The land
What we're buildingThe farm sits on a slope that falls about twenty feet from the road down to a wet corner in the southeast. Everything we plant follows those contour lines, so the rain soaks in instead of running off.
A flock of laying hens moves across the pasture on a weekly rotation, ahead of the trees. They clear the ground, eat the pests, and fertilize the rows we'll plant the following spring.
Two of the grazing lanes are left alone each year — never mowed, never grazed — so that ground-nesting birds and overwintering insects have somewhere to be. Those strips move up the hill as the orchard moves down it.
The orchard goes in on contour over four years: stone fruit high where the frost drains away, apples and pears through the middle, and pawpaw and serviceberry down in the wet.
