Need some advice with my first permaculture project

Hello!

I was wondering if anyone could give me a few pointers with a personal project I'm working on.

I got my hands on a parcel of land in northern Italy that used to be a wineyard (about 25 years ago), and has pretty much devolved to woodland. Half is sloped, rest pretty much horizontal.

So far my plan is to clear the underwood where I need to plant first, and use the sloped part for swales. Depending on how much rain I get, and if I can access irrigation again, I might develop a pond somewhere cool.

My biggest issue is that the big trees I have are mostly oaks and cherries, which are amazing and even a bit rare in this zone (oaks are even legally protected here), so I don't want to get rid of them but I want to integrate them in a food forest, while using the clearings for crops and smaller perennials.

I have decided to start in lanes, sort of what you'd do in regenerative agroforestry, even if I don't need to regenerate the soil, so I might skip some steps.

However, I don't know how to work with existing trees. They are not fully shading, but they definitely cover a lot of sun, so how would you go about figuring out what to plant?

Thanks!!!

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Evehn, 11 months ago

Thank you! I started clearing a few paths, and that should give me a way to roam the property a bit to analyze it. Mosquitoes were way worse than expected, but it's still manageable, so hopefully I'll be done before autumn. (on a side note, battery tools nowadays are really on another level!)

I've also discovered a few communities and sellers of ancient varieties of plants and trees, so I might get a nursery going and go trough some trial and error to see what grows where :)

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sheetmulch, 11 months ago

Congratulations!

When in doubt, walk the property. Every day the sun tracks a different arc across the ground. You need to identify microbiomes around the trees and start piecing together what plants will be happy with four hours or morning sun vs three hours of evening. What can tolerate full sun in the summer but shade in the spring and fall.

You also need to figure out when the canopy closes on each tree. There are many spring ephemerals that can get their growing season in before the shade becomes a problem, and other plants that can get well along in those conditions as well.

There’s an evergreen fruit bush indigenous to my area, and I’ve planted it where I expect the deciduous trees to fill in. If I were younger I’d just wait to plant them. But they grow okay from seeds and I’m working on my cuttings skills so even if they’re wrong I can just start over.

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