Back to the Future
Farewell "Fossil Foods", with your synthetic herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers; your over-processing, plastic packaging and long hauling; your additives, preservatives, and irradiation.
Simple, natural, local. Returning to past food and energy systems is our goal. We hope both Skyhill and Falling Water will evolve to become small permaculture homestead-type communities of year round self-sufficiency-- food, water, solar electric, passive solar, wood heat and stove, near-zero waste.
Small is beautiful. Size matters. Smaller communities lend themselves to caring and camaraderie, to sharing and bartering. Smaller business ventures, ditto.
Incubate and celebrate! The plan is for both Skyhill and Falling Water to incubate small-scale, sustainable businesses. We will provide land and some infrastructure, as well as room and board, to self-starters who are interested in living here and operating small farm and food businesses.
Beekeeping services, a business venture of great need. Other ideas include mushroom production, natural landscaping services, farm stand, local market or CSA (for veggies, fruits and herbs, goat or sheep products, meat and eggs), small-scale grains, bicycle design and repair, yoga, soap, candles, etc. Entrepreneurs would exchange some hours of general farm work for this opportunity.
Organic heritage hatchery, i.e., chicks from non-GMO parents! Also, we would like to begin an organic compost business. We sincerely hope to replace ever more costly and scarce organic chicken feed with homegrown worm production scaled to be the primary food source for our 300 hens. Indeed, a novel and needed threesome.
Winter chicken playground would be a bonus use for a future large greenhouse at Skyhill, and we also plan to design a closed system aquaculture project for our in-ground pool area.
Conservation at Falling Water: We will continue to protect the 36 acres that are under a conservation easement with the local land trust. Indeed, our diverse landscape with ravine, waterfall, mature forest, meadows and beaver pond is a balanced natural system that increases our garden’s resiliency and inspires us in our design ideas.
Multi-layered food forest. We have begun small-scale fruit production with the 140 fruit bushes and low trees inter-planted in our permaculture garden. We want to dedicate the remaining 1.5 acres to an organic orchard that is more layered, each standard size tree (chestnut) becoming the canopy for lower trees (plum), high bushes (elderberry), low bushes (currants), herbs (comfrey) and ground cover (strawberry).
Lengthen the growing season with the completion of our wood and glass, permanent greenhouse with a chicken and compost component. Falling Water also has a goat barn to be finished.
Native tree nursery. We hope to continue transplanting seedlings from our woodland floor and offering small trees to the community.