Homesteading in Cities

   The late, great Permaculturist Toby Hemenway left his rural acreage to move back to the city. Then he wrote a book called "Permaculture City" to show the many benefits that living in the city provides to those with a self-sufficiency mindset. I read that book a couple years ago so that I could find out that it's not crazy, in fact it's very doable to "homestead" at the urban scale. A city lot is all I've got, probably for a long time.

   After reading, I realized that the first thing I had to do was to mentally stop fighting the situation. I'm still kind of working on that acceptance, actually, but it's much better now than it was at first. After a couple years now of growing a few things in the front yard, and getting more in touch with the rhythm of the flow of the seasons and the patterns that exist in my ecosystem, I felt a shift flow through my mindset. Today I feel comfortingly aware of and connected to that giant rhythm around me that I am a part of, even if I don't have my "three acres and cow." It's all bigger than I am, and I am a part of it wherever I live, and it will go on and on. That just feels good to me.  

  Related to this, I also have challenged myself to some interesting experiments in order to say, "Bleep you!" to my feelings of limitation in a city scenario. I raised 12 chicks in my bathtub last year just to feel like I could be a farmer. That was hard, and also it was really good for my outlook on life. I don't think I would have tried this experiment if I didn't want to challenge my limited mindset in order to expand it.

  I have many more thoughts, but right now I have to run and help my mother with her chicken coop roof on her acreage!

There are many issues I would personally have getting comfortable in a urban "homestead". One would be dealing with the city government and the crazy zoning laws that every city has, and just dealing with a large city government in general, especially in a packed urban area. Also, the noise, surrounding pollution/contamination, lack of trust and everything else that goes along with living in a city.

I live in Colorado Springs and contribute to multiple community gardens/farms and enjoy having plots in a lot of them, especially since I don't have land and rent an apartment. If I did have land, I'd much rather live up in the mountains and/or potentially join a rural permaculture based community.

More power to you though!

When I lived in town, it felt that permaculture was so far away, some days I struggled to hold on to the dream.

But then I discovered that a lot of permaculture are things we can do at home.  Things that help improve my life and save money so I can get to the dream earlier.

Starting small, here are some of the things that helped me.

- hanging clothes to dry.  In our buildding, laundry was coin operated.  It was $2 for the wash and $4 for the dryer.  At 4 to 5 loads per week, not using the dryer saved a lot of extra money.

- I was already a mender because I can't stand wasting money on clothes that start to fall apart, but not using a dryer changed everything - I didn't have to mend clothes as often.  Very nice.

- cooking at home saved a lot of money.  Eating out would easily be $10-100 per person per meal and cooking at home almost never cost more than $2 per serving (including time and electrical).  

- of course, now I was cooking, I wanted some herbs so I learned how to grow potted plants which improved the air quality while making life more delicious.

- Which got me remembering how much I loved having a garden as a kid and could just go out and eat from the earth - so to speak.  An allotment was $20-50 per year and I was able to grow 100% of my fresh vegetable needs, and enough to share with friends.

- Collecting was another great part of things.  Okay, possibly hording.  But It's not stuff - it was skills.  Any time I was curious about something, I would get a bunch of books out from the library, try the new thing, get less-bad at it, then get good at it.  These skills have come in handy once I have my farm.  

Hording skills also helped improve my sanity.  I can bake bread or ferment beer.  I can grow and process grain if I want to.  I don't do it much these days, but if the shops let me down, I don't need to give them my money as I can make better for cheaper.  

Rachel, thank you for sharing that this has been done.

Your topic reminded me of this thread:

https://permies.com/t/143914/Edible-Yard-Visited

Those folks had a homestead of sorts where they grew almost all their food and had bees in the city of Dallas, Texas.

I believe that folks don't have to have animals to be a homesteader.

The main principle of homesteading to me is to be self-sufficient and live off the land.

This can be done by having a garden, and through foraging.

This got me curious. What exactly is the definition of "homestead"? It's actually quite different based on both the country one is in, and the decade. Almost makes me think we need a new word for what Rachel and Toby Hemenway are/were trying to do (may Toby rest in peace - he was a wonderful author).

In general, I always figured that a great place to start was edible landscaping. Stealth food may not provide a lot in terms of calories, but if plants are chosen for their nutritional value, you can improve your micronutrient and health levels quickly. If no one seems to notice or complain, it gives you experience and a base to expand from. Like R Ranson's window ledge herb garden. At the moment, I have a bin of Holy Basil on my. If I accidentally brush it, I get a wonderful aroma experience! And it's nice adding a leaf to a pot of tea.

I'm always giving away baby walking onions and encouraging people to poke them in in different spots in their yard. Fresh green onions for about 9 months of the year with basically no effort. Having a "total noob plant" one can give away freely, can help engage others.

Municipal rules can impact this substantially. Some places are supportive of this concept, some will take a "blind eye" approach, and some will actively work against it. I would try to choose the right city to live in, if possible. There are some great ones out there, that actively encourage people to plant food producing plants/shrubs/trees. Sometimes, you don't need to change cities, but just look for enclaves that seem more open to alternatives. There's one in the local city that houses a "compost education center" and "Spring Ridge Commons" (a mini-food forest with paths and seating). I used to see houses there growing veggies on their front lawns. I understand Tyler's concerns, but one of the best ways to be part of the solution, is to start sharing plant starts with neighbors, hosting pot-lucks, and building some of that trust we've lost.

I know that my father's family raised both rabbits and chickens, as well as having a large garden that helped them sustain their teenaged children in Britain during WWII. Helping local people see how fragile our supply chains sometimes are is another way to help get them on board with what you're trying to do. I just hope it doesn't take another war to accomplish!

I have a house with a yard, an entire lot I bought to grow things on,5 plots at a community garden, plus plots at my mother and my sisters houses.
Recently my friend that runs the Table of Hope food pantry has asked me to come grow on the church property.
I'm hoping to draw on my social network to bring growers together with land to create resilience for all of us

In my experience urban homesteading works best when you are working with your community, but that is probably true of all homesteading.

As a person with disabilities which make driving not possible for me, I will realistically be spending the rest of my life within public transit range.  Right now I'm just thrilled to be out of apartment life and have a small house with a small wraparound yard and landlords who are okay with me growing things, as long as I don't demolish the whole yard I guess.  Maybe its time to have some conversations about what counts as demolishing  It probably means no covering up the grass with tarps to kill it.  And that I can't fill my yard so full of raised beds and containers that the paths are too narrow for the lawn person to mow  But there is some wiggle room and I'm going to take it and put in raised beds as I can, now that I have a read on how the sun falls on my yard throughout the year.  My husband cooks for us a lot, I am doing my best to make compost, we're mindful about how we choose to spend money, we value connection with others, his goal this winter is to learn to make mead, that project will be happening next month, I've finally found a combination of side hustling formula that really works for me, etc.  I'm content with where we are right now and I don't see us making a move to something bigger unless circumstances significantly change in our life.  I won't even entertain the idea unless/until I feel we're making the absolute most of the space we're in now.

Squabs a great urban meat source. Ditto rabbits.

I'm in Memphis and I've seen a goat and a lot of chickens in the city proper.

Once people get used to something there tends to be more of it regardless of zoning and ordinances.

Rachel Lindsay wrote: Today I feel comfortingly aware of and connected to that giant rhythm around me that I am a part of, even if I don't have my "three acres and cow." It's all bigger than I am, and I am a part of it wherever I live, and it will go on and on. That just feels good to me.  

Yes, I love this outlook. Toby has a great story in Gaia's Garden about feeling like he didn't have enough room in an urban lot to grow everything needed for a "proper" homestead. Then he got a great harvest of apples and shared them with neighbors, and some neighbors shared their harvest of plums, and he realized his "homestead" extended beyond the boundaries of his own lot. I have always felt like that anecdote is very instructive about the different ways you can approach a permaculture practice depending on your situation. Realistically, you're not likely to be able to grow enough calories on an urban lot to cover all your needs—nor are you going to be able to pasture livestock, or go off-grid, or practice forestry. If you look at your life and only see deficiencies, you're gonna be unhappy.

Instead, better to realize that living in a city means sacrificing some self-reliance but gaining a great deal in interdependence. Engaging with society is one of humans' superpowers. We got to where we are by being social animals, after all! Living in a city means you have, if you put in the effort, access to all sorts of people with different skills, perspectives and resources. This diversity can expand your own horizons, and diverse communities are stronger in the face of hardship. And you have access to a lot of support, too, even if you don't need it right at this moment.

To be honest, this is an area where I think Permies sometimes fails to recognize its own bias. The forum skews pretty heavily toward rural living, and I think at times this can leave you feeling like it's not real permaculture if you're not on a large acreage. I'm biased too, of course, because I live in a city & like it, but I think permaculture must get better at crossing the metro area boundary if it's going to achieve its goals. Most humans on earth live in cities, and if we're going to sustainably support our population levels, we frankly have to continue doing that. You can't change the world if your philosophy stops at the edge of your rural plot. I know things like geothermal heating districts or municipal stormwater management aren't the bread and butter of this forum, but I'd like to see a space where us city dwellers can start expanding the definition of permaculture.

Here's an intention I set a number of years ago that fits my expansive view of permaculture: do small things to build community and as a result, build collective resilience. I organize social events for our block a couple times a year. I volunteer with our neighborhood "community council", which gives residents a voice in local government. I helped secure a grant to install a bunch of rain gardens in neighborhood residents' yards. Last year, I recruited some immediate neighbors to replace sod with native plants on a bunch of the boulevard on our block. Next year I'm aiming to expand that to a bunch of other blocks. A different group in the city has been working on edible boulevards and just won an ordinance change to officially legalize them. I led a political movement to downsize a city golf course and restore the wetlands it had displaced. New neighbors moved in next door and after talking to them about my mini food forest, they got interested and I connected them to a city tree sale, and their back yard is now an orchard with six fruit trees plus a swamp oak that'll be a big pretty shade tree one day. This work is different from, say, building a roundwood barn for livestock. I think it's valuable work all the same.

Ian Young wrote:...I think at times this can leave you feeling like it's not real permaculture if you're not on a large acreage. I'm biased too, of course, because I live in a city & like it, but I think permaculture must get better at crossing the metro area boundary if it's going to achieve its goals.

I absolutely agree with this. I have tried hard for the last couple of decades to push concepts such as edible landscaping, relaxed definitions of 'pets' to include well managed small farm animals, and many more allotment gardens in pocket parks close to apartment buildings and garden homes.

Most humans on earth live in cities, and if we're going to sustainably support our population levels, we frankly have to continue doing that.

Personally, I do not see how it is possible to sustainably support our population level, but many countries are in a reverse pyramid of age groups already, or are heading that way. How can we use permaculture to ease that transition, help humans to settle at a lower, more human scale planet-wide population, and ideally turn our mega-cities into human compatible, high density living that supports our current economic benefits - like manufactured goods - without the current, unsustainable model of forever growth that math doesn't support? I see the attitude that a contracted human population will "hurt our economy" as a status quo excuse from the mega rich who benefit the most from an ever expanding, unsustainable population.  City Permaculture could prove that there are better ways.

Here's an intention I set a number of years ago that fits my expansive view of permaculture: do small things to build community and as a result, build collective resilience. I organize social events for our block a couple times a year. I volunteer with our neighborhood "community council", which gives residents a voice in local government. I helped secure a grant to install a bunch of rain gardens in neighborhood residents' yards. Last year, I recruited some immediate neighbors to replace sod with native plants on a bunch of the boulevard on our block. Next year I'm aiming to expand that to a bunch of other blocks. A different group in the city has been working on edible boulevards and just won an ordinance change to officially legalize them.

Yes, all these things! I have a vision of city blocks putting a different fruit tree in front of every house, instead of the current, sometimes invasive, ornamentals (which do at least help cool the city). As they grow, the hope would be that they could be shared with a group of families, as each different fruit/variety of fruit, comes ripe. I am not a purist - flowers are good for our souls, so not every plant has to be edible, but the idea is to have plenty that are. We need thousands more like you, who are actively working to makie this happen.

My front yard is planted with cane fruit, specifically for the kids in my neighborhood.
I think small fruit like raspberry are better for public urban plantings than most fruit trees are.
A fruit tree needs pruning to keep the fruit in reach, cleanup of fruit that hits the ground, and special effort to get them established.
Raspberries can be pruned to the ground once a year, unharvested fruit doesn't pile up, and they are easy propagate and establish.

Trees like persimmon and chestnut  drop their ripe fruits, so they don't need to be pruned for  size.
They still are not suitable for the "hell strip"  plantings in my opinion, because the fruit still must be dealt with.

I've been finding  the same kind of columnar oak tree used as a landscaping tree in multiple places.
It was significant to me because it seems to produce a lot of large acorns, at a relative young age/size.
I haven't been able to identify it yet, but like a basswood tree, it would be useful to those who know how to use it and innocuous to everyone else.

Speaking of innocuous, I grew sunchokes in my front yard this year , and not only were they inoffensive, they got a lot of complements.
Regular sunchokes do get rather tall for most front yards but I'm seeking a true dwarf  variety to plant at my mother's house.
I'm planting many containers of the sunchokes I have already.
They will be strategically placed to provide shade for the greenhouse at the community garden I belong to.
I plan on sticking elderberry cuttings in the same buckets, as well as fava beans and peas
Something is bound to grow, but the chaos will be contained in buckets, easy to move, easy to share, easy to harvest and replant.


I am hoping to put up a hoop house at the food pantry.
If we can use it for starts, we can save on our planting costs, but we can also offer plants to our customers.
There are raspberries already there and I plan on bringing other easily propagated plants to the property.
There is compost being made onsite already, so maybe be we could offer a sub irrigated bucket planter with a some green onions and a  cherry tomato plant in each one.

I've been hesitating to reply to this thread because I've been thinking about what exactly homesteading and permaculture even means.

but in my definition it means stewardship. Caring for the piece of land I have and doing the best I can for my family who live here. This may mean repurposing trash or planting intensively or farming rabbits to eat my waste. Even without land, I can find ways to use what I have-- right now canning tomatoes, fermenting sauerkraut. Making herbal medicines as alternatives for things that come from far away and involve lots of waste. The ecosystem I help may not even be my own, but I'm also doing what I can to improve mine.

The other treasure we hold is skills. With every generation skills are getting lost. When we learn how to make sourdough or jam or dry persimmons we're preserving knowledge and culture. How often do I make something and someone (often a young person in my family) says "I didn't know you could MAKE that!!" You absolutely can!

I honestly am a city person at heart. I love the idea of a farm but I know in practice, my soul needs to be close to a library, a university and a symphony. My ideal setup is a good-sized home garden in the city, with access to a community garden to help infect more minds.

I've been doing a version of this for awhile.
I had a small garden within a small town way up north. Not an ideal situation, lots of shade and it was sloped, the ground filled with basement spoil. Yet I grew a lot of things. A decent percentage of what my family needed.
Now I have almost a full city lot, in a much larger town in a much milder climate. I grow, can grow, lots of things. However, the level of parasitic pests has increased as well. Lots of 'em. My morning and afternoon rituals involve beetle patrols and cat scanning. (Yes, kitty kats, who eat the birds and love a nice prepared bed, or young seedling row to scratch and poop in, sigh.) Spring and fall bring rats. Deer, and raccoons all through the temperate months. All the wilts and blights as well.
Yet I grow a ton, literally and figuratively, of food. Love it.

I grow lots of flowers in with my vegetables, I use lots of containers, floating row covers and have won a kind of peace with the kitties. My morning and afternoon rituals of debugging gives me a kinship with the micro environment, the birds know me and flutter about with no worries around me. I am after all, the cat chaser.

My advice is to start small, and grow into what you feel you can do. Use the environment for what it is. If shady, shade grown cucumbers are nice, and when overripe, almost like melons, sweet. If sunny, giant sweet onions, and huge brandywines will abound.
Leaves are free, compost is free, building soil is the most valuable of hobbies.

Welcome Mike! I'm also a master of the Cat Scan!! (scan, identify, and go pick up the hose, at which point cat scampers over the rooftops to find another bathroom, while the rabbits stamp and snort)

I have been, not by choice necessarily, homesteading in the city/suburbs for 20 years. Landlords hate me, although I'm not sure why, as I bring life to concrete. Laugh out loud.  I think that most people that want to "homestead" that haven't been doing it, should do it in the city. Moving out  to the country, as I have had many many clients that chose to do this, brings problems that are insurmountable to them. They wind up quitting, or just grouchily spending all their time mowing and managing an overwhelming amount of land, when all they really wanted was a garden, some chickens, and compost pile.
Believe me, you can do this in the city. It's the mindset, not the amount of land that is homesteading. If you are "waiting" to do this, you may never do it. Zone zero (yourself) is the most important zone in permaculture, in my opinion.  

One solution for urban dwellers is to move to crappy neighborhood, where the officials have much bigger fish to fry than you planting an unruly garden or having a bunch of chickens. Noise is a drawback for sure. I can't convey to you how powerful the "shut the f*** up" internal dialogue is to my country soul living in the city.

Kevin Feinstein II wrote:One solution for urban dwellers is to move to crappy neighborhood, where the officials have much bigger fish to fry than you planting an unruly garden or having a bunch of chickens. Noise is a drawback for sure.

I have heard of people looking for a crappy neighborhood, and then managing to find 3-4 lots with shared lot lines to buy up. That can give you enough space to put in layers of hedging that can help a lot with noise dispersal.

A friend who lived on a city lot, had a row of trees beside her home die. She didn't realize until they were removed, just how much the trunks reduced the traffic noise. It didn't need to be solid to reflect a good chunk of the noise.

Noise reduction, and car head light trouble was solved by one family near me by building a berm near the road, and planting some trees on top. It wasn't super tall, but it deflected the light and noise upward, rather than it hitting the front of their house and their windows.

One of the joys of permies to me, is people identifying "problems" and other permies suggesting ideas that can help the "problem be the solution". Plant a row of fruit trees near the sidewalk - yes, maybe people will take the fruit, but maybe you will build neighborhood good will, and maybe you will get the neighbors asking you how to plant trees too. If you want trees to absorb noise, stack functions!

When you say "in the city", how much land are you talking about?
I live in a fairly dense city, but my neighborhood is still largely either single-family homes or former single-family homes that have been divided up into small apartments. In other words, there are still yards. I have a moderately large yard for the area, at about 6200 square feet, or a seventh of an acre, minus the area of the house.
My son's family are a little overwhelmed with a yard about twice as big in the suburbs, with chickens and trees and veg and play structures, and pets and too much work to do.
As an elderly woman without much traditional gardening experience, I find this is plenty of land for me to steward. There is light pollution and noise pollution and occasional vandalism and fruit theft, but there's also a lot of satisfaction. I prefer working on things that are in poor condition so I can improve them and not worry about my mistakes messing them up.
This house when we bought it was falling apart: roof, floors, windows, doors, electrical system, plumbing, walls, foundation all needed work. Repairing rather than remodeling or tearing it down conserved hundred-year-old materials and much human investment of effort and thought.
The yard was invasive toxic bulbs and ivy and poke and blackberry and trash and broken glass. Now it's a forager's plot with dozens of fruit trees, mushrooms, vegetables, fiber and medicine plants, as well as places to nap and host dinners. I have conserved and brought in woody debris, so the soil gets better and water sinks in. There is always work to do. It's kind of a bonsai food garden. Good thing I like pruning. The weeding is impossible to keep up with. My "zone 5" is a 5 foot diameter thicket in the back corner.
I have been working on a book about my experience here. If anyone wants to read it and comment I'd be thrilled. It's mostly about particular species in my particular climate. Maybe I should broaden its scope.
I'm happy others are thinking about city permaculture also. I am convinced that unless city people have a lived connection to the earth and the sun and the water, all our efforts to "save" our home planet are nothing but an abstraction, with no real conviction, just ineffectual, out-of-context sentimentality.

I like to think that having a discussion about this on here, and with people in our lives is one way of observing and interacting with nature (human nature included).

When I read early retirement extreme I realized that the mental game of choosing what's necessary and valuable is very much like homesteading. Maximizing one's resource efficiency is sometimes more practical in an urban environment. The forms of capital described in the permaculture city are certainly more readily available.

As others have said, I like city life and don't think I would thrive with the rural lifestyle, despite it being easy to romanticize.

There's a lot of us out there moving the needle, bit by bit, on codes and restrictions that inhibit our freedom to make more and use less. Patience doesn't have to be passive, it has to be practiced.

Advantages of urban life:
So much less need for a car, it can be a 'where do I put it?' problem. But public transport is so much easier, and in a city they all join up, with short waits.
Lots of food, but lots of ultra-processed. Organic takes a bit more searching for.
You may be in an urban heat island, reducing heating bills. Smaller properties, especially flats and terraces, reduce external walls. And if your neighbour heats their home to a higher temperature, you'll get some of that through your common wall.
In the community, there may be a Transition Town group, community gardens/allotments, community eating (often involving volunteers gathering end-of-life food to feed all, poor, homeless, and general community).
Lots of other social groups, often in walking distance. Street lights may hide the stars, but they'll guide you home without a torch.

Pure permaculture would be nature doing its thing, with niches of humans able to survive and thrive within that niche without knocking it out of whack.

The original native tribes here in the US were doing that for thousands of years.

Fast forward to today and all the basic things you would have enjoyed in your native permaculture niche, like food, shelter, companionship, are now mostly only accessible from a giant and damaging "machine" that our cultures have given over the power to. A machine that wants a major piece of your time and resources to feed it in trade for mere survival, and never does achieve equitable distribution of the benefits from the resources it gobbles up.

So it's a sliding scale backwards to the pure native from the machine owning you, and your requirements to live that we're working on.

I figure as long as we're moving backwards from the machine to the native we're doing OK, and need not feel guilty that we're not the pure embodiment of the large scale ideal.

Our approach as we work on this gives us hands on experience and frees our creativity to come up with more ways to move towards the ideal.

Every tiny move counts as a positive.

In an urban setting if you're growing food under lights, in containers, in allotments, getting around via public transit/bike/walking (one less car) or whatever else you might enjoy doing in the way of tiny "in house" permaculture, you're still on your way in the best and most satisfying direction.

Even though you may need some resources from "the machine,"  like grow lights, electricity or plastic, you're on your way.

'Queen of the Hood' is what I sometimes think of myself as. I've managed to purchase 3 consecutive lots on the edge of a low income district in Wichita, KS. My neighbors are great and I have very little trouble with transients passing through. I also don't enjoy the lights or noise but I'm here and it's paid for and as I interpret Anastacia in the 'Ring Cedars Series', "Start where you are and learn before you move to a cleaner place". I'm 69 and probably won't be moving again.

The lawn gets pretty relaxed with seed heads but I try to keep the bulk of the paths and easements at our 8" or below height. It's getting more difficult to find a mower that you can raise the blades up high but I don't mow any more than I have to. Planting Dutch clover helps though I have to replant it now and again in my zone 7a after dry summers. And I'm trying different low growing plants to add to those mowing areas. The more you keep defined areas of low and then taller plants, the more people feel comfortable with a fuller landscape. And neighbor opinions are important.

My Dwarf Nigerian goats are shaping my planting focus as well as a food forest for me too. I was required to petition my neighbors to get permission to have 'a goat' (I have 2, shhh, they're dwarves) and ended up having a great time meeting my neighbors. They stop by to pet or feed the does, and kids love them. Some high school girls helped me herd them back in once when the does escaped. The goats love bagged leaves to eat and I cover the deep litter mini barn with bagged leaves that I pick up or that my gardening business brings back. I also supplement with hay, alfalfa and minerals. Their milk is so sweet and creamy, not goaty at all.

3-5 chickens are plenty for me. They work up the whole 3 lots that equal 150' x 150'. It's divided into 5 paddocks for the goats and chickens to graze. I supplement them with a little grain and may expand to collect food scraps for the chickens and maybe goats from local cafes or smaller grocery shops.

Bridgit and I also trade one day a week with each others land projects. It helps keep us motivated and actually get things done. We shape our land, build infrastructure (though it's a little crooked sometimes), process fruits, veggies, herbs, and animals together. What ever needs done, we try to do it ourselves. Otherwise, we call for help.

My Toyota Highlander SUV works great for hauling chickens, goats, or 5 bales of alfalfa. The Highlander helped to relocate 35 coons and possum from the live trap last year, which is getting really old. I'm toying with the idea of tanning their hides while I watch YouTube in the winters. I need a new seat cover anyway but those animals are really tough to skin. Any tips on that would be appreciated.

This is my 'Healthy Aging Plan" and I'm teaching homesteading classes and slowly starting a community garden and working with other organizations with similar interests.  The land is being titled as a non profit for feeding people and helping them learn about aware connection with their spaces. I think that my SS check with me working the land is a good model for families interested in alternative lifestyles. So, that adds purpose to my life and helps to make it worth the city noise, lights, and the blowing trash that I pick up regularly.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play your hair.
Khalil Gibran

Charolett Knapic wrote:Bridgit and I also trade one day a week with each others land projects. It helps keep us motivated and actually get things done. We shape our land, build infrastructure (though it's a little crooked sometimes), process fruits, veggies, herbs, and animals together. What ever needs done, we try to do it ourselves. Otherwise, we call for help.

I love this idea - I'm sure I'd get more done if I had someone here regularly to a) help and b) notice that I hadn't made the progress I hoped for during the week. Having more people in a close radius means that although there will be more trouble makers, there is likely to be more permie minded people too (even if they don't know it yet!)
Thank you for sharing Charolett.