Draco Hill is back up and running! 75 acres of prairie, trees and perennial food crops on the Cedar River are going to get a lot of love this year. Come visit!
On the personal front:
Suzan recently retired from the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, which she, her husband Paul and 23 other good people founded in 2014. SILT now protects more than 1,200 acres in Iowa for nature-friendly table food farming in perpetuity. After nearly 9 years of successful fundraising and land raising, Suzan’s now glad to be home, focused on her family and her farming.
Paul has been retired for some time and has been Suzan’s primary source of energy and love, (not to mention funding), throughout the launch of SILT! Now with our gift to the state we love firmly established on the land, we want our last chapters to be an illustration of our dream. Paul continues to write and read, and will be presenting a paper at the Society for Economic Anthropology (a group he helped found more than 40 years ago) this May.
On the farm front:
Thirteen years ago, when we could finally build a home and move here, we established more than 20 acres of restored prairie and another 15 or so of native trees. About 4 years into that work of planting and protecting, building trails and hacking back invasives, we developed this idea – thanks to so many other people around us – that we could stack the benefits of each acre with food production in concert with nature. After a year of research, we planted more than 150 honeyberry plants, 17 Japanese walnut trees, 50 Asian pears and 60 paw paws. When the paw paws didn’t take, we replaced them with about 30 chestnut trees.
As SILT grew, our time on the land diminished. The trees and bushes did their thing, but not as well as they could with some TLC. So now we’re back!
Spring So Far!
- Expanded blueberry patch
- Nurtured and expanded honeyberries
- Expanded Asian pear orchard
- New serviceberry trees planted
- New ever-bearing mulberry trees propagated
- New currant bushes planted
- New pussywillow trees planted
- Three strains of mushrooms cultivated
- Three new varieties of cultivated elderberries
- Waterway reclaimed with trees torn out and down (this is a good thing, trust us)
- More comfortable camping facilities
More to come but this is our first post in years and we don’t want to overwhelm! Like our Facebook page for more up-to-date posts as things get busy around here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.