For all your Montana Masonry Heater parts (also known as) Rocket Mass heater parts.
Visit me at
dragontechrmh.com Once you go brick you will never go back!
bee well
A build too cool to miss:Mike's GreenhouseA great example:Joseph's Garden
All the soil info you'll ever need:
Redhawk's excellent soil-building series
Trace Oswald wrote:I don't want to discourage you, but I couldn't live the kind of rural life I live without a pickup truck. I don't see it as an either or situation. I just bought an electric bike for my 16 miles round trip work commute. I ride my bike when I can, but I still need a pickup for so many things. Maybe you can find a compromise.
Visit Redhawk's soil series: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil
How permies.com works: https://permies.com/wiki/34193/permies-works-links-threads
John Daley Bendigo, Australia The Enemy of progress is the hope of a perfect plan
Benefits of rainfall collection https://permies.com/t/88043/benefits-rainfall-collection
GOOD DEBT/ BAD DEBT https://permies.com/t/179218/mortgages-good-debt-bad-debt
How Permies works: https://permies.com/wiki/34193/permies-works-links-threads
My projects on Skye: The tree field, Growing and landracing, perennial polycultures, "Don't dream it - be it! "
….give me coffee to do the things I can and bourbon to accept the things I can’t.
Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
Henri Alain
Timothy said, " I've resigned myself to that if I'm going to get more land and be in a less dense area, I'll pretty much need to get some sort of motor vehicle, and would ideally find a property where I'd still at least be able to use a bike sometimes to do some useful tasks.
Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't work. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Visit Redhawk's soil series: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil
How permies.com works: https://permies.com/wiki/34193/permies-works-links-threads
pax amor et lepos in iocando
Kena Landry wrote:Oh, you might want to look at the RetroSuburbia project. It's Australia-based, so not everything applies, but I really like their principle of transforming suburban areas in sustainable places. I find their case studies a very good source of inspiration for the myriads of ways in which sustainable living can take form.
pax amor et lepos in iocando
John Daley Bendigo, Australia The Enemy of progress is the hope of a perfect plan
Benefits of rainfall collection https://permies.com/t/88043/benefits-rainfall-collection
GOOD DEBT/ BAD DEBT https://permies.com/t/179218/mortgages-good-debt-bad-debt
Little house with a big garden in the city!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." ~ J. Krishnamurti
Weeds are just plants with enough surplus will to live to withstand normal levels of gardening!--Alexandra Petri
Trees are our friends
You are welcome to check out my blog at http://www.theartisthomestead.com or my artwork at http://www.davidhuang.org
sortof-almost-off-grid in South Africa: https://www.instagram.com/heartandsoilnoordhoek/
Cargo bikes are cool
Timothy Karl wrote:I'm in the USA, so all of the following is based on USA's for-the-most-part car-centric transportation infrastructure.
I've lived the past 15 years, essentially my entire adult life, without a car. I fell in love with bikes for transport when I was 19, sold my old unreliable car, and never looked back. Over the years, I've refined my bike setup, and have acquired different cargo bikes and trailers and panniers to expand my carrying capacity. On bike, I've hauled animal feed, trees, logs, bricks, lumber, groceries, furniture, children, and more. It feels awesome to use your body to haul loads that most people couldn't even imagine moving without burning gas.
But the only way that this has worked for this long is by living in dense urban cities, where every place I might need to go is within 10 miles, with a densely connected grid of relatively quiet non-highway streets. From my house, it's half a block to the library and the park, half a mile to countless stores including a major grocery store and a big-box store, 3 miles to 4 different hardware stores and two feed stores and the doctor's office, and then I rarely have to go further than that, but if I did, any errand that I could conceivably need to do could be accomplished within 10 miles. That's not to say that living without a car is easy -- people still give incredulous looks about it, my wife (who is mostly on-board with being a car-free badass) sometimes doesn't want to ride up that damn hill again in the rain -- but there's just a lot you can get to within very comfortable biking distance, and people mostly view people who ride bike positively.
There are downsides of having so many destinations within such a short distance:
Price: my current house cost an unfathomably large amount of money (a good chunk of which I still owe), in part because it has a "big" (.20ac) lot for gardening and is so close to everything Crowded: People are stacked on top of each other. I live in a neighborhood of single-family-homes with mostly fairly "big" lots, but I have to be careful when I pee on my plants so that the neighbor kids or the people on the balcony two houses over don't see. And pretty often, houses on my street get redeveloped as monster 8-plexes 2-3 stories tall Livability issues: People steal things off of my neighbors' porches on a weekly (if not daily) basis. I had to chase a druggy around the block last week to retrieve a package she stole off my neighbor's porch in broad daylight. I check for needles and human poop at the playground before I let my kid play. I know several people on my street who have had tools and bikes stolen from their sheds/garages. There are a lot of shootings that happen nearby. Cars with loud exhausts racing up and down the street in the middle of the night. I'm 2 blocks from a bunch of restaurant dumpsters and other filthy establishments, so there's always huge quantities of rats running rampant and trying to set up shop in my garden or outbuildings.
I've been feeling a strong pull towards getting more land and getting out of the city. I'm always running out of space for growing more plants, and running into city regulations about keeping livestock. Building up systems to build soil fertility while producing most or all of my family's food currently feels like my most urgent purpose in life, and can't be accomplished to the level that I desire on my current city lot. And escaping from some of the livability issues would be great, too! A peaceful place where I'm not having to constantly be on the alert for threats would be awesome.
So we've been casually looking at property listings, but the one thing I keep running up against is that I have based my entire life up until now around not having a car. I'm okay giving that up and getting some sort of vehicle, but even still, I don't think I could stomach living on a highway dozens of miles from anything, where, in order to get out of my driveway, I'd have to get in a car and drive. I've built my life around this premise for so long, I can't even imagine living a life where, in order to get anywhere I'm dependent on a car. That's not to say that I want everything to be walkable/bikeable, but just that I'm having a difficult time coming to terms with the level of car-centricity that seems prevalent in most places where one can actually get a few acres of land.
If it were just me on my own, my threshold for car-centricity would be a lot higher (I used to ride pretty regularly on all sorts of highways that people thought I was crazy for riding on), but ideally I'd be able to take my 4-year-old out to something without getting in a car.
Possible solutions I've been thinking about:
Edge of small town: Conceivably one could find a few acres on a road that isn't a main through-highway and be able to comfortably human-power oneself into the town Bike Path: There a few places that I've found where there's a separated bike trail extending out of a small city or between towns, and living close to that might allow for at least having the option to sometimes ride bike into town, even if it's a longer distance Go less places: (not sure that this is a feasible solution) I already don't go anywhere. I would be happy staying on my several acres all the time and driving to town every couple of weeks. My wife doesn't like that degree of isolation, though, and my kid is going to need to go to school in the near future and will hopefully have friends
I dunno. Anyone have any ideas for how to balance this value that has been the core piece of my identity for so long, with the strong desire to have more land and get out of the giant filthy city?
(note: I wasn't sure whether to put this in "Bicycle" or "Rural" or "Personal Challenges" forums, so I put it in bicycle)
Maybe Life is always like being on a trapeze or a tightrope at the circus...
Living a life that requires no vacation.
Timothy Karl wrote:I dunno. Anyone have any ideas for how to balance this value that has been the core piece of my identity for so long, with the strong desire to have more land and get out of the giant filthy city?
(note: I wasn't sure whether to put this in "Bicycle" or "Rural" or "Personal Challenges" forums, so I put it in bicycle)
So we've been casually looking at property listings, but the one thing I keep running up against is that I have based my entire life up until now around not having a car. I'm okay giving that up and getting some sort of vehicle, but even still, I don't think I could stomach living on a highway dozens of miles from anything, where, in order to get out of my driveway, I'd have to get in a car and drive. I've built my life around this premise for so long, I can't even imagine living a life where, in order to get anywhere I'm dependent on a car. That's not to say that I want everything to be walkable/bikeable, but just that I'm having a difficult time coming to terms with the level of car-centricity that seems prevalent in most places where one can actually get a few acres of land.
"Also, just as you want men to do to you, do the same way to them" (Luke 6:31)
Cletus Hatfield wrote:If I had to deal with porch pirates and porch poopers I think I'd need a backhoe.
Just my 2 cents...
Money may not make people happy but it will get you all the warm fuzzy puppies you can cuddle and that makes most people happy.