Weed grower diaries: distributing the treasures of the forest

 
One of my biggest ambitions at this moment is to be able to feed myself entirely without buying anything. My time moving towards this goal has shown me that i have to redefine the way i eat and obtain food because if I wanted to eat the same that I am used to like grains and the vegetables that can be bought at stores I would have to prepare tons of soil make large fences and cut many trees for enough sunlight to come in. All is doable but it requires plenty of time, so the way I see it I need a short term plan before all that can happen.
 

 
From the beginning of my journey to live in the forest I have been told many times that I must grow a garden to sustain myself. The problem is, I have never met anyone who could live entirely off their garden unless they had help from machines. However, I have fed abundantly from weeds this year and I would continue to do so if I wasn't competing with the surrounding cattle for them, who have exhausted most of the nearby fields at this moment. Also having to bend my back to forage these weeds is very exhausting and so I have come up with the idea of building piles of soil and organic matter to allow them to be populated by weeds.
 

 
Beside the piles i have also dug little trenches to act as swales and gather the nutrients that will run down with the rains. My guess is that one of the reasons why the land where i live has such clayish and low nutrient soil is because the top soil is constantly being washed into the stream with the heavy winter rains. Having lots of these trenches should help mitigate this effect.
 

 
Piles are composed of leaves, twigs and mature soil that has been building under the willows but was compressed under the huge mass of material that is constantly dropping from the trees which stopped anything from growing there. It is also my intention to build some piles even where there is only soil so that it becomes comfortable to harvest the weeds that grow on it.
 

Beginning to form a pile
 

 
There is an ocean of leaves i want to take advantage of this way
 

 
I have also been throwing lots of seeds into the piles. Every time I go to town I pay attention to the plants at the edge of the gardens in the street and check if they have seeds on them. I harvest as much as I can fit in my pocket and throw them in the piles. In the picture you can see fennel seeds and I have also been throwing a lot of lambs quarter and curly dock seeds.
 

It was a great discovery to find that there are so many seeds to be harvested in town because to me going there was always something that i didn't really enjoy doing, more of a need. Now I know i can go and take a walk around to come back with my pockets filled with treasure.