Frederick, Maryland is home to this beautiful 60-year-old chestnut orchard. Chestnut trees can live 200-800 years.
PHOTO courtesy: michael Judd design systems that support life rather than exhaust it. It stops being something you apply only to gardens or food forests, and you find it truly spilling out into every area of your life; permaculture can guide how we organize, how we lead, how we resolve conflict, and how we treat one another. It becomes an invitation to live differently. To design our lives the same way we design productive food systems— with abundance that is shared and community that is felt.
SilvoCulture: Building Community and Culture
SilvoCulture, a boots-on-theground nonprofit organization based in Frederick, Maryland, uses permaculture principles to design agroforestry food systems in pursuit of its mission: to plant one million nut trees across the mid-Atlantic region. As its Executive Director, I am witness to the power of coming together and collaborating to accomplish this enormous vision. We host field days and workshops. We help landowners navigate funding and longterm stewardship. We work with partners. We gather in community, share recipes, and celebrate harvests. We think about the longterm economic impact nut trees will have on our future economy and develop methods for processing and marketing the nuts.
Nut trees don’ t produce once and stop. They produce more each year, for decades, sometimes
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