Summer Abdelghani

I am totally necro’ing this post but I’m interested if you guys still need help! I filled out the form. I’ll look around for more recent forms and announcements and catch up with the more recent happenings in the community.

I mean, it kind of looks like you just smeared the outer finish on. I can see the straw. I don’t know about the insulation issues you’re describing, but for sure you need more stucco or plaster than that for waterproofing and mice. Like I think 1.25 inches thickness is what’s recommended. That’s 0 inches.

Thanks for your quick reply! As it turns out, I was looking at the wrong property. The right one was about 100 feet away, and has less dense brush, I think, but thicker trees, so I'm thinking about maybe calling a lumber company and seeing if they wouldn't pay me something minimal to pick up the wood, or at least take it for free. We have a lot of lumber activity in this area, and a paper mill, and the trees they haul off are not usually very mature, about 4-6 inches in diameter. Goats are definitely an option since I want goats anyway, but pigs are completely out of the question for religious reasons (we're Muslim). We're thinking that since we don't have much capital to start off, we'll probably start by just raising a few chickens and goats while staying in the apartment we are currently in, and see if we can't make it profitable enough to at least help for the project to pay for some of the building expenses. I'm really interested in building with adobe, though my husband hasn't come around yet to the idea of us actually building our own house. He wants it to be "nice and respectable" so that in the future we could easily sell the property if we needed to move cities or states or countries, but I don't see why we can't make something nice and respectable and CHEAP ourselves, given enough time. We don't really have any experience building (other than a bedrock (Flintstones)-style room I made with my friends in the middle of the woods in middle school with large, flat rocks), but I think if we gave ourselves a long period of time, say a year, to complete the house, we could still end up with something nice and finished looking with minimal costs. a large-ish house would need about 4000 bricks, I estimate, and over 12 months, working 5 days a week, that's only laying like 8 bricks a day. Of course, I don't know how easy it would be to build through the colder, rainier months. It can get pretty muddy here (Arkansas) in the rainy season, but that's almost a plus, given a high foundation, because then I don't have to mix the mud! Am I delusional?

Hi all,
I have been dreaming of my own land and my own farm for a while, watching videos on permaculture, and reading lots and lots about raising different plants and animals. Recently, I talked my husband into looking for a cheap piece of land that we can at least farm on, even if it's not feasible to live there for a while. I found something ideal for us, about 6-some acres, that would actually be nice to live on and has a lot of nice houses around, but it is DENSELY populated by very young trees. I don't think I saw any thicker than four inches in diameter. I was wondering if there was a simple way to clear this without running into huge costs to cut/bulldoze everything, then repair the damage. Is there a more gentle approach to at least thinning it down to being mostly clear? I eventually want something kind of foresty in the back, but with nut and fruit trees, not pine, and some wild plants and flowers for some bees, but I want a decent area that is clear enough to build on, have a backyard garden, house some chickens in a permanent nightly enclosure, maybe eventually a greenhouse, and space for a barn, small paddock for a horse and some goats, etc. Is there a way to do this without going medieval or moving excessively slowly?