To Gulch...or not to Gulch...

Robert Klassen looks at the salient points...

I’d like to thank those readers who wrote to me asking for more information about small-scale restoration farming. My advice is usually the same: Look for level land in a poverty stricken county that has been trashed and overgrazed, has utilities in place, has ground water, rainfall, and moderate weather. Such property can be cleaned up and the fertility restored with little expense or labor, although that will take time. For a high-tech urban dweller, that means the place is only useful as a private vacation spot.

I saw a perfect place on the western slope of the Olympic Mountains recently. Ten acres in a flat spot on a valley floor beside a year-round creek, covered in weeds from overgrazing, a trashed doublewide, junk and garbage scattered around, the kind of place a spouse might condemn on sight. What I saw was restorable land with utilities in place in an excellent spot for a vineyard. I would pick up the trash, give the mobile home away, remove the cross fencing, hire a guy or rent a tractor to disc it down, sow in clover, and forget it for a season. With nothing to steal showing, I'd use it as my personal campground (I live in an old motor home) once or twice a year, bring up the fertility, and get up to speed on viniculture.

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"...the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
-- Thomas Jefferson