A pathway...

Sometimes, I wonder how a pathway to a better life after the ecological transition will look like. I dream about the "RetroSuburbia" world that Holmgren has depicted. I fantasize about the "Local Futures" of Helena Norberg-Hodge. And sometimes I see a fragment of a better future, that has already materialized.

This week Thursday, I was biking another way to town and I found this beautiful bike lane:

I think you would be as happy as me if you stumbled upon a path so elegantly curving, with nut trees on both sides!

It has 20 or so nut trees that all look 10-15 years old, and I arrive a month after harvest, so next year I will go there every week, starting in September.

It is hard to identify trees without leaves, but I think that this one is a classic walnut:

This one is clearly a Chestnut, easy to identify thanks to the remaining leaves:

These ones look like "Cinerea"-walnut trees:

What do you think?

Another toy, or tool.

This week, I got another tool for the two-wheel-tractor. A rotary plow. It is an implement that Jean-Martin Fortier has popularized through his videos about small scale commercial vegetable production. I want to use a permanent-bed system with raised beds for the seedling trees, for vegetables, and for chestnut trees that are extra sensitive to wet feet.

It worked like a charm:

But I was quite scared of the orange food-chipper that was shredding everything it touched, so after a small test plot I was exhausted. I hope it gets better when I get more experience. These testbeds are 7m, but my main fields are all 20m long.

Tree bane - the hare

One of my fears it that the hares in the surrounding will eat the bark of all our trees. Yesterday I found one hare chilling out next to our wood shed.

I need to put up a mesh net around our whole property to keep these hares out. I hope it will be enough with a 50cm wide net, and staple it to the bottom rung of our fencing, but I am not sure.

Do you have any experience with hare-fencing? What would you do?