!! Alexandra Malecki made it to PEP2! Follow my family SKIP to homestead!

Congratulations on getting to PEP 2. That's an awesome accomplishment!

Maybe staff would be cool with a thread about PEP 3 including family help, without requesting the certification?

Hello Joylynn, thank you for your reply!! It means a lot to get feedback that what I'm posting matters.

Funny you should mention doing PEP3 as a family made me wonder if I could just post what I do on a day to day basis similar to the BEL. Would it matter if I posted here or in a BB? If I post here then it's more of a narrative, a story. I'm curious what you think? It's my SKIP story in a way for someone to get to know me and my family.

What I would do is post it in PEP in the associated sub forum ( I think that the wrong word...), BUT in a separate thread than the official BB. With a disclaimer at the top of each thread so new folk see you are not seeking the BB credit for the family stuff.

Just an idea to run by your fellow staff.

Yes, I see. Thanks for the suggestion!  I'm unsure what I'm going to do just yet but working with the SKIP team makes sense.

Yes, what you've done is awesome Alex!  I'd say posting family work to your own thread or to the subforum for the aspect (PEP Gardening, for instance) and being clear that it is a family thing should be ok.  As long as 100 other people don't do it too.

I can understand what you mean about involving your family. The way SKIP is set up is for individuals to prove their worth, but as you say you come as a package too. IF PEP3 isn't feasible, you could always pick and choose which aspects you want to do as a family and do them together. You wouldn't get certified, but would have a lot of fun and develop together. By logging the adventures on a project thread, you can still point to the evidence for future Otis' consideration.

Forgive my ignorance, but do you put talllow butter on your body or cook with it? Maybe start a new thread telling your secrets!

Yes, I absolutely agree that you have to push your family back to do BBs on your own. Thats part of why I got so involved with SkIP scouts this summer. I wanted to work with them. Teach them. Involve them!

Nancy Reading wrote:I can understand what you mean about involving your family. The way SKIP is set up is for individuals to prove their worth, but as you say you come as a package too. IF PEP3 isn't feasible, you could always pick and choose which aspects you want to do as a family and do them together. You wouldn't get certified, but would have a lot of fun and develop together. By logging the adventures on a project thread, you can still point to the evidence for future Otis' consideration.

At this time, I plan to just post about things that my family and I are doing regardless of whether it's a BB or not. I'm not looking to get anything more certified so I don't think it makes sense to post in the SKIP forum. I thought that I could just post about my family and I on this thread, similar to the BEL. I made it to PEP2 and I don't have an Otis. I think I need to pivot and market myself in a different way. My hope is to show Otis's that I'm a real* person with a real* family. *With personalities, values, priorities, etc. I wonder if an Otis would be interested in these factors as equally important as the fact that I can follow instructions and do hard things.  I think about how Paul puts himself out there so that other people know who he is and can then decide to pass or stick around. I'm thinking that I have to give this a try because it would be good for me to get out of my comfort zone and market myself.

Nancy Reading wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but do you put talllow butter on your body or cook with it? :rolling: Maybe start a new thread telling your secrets!

I use it for cooking and to make a whipped tallow butter. There was already a thread on tallow, so I just added to it, take a look: Tallow Thread

I'm currently in the process of making pemmican; my first attempt. It's basically tallow, meat powder, and other flavors (berries/nuts) for long-term preservation. I'll add to that thread when I've finished making it!

Almost exactly a year ago, I picked up deer roadkill. I don't have a meat grinder so I stuffed my freezer with the (unground) grind meat to figure out what to do with it at a later time. I've been so preoccupied over the last year with getting to PEP2 that I wasn't able to give attention to this unfinished (and unexpected) project. I decided that I wanted to make pemmican with it. So I dulled about half of my knives to cut all of the meat against the grain, marinaded it using this recipe, specifically option 3, and then dehydrated it at 160degF. The venison is so tasty and this is the last of it. I hope to find more roadkill soon!




A few days ago, I used a paper towel to clean up tallow from a mold. I tried to make pucks of tallow but the tallow didn’t harden enough to separate cleanly from the mold. This experiment was a lot to clean up. I love using these oil clothes as firestarter and I hope to have a wood heated home in the near future to make use of the firestarters I've been saving because I can't just throw it away.



I have now preserved 29 jars of applesauce and 7 jars of dried apples. I can fill 4 quart jars of sauce per batch and it takes 3 trays of dried apples to fill one jar. Then I need to immediately hide the jars or else it disappears into bellies! After 3 weeks of apple processing, the kids and I can tag-team this and get a batch done within 75mins, including the cleanup, but not including the simmering/tending of the sauce or flipping the apple slices drying.






Due to the added energy demands of datacenters, our energy utility/city council opted to increase our energy rates on Mon-Fri 5-9p. This has caused me to do as much of my cooking earlier in the day and turn off unnecessary appliances by 5p. I was just talking to my friend about how I wish I had a solar dehydrator. In the winter, I don't mind using the oven to also warm my house but it also seems ridiculous that I'm using an oven instead of the sun.
--I plan to build a solar dehydrator in 2026. I'm not sure where or whether it could be designed to be moved since I don't plan to stay at this house. I would like a way to dehydrate a huge volume of food without using electricity.

This summer, I traveled so frequently, that I wasn't able to ferment as much food as I'd like. I found myself spending so much $$$ for kimchi and kraut at the store because I just wasn't home to monitor the crock. I find that if the cabbage is overfermented and mushy, no one enjoys eating it. So, 3 weeks ago I finally got back to my fermentations! The first batch was a caraway kraut. Now that this batch is bottled, I currently have all of my apple scraps from all of the processing to make vinegar. I froze the rest of the apple scraps because I have enough for ~6 batches in this 5qt open crock.

I'm thinking we might want to have a subforum (if that's the right word for it) in SKIP for folks that have achieved PEP2 to have their own BEL-like threads to advertise themselves.  Then Otises can find a concise list of the advanced candidates and deep dive into their situation if they want.  We can direct the Otises to that forum, as well as the leaderboard and list of skippers and peppers

Last year, my good friend Ally took a willow basketry class and gifted me the first willow basket that she made!! I still think she was crazy to give it to me!! I love the basket so much that I wore the handle out and replaced it with a recycled leather handle. It's just so cute:



Now that I have extra time for projects, I'm getting really excited about harvesting willow to make more baskets and maybe even a willow backpack! There's a really great willow patch with first year growth by her house that we've harvested from a few times and I look forward to going back again soon to harvest and hang!



I've been scouting a few spots around town to find some contrasting colors to add to the baskets and my kids alternate who'd going to tag along to help harvest:



Just prior to Paul's latest youtube live call - link to patreon early access, I decided that it was time to remount my hand-planed hooks to hang all of my baskets:



I previously didn't plan to re-mount those coat hooks to the walls because I wasn't planning on sticking around this house much longer. Now I'll need to patch the holes - which isn't a big deal. However, given that I can't control the future and I suspect that we'll be here for a while, it was a gift to myself to make my baskets accessible.

Yesterday, we met my sister out for a hike and I was impressed that she was willing to sample some wild fare: watercress. What a delightful, pungent flavor. It's obviously in the nasturtium family and related to brassicas with that sulphuric flavor.



I'm just going to call this limited post good before I get distracted by placing basketry book holds in at the library....

There are several basketry and willow collection/management BBs in PEM :)

Thanks for sharing your journey! I look forward to hearing whether the otis portion of the program works out or not, though the knowledge is valuable regardless.

Wow, Mike! I really like how you emphasized traditional/ancestral skills. Two things come to mind:
1) I was just reading about how the rubber tree changed the course of history. I recall when I was in school/visited the Ford museum in FL, I didn't fully appreciate the impact of this in terms of our recent human evolution. Last night, it occurred to me that only a mere 4 generations removed from my son, there didn't exist cars (or at least it was a rare sight). Only four generations ago, we depended on horse and buggies to get around. It's rather quite sad to reflect on how much knowledge has been lost in only 4 generations.
2) The art of willow basketry has also been lost due to the discovery and manufacturing of plastics. With the anticipation of exhausting fossil fuels, I wonder if humans as a species will be able to adapt back to our sustainable ways with so much knowledge lost. edited to add: it's not just knowledge but a re-adaptation to inconvenience and discomfort.

Lina -- thank you! I had hoped to share more about my better half and my kids on this thread but I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. A few days ago my husband and I were discussing what our next steps are because we had anticipated a certain outcome that hasn't come to fruition. One thing he mentioned that really struck me was that, we need to still make a change to our living situation in the city or else my "skills will stagnate". I'm not sure what our next steps are but I plan to capture it here.

Alexandra Malecki wrote:
Lina -- thank you! I had hoped to share more about my better half and my kids on this thread but I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. A few days ago my husband and I were discussing what our next steps are because we had anticipated a certain outcome that hasn't come to fruition.  

Hey, maybe the Otis thing will still work out! I imagine most senior homesteaders are not regularly checking the pep2 page, perhaps they simply haven’t noticed. And if not- something else will come up!

It’s been too long since my last post, and so much has developed that I’m overdue for an update—and it’s a good one!!

Since completing PEP2, my husband and I have had many extended (sometimes exhaustive) conversations about our best path forward to get out of the city. By the end of 2025, we had explored a wide range of options and narrowed them down to two, which we evaluated using a detailed trade study.

This decision felt especially heavy given the developmental stages of our children. We wanted to make a move that would truly serve everyone in our family and provide experience and growth. To avoid disagreement, my kids and I agreed that my husband would make the final decision. We each contributed our needs and desires, he assigned the weighted values, and thankfully, there was a clear winner.

I’m excited to share that we’ve decided to sell our home in the city and move to Wheaton Labs this coming spring!

From my perspective, here’s why this path feels right:
----The best opportunity for us to build, learn, and live without constantly having to “pay to play.” Financially, it gives my husband a viable exit from the corporate world as we live off our savings, there are built-in opportunities to supplement our budget, and we'll learn how to live more humbly.
----The most land and existing infrastructure in a location resilient to climate extremes and change.
----Built-in learning opportunities through bootcamps, workshops, and from Paul himself.
----A built-in, subsistence-oriented community with shared values and ethics, where my kids will have access to great mentors and neighbors, and where people work together most days.
----Most of our dream property goals feel viable at WL, with time and effort.

I still want to better articulate my why, especially around SKIP. I can't continue to progress along the SKIP path in our current situation so we would need to move to continue to learn more and build resiliency. What Paul has built at WL will help accelerate our families' path to homesteading.

While I continue to be open to future opportunities from Otises, I feel really good about investing our time and energy at WL as our families' search for a permanent place unfolds.

That said, I’m realistic about some anticipated challenges:

----I wish for a gal pal and more social opportunities for my kids. I’ve identified local homeschool connections and 4H programming as ways to build those relationships.
----I wish there were fully mature food and animal systems, but developing those systems is one of the aspects of permaculture I love most—so perhaps the problem is the solution.
----There’s an immediate need to finish the water connection to the cabin we’ll be occupying and to improve the greywater systems. It may be a rough transition, but manageable with focused effort.
----No year-round, above-ground moving water (a girl can dream), and irrigation will be labor-intensive. Still, I’m excited about long-term solutions and possibilities through earthworks, grazing, and experimentation.

Once we’re moved, I expect we’ll settle in, go with the flow, and discover what feels most soul-building—while hedging against the failure rate of first-generation homesteaders. We’re genuinely excited for this upcoming transition. Cheers to a new year and a new lifestyle!

Between now and moving day, we’ll be downsizing, preparing our house for sale, and finishing the second half of homeschooling (now co-teaching with my husband!).

In the meantime, I’m elated winter has arrived, giving me space for stillness and study—specifically herbalism, preventative health, and natural building. This season of learning feels relevant, timely, and deeply soul-building, especially as we work to take greater responsibility for our family’s health.

Here are a few books I've enjoyed/am enjoying:
*So many good Lloyd Kahn books, half acre homestead was my favorite
*I've also been reading a few books about intermittent fasting and cherry-picking information from each; I haven't found a singular book that I would recommend.

Thanks for the update! I was just wondering if a good land opportunity had come along for you.
I am curious - I know from some of the podcasts you participated in was the desire for permanent land you could pass down To your kids. Is that an option at WL? My understanding is that you don’t actually purchase land, you buy lifetime use of an acre. Is that use something that can be inherited? Is there some kind of structure (a trust, etc) to ensure that the situation is stable?

WL will continue to be a place where my kids can be for as long as they choose.

Hi everyone — This is my first post to Permies, but I’m not new to Permies. I’ve been a long-time reader and have lived vicariously through my wife’s SKIP journey and Permies efforts until now. I’m excited (and a little nervous, in a good way) to finally step out of the shadows and join the conversation myself.

I’ve spent a little over 20 years in the corporate world. Early on it felt purposeful, challenging, and rewarding. But the longer I stayed in the rat race, the less fulfillment I found in the work. Over time (especially as I cheered on Alex’s SKIP accomplishments), it became clear that while we could continue building a bigger and bigger pile of coin in the name of “financial security,” we’d likely be trading away something far more valuable: time — especially the years that matter most with our kids and for realizing our long-term ambitions.

Over the holidays, Alex and I spent a lot of time reflecting on what we want the next 10 years of our lives to look like. A few themes kept rising to the top:

• A deeper focus on family and the relationships we’re building with our kids. More time to be present, to work alongside them, and to grow together rather than passing each other between schedules. We want to learn skills with our children and intentionally build a close, supportive family culture. Long-term, we’re excited about the possibility of creating a family-based livelihood rooted in permaculture—something that integrates meaningful work, shared responsibility, and time together instead of pulling those things apart.

• The ability to accelerate skill-building through daily, hands-on practice in an environment that supports experimentation and learning by doing. We’re drawn to a place where we’re free to build, try, fail, iterate, and improve without the constraints of corporate schedules, city rules, or confused neighbors. Having land, materials, clean water, mentorship, and a community that understands and joins in makes it possible to build real, practical skills much faster than our current life allows.

• A strong desire to understand what it actually takes to build a lasting, resilient community of like-minded, motivated people who work together to create something self-sufficient, meaningful, and a path to Gertitude.

After weighing all of this—family, time, learning, community, and what kind of life we actually want to be living—we’re ready to take the plunge. This feels like the start of a new phase defined less by accumulation and obligation, and more by intention, contribution, and fulfillment. I’m genuinely excited to step into this work, learn as a Boot, contribute where I can, and grow alongside the Wheaton Labs and Permies community. Thanks for welcoming me here—I’m looking forward to what’s ahead.

Alexandra!!!  You officially have a new Permie fan!!!  I have only read some of your posts so far, but I am entirely inspired!!  You have given me SO much to rethink and reconsider for my own Permie path that I am in tears right now!! (of JOY)

Thank you for sharing your wonderful, hard, rewarding and inspirational journey.  I look forward to mine even more now.  You have a beautiful family and I hope that you and your Otis/Otessa find each other!!  I will be reading on to learn more from your experiences!  Thank you <3  <3   --Tess

Welcome to permies Harry! I do hope your move to Wheaton labs will be all you wish for. I get the feeling that it could be an excellent place to be a child (again!).

Alexandra - I look forwards to reading about your homesteading adventures - just in time to perpare for the new season. Good luck!

😱😱😱 what!? Making a courageous choice to move forward! Congratulations to Alex and Harry 😊 (and Paul! Who gains a family in the move!🧡) I wish you all peace in down-sizing and selling.

Where will you bunk? Harry, you're going to be a boot! How fun! Stephen is a great teacher! Alex, will you be a sepper?

So excited for your Terabithia summer ahead. Full of woods and animals and wonderful learning opportunities!

With love,
Rebekah

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read and respond here — I really appreciate the interaction and encouragement.

@Tess — thank you for your kind words and for chiming in. It means a lot to know that what I’m sharing is useful or encouraging to someone else, and I appreciate you taking the time to say so. I'm rooting for you as well on your journey!

@Nancy — thank you for your thoughtful response and especially for welcoming Harry! =) Making it to future land by the beginning of this growing season was a goal I had so I'm delighted that it's coming to fruition!

@Rebekah — Honestly, I meant to text you to tell you the news! We've been sitting on this announcement for too long! All good questions and, if I'm being honest, we're still figuring out the specifics. What I do know is that Harry will start as a boot on March 1 prior to the whole family moving. As for the rest, we're going to have to get there and try out a bunch of different scenarios and "stumble", as Paul puts it, until we figure out the right balance. Everything's TBD but I'm excited that (I assume) our paths will cross more often now!!!

Also, @Liv, thanks for the pie; that was so kind of you!!!

This is great news! A whole family will be added to the Wheaton Labs Community!
I hope you'll keep us updated here.

Harry Malecki,
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I see Harry now has his own thread as a boot. So this one will be Alex(andra)'s?