The floor we intend to use is a dirt floor.  I will get into the details of that aspect when we do it, but it is not just dirt beneath your feet.  It ends up nicely sealed so that you aren’t getting dirt all over the place.  What I am …

Frogs can be great friends for you have in your garden and great learning tools for your kids.  Frogs eat lots of bugs like mosquitos and garden pests.  The more frogs, the less pests.  Watching frog eggs turn into tadpoles and then frogs in your own backyard is awesome to …

We need a lot of clay and gravel for the cordwood build.  We are going to have to collect and sift through all the clay we need to not only get the smoother clay, but to also get all the gravel out of the caly so we can use that …

Living on a homestead, you grow your own food.  Maybe just a small garden at first, but it’s a big part of having a homestead.  The kids need to learn how to grow their own food, too.  Let’s get them started ASAP, so they know from a young age that …

The snow has taken forever to melt.  We can’t start digging as soon as I had hoped.  That’s ok though.  I have a lot of other things I can do to keep busy.  I’ll be building some small things like a rainwater system.  I am planting tons of seeds and …

An important part of raising children on the homestead is to teach the children how to do all the different homestead chores.  Not only for them to learn for themselves, but to also learn responsibility for their share of the work.  Now, my children are too young to be sent …

The planning of this house has taken years.  We have been researching and learning since well before we moved onto our land.  We knew we would be doing someting different, and that we didn’t know how to do it, so learning as much as possible was necessary. We had to …

And the last permaculture principle is: Creatively use and respond to change.  Things change all the time.  Change can not be avoided.  You may as well embrace it. The picture above is an experiment we did with cob rocket stoves.  We wanted to build 3 burners, but were’nt really sure …

One of the many benefits of natural building is that they are highly customizable.  You can build any shape or size home that you could possibly want.  Since you can build any shape or size, this allows you to stick a house in any old awkward place you have on …

Think about two different eco systems: a forest and a meadow. The forest is full of larger trees an d larger animals, while the meadow is full of smaller plants and animals. The two habitats provide very different needs for the different animals. Now think about where the meadow meets …