Our future homestead

We went out to the "garden" this Memorial Day weekend. Didn't do any gardening though. Actually we planned the destruction of the garden to be honest. Where my dad plants his big garden is where we'll eventually be putting our house in a couple of years. We went out there and walked the area and visualized where we'd put the house, I then visualized where I'd put the workshop, the smokehouse, the chicken coop, the goat pen, the garden, the storage building, the earth/mud oven, the apiary, the orchard, the vineyard, the compost bin area and the picnic table. My wife is on board with the house, the garden and probably the picnic table. I think she's with me on the chicken coop too but the other stuff, not so much.

I really hate the idea of destroying the garden to build a house. Especially since there seems to be no way around building the house on the most fertile plot out there. Its where my grandfather had a brush pile when he owned the land and had cattle on it. All that rotted organic material has made that area very rich. I was amazed at the various soil types in the different plots in that little 2 acre field. The plot up next to the road that doesn't get much use has hard red clay just a couple of feet down. That is where I got the idea, or at least it persuaded me to build an earth oven. I watched a 10 or 12 part video on YouTube about a family building their earth/mud oven last year. They called it a "cob" oven. From what I can tell the difference between an earth/mud oven and a cob oven is that a cob oven has manure in it. I don't like the idea of cooking stuff in a manure structure even though I do know it would be perfectly safe since the ovens get very hot. An earth oven is basically the type of oven in which you can cook a pizza in about 3 - 5 minutes. You build the base out of rocks or concrete then you put a layer of fire bricks (whatever those are) and then you pile sand up on top of the bricks. Around the sand you put a layer of mud and let it harden. Then once it's dry and hard you cut a hole in it and remove the sand and it forms the interior of the oven. You then start a fire inside to further cure the mud making it rock solid. There's a little more to it than that but that the gist of it. I bought a book on making one a couple of weeks ago but it's not come in yet.

I may start building my little homestead before we start building the house itself. By that I mean I may go out there and setup the compost bin area or build the smokehouse or setup an apiary or even start on the mud oven. We think we can salvage the blackberry bushes that are there as long as none of the construction equipment gets into them while the house is being built.

Another DIY project we're going to try is we're going to attempt to self-contract this house ourselves. Instead of hiring a company to build our house we're going to hire the plumber, the roofer, the foundation people, etc and do the contractor job ourselves. You can save up to 25% that way. We have a friend who builds houses and we're going to try to bribe him for advice as often as we can. He builds very nice high end houses so I don't think we could afford to have him do it even if we wanted to. It'll be stressful I know and we'll probably regret trying it but it's worth attempting just to save that much money.

Homesteading tools #1 - Whizbang Garden Cart

As we move further down the line towards modern homesteading I would like to make a regular post on this blog on the topic of homesteading tools that we come across and decide to use. So, I suppose this is the first official posting on such topic. For my first topic I'm going to talk about the Whizbang Garden Cart. Now, I will admit I do not own this cart but I did purchase the plans for it this weekend. You can pick up the plans here if you would like to give them a try. To me the cart just looks like a huge improvement on the wheelbarrow's single wheel design. I've almost dumped several wheelbarrow loads because the weight shifted one way or another. With the Whizbang cart's dual wheels it seems like that would be practically a non issue. You can buy similar carts online made of aluminum tubing and thin plywood but Herrick's design seem much more sturdy and reliable with it's 2x4 framing.

Here's a few pics:





























*Also, if you would like to read Herrick's blog you can find it here: The Deliberate Agrarian I highly recommend it!