Water Management on Regenerative Farms - NRCS Staff Educational Event
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writings & media
Articles, photography, video, and writings sourced from our work in and beyond the field. Our “from the field” series features projects, daily life, and reflections inspired by our work at home on our two farm sites in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Our “beyond the field” series features, projects, collaborations, and partnerships we are engaged in with our broader community.
Popular subjects include permaculture, forest gardening, regenerative agriculture, plant medicine, ecological restoration, earth based spirituality, and other diverse musings on agroecology topics.
Decade in Reflection Part Four: Beyond the Field
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In honor of our ten year anniversary, we’re taking a trip down memory lane in a new multi part series. Through archival photos and retrospective writings, we’ll revisit forest gardening, water management, plant medicine, and other pursuits we’ve explored over the last ten years at Fields Without Fences with the kind of nuance and cosmic humor that only hindsight provides.
Read MoreDecade in Reflection Part Three: Plant Medicine for People & Planet
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In honor of our ten year anniversary, we’re taking a trip down memory lane in a new multi part series. Through archival photos and retrospective writings, we’ll revisit forest gardening, water management, plant medicine, and other pursuits we’ve explored over the last ten years at Fields Without Fences with the kind of nuance and cosmic humor that only hindsight provides.
Read MoreDecade in Reflection Part Two: The Way of Water
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In honor of our ten year anniversary, we’re taking a trip down memory lane in a new multi part series. Through archival photos and retrospective writings, we’ll revisit forest gardening, water management, plant medicine, and other pursuits we’ve explored over the last ten years at Fields Without Fences with the kind of nuance and cosmic humor that only hindsight provides.
Read MoreDecade in Reflection Part One: Forest Garden Farm
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In honor of our ten year anniversary, we’re taking a trip down memory lane in a new multi part series. Through archival photos and retrospective writings, we’ll revisit forest gardening, water management, plant medicine, and other pursuits we’ve explored over the last ten years at Fields Without Fences with the kind of nuance and cosmic humor that only hindsight provides.
Read MoreShaping the World Through a Conscious Process of Encouragement & Discouragement
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As the plants retreat into the underworld and we wrap up another season, our focus naturally shifts from the complex web of relationships that comprise the green world, to the curious continuum of human relationships that shape our culture and connect us to one another.
Over the years, through our work on the farm and within the fields of permaculture and ecological restoration, we’ve developed and refined an approach to landscape management that revolves around a deliberate process of encouragement and discouragement.
Read MoreFrom the Field: The Overlap Between Productive and Wild Spaces
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There is often the opportunity for overlap between productive and wild spaces. The best designs are guided by observations we can make about the way the world around us behaves.
WILD FARMING SERIES: Perennial Polycultures / Complexity & Abundance
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Growing in perennial polycultures mimics the complexity and abundance naturally displayed by wild ecosystems. Cultivation happens within a horizontal and vertical spacial context, maximizing the productive yield of any given area, but also within the context of perpetually unfolding succession.
Read MoreREADING THE LANDSCAPE SERIES: Snow Cover
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From a permaculture perspective, late season snow presents a wonderful opportunity to read patterns in the landscape. By observing snow melt, we can easily identify where water naturally moves across the landscape, and this gives us insight into ways we might harness water flow, interrupt or redirect it, or choose select species that thrive in seasonal inundation…
Read More2019 Permaculture Apprenticeship Program Opportunities
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After a two year hiatus, we are please to announce the reinstatement of our Seasonal Apprenticeship Program for 2019!
Join us for a unique work-study program on our 10 acre forest garden farm. Our Seasonal Apprenticeship Program offers hands on learning opportunities for beginning farmers, gardeners, permaculture practitioners, and plant lovers.
Read MoreUNDERSTORY SERIES (UNDERSTORY: 003)
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For the first few years when anyone would ask what we grow on our farm, I would crack a smile and quip, “we mostly cultivate patience.” It’s like that with perennials. A tiny herb, a bare root whip, a scattering of seeds cast out into the landscape like a wish that might one day blossom and fruit into the vision so easily teleported to within the mind’s eye. But time travel otherwise trudges on at a reliable pace; minutes becoming hours, becoming seasons, becoming years. In the meantime you will curse the nursery woman who sold you the poorly grafted pawpaws, then you’ll curse yourself for buying more…
Read MoreWATCH: Fields Without Fences Forest Garden Interview with Green Revolution
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Sharing this rather sweeping interview with our friend Alex Marcoulides for his Youtube channel called Green Revolution. Alex stopped by Fields Without Fences for a broad conversation with us about forest gardening, permaculture, successionally managed farm ecosystems, and elderberries, and we go pretty damn deep. This interview is from last season (2017), and listening back to it, I am completely impressed with Alex's ability to listen, synthesize, and offer careful reflection at a nearly rapid fire pace! Alex's energy is purely electric and plugged in.
Read MoreUNDERSTORY SERIES (UNDERSTORY: 002)
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Someone chopped down a tree and began the task of making firewood. That task was abandoned in favor of a more pressing task, and a forgotten round of tree trunk began to dry, then wet in the rain, then dry again. One day someone pulled it into the shade of the old crabapple to sit on for a sunny afternoon, until it was forgotten and left to decay once again…
Read MoreUNDERSTORY SERIES (UNDERSTORY: 001)
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Each still image I capture in the garden represents a particular passing expression of the plant world in seasonal succession. And the static nature of the photo belies the true nature of the emergent forest garden which is in a state of perennial movement, forever shifting as plants come into blossom, maturity, death, and rebirth. I’m beginning an ongoing series where I’ll explore dynamic evolving interactions within the polyculture understory of our forest garden farm. If you enjoy it, please let me know and pass it on!
Read MoreLISTEN: Fields Without Fences Interview on Farm Small Farm Smart Podcast
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Back in early April I had the pleasure of speaking to Diego Footer during an interview for his Farm Small Farm Smart Podcast. Diego initially reached out to talk to about medicinal herbs and our herbal CSA, but the conversation organically expanded into more nuanced topics including plant medicine for the earth; site specific design; breaking free from traditional modalities of cultivation; plant autonomy and sovereignty; and understanding the driving force that is propelling and defining your interaction with the land…
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