What we're starting with

We have about an acre of open, sloped land.  This is an aerial photo from probably 2012.  Look how burned the land seems.  The home-owner used pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for about 20 years.  We bought the property in 2013.

The land slopes downwards to the right, with a bit of a leveling off in the middle.

Here's a photo from Google's enhanced satellite, taken probably around the same time or shortly after.  Notice the difference in burned spots.  Every summer is different.  Patches move and grow.  It's odd.  (Flash forward to now, 5+ years later, and the green stripe you see below is a bit wider to the right, covering the entire leveled off patch.)

Last year (2017), I took soil samples from various spots all over the property.  The results?  No nitrogen anywhere, except for a tiny amount in the green stripe (mentioned below).  And the soil was highly acidic everywhere, even where there aren't any evergreen plants.

Luckily, shortly after the tests, my kids caught my neighbor spraying something along the south and east ditch, which is 10 feet from our property lines.  We don't own the ditch, but neither does he.  I knocked on his door, and his wife told me that he sprays the ditch twice a year with RoundUp, "to keep it looking nice".  I said, "he's spraying someone else's property?"  She said, "he got permission from the property owner."  I said, "the rain water drains from all of our ditches straight into the lake in the conservation area east of us.  We're polluting that water.  Additionally, I just tested the soil all over our property, and we have zero nitrogen everywhere.  RoundUp kills the microbes that fix nitrogen in the soil.  If I get permission from the owner of the ditch to maintain it, will you please ask your husband to stop spraying RoundUp?"  Later, I got permission, and our neighbor agreed to stop spraying.  So, we're now a year without RoundUp.

This is an aerial shot from around that time (2017), but sadly from Yahoo Maps, which doesn't allow for better focus.  Regardless, you can see a vertical green strip, which is the left half of where the ground levels out a bit before sloping downwards to the east again.  That spot of leveling-out is acting like a massive, shallow swale.

We plowed the manure pile into a 70' by 70' square, almost in the middle.  This was before I found out that tilling destroys soil structure.  But hey, we didn't do anything with the land after that, and the soil structure recovered.

This past summer (2018) was the worst yet, in terms of heat and rain.  Imagine the same picture as the one above, but even more brown.  We have a huge variety of weeds, dead grass, and moss.  But all through this past summer, the 70' by 70' square always stood out, always slightly more green than the rest.  I wish I had taken a picture from when you could actually see the edges of the square.

Here's a more recent picture, taken at the end of September 2018, looking eastward after a weekend of rain.  You can still sort-of see the edges of the green square, which I've drawn in with white lines.

The pile of poo you can see is a new pile.  Our neighbor on the left got a horse and graciously drops off the manure for me to use.  I have plans for it, to spread it thinly over scattered straw like in The One Straw Revolution.  

You might have noticed little pylons in the photo.  Those are garden stakes with pool noodles fitted on them to make them highly-visible.  The blue ones mark the edges of two 70' by 70' squares that are earmarked for a food forest, and the edges of the future veggie swales.  Pink noodles mark the locations of the main trees (apple and walnut).  Orange noodles mark the mulberry and Russian olives.  

In order to stake these out, I had to have a plan.

After 5 drafts and lots of thinking time in-between, my plan is pretty well set now, though not in stone.  I'm using guidelines from the permaculture book Gaia's Garden, the no-till, do-nothing book The One Straw Revolution, and the principles of Korean Natural Farming and JADAM.  For the veggie swales, I'll use Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.  This next picture says "Plan 4", but with all of the modifications, I consider it Plan 5.  :)  One modification not shown is that the two super-guilds are going to make a U-shape instead of a Z-shape, in order to create a permaculture "sun trap".

These are the plans for each of the two super-guilds that will make up the food forest.

Here's a little pic that helped me place the stakes on the diagonal from the corners of the two 70' by 70 squares.  This probably isn't interesting to anyone but me.  A quaint reminder that, yes, you will use high school math again.  I had to use the Pythagorean Theorem to get the right distance.

So... here we are.  A month ago, I started the actual work.  My budget is skimpy, and so is my time.  It's going to take 10 years until it looks like the picture in my head, so I won't beat myself up about it too much.  

Wish me luck.  :)