Jacqueline Freeman

Cows can be so lovable. Our dairy cows weaned their calves when the mom decided and that tended to be around ten months. On a daily basis, the calves stayed with their mothers for 16 hours, then we put the calf on the other side of  a wire fence for 8 hours. Standing next to the mother, there was no trauma of separation.  We milked once a day after that 8 hours. The calves grew strong and well-behaved and all of us were happier.

Tabor Bakery in Portland, OR, is all organic, everything's sourdough, and they use sprouted ancient grains (locally sourced) including Einkhorn, which my gluten-free husband can eat!

Also into community-building. Every other week they have live tango lessons at night when the bakery is closed. Ole!

You might be a permie if ...

You wonder why nitrogen fixing fruit trees haven't yet taken over as major commercial orchards.

Your neighbors are digging up the black locust shoots in their yard and you, oh silly girl, are taking them home to plant.

You tried to get your county to approve a permit for your "exemplary system" of 'toilet water to drinking water' and they denied it. But years later you run into that engineer and he tells you with amazement that New Mexico is now requiring 'that crazy system you wanted to put in' for every new house built. You take some satisfaction in knowing a lot of permies are ahead of their time.

I'm on a list and this just came in. The WA Dept of Transportation is giving away FREE the big old metal trusses that held up the bridge in southwest Washington. Here's what they say. If you can use them, contact them directly.

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FREE Bridge! Looking for the perfect holiday gift for that special someone?
Public Information Officer Tamara Greenwell from Washington State Department of Transportation

https://d3dqvga78raec5.cloudfront.net/post_photos/70/26/7026bd64202a7c05b3c7cdcae9ef2a21.jpg
image bridge trussse

How about the State Route 508 South Fork Newaukum River Bridge? Located near Onalaska in Lewis County, it would make the perfect present for someone who has always wanted their own bridge, but didn’t know quite where to start.

Sure, at a rusty 86 years old, the bridge is past its prime, but we like to think it’s full of character and charm. Also, because it is eligible for historic listing, the National Historic Preservation Act requires we market the bridge to find it a new home. So, what do you think? Does this sound like the right fit for you?

We'll give you the trusses, but you'll have to move them and meet a few other conditions. Read more about the deal on our blog bit.ly/2fcyT3B or drop us a line for more information.
Tamara, 360-905-2056

Want to be our new neighbor? We're selling part of our farm. Five acres at the end of a dead end road in a rural area in our tiny village, 35 minutes from Portland, OR. Looking for folks who love and respect Nature.

Read more at this link:
http://FriendlyHaven.com/Farmland-for-sale



Who we are
Joseph and I have owned our ten acre biodynamic / organic farm for 15 years. During that time some mighty wonderful things have happened to us through living here. We learned to care for the land, animals, trees and gardens. The farm has given each of us a career — Joseph founded his horse school here. I fell in love with bees, wrote my first book ("Song of Increase: Listening to the wisdom of honeybees for kinder beekeeping and a better world") and have a honeybee sanctuary. We milk cows and goats, tend fruit trees, grow tons of food (by weight, yes, tons), make topnotch compost, and nurture friendships with exceptional people. We’ve had fun making lawn sculptures, a brick rug, garden art, beehives, greenhouses, a new barn, building grape and vine arbors and sculpting land with farm machines. We’ve planted hundreds of trees and dozens of gardens. We learned house-ly arts from carpentry to cooking, and we’ve enjoyed near every minute of it. We love living here and we'll be your neighbors.



The farm continues to present us with inspiration and opportunities for art, writing and creating. Most of what we’ve done has been on the northern part of the farm, but we noticed we don’t use the south half nearly as much. We’d like to find wonderful neighbors to buy and live on the south five acres. If you know some delightful, kind, enthusiastic folks who are incredibly respectful of nature and doggedly organic, please let them know we may be looking for them.



The land has a gently sloping southern exposure. The entrance to the land is at the SW corner at the end of the dead-end road. Three homes share the end of the road there, one directly south and two houses further west. Entry is through a wide metal gate near two century old apple trees. One tree is extra special because it was thought to be extinct for many decades until we re-discovered it. The Gideon Sweet is a marvelous “keeper” apple. It’s rock hard and tastes like cardboard in October, but if you pick and store the apples until January when they sweeten up, you won’t believe it’s the same apple. We learned to graft fruit trees so we could re-introduce the variety and now friends are growing them. The south perimeter has 60′ tall old heirloom apple and pear trees, including a fabulous yellow baking apple called the Winter Banana. Also a prolific black walnut tree and a few hazelnut trees. Land is 3.5 acres of open pasture and 1.5 acres of forest.

Click over to this page to see more photos and description:  http://FriendlyHaven.com/Farmland-for-sale

warmly,
Jacqueline & Joseph Freeman

Friendly Haven Rise Farm   http://FriendlyHaven.com
The Bee Sanctuary    http://SpiritBee.com

This is a cool idea. We have a five acre piece next door to our farm that we'd like to build an eco home on. Though I know the holy thought is to say I want to do it all myself (or with friends), actually we'd like to hire someone to do this and we'd pitch in on it. I have other projects I/we are in the process of doing, which is why we keep delaying getting started. I want to get this one underway and I think getting someone knowledgeable in on it might mean the idea moves forward into fruition.

We've been looking at eco-modular houses, and driven out to see some in WA and OR, but geez, they can get pretty pricey! We found a plan on "Green Cabin Kits" for a SIPs package called "Dogtrot Mod" that we like that's 1500 sq ft that would work for us.

How does one find an experienced permie-eco-buddy who knows how to do this? We're thinking about 15-1600 sq ft, two stories, and a 400' teaching space after that.

warmly,
Jacqueline Freeman

I have had bindweed for the past 8 years, and it's slowly expanded its area from 10'x10' to about 200' x 100'. Nothing's done much to diminish it, though I have noticed frequent mowing (which I'm not great at) seems to help, but it takes a long time to make a difference. I've been hand-pulling about 80' along our wire fence for years and I can see I've made some headway, but not really. In other words, if I continue to hand pull for 50 hours every summer, I can keep it sort of at bay.

I just mowed a few days ago and was startled what I found underneath the tall grass. On the left side of this image you'll see bindweed is the #1 prolific plant. The bindweed had been so bad here that I decided I'd plant trees (my hopeful long term solution). Once the trees were in, we pulled up every bindweed in sight and mulched with 6" of woodchips. I don't think I could have designed a better bindweed growing environment. Where we pulled it up last year, there's pretty much a solid blanket of it this year. You should probably call it "pruning" bindweed because it seemed to have given it more vigor. I'm guessing I probably TRIPLED it's production.

In the photo you can see a striking difference -- heavy bindweed on the left, NO BINDWEED on the right.

What'd I do? Last summer on the right side I mowed low, then did a light till to break through the bindweed roots, then planted buckwheat for a late season bee forage crop. The buckwheat took about two months to grow, flowered beautifully, then died back. This year I didn't do anything there, just let the grass grow over that patch and a few days ago I mowed the tall grass down. Imagine my surprise -- NO BINDWEED in that area, none at all.

So did I inadvertently find a cure for bindweed? Seems as though I did. Don't know if it's the buckwheat itself, or if the buckwheat changed the pH, or provided some mineral the soil needed that bindweed isn't fond of. Whatever it was, it worked. I planted the buckwheat densely in July during a hot spell, made sure it had enough water to get started. Then just watched it grow. Bees loved it, frost kicked it down, end of story.

Somebody else has to try this and report so we can figure out if this method works on your land, too. I'm amazed this happened. I'm about to go plant buckwheat everywhere I have bindweed.

Not everyone does initiate buys, it just falls to whoever wants to. Someone had a burning need for organic semi-sweet chocolate and geez, we all ordered once we realized we had that need, too. Because we are volume buyers, lots of places listen to us. Though we do try to support other local businesses and farmers first. So if no one in our group is doing organic peaches, off someone goes to research where we can make this happen. That's part of the fun of it, too. I didn't know I needed 50# each of organic hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews and almonds. I went in on the buy and have nuts for a year for a piddling price compared to buying retail nearby or online.

I wanted to cure my own olives but I'm too far north (WA) to grow them. (We did try with a dozen trees but over a two year span they all died.) So I ordered them from CA and we all salt or whey cured our own and I know I didn't spend $10/lb to do that, which is the going rate at my local store.

I've sold/bartered our tomatoes, apples, starts and grafts from whatever trees and bushes we grow, herbs, berries, roses and flowers, squash, melons, pears, grapes and vines, eggs, poultry, beef. I've also had some of these friends make cheese and ice cream using our ingredients. It varies each year. One of my favorites is to give a really good cook a box of stuff, including meat, and tell her to cook/freeze up a few casseroles and give us back half. Great deal for both of us.

Jacqueline

Thanks for mentioning our "system," Jocelyn. Yep, we tried the farmers market for awhile. We'd pick on Thursday, clean/package and price on Friday, get there early on Saturday to setup and spend the day selling. One day, standing there mid-afternoon with a fistful of dollars, I (foolishly) used the lull time to figure out true costs. I added up the hours we all spent doing prep and the day spent selling, and -- with paying ourselves a whopping $5/hr thereabouts, realized our TRUE PROFIT was about $64.

That was a stinging realization. For $64 I'd rather have my Thurs-Fri-Sat back. That was the last farmers market we ever did.

Instead we came up with alternatives and I like these processes better. Here's the new (non-safeway) markets we came up with. These fit with our politics and the entire process is richer in many ways, for us.

1. A woman who has a small but growing business selling ready-made meals (frozen) to people who have food allergies. [barter & cash]

2. Another woman who bakes and sells her gluten-free organic hand-pies to stores and at the farmers market. We provide apples, grown organically and biodynamically. [cash & barter, but mostly barter because I can get a delicious year's supply and I know we'll eat them all over the next six months.

3. Friends and neighbors buy eggs ($5/doz), veggie/herb starts, fresh produce. [mostly cash]

4. We barter or gift our meat (chicken and beef) for projects. When we hire someone to do a task that involves heavy machinery, we use the meat as a tip. This is a real people-pleaser and it's made a big help in service. If I called my plumber at 3am and I bet he'd be here in 20 minutes. Because we don't have USDA certification, I can't outright sell any meat, so 'gifting' it works.

5. Referrals -- We don't grow everything, so I refer a LOT to my friends who grow other stuff. Nope, not a nickel of profit here, but I love doing this. [good will]

6. Outright trades -- I got 50# of something and you have bacon. I want bacon. I don't even measure tit for tat. I figure this kind of stuff done long enough balances out and I have longstanding relationships with friends where both they and we feel we got the best situation. For years we grazed our beef and dairy cows on my neighbors fallow fields. We paid for fencing, installed it ourselves, and all he wanted was to have a year round supply of beef. We just tallied in a half a cow a year and that 'paid' our end. He thought he had the best deal (no work, free beef) and we thought we had the best deal (we didn't have to buy additional land, yahoo!). [trades]

7. My favorite arrangement [mostly cash & some trade] -- I'm in a buyers' club, a group of about 25 small scale farmers plus about 100 families, all on facebook. Each of us sets up "buys." This is an awesome system. The non-farmers choose something many of us want, like wholesale organic coconut oil, purchased in 5 gallon tubs. She finds out from the company how many gallons she needs to buy to get the wholesale price, posts it to the list and we each sign up for whatever we like. I buy 50# nuts, blueberry bushes, bulk organic chocolate at the wholesale price. Last year I bought 40 various heirloom melon starts for less than I would have paid for a half dozen seed packets and minus the work of starting them (though we do seed buys, too). The buys are all over the map and they work out really great. Non-farmers do the commodities and deal with larger companies or directly to other farmers. We farmers post and sell what we grow and it's FAR FAR easier for me to pick on the perfect day of ripeness and then post that I've got 50# of ripe heirloom tomatoes for sale today. I post it at 10am and they're sold and picked up by noontime. Oh man oh man, that's far easier than farmers market.

As farmers we pick and sell within this group and nearly everything goes out the door in quick order. I am no longer confined to picking too early or late to match up with the market or store's schedule. I have a guaranteed market for everything I grow. They get a great deal because I would rather charge $30 a bin for our organic/biodynamic apples and have the entire pick-to-sale process be done in under an hour. They get quality and fresh and it's still cheaper than a store.

As farmers, we also arrange our own sales, like an enormous tractor trailer of organic straw from the east side of WA at a kick-ass price, or bulk sales to each other for garlic bulbs or tree starts. Last year I wanted to buy some fancy cool recycled socks but they cost $20/pair, so I went to the company and asked how many socks do we need to buy to get the wholesale price. Turns out we only needed to order 100 pairs. I posted this to my group the month before Christmas and we ordered over 400 pairs. Everyone gave them as gifts and for $9/pair, they were a steal. No middleman.

My group is closed at 125 families and we have a wait list to join. I highly recommend you create more of these. I believe they are the wave of the future for farms like us.
warmly,
Jacqueline Freeman
Friendly Haven Rise Farm www.FriendlyHaven.com Spirit Bee (our bee site) www.SpiritBee.com

Paul, in my past I was on faculty for a Structural Integration school and i'm sure this would give you a lasting solution. The problem is that your underlying structure isn't supporting your body or encouraging good movement habits. I know from being around you that this was bound to happen eventually and I guess now is when. This is the work my husband Joseph does on horses, but for humans. There are different variations on the work (Rolfing, KMI, Hellerwork, SOMA, GSI) all based on the same organizing principles. Short term work that reorganizes your structure so weight bearing and movement become more optimal. The work is fairly permanent, too.

I just looked up folks who do this who are nearby. Let's talk.

warmly,
Jacqueline