Feral Feline Foundry is a little area they hacked out and cleared almost entirely on their own. It's named after our two cats, who we found there as little kittens. We'd noticed kittens coming out of the woods in this spot, trapped them and their mom, searched for their mom's owner (never found her owner, and ended up rehoming mama when she gave birth to 7 more kittens just a few days after trapping her :o !). We kept two of the older kittens and gave Mama an her 7 newborns to another homesteader. We've had these two cats every since. They're names are Stipey Kitty (also known as "Potato" because she's so fat) and Black Kitty (aka "Houdini" because she was such an escape artist as a kitten). We had both kittens neutered them, and have had them now for 7 years!
We borrowed a live trap from my grandpa and lured them in with canned tuna! Here's Black Kitty
My son petting Stipey Kitty just a few months after we found her
Both kitties continue to make cameos in many of my pictures here on permies. You can even see them on the picture on my profile!
So that's the story of the kitties, but wait, there's more!
The Area
This area isn't just special because it's where we found our cats, it's also the area behind my daughters' garden. For both of my kids, we planted a fruit tree on their first birthday. My son has an apple tree, and my daughter has a pear tree.
My daughter's pear tree has been surrounded by straweberries and gardens, and behind it is Feral Feline Foundry
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There'd always been a bit of a deer path through the salmonberries behind my daughter's garden. And my kids loved to try and hack their way through it. Last year, they decided to clear it out and make it into their own fort!
Here's my son, clearing out the salmonberries to where their future fort would be
Turning a Clearing into a Fort
I don't feel like rewriting what I already wrote last year, so I'm just going to quote it!
As we ventured into the bramble, we spotted a little "clearing," and it even had a cute little stump! My daughter decided that this was her kitchen, with the tree next to it being a stove. We brought over another log to put on top of it for a table, and I wove a mat of sword ferns and cedar branches for a little cushion.
Their little kitchen! They even had a snack of biscuits and blieberries, and then went and ate cereal there the next day!
While my daughter was thinking of it as a house, my son was calling it their "base" (he watches people play Minecraft a lot, and they call their homes "bases".) He started building a way with the trimmed bramble to secure their base. He added tripwires (blackberry vine attached to an old christmas tree so it falls on you when you trip on the blackberry) and logs and sticks you might trip on, or you have to duck under.
My son, working on his wall, while my daughter is standing in her kitchen, leaning on her 'stove's chimney'
We got some fallen wild-cherry logs and turned them into "couches" in the living room. The ferns to the right are their "beds." You can kind of see the wall in the back, and the "kitchen" stump is to the left, obscured by salmonberries.
View of their cleared out house/base
My son was pretending to play the sword fern fronds as as piano, so I ran off and grabbed some nice, dense Big Leaf Maple rounds from our woodpile. They make a nice sound when you smack them. I leaned them up against a fallen log for an instant piano!
rustic piano being played by both kids
We thought we might take things up a notch, and we got the sticks in musical order, and I used blackberry vines to weave them together and then hang it from a tree. Now their living room is complete with a piano/xylophone!
Just some sticks and vines, and you have an instrument!
My husband wanted to just go get twine to bind the logs together, but I love being able to just wildcraft everything from the woods! It's a really fun challenge for me, and I think the kids have a lot of fun learning just what is possible. It also kind of fulfills my own childhood desires to make brooms and pillows from things found in my childhood woods. I never had anyone then to teach me how to make things, and I was frustrated that none of it worked. Now I can finally do these things, and show my kids how, too!
My daughter had a clay and sculpture class last year, and I got to tag along! I decided that I would make a clay sign for their Feral Feline Foundry. It took me until today to finally get the sign hung. The holes I'd left in the sign had shrunk when they went through the kiln, so I couldn't screw it into a post like I'd wanted. So I ended up using an old clothes hanger! My kids wanted the sign at the entrance to Feral Feline Foundry, and so I hung it on the elderberry tree at the entrance.
Feral Feline Foundry
The kids, a year older, at the entrance to Feral Feline Foundry
It was a good thing that I'd hung around in my daughter's clay class last year, because they asked me to substitute for the her teacher this year for about a month. My daughter got to tag along, and made a fairy playground! There's a lake, a mushroom log house, a little slide, a swing set and a climbing wall! I brought in some rocks to give a dry foundation for her little fairy land. So there's now a cute little fairy land in their fort. Or should I say, there's a fairy farm in the feral feline foundry fort?
It was a nice, sunny day, perfect for spending the day outside. At one point, my kids decided to take one of their chickens out of her yard, and put her in Feral Feline Foundry. The chicken (named Brownie II) had a blast digging up the leaves. One of our cat even came over. I had to snap some pictures.
Watching a chicken scratch up the forest and eat all the bugs is entertaining for us all!
Yesterday, some mysterious spirals appeared on our patio. My daughter informed me that fairies make spirals to indicate a place that they like, to tell other fairies that it's a good place to stop. Apparently, fairies really like our place!
Fairy Spirals! So many fairies made spirals at our house!
We made them tiny fairy crowns, and they wrote us little letters in thanks! My daughter made them little crystals made of cellophane, too, since they like shiny things. This evidently emboldened them to talk to my daughter, and they told her that they live in the fairy houses in Feral Feline Foundry!
Letters from the fairies Flora and Sparks
tiny twined flower crowns
Placing crystals she made from cellophane tape for the fairies to find
Today, we discovered a fairy spiral made out of flowers. That takes a lot of work compared to drawing a spiral with chalk. They must really like it here!
A braided spiral of clovers and self-heal
To express our gratitude, we made them a clothesline from twinned nettle fibers and pealed cedar branches. Then, using the bark from the cedar, we made them a swing! They've already started hanging foxglove hats and rose petal skirts on it!
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