Rhea Ridge is a permaculture food forest and farm.
Established in 2021, we have been focused on clearing less diverse portions of our forest to make space for new planting, adding organic matter to cleared areas, and planting cover crops to build soil in those areas. Invasive removal has been a key priority of ours to increase native diversity and reduce the spread of a single variety of plant from taking over and outcompeting all others. Some of our most troublesome invasives are bush and vine honeysuckle, privet, and tree of heaven.
We have 50+ mushroom logs producing a variety of oyster mushrooms, shiitake, and chestnut mushrooms and a winecap mushroom bed. We had a decent cover crop of daikon radish, white mustard, and cowpea this year (2023) in some of our heavy clay soil as “clay-busting” plants, though we weren’t able to easily water the crops and didn’t have much organic material or mulch covering them so the soil dried out more than we wanted, so we have gotten several truck loads of woodchips via local arborists and ChipDrop and that has really been helping with moisture retention.
We planted lots of fruit and nut trees this year, some standard orchard trees, and quite a few natives which will produce delicious fruit and nuts and also provide pollen and nectar for pollinators. We will be making swarm traps this year to capture local bees and will hopefully be able to get into beekeeping this year and have our own bees to pollinate our trees and hopefully make some honey for us as well.