The hottest day

    
     Today was officially the hottest day of summer so far. Over 100 degrees, capping off a week of sweltering high-ninety weather. It hasn't rained in a month and it would be fair to say that we have been feeling a bit wilted during our first week back in Missouri. Has this fact, or Mike's neck injury, set us back on our homesteading plans at all? It would any sensible person, but not us, since apparently we are unreasonably hardy and determined. Usually we would not have pushed as hard as we have this past week, but a rare opportunity presented itself... we were offered the help of a work party of volunteers on Friday, which meant that we had five days to finish the timber-framing section we were working on before we left if we wanted their help moving it and setting up the next section. "Yes!" I foolishly thought, "let's go for it!" Our amazing, fearless, slightly-crazy-like-us, homesteader/builder neighbor Beth volunteered to help us build this week and offered up her strategy for beating the heat... get up and start work at 6 am, go until noon, quit until 4, and then finish when you can't see anymore, around 8. So that is what we did, all this week, hammered and chiseled and sawed our butts off, heat be darned! (In case you are reading this and having alarm bells sounding in your head regarding Mike's mending neck, be not alarmed, he sensibly did not push himself as hard as Beth and I and resigned himself to cook duty and what you might call "timberframing-lite," the detail work minus the heavy lifting).

Proof, thanks to our neighbor Beth

  
      The 6:00 AM strategy worked well, giving us two sweet hours of cool work weather before the sun reared its blistering head over the tree canopy to start its daily frying. Beth had another great strategy for this stage of the day, which is to jump in the pond with your clothes fully on and then let yourself air dry. Strangely, this works wonders, producing literal air-conditioned cooling as the water evaporates in the breeze. Repeat every hour as needed, and we got ourselves through the day. Last night, the night before the crew was to arrive, Mike and I succumbed to power-tool temptation and finished trimming the legs of the section with a chain-saw and power grinder, a much more expedient version of what we had been doing with hand saws, but we were finally done. Whew! I don't think we will be choosing to work under such pressure again. But as you can see in the photos below, the work party came and moved section #2 (first picture above, laid out on pallets) and set up section #3. We celebrated afterward with watermelon in the shade, which always tastes so much more sweet when it comes after a hot day of work. We are taking the afternoon and weekend off to let our blisters heal, though I can hardly imagine picking up a chisel again come Monday. Still, we are getting much better and quicker as we go. Within a month the frame will be standing (God willing!)

    Some folks from the work party also helped me go around the do triage on our little tree saplings who are badly in need of water. We hauled buckets of water from the pond and got a good section of them watered, but we could really use some rain soon. The ground seemed to suck up the water, sometimes with an actual gurgling sound as it ran into cracks. It is hard to see their little leaves drying up or turning fall colors prematurely. Part of our planting strategy was to plant twice as much as we hoped would make it, knowing many wouldn't, but of course I have been hoping they all will anyhow.

     Our pond has also been losing water to evaporation, evident in rings around the shoreline. It has stayed cool enough however to be a refreshing part of our days, and not just ours... We noticed that the number of animal tracks around its perimeter has greatly increased since the creek on our land has dried up, revealing wild turkeys, racoons, possums, deer and others have been also making use of our little oasis. It is sort of fascinating to consider how other life here endures the heat. I think the deer have also been employing the 6 AM strategy as I have heard them snorting at that early hour. We have watched hornets come and rest on the pond surface and then fly away after thirty seconds. Are they cooling themselves? Drinking? I don't know but there are always a dozen or more of them. I also wonder why only hornets? Why not bees? These are the sorts of mysteries that are beginning to present themselves to us as we get to know the land and its inhabitants better...

   
      Last, and best, one of the surprises of coming back this past week was discovering a whole new round of wild flowers on our land that we had never before seen. This was most likely because last year we had such a serious drought that not many wildflowers got to the flowering stage at all, but the abundance of spring rain this year primed a flush of blooms. Purple rough blazing stars are especially abundant, even on hills we thought almost nothing grew on, as well as stiff sunflowers, which grow in thick masses up against the burgundy staghorn sumac. I have used some of these to make natural fiber dyes, like purple ironweed and various sunflowers, as well as the sumac berries. Elderberries are my favorite range of colors, from teal to periwinkles, and Mike has some ideas about making elderberry wine and jelly, we shall see. What the conservation department has told us is that these and other native prairie grasses and flowers all thrive in the hot season, as opposed to cool season grasses like fescue that have been introduced as feed grasses for livestock. So somebody is out there in enjoying the weather! Well, keep fingers crossed for rain and send cool thoughts our way!

One down and three to go

     Now that an embarrassing length of time has lapsed since my last posting, I have positive progress to report on the house construction! We have completed one whole section of four sections (in the timber-framing world they are called "bents") of our main house frame. This first section was a huge hurdle for me personally, since I really had no experience cutting this kind of joinery, only having ever worked with squared-off timbers before, AND there was the seemingly insurmountable problem of actually lifting and maneuvering the massively heavy timbers on and off the framing bed! But once we started in, we slowly and awkwardly figured out how to cut each special joint (the notch made where two timbers come together) and we found friends who liked us enough to come help us lift the aforementioned massively heavy timbers each time we needed to add a new piece (6-8 able-bodied men/women on average!) When we finally finished one whole section, we had a big lifting party to get it off the framing bed and onto the ground so that we could set up the next section, which is already underway, about half finished. So below is a picture of the relocated first section, ready to be adjusted and ratchet-strapped in place for our future raising day when all four will go up together.... or so we pray.

     We have been doing all this work on the "framing bed" that we constructed especially for the task, a perfectly level and purposefully-spaced grid upon which to lay out the timbers. It helps us determine at what positions to line up the beams in order to get consistent heights for the first and second floors, to know where the cruck timbers should cross to support the ridge poll, and where the feet of the building will stick out and sit on the padstones we set last summer. It has been surprisingly solid, though it looks like it should collapse under the weight of several tons of timber. See picture below... We roll around logs, pivot and push them into and out of place to cut the notches, and it has not budged! When we are done this phase of construction, we will dismantle it and reuse the wood we built it with to construct our first floor joists. 

     We have been doing all of the construction at this phase with only a few key tools: mainly chisels, mallets, saws, levels, a string, and the tool that I am using in the below left picture, a scribing compass. This was one of our big investments for this project, but it is a very cool tool and well worth it. Once set level, it can be used to transfer the curve of one timber onto the one below it and vice versa. Knowing this allows us to remove wood from both the bottom and top timbers so that they will fit perfectly together, despite the irregularities in the contours of their curves. We end up with each joint being somewhat like the one shown bellow, with several flat parallel planes being cut so that they connect flush with the ones in the connecting timber. The dove-tail shape helps transfer any sideways pressure from the cruck into locking the joint more securely together (and prevents them from slipping out), PLUS the peg hole you see drilled here will eventually be filled with an oak peg, which further secures it together. For the raising and this phase we have been using removable metal pins which our very talented blacksmith neighbor Brian custom made especially for this project. Thank goodness for all of our hands-on friends!

The mallet is one my grandfather used to make wooden sculptures

     One of the other projects we have been working on this summer has been building a dock into our pond. One day a few months ago as were watching the spring rain rapidly filling the level of the pond, Mike got a certain look in his eye and determined it was time to get the dock in before it was too late! Within a day or two, he had located rot-resistant white oak from our land and had set it into the ground to form the moorings of our soon-to-be dock. We then ordered some planking from one of our local mills and had it nailed in, just in time for the summer heat wave to hit. Almost as soon as it was done, our friends from Philly came out on a camping adventure with their two boys, Nino and Niki, who were in the water almost non-stop. Our neighbor's daughter Ella and another few community kids, Etta and Oliver, plus Nino have all been learning to swim this summer and our pond has turned out to be the perfect spot for it since we have a bit of a "shallow end" where they can practice. This was an unanticipated additional benefit to add to the list of why having a pond is amazing. We also have been using the water to keep our new little trees alive during dry spells, plus hosting a healthy frog population who saw the "vacancy" signs and moved right in. 

Sitting on the dock of the bay...

Nino and Niki, our resident frogs

     Our land continues to amaze me, week after week, as it unfurls new beauties to behold. This summer, it seems, has been entirely different than last when we had a bad drought, as the wetter weather has brought out terrific wildflowers that I had not seen before, coneflowers, oxeye daisies, bright orange milkweed, black-eye susans, blazing stars, etc. It also brought on a surge of mulberries, the biggest, juiciest, sweetest ones I have yet tasted. All the while Mike and I were planting our hundreds of little trees, including 25 native mulberries, it turns out we actually have four mature mulberry trees already on our land, full of low-hanging branches and ripe berries! This discovery felt like a little surprise gift from our land, and for about a month and a half, we were harvesting bowls of delicious purple-staining berries. Yum. Between that and the bountiful wood nettles on our land, we were bringing in daily edible harvests. Our little tree seedlings are for the most part doing well, by the way, with about a 5% die-off rate so far (about half that were non-native eastern white pines and fussy flowering dogwoods). In particular, our 25 paw-paws all took to the places we planted them which feels like an exciting victory (they are notoriously bad at being transplanted, and we were forewarned that they would likely not make it). But visions of delectable paw paw fruit (somewhat tropical and custardy, almost like a less-tart mango) propelled us onward. I hope they continue to survive the heat and the deer, who may also have an appetite for paw paw! 

     Another fun experiment in edible planting has been our wheat crop, which we planted as a dam-wall stabilizer while the native grasses and wildflowers get established. We sowed a bag last fall and didn't think much of it until we realized this July that we were surrounded by mature grain-heads full of wheat berries ready to be harvested! We didn't have much intention of actually doing it, until our friend Selma, visiting from Philly, decided she wanted to try it out. So we harvested a couple of bowls worth and went through the process of rubbing out the berries and winnowing the sheaths away in the wind by pouring the berries back and forth between bowls. Amazing how it all works using no fancy machinery, just these ancient techniques! We then tried grinding it in a hand-cranked grain mill, mixing a dough from it and using a sour-dough culture to leaven the dough. Finally, post-baking it became little buns which were quite good, though not terribly efficient in the making.

     Another practice we have started which is relatively inefficient, but still, a satisfying step toward self-sufficiency, has been hand washing and line drying our own clothes. We picked up this double-basin washer at auction, and combined with a washboard, soap and water, makes for a rather meditative ritual. These kinds of additional labor-making practices can quickly fill up a day and when one has a sense of scarcity about time (as I often do), that can be quite frustrating. I can see how my fast-paced, efficiency-seeking, east-coast upbringing has conditioned me to avoid or expedite such labor. I often have to consciously slow myself down and remind myself that I have no deadlines or anywhere to be except the present moment, because I can easily slip into being a multi-tasking stressed-out maniac if I am not careful. So taking care, relishing these little rituals--"chopping wood, carrying water" as it were--is more and more a part of my days as I transition into this liefestyle. Selma and Niki also tried out the old-fangled clothes washer while they visited, and, I think, enjoyed it!  

    So, where are we now? As many people reading this will have heard, while on a family-visit in Ohio, Mike recently broke his neck, an unexpected and serious new development. He is super fortunate to be making a full and relatively quick recovery right now, and we are still figuring out what this means for the rest of our building season (and how soon we can return!) The especially unfortunate bit is that his injury will mean no "heavy lifting" for him for awhile and, ironically, we have pretty much nothing but heavy-lifting ahead of us on the house for the rest of the summer. But I am hopeful I will find help to keep going with it while Mike keeps the hammock warm and the hearth-fire (or cook-fire) burning. For now, gratitude to our bodies that enable us to do this work and keep going, day after day...

Projects beyond projects

    

     This month we've been immersed in the beauty of late spring, fueled by twice the average rainfall... lush, green, croaking, chirping life. The tree frogs have moved in close to our campsite (attracted by above-average bug traffic?) and start up their chorus around 7pm every evening. The whip-or-wills take over at 9pm. Early morning bird song wakes us. Then through the day we have been hearing the geese pass over honking, mostly in pairs, on their way south. Occasionally you can spot a three-some, which our friend (and bird specialist) Richard Crawford has taught us is a yet-to-be-partnered daughter goose who will stick with her parents until she finds a mate. I found this fact to be especially interesting in light of our good friend Melanie Crawford's wedding a few weeks ago. She and Dave Greene were married at the Crawford's farm surrounded by an explosion of iris and roses in the garden, and friends and family helping with a huge outpouring of gifts and support to bring it all about.  (Unfortunately I didn't get a single picture due to the fact that I was running around helping set up and attend the bride.) The event felt especially poignant since she had been living with her parents helping run the farm up until now, and now she is parting ways for Iowa with Dave. A new migration route in the making. But one highlight from the wedding-- our friend Beth brought all dozen of her hula hoops and one of our neighboring Amish family brought all dozen of their kids and the combination was wonderfully hilarious. And then they schooled a group of us in volleyball, which is apparently the Amish sport of choice, go figure. Finish all that with delicious locally-grown and raised food, lemon-curd cake made by our neighbors Brian and Teri, and dancing to a bluegrass band, and you have one perfect day.


   Anyhow, spring is heating into summer and it has sent Mike and I scurrying to finish our last round of "campsite improvement projects" to prepare for both coming guests and summer heat. We learned last summer that a cool shady spot is key to surviving the mid-day heat, so this year we cleared out the brush (read: poison ivy) under a tree grove and mulched and hammocked it into a little shady oasis for eating and hanging out.

    We have also working on some small garden beds, both at the Crawford's farm and this salad bed at our campsite, which is mostly lettaces, kale, collads, and a few tomatoes and peppers. Come to think of it, one can grow quite a lot of food in something the size of a large dining table! Hopefully we will get the most of it and not the rabbits...
     We also extended the roof of our little living shed to block out morning sun and rain, which was beginning to render it quite uncomfortable. Your can get a sense of the campsite-sprawl we have going on, laundry hanging everywhere, carpentry projects continually in the works, lots of herbs, flowers and such in whatever pots I could find to tuck in here and there, always dishes and to-do lists and books, etc.... When we start hearing a storm approaching it is quite the scramble to get everything put away and under cover before ducking into our tent, which stays (mercifully) dry!

     Another project that I have been itching to tackle for quite some time has been our jumble of a work shed. I finally built in some shelves and bike hooks and shock-le-bleur! One can actually now find the right tool when one wants it. I realize that much of what we have been working on up until now is getting our systems down. Water systems, food systems, tool systems, waste systems, laundry systems and so on. If not followed properly, we can easily find a favorite shirt chewed into shreds by mice overnight (very frustrating!)
     Another little project just completed was clearing a space and putting in a raised tent platform for guests to come and stay, and just in time since we are expecting some folks to come and help out with the main house project. Yes, that is right, we are actually re-starting the main project!

  
      Last, but not least, we have been moving ahead with the house in fits and starts.... This endeavor is the most daunting task of all, really of any building project I have ever tackled, mostly because it is almost unimaginable how we will actually maneuver several tons of lumber into a raised frame! We have almost all the members we need harvested and moved to the site, and we now have a raised, level, building platform constructed so that we can lay out each section and work mark each connection joint in a uniform way. However, actually moving the timbers on and off of it is the worrying aspect, a task we could easily use a 8-person team for! Still, we are finding ways and our first "lifting party" will likely be happening in the next few days. In preparation we have started on the "scarf joints" required to join the floor beams together. One very cool tool we have on loan is a mortising machine, essentially a hand-cranked boring machine. See Mike below in action. It is exciting to be finally taking chisels and hammers to wood... starting our first joints... beginning to craft this wood into our home. Send us wishes for strength and hopefully in our next update we will have something taking house-like shape!

We've got mail!

We finally have gotten around to applying for an address number and setting up a mailbox... and guess what? We got mail on the first day! That is... junk mail (ugh!) So we thought if we actually let someone know our new address, then maybe when we open our mailbox in the next few weeks there might be something more exciting than coupons in it? Here it is, hot off the presses--

Mike Patterson and Julia Jack-Scott

27660 Frontier Ln.

La Plata, MO 63549

And PS- it is Julia's birthday on the 21st :) A birthday postcard would make my day!

Planting and storing

 

      

      Spring is finally here! For weeks we were watching for the moment when all the bare tree branches would leaf out and turn green and all of a sudden, we looked around and realized that it had happened, that the forest was a light shade of green instead of brown. It is a pretty miraculous process to see a bare stick form a tiny bud and then watch the bud unfurl into tiny oak leaves. Baby animals are abounding around us-- many of our neighbors have new piglets, pullets (chicks), goat kids, lambs, calves, and fowls frolicking around, rendering everything a little picture-postcard perfect. The only babies we seem to be harboring on our land are tick-babies, but that is okay, one day we will have more animals! In the meantime, we have started working one day a week at our friends, the Crawford's farm, Butterfly Hill Farm, which is a much more established version of what we are working on ourselves. Richard and Glinda are both retired from university careers and are both a wealth of knowledge on native and garden plants, animals, birds, and much else. As Glinda is recovering from a long struggle with cancer (and Richard as well, as care-taker), and they are preparing for their daughter's wedding on the farm later this month, they both felt the need for additional hands preparing their land and gardens for spring. And since we adore them, and are eager to learn from their experience, we stepped up to the job. (Pictures of their gardens below and above and more to come in the next post from the wedding.)

    Meanwhile, the Crawfords offered us use of part of their garden beds to plant some of our own veggies this summer, while ours are still getting established, and we have jumped at the opportunity. We started some plants from seed and have been nursing them along through random late frosts (May 9th?) and blistering days of sun to the point where they will leave their little plastic cartons and become one with the earth. It has been hard to limit ourselves to only a few easy plant varieties, since we are now cooking out at our land and are somewhat limited for fresh produce. "One day..." we keep saying, "we should really focus on the house this summer..." Sigh.

And yet! One thing we really went for this year, and could very well be the major theme of the last few weeks, has been tree planting. Missouri's conservation department has a very amazing service where one can pre-order and purchase native tree starts from their nurseries for, well, .33 cents a tree! What a deal! Last fall we went in with our neighbors on a big order and ended up with 350 young Persimmon, Wild Plum, White Pine, Redbud, Flowering Dogwood, Paw Paw, Serviceberry, Mulberry, Choke Cherry, Black Locust, Elderberry, and Nannyberry tree that arrived in the mail three weeks ago. I am not sure what inspired us to such an ambitious order, but it has been quite a lot of work to get them all in the ground, watered and mulched! Still, it has been a good process for us to go through, envisioning natural privacy screens, windbreaks, firewood coppicing and edible gathering paths through the land, plus of course, an abundance of spring blossoms for bees and beauty of course. The best part about it all has been actually having a water source to pre-soak and water them with. We keep repeating to each other, "I'm so glad we put in the pond last year...", since we not only use the spigot all the time, we also now have a spectacular sunset view over the pond were we rest our weary bones at the end of each day and pause to watch the sky turn colors. Such a sweet world.

    We have now been actually living on our land a little over a week, thanks in large measure to Mike's rain barrel and water filtration set-up that he has been working on. I realize that much of what enables us to live on our land is our ability to store food and water effectively. We have refined our systems greatly since last summer and now we are really self-sufficiently using the natural resources around us--rain and wood from the land--to drink, do dishes and cook food with. Mike figured out a way to use 5 gallon food-grade buckets plus the filtering components from Berkey filters to make our rain water potable. We also found these great twist-off lids for 5 gallon buckets that makes them much more usable for bulk food storage. We put in our first order from the "bulk buying club" that many people in our community are a part of (ordering once a month from bulk distributor UNFI), so now we are cooking and eating our meals al fresco in our little open-air kitchen/dining area. For that matter, we have hosted and fed guests several times now (including a bachelorette tea party), and it feels really good to be able to offer a space and meal to friends. More to come about our rocket stove and sun oven, since they are such amazing cooking tools and merit their own post.
      Though most of this post has been about to-doings on our land, we have involved in a number of great community events that I seem never to have a camera on-hand at, including a May day party (complete with pole and ribbon dancing), a contra dance in the Duplex structure that I worked on two summers ago, work parties, birthday parties, potlucks, and we are about to take a four-day course at the neighboring Peace and Permaculture Center on Restorative Justice being taught by Dominic Barter (an amazing system of communication and conflict-resolution that is spreading around the world). So, more to come soon. Much love to family and friends reading along--spring blessings!

A Pulse of Life

     We have been back in Missouri for two weeks now, and have very much hit the ground running. Thankfully, we have been surrounded by wonderful, welcoming community and friends who have been helping us in one way or another every step of the way. Part of what has softened our transition from cozy, convenient city living to scrappy, roughin' it tent dwelling on our land has been staying with our new neighbors, Brian and Terri Thomas and their two awesome kids, Ella and Everett in their rented house in town (read: hot showers and gas stove, woohoo!) We are all in the same boat in that we are all new-to-Missouri transplants building houses on our undeveloped land side by side, currently trying to transition into some sort of a comfortable temporary set-up to keep from going crazy from the mud, the bugs, and soon to be coming, the summer heat. So it has been nice to brainstorm and compare notes and building ideas with them, as well as catch up on all that has been going on since we left. Needless to say, we are pretty excited to have them as immediate neighbors since they are not only great folks to sit down and chat with, but also super skilled gardener-homesteader-craftspeople who have more than a thing or two to teach us!

Ella, Everett and the chicks

     We also have been very impressed with how they are integrating their two kids, ages 5 and 2 into this ambitious endeavor, no easy feat to be sure! Ella and Everett are very hands-on and help with lots of tasks like cooking (Everett mostly in the sampling department), planting seeds, taking care of their ten chicks recently acquired for the season. Chicks make even better kid entertainment than any game apps, and just about every evening, we have chicks wheeling around the kitchen on the backs of toy trains. Bonus: the chicks get comfortable with human handling, making it way easier in future months to tend them!

     While we have been sharing meals and a roof overhead in town, we have been going out to our land every day to work on our first projects and to get acquainted with how our land handles what is proving to be the wettest season we have yet experienced. There has been rain after rain after rain, infusing our softly rolling hills with little rivulets and lots of mud. It has been GREAT for our pond, which has filled almost to the top with water and great for our dam wall which is now sprouting with green shoots instead of eroding away (so glad we spent a week last fall seeding and mulching it!) The other totally fascinating feature of our land in this season has been our creek, which in its summer incarnation is a dry sandy ditch. We have always had a hard time imagine it full and running, much less, overflowing its banks and flooding our bottom land; but lo and behold, after two consecutive deluges, it did just that and a mercurial brown snake was ribboning its way around our land. Our lower field had standing water, and just about all of the ten acres to the east (woods side). We explored around in it, just dumbfounded at the elemental power of water to both knock heavy things out of its way (gravel, tree trunks, and our neatly mulched pathways) and infuse everything with a pulse of green life in its wake. Just as quickly as it came, it has subsided and by the time we got our camera out, the creek had sunk a foot or so, leaving vernal pools around for the frogs to spawn in.

Pond almost full!

A very swollen Bear Cub Creek, which weaves through our bottom land

     While we didn't have kayaks to go out exploring our flooded lowland, we did get to spend a day hiking and boating in nearby Thousand-hills State Park for our friend Beth's birthday, our first time there. No morels spotted yet, but Mike--the consummate mushroom enthusiast--is ever on the hunt. He also just took a two-night workshop on truffle culture, which he is now excited to add to our future farm-products list. Our visions are getting more and more gourmet by the season, since after completing construction of a wine-cellar for our friend back in Philly, we also have ideas about growing grapes and doing some home wine making. But everything in good time!

      For the present, our goals are set much lower and more immediate. We decided that our most pressing need was to create a more comfortable tent-covering structure with a shed roof and level floor platform. We jumped right into construction last week, using various lumber scraps we have scrounged together last season. We dug post holes (which promptly filled up with the swelling ground water) and used our auction-bought transit level to level the tops to one another. We used gravel to tamp around the post bases, which locks them surprisingly rigid. Some more scrounging resulted in used plywood and roof metal, a few needed 2x6's and rafters and by the end of yesterday we were done. I can't believe we went through one whole season on the land without this structure, and am already grateful to have the rain-cover and shade that it will provide us. Also, thanks to a gift from Mike's mom, we have a new tent to set up next week, minus the holes and broken zipper of our old one. 2013 Missouri season, here we come!

Our finished tent platform! Tent will go in the right bay, benches and table in the left bay.

Spring migration underway

We have gotten some reports of late from friends who have been checking this blog for signs of life, and have come away disappointed after discovering our lengthy winter hibernation away from blogging. Well, faithful followers, here we are, emerging from our winter cave-abode in Philadelphia, stretching in the spring air, and setting our tires west once again for Missouri!

 It has been a long, weary winter in the big city in many ways, as Mike and I have been working (renovating, painting, constructing) almost non-stop to save money for the coming season on our land. But we will need every bit of it, for as our friend Glinda recently wrote to me, "this will be a marker year for you on the land, for sure!" and I believe she is right. Our list of projects to tackle in 2013 is long, not the least of which is cutting and erecting our house's main timberframe, the skeleton for all that is to come, and capping it with a roof. In a few days we will be cracking open our storage shed, setting up our (reinforced) tent, cooking all of our meals in our yet-to-be-constructed outdoor kitchen, participating in weekly rotating work parties in our community, planting a very modest survival garden, and battling the ticks, mice, chiggers and the rest of the usual gang out on our land! I can hardly wait!

So there are lots of posts to come for sure, but in the meantime, let me leave you with the vision that keeps us going in this crazy endeavor, our plan for Giving Tree Homestead...