youâll never be done. âFinishedâ is a theoretical concept best dispensed with early on in working with land and it causes stress and burnout. Your list, if you make a thorough one, will take many lifetimes to get through. So revel in it. Soak it up. Enjoy the process and be grateful for the good hard work of integrating yourself as a conscious, reciprocal member in your local ecosystem. Just engaging in your landscape is worth it on itâs own regardless of any result.
¡ There arenât any real shortcuts. It takes roughly 10 years to set up your habitat pretty well, at least, if you go hard and donât make too many big mistakes and have a lot of energy and a bit of money too. And thatâs if you work from home and have lots of time. So be patient. If you instead apply mostly money hiring others to get the site dialed in you will make many times more mistakes and will have to reverse more actions. It also wontâ ever be as sensible as if the inhabitants do it themselves. So choose what to hire out carefully. Like anything worthwhile it takes sweat and thousands of hours to have a something phenomenal, but you can count on it happening. Have faith in that process. If you have to work away from the home, be realistic and donât try to do too much. Grow a raised bed of garlic and salad greens but do it well. Gardening takes vigilance far more than it does hard work.
¡ Track your watershed from the top to the bottom. Pay attention to where all the water comes from and goes to. Donât let it take value (soil) with it. Go outside when it rains hard and be a detective. You have to be outside. A lot. If youâre stuck as to what to do next, be outside at hours of the day when you normally are not â e.g. 3 am (drink lots of water so you get up during a big moon, etc.). You canât respond to what you donât notice so your job is to notice ever more as time goes on.
¡ Cover your soil. Bare soil, unless itâs a newly seeded vegetable bed, is the result of trauma and neglect. And itâs not hard to begin the healing process.
¡ Ask what the land wants. The more nebulous and silly that question seems the more benefit there is from earnestly engaging in this question, even though answers wonât usually be forthcoming. Keep asking.
¡ Itâs easy to confuse a method or strategy with a goal, e.g. you donât want a masonry oven, you probably just want a beautiful form of affordable resilient heat, and you probably donât want an actual herb spiral or keyhole garden so much as you want a sustainable, attractive and productive garden. Nor do you want swales as much as you want water infiltration, flood reduction and productive growing areas. Donât take prescriptions, work on principles.
¡ Thus, the questions you ask and how you frame them are more useful than the answers. When I see folks go off course into a more expensive, time-consuming and stressful approach rather than a simpler, more direct and effective approach, it usually has to do with asking the wrong questions and not realizing what they donât know. Not knowing is great when you can identify it â itâs usually easy to find someone who knows a bit. But not knowing what you donât know is always self-defeating.
