Heavenly Bamboo, Nandina Domestica, is a great choice for your needs. It gets to six feet tall pretty quickly in my yard but does not grow any taller than eight. It is drought tolerant but it can take lots of water, it likes sandy or clay soil, it looks pretty year round without the litter or runners that you get with bamboo. I love my regular bamboo, but it's messy and it's very difficult and expensive to keep it under control.

Thanks all, I guess I just needed to open my eyes when out. I was researching on the web, and not seeing good options there. I went to get a yard of compost today, and turned around while he was dumping it into the truck bed, and there it was - the big pile of forest mulch. Looked consistent enough to do okay in the front yard. And at about $22/yard, that seemed reasonable too I think kimmq - regarding 'may take years to show soil improvement', Yeah, I wish I had done what I'm doing now when I moved in here 10 years ago. But I figure I'll probably be here another 10-20 years, so it makes sense to get the soil going in better directions. The sad part... I had three large (30-40') trees removed a bit over a year ago. Had I known wood chips were a good thing to improve soil, that would have been ideal to just use those (at least in the back yard.) Live and learn...

The way people use the term "French drain" today makes it not any different than any underground drain. An underground drain pipe is useful when you must translocate water from one low point of the yard to an even lower point elsewhere in the yard and have to pass through a higher elevation area along the way. But if all along the route, at the surface, you need to be collecting and translocating water, then an underground drain is not helpful. What you need is surface drainage: slope, swale and/or flume. The exit point in your yard for drainage water is the ditch. And the water needs to get to it, along any point, using one of those 3 devices. It's not necessary to worry about every square inch of the yard. Out in the wooded portion, if the yard is juicy and sloppy for a day or two after the rain, does it really make a material difference? Probably not. What's likely to matter most is the area all around the house, the drive and the storage building and access to it. Mainly, you need to be evaluating how you can get water from the left side of your yard to the right side, where the ditch is. It looks like the biggest problem you're showing us is standing water in front of the storage building. It would help if that building was raised up a few, like 6 inches. If it's sitting on the ground, you could raise the grade with soil, gravel or by pouring a concrete slab (if the building needed a solid floor.) Also, the approach ground in front of the storage building needs to be raised, with a slight cross-slope tilted rightward. From that point on, you could create a swale between the building and the trees and the trees and fence. The bottom of the swale would be continuously gradually descending in elevation as it travels toward the ditch ... roughly about 2 1/2" to 3" per every ten feet. The swale profile can be gentle. Establish the bottom center of it first (like a channel) and then carve out the sides to make it blend more gently into the surrounding grade. If the space is really tight between the trees and fence, then you may need a flume ... a concrete lined channel. Think of it as a splash block (like would be below a downspout) but that runs the entire length of the channel. The reason it's concrete because water is moving faster in it that it would be swale, so it can erode the ground. I looked on Youtube but couldn't find any videos about making a drainage flume. Usually, they are just hand plaster in by some grandpa. A poor man's flume could be made by lining a channel with roofing shingles oriented the same way they would shed water on a roof.

I read the same things. The greenhouse engulfs the house, but yet the human living is part of the greenhouse that also includes the pool, wood burning, and combustion engines. And the sun is blocked by the roof solar panels, which is fine for vertical farming using electric light but "greenhouse" infers natural light. If you live in Nova Scotia even trickier. Also a generic 20' house deck length (to access the upper part) of a two-story vertical farm could yield enough of a crop to supply a small town. And you are talking a greenhouse to cover about an acre footprint. Not even mentioning the water, labor, and energy requirements. Your goals surely come from a good place, and many on this forum probably share similar goals in various degrees of reasons and purpose. It might be better to start at solar with passive design attributes - it's difficult just to accomplish that. And work on your program requirements for farming - maybe just a grow shed is sufficient.