GCLECKS GCLECKS

You have ideas of your own, and cite resources. I doubt there is a building materials conspiracy as there are so many varieties of materials and ways to build a home. If it can make money some one will do it, nut subdue it. Perhaps he did not go further for the same reason your not, resources. If he did not have them I can see it being hard for him to convince his bank loan officer that people really want a Lego house.

Thanks for the input ladies. I fear deer must be the answer as there is a wild herd of them several hundred strong in the area, and prior to a few years ago the land had been grazed by 600 dairy cattle. Will see what I can do though individually caging each new sapling sounds less than cost effective given the long time for return, though I am still young. Will see, I also read some silviculture documents that said they grow best with shade though that was certainly not a problem.

I don't know about what the variety is but in the UP (Zone 4/next to Canada) there are plenty of wild choke cherries.

We have yellow plums that had always produced heavily in my youth. They are left in a near wild state and had never been messed with. For the last proximately 8 years they have gone barren. Does any one know enough about plums to suggest a cause? The trees themselves look healthy and hearty, they have just gone from high yield to absolutely not a single plum on them.

Burning is not highly healthy for the soil either. If you can not find a permaculture way of doing it, and you are doing so for your use and need no legal organic certification, some herbicides may actually be better for your land than burning, believe it or not. Burning does much of the damage that tilling produces, and will only be a short term solution.

Is any one familiar with or no where I could find info on encouraging Sugar Maples as a long term project/goal for expanding existing maples into a large sugar grove?

Q: How did Fukuoka manage financially to take his run down family farm and transform it while experimenting in natural farming? What factors of Japan then might contrast with the US now to pose greater obstacles? What benefits does the US now have over Japan then?

Jami:
The Natural Way of Farming is available for research use from the soil and health library.
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/01aglibwelcome.html

Fukuoka claimed that protection from foragers was only one aspect of the benefits of seed balls. The book to my memory did not go on in great detail explaining it, in fact it explains nothing in great detail. Fukuoka purposely and intentionally trampled on his young crops to encourage root development. I believe if my memory serves me right in the book he talks about trampling the grains growing beneath his rice when harvesting the rice.