I chose the outdoor kitchen to be the first project on the new blog because this kitchen is my baby.  My outdoor kitchen is far nicer than my indoor kitchen will ever be.  It has it’s own garden, rain collector,  rocket stove, and other good stuff.  Lots of projects for …

Our tiny house was thrown together as we went along trying to build the homestead, and everything else, all at once. The house is functional, but it isn’t really finished. I’m ready for my house to look like a home, time for an interior upgrade! I know that my last …

The ground is just thawed and dry enough to get in some digging on the sunnier days. I have a lot of digging ahead of me, and so I have to take advantage of all the time I can get. An addition will be put on the house, including an …

Principle number 10…Use and value diversity.  I find this principle to very closely related to number 8, integrate rather than segregate.  In order to integrate, you need to have diversity.  Integrating has more to do with building systems and diversity is more about having many different options for your needs …

Our dream home is a fairly complex natural home with lots of fun additions like an attached green house and an amazing masonry stove as the centerpiece of the home.  This house will take a lot of skills to build.  A lot of skills that we do not currently have.  …

The fourth principle of permaculture is to apply self regulation and accept feedback.  Self regulation is about mimicing the systems of nature to form your own living systems.  Natural systems take what they need to grow and reproduce and not more.  These systems can adapt to change, which is accepting …

While the landscape is not quite part of the house, there are many features outside, around the house that will improve our day to day life and the house itself.  From the outdoor kitchen and kitchen garden to the garden pond, all the elements including make a more functional home. …

This is the fantastic pile of rich yard waste we have to work with: The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how a pile of twisted up “waste” can be useful for so many different things.  The pile is tree tops left by the logger and pushed aside, twisting …

Much of the winter is spent keeping the wood stove hot. We rely on the wood stove for our heat, hot water, cooking, and anything else we might need some fire for. We try to keep it going all the time so we aren’t constantly restarting it, but we don’t …

We have been hauling water from the stream much of the time we have been living here.  Over the winter, the plan had been to melt snow on the constant burning wood stove.  We thought winter would be much easier for water collection.  This plan was baffled twice.  First, we …