A new homestead in the woods...

"homestead houligan: one who lives on any homestead and tends to break the "rules" or practices of a traditional homestead. ex:using practices such as permaculture or natural building on a homestead"

About 3 years ago, my family and I left town to build an off grid homestead in the woods.  We haul water from a stream, melt snow, and collect rain water for all of our water needs.  We heat soley with a wood stove which also supplies our cooking surface and water heater.  We have a composting toilet and shower in a big bucket.  Life is good.

We are woking to incorporate many aspects of permaculture like hugel beds and a food forest.  We are building cob ovens and have a rocket mass stove.  We will be doing a lot of round wood building for our projects this year and plan to break ground on a 2-3 year geodesic dome house project.  
I post all of our projects to my blog: homesteadhouligan.com.

But my favorite new project is my open discussion project posts.  I will give a project idea, like a greenhouse, and ask people to share information on that particular project.  Then I do the project and share the results.  One more way to share good information.
http://homesteadhouligan.com/2017/04/17/open-discussion-projects/
"The idea is to keep these discussions open, even after the project is done, for others to be able to go through the links and ideas for their own projects.   Once you finish a related project, you can share that in the comments too."

If any of this intetests you, please check out homesteadhouligan.com!  Thanks

It looks like you have a nice setup going

I live in an Unorganized Township in Penobscot county Maine. It is good to see you neighbor.

Nice! We are in one of the under 2000 resident towns in Somerset County.  Not quite an unorganized township like we were hoping for, but real close.

Hey everyone,
I am planning to move to Maine next spring, I was just up in the Lee/Lincoln area looking at properties but no luck yet. I will be back up in the area of Unity mid June and was wondering if anyone had advice for a good town with people living the homesteading/self sustaining life. I am also hoping to build a superadobe home with earth bags and was wondering if anyone had any input on that, in the sense of would the local building codes even allow it. I've been seeing they vary from town to town but the realtor we spoke with made it seem like it's no problem but he was working for the property owners. Any feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated, I am coming up from NJ and only have limited information about the communities in the state. Thanks!

Many of the towns in Maine, depending on town size, have little to no building codes.  I believe under 2500 (which our town is) you only need a wastewater permit.  Since we have a composting toilet, this permit was super easy to get and not too expensive.  Then one of our neighbors chuckled because "why did you even bother to get a permit?"  Much different from CT.  
We are also considering using some earthbags for part of our house.  If you find some in Maine, let me know!

Good morning,I checked out the link to your site. I am pretty impressed on your progress. I'd like to be able to say that we will be neighbors (by ME standards) I have lived in upper ME and central ME for a total of 5 or 6 years in the past. The past 15 months I have been building a camp section ally here in CT and have been loading it in a trailer for its voyage. This forum has given me lots of info not found anywhere else. Including emotional support every time some one tells me I'm "crazy" for this dream and that I'm not the only one in the world that has it.lol.....Larry

I could more eadily count the people who didn't say (or hint) that I was crazy.  But that's ok.  We are finally starting to feel like we ate making progress.  This is year 3 and I feel like we might get to enjoy a little more.  Looking forward to more permie neighbors!

Sara, I have no dis allusions on how long this is gonna take. There are challenges in ME that are not found in other regions.  Same could be said for our souther folks. In my heart I know that this " crazy dream" is my path
Hey tell you what, if we /I fail.  We can just come back to CT, regroup.  And attack agian.  Lol

We have already failed here and there.  Teaches us lots of good lessons.  Haha.  I'm not sure I could ever go back to CT after being here.   So much more fun here.  I actually work full time to support our start up.  Kind of a fail safe.  We had a miserable failure when we first got here and had to get an apartment in town for the winter.   That destroyed me for a while.  But life is good now.  We have a tiny house on the land and we progress slowly.  But speed is starting to pick up.  Don't worry though, you can't fail. If you/I ever need a regroup, I'll be around permies!

Hey Sarah, it looks like a year and a half is missing from your blog. Don't now if you knew this.

Unfortunately yes.  I do know and haven't had the time to go to town and fix it.  The year and a half that is missing was actually my old blog that I attempted to transfer.  Half or more of my stuff didn't make it.  Maybe if we get a lot of rain I'll have to spend some time inside and I can figure out the issue.  Thanks though!

 Sara, I have lived above Houlton for five years and west of Bangor for two. I remember how bad the blackflies were up north. But draw a blank about how bad they were in your zone. How thick are they there?...Larry

We have tons of nasty little gnats at our place, but no black flies at all.  Everyone else around here does complain about black flies though.