The Beginning - Early June 2008

Welcome to our homesteading blog. I'm writing this in May of 2009, but we were too busy, and too slow of an internet connection to do any blogging last summer.

Early June 2008:

In this blog, I'd like to write about the adventures of two people attempting to develop a more sustainable way of life for themselves. We'd like to grow as much of our own food as possible, harvest our own fuel (wood and sun), water (rainwater), build our own shelter, and even tackle the idea of sustainable transportation.

We bought 4 acres or so of land last June in the mountains of southwestern Colorado (picture above). Most of it is fairly steep, east facing hillside, with a small amount of flat land at the top, a nice canyon with a dirt road passing through at the bottom, and even a seasonal stream (very short season). Access to the top of land is from a dead-end, dirt cul-de-sac. The bottom of the lot can be driven to on the public dirt road that passes through it. The price was right, and we wanted solar access to the early morning sun because it's cold in the mornings up here in the mountains. We didn't want western exposure, the afternoon sun will bake you and your plants here, and we made sure we could at least see the southern sky so we'd be able to use the sun for passive solar heating, solar electricity generation, and gardening.

The land was mostly covered in second-growth Ponderosa Pine, Gambel Oak, Sage Brush, and grass. At shady canyon bottom, there is quite a bit more grass, a couple of small Chokecherry trees, and even some scraggly Aspen. The soil is a clay-silt mixture, very little topsoil, and lots of rocks, especially on the hillside. We're not talking prime farmland here, and there's a good argument that land like this should be left for the wildlife, but it was all we could find in our price range, and I'm thinking that by the time we're done, this land will be able to support a lot more life and diversity than it could before we started.

Because we don't have much flat land at the top, we are now negotiating with an adjacent property owner to buy an additional acre of mostly flat land to make it easier to build and garden on.

There is no water here without drilling a deep well, and even then, it's often full of sulfur, so we plan to harvest and store enough rainwater to meet all of our needs. We get 19" or so of precipitation here, a lot of it in the form of snow. In the warmer months, it works out to a little over an inch of rain per month. 1000 square feet of roof will collect 660 gallons with one inch of rainfall. We only use about 2-3 gallons/day of water for all of our needs right now (cooking, washing dishes, bathing), but we'll need quite a bit more once we start trying to garden here.

The land has no grid electricity nearby, and we preferred it that way. We'll use solar electricity for the majority of our needs, and run a small gas generator when we need to run the occasional large power tool.