Steven Johnson

I found several linden of some sort in the yard of a community center near me in south Missouri. I ate leaves in the summer and collected fruit in about November when they were ripe. The fruit tasted like apple sauce about raisin sized and fermented on the tree easily. Those that fermented were the best to eat.
    I’ve collected some of the tiny black seeds. Would like to sprout them. When is the best time to put them in the ground?

HI guys nice to hear about your ideas for grazing. I love it and have recently started doing something similar in southwest Oregon. We have a 9 yr old female marema who has been doing the job all alone and would like a puppy to train. we had kept a herd of goats more or less on their own in wildland edges for many years but recently started supervised grazing part of the time with good results. we give them an hour to 1.5 hr twice a day and that seems plenty here and now. We have been thinking about getting a younger dog, so it might be nice to visit either here or at rowansc@yahoo.com

hi Elizabeth, I have land in mo near eminence that I would like to see used for permaculture, it is 32 acres and rural with a house on it. lots of details if you are interested contact me and we can exchange some info. I am open to many sorts of options too. steven

Hi Daniel, I'm interested in buying land in conjunction with other people and creating the conditions where a village might develop. Have you thought much about how you want to structure the ownership of the land? I have been thinking that a corporation, probably an LLC might be the best. it would need an appropriate charter, any ideas on that? I have some ideas involving how to decide what would be done. I'd like to make it as simple as possible, and mimic natural processes as is the permaculture ideal. Don't want to get into much detail right now, but I am interested. How large a piece of land would you like to have, and how many people living there, and who decides how many people go with each home on the place for example?

Hi Joseph, just noticed your post, don't know how I missed it as you are not too far off from where I am and I think it best if a person already want to be where they are going. This place is much more rural than stl, of course, about 3 hrs away, in Shannon county mo. I have 32 acres, partly wooded and partly sort of open, which I am just starting to convert to a food forest. I've only been here a few months so there is a lot to do, and room for your own input. it is not off the grid, or even very far off a main road, but is out of sight of that road and even mostly hidden from the gravel rural county rd it is on.
i'd like to have an intentional community of sorts at some point, but one with very few rules, mostly to keep things permaculture and organic.
I'll be in the stl area for the weekend, if you'd like to consider meeting, write to me. i'm easy to find if you look around this site. steven

Seems to me that the goal of permaculture is to increase productivity by mimicking natural systems. Well natural systems and most permaculture gardens look messy, like jungles, compared to neat, normal (square) farms. there is a lot more biomass/food around, and the normal farms don't like that since it makes it harder to make a profit, which is the tool of hoarding, and the cause of fighting.
I guess my idea is that we should recognize that the ultimate goal of permaculture is already to minimize hoarding, but to try and say that we are slaves to a certain system distracts us from the truth that we fight because we decide to. I respect Andrews attempt to find a way to subtly reduce the need for conflict, I think we need that, and we need to not be so subtle too, and just choose that whatever form of agriculture we engage in that we won't be greedy and fight. it probably takes both.

I believe that the essence of non-hierarchial (I might as well say anarchical) thought, is that there is not only one good way. it seems that to try and deduce the essence is an inherently hierarchial,'one way' sort of thing. i'd say we are getting very close to the line paul drew about discussing philosophy here. instead of the nuts and bolts of how to grow more food. now i'm ok with that, but it has gotten me in to trouble on this forum before, so I try to be careful. it seems to me Andrew is trying to figure a way to reduce stress between people, by avoiding farmng and the inequalities that seem to go along with it.
I wonder if the inequality ideal maybe came first, and farming came along as a possible outgrowth of that. but not a required out growth.
I suspect that we could make the decision to have horticulture, even somewhat sedentarily, and still be egalitarian. Andrew just found some research saying that some people did that. Might it be that the real deciding factor in whether we fight is whether we decide we should or not?

Dick, which cvt do you use, I suspect the nu vinci. they told me that with them, regenerative braking was out, and that's what I really want, that and pedal charging. I believe it is doable.
check out velomobiles on you tube, for ideas on enclosing other recumbants. this is an idea whose time has come.

In both cases, I lived alone most of the time, people liked to come and visit, but, I believe they were mostly not ready to put their faith in that kind of life. It did not bring in money, but the satisfaction of living there was great for me. I would walk out and find something to eat in the garden and eat it there, often not even taking it back to the kitchen and preparing a meal.
when I needed to kill a goat, I would walk out with them and kill one in the woods. the others would run away, when one fell, but then they would come back and watch, they were each concerned that it not be them, but as a herd, they seemed to have no problem with the process.
it felt a lot like hunting and gathering to me, combined with the horticulture that made much of the gathering possible. I found that with supervision, I could let the goats into the orchard areas for a period of time, they were pretty easy to convince to not eat much of what I didn't want them to and they got great nutrition, and they loved it. visitors were always remarking on how happy and fulfilled the social life of the goats was.
in both cases, I eventually had to leave. Now I would like to start again, in a way that it will not be taken away, I think maybe the right sort of corporation might be the answer. any one else agree?

In a couple different places, over the course of over 30 years, I have mad considerable progress toward developing the physical aspects of the kind of life we are talking about. In each case the land was owned, or partly owned, by someone else who did not completely agree with what I was trying to do. as long as I did at least most of the other things that they wanted, we got along for a while. Both places were fairly large, one was 1100 and the other 80 acres, mostly undeveloped, and contiguous with much larger wild land. I kept goats and let them go free, at least in the direction of the wild land. they really could have left me, they were not fenced in and there was plenty to eat. I had an abundance of goat meat, I needed to reduce their numbers myself to keep them in balance with the grazing in a reasonable distance, but they gradually learned to go a distance away, and let things grow closer in as well.
I could have helped with appropriate fencing but that was not allowed by the other owners.
I also planted orchards and gardens, not with an emphasis on making money, but planning for constant supplies of fruit and such to pick throughout the year. again this is not what the greater society encourages, though it is much more popular now. seems to me what permaculture is all about