Joe Moore

If possible consider building a raised platform first. You could sleep there in a canvas tent on that for a bit and then do some local research about what may work best for your site.

I do know that different sides of the islands have hugely different percip patterns, so this may help to inform your decisions.

Which island will you be heading to?
I know that there are plenty of people interested in permaculture, and communal living already in place with fairly mature sites.

Curious to hear how this works out for you.

Hi Crystal,
Cool that you are in NH. I grew up maybe 40-50 miles east of your town.

What specifically are you trying to do? Begin work as a designer?

The great part about your location is that you are near the Amherst MA area. There are tons of things going on there. Ryan Harb did a ton of work to promote permaculture at UMASS Amherst (see youtube). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWHSzGDItBA

There are some great Permaculturalists in the region as well. Check out D Acres near Plymouth, and maybe look up David Jacke for upcoming workshops \ networking meetups.

Years ago I started Boston permaculture, which I think is now defunct, but worth googling. You should also check out the Brattleboro VT area for the natural building communities there, and some of the Keene permaculture / Transition people for cool projects happening.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask. I haven't been around in a while, but used to be fairly well connected.

In regards to the thread - I agree with Julia Winter and Adam Klaus above, but it would be great to lightly discuss thoughts on Fracking and some other concerns you may have, and a mention of permaculture solutions to those problems.

Perhaps discussing what you are doing now, how the model could be replicated easily, and then how amazing it would be if others did similar things all over the place.

I feel like there could be forums with a focus on guns and bugout locations and bigger guns, and hunting and little guns and .... permaculture. Maybe hundreds of forums managed by hundreds of people or groups.

And there could be forums about fairies, and paganism, herbs, witch stuff, astrology, crystals and ..... permaculture.

And forums about politics, activism, social justice, the peace corps, protesting and .... permaculture.

And forums on pot, other recreational drugs, fun things to do when you're stoned, growing pot, legalizing pot and ..... permaculture.

I couldn't agree more. There are a gazillion niche interest and subject areas. They could not possibly fit neatly into one forum without chaos breaking out. Too much fighting in the forums means a lack of forward momentum. A diaspora on the web would allow for a Darwinian process to hopefully let the winners start their own 20+ person communities based on their values.

I lived in Utah for a few months and quickly noticed how great their Craigslist alternative was. It was called KSL, and correlated to a TV station in the area - http://www.ksl.com/
It doesn't appear to be an outfit like NBC/CBS etc, so that is nice..

I do have to agree with the above that it would be great to have a local listing site for a town, though where I live in Colorado it may be better to have the listings on the county scale due to low-ish population density.

That is a great idea. I was at a workshop years ago on super small scale aquaponics with Scott Kellogg (Radix Center) and one of the methods for "inoculating" the water was to obtain water from 3 different wild streams or ponds. This introduces all sorts of "native" biota to the ecosystem. Something similar for the soil should also be great.

Maybe stacking functions by turning this into an OC camping road trip?

How is the seaweed in Orange County? I'm originally from New England and some gardeners used to take heaps of it hope to build soil.

Hanley, Interesting. How are you mitigating run off or top soil loss? Do you have a basin shaped garden?

While recently in Mexico, I thought hundred of these things all over the place. They seemed to really like sun. Would a mature food forest in the keys be able to block (store) enough sun to keep the critters from basking in the garden /eating your goods?

I do have to say that using them as a food source or income stream might be a great place for them. Maybe even hire / contract with a teen to do the killing \ selling for you?

Glad to see it finally happen. If I lived closer, I would certainly want to spend some time there. Quite excited to what happens next.

Morgan, Is this a grid computing platform, using spare CPU cycles to number crunch? This is a nice application of the technology, which is currently in use in a number of other places primarily medicine or for finding aliens (seti).