The Beginning

Well, we purchased some additional property last month next to our existing house and property (now totaling almost 5 acres).  We plan to build a house on the new property and eventually use our existing one as a studio (for art, dance, luthierie, herbalism,...).  We're currently leaning toward building an earth-bermed Earthship home using earthbags.  We also plan to cultivate around an acre in organic food production.  The rest of the property is forest.  We plan to be off-grid ultimately, or at least be set-up to survive off-grid if, or should I say when, needed.

Our current house:

An A-frame nestled in the lush forest of the Virginia moutains.

The newly acquired land facing South:

 

The newly acquired land facing North:

This is really only about a third of the new property; the rest has 3 vehicles, 2 sheds, and other junk on it.  Right now we are working on getting the junk off the property left from the prior owner, moving a 14' x 24' shed out of the growing area - which we will document here - and getting the already installed septic checked out.  We also need to remove a bunch of stumps from when the prior owner cleared years ago and take down a few trees to let more light into the future garden site.  We plan to utilize the wood for building the house.  There will be some substantial Oak beams.  I had a hard time coming to terms with cutting down 100 year old trees and decided I would sit with them to see what they had to say, letting them have the final word.  The strong message I got was "Life goes on."  I felt the trees were okay with what we were going to do.  It's for a good cause, is going to be done with respect, there will be no waste, and the rest of the property is a woodland sanctuary where there are some old trees that I made a promise to years ago to protect.  Life does feed upon itself and taking life is necessary for life.  What matters is that it is done with respect, without greed and gluttony, and nothing is wasted.

You can see from the pictures that the property is full of plants of all sorts; I'll be going through and determining what to save and then we'll transplant them to their permanent locations.  As Mathieu says "It's hard to weedwack when you're married to an Herbalist!"  We're saving the important medicinals, the natives, and the plants good for wildlife.