See Remez

Hi all,

I live in a small community in Washington state, rural but close enough to some metro areas that there are employment opportunities locally. We have a spot opening up at the end of April and are looking to find someone who is a good fit.

The housing available is either an on-grid 2019 27' RV or the spot it's currently parked in if you have your own rig. The RV isn't currently connected to the septic but it could be. There's a main house with shared communal space including kitchen, bathrooms, and living room.

[This post] represents a small group of friends in our twenties and thirties who have moved together to rural Washington. We are a queer community, looking for like-minded folks who would like to join us as we build permaculture systems on our property and engage in small animal husbandry. We are a relatively new community and we are in the beginning stage of understanding how we take care of each other and the land in the context of a slowly collapsing dystopia.

A few other notes about us:

We share meals regularly. We are comfortable keeping and culling animals for our own consumption and you should be too.

We are capped on dogs and no outdoor cats are permitted. If you have small livestock, we want to hear from you!

We are ultimately looking for the right person who wants to make a serious long-term commitment to this community. We have an equity ownership pathway for the right person(s).

Please reach out if this sounds interesting to you.

It's hard to justify building stuff that I don't need or that the community doesn't need just to get a badge. We also have a lot of random odds and ends around that can be repurposed...with enough nails. I know nothing about joinery, as yet.

Here's me building a bridge to go over a creek. The creek floods every spring and currently has a not-long-or-wide-enough board over it. I've fallen in the creek a couple of times and so I decided it was time for a better bridge.

Bridge building with help: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Jt8b21Yg3Tizzn9u9
Bridge over the creek: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sFUBp3vsscDno7aPA

Our garden needed a new compost bin, so we built one out of this weird crate we dug out of the forest. I don't know why these are here or what they were once used for, but we had to cut them out of the blackberry: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sFUBp3vsscDno7aPA

We covered the back of it with spare 2x2's that somebody thought would make good fence posts (they didn't): https://photos.app.goo.gl/S3TZ5NhcjQUjSogr9

We found some extra plastic netting in a shed and stapled it to the inside: https://photos.app.goo.gl/uTGx4CM3xxJ3q8xs6

We put a roof on it: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4xzozpn4u4devHDt9

We need to make more. Lots of projects to do though!

Somebody who helped me clear the forest around my RV a few weeks ago did an absolute hack job when he "chopped" down some small trees that needed to go. We have big issues here with fire danger and a lot of inappropriate species were planted on these 80 acres, so there is a lot of forestry work to do, but not a lot of tools to do it with. Last week I asked our Site manager for a lesson on how to use the chainsaw because I wanted to turn some of the trees into firewood. He failed to show up and then broke the chainsaw on a different day, so I bought my own. I basically have no idea what I'm doing and have used a chainsaw once before on a different property. I got the blade stuck in the tree.


Here's me cleaning up the hack job someone else did today, using my own chainsaw for the very first time: https://photos.app.goo.gl/FSkkyPtC2JbXJ1FN6

Here's me taking down a tree with someone else's chainsaw a few weeks ago: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hra2wZD83gL2XBRz6
The blade got stuck and I needed help, but the tree did eventually come down.

Here's me managing a controlled burn of mostly dead Himalayan blackberries on the edge of our meadow: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hra2wZD83gL2XBRz6
I had some help with this as the burn was quite large.
We don't have a wood chipper to handle the amount of material we are taking out of the forest. I bought a small electric one and it can handle diameters of up to 1.75 inches. It would also be awesome to use this stuff in hugelkultures. We have a couple of those out in the forest along a major swale project that wasn't built on contour (workshop happened before my time). We don't currently have a working tractor, so digging trenches and burying biomass is not a thing that will be happening. Burning is, ironically, one of the best ways to reduce the fire danger.

Ran into a landowner who gave me a strong nudge in this direction. He likes Paul's system, though it doesn't all apply to his property. For the most part, he's looking for agroforestry, construction/carpentry, and livestock skills. I'm currently living in a different rural location with a variety of opportunities and challenges, some overlapping with what he's looking for, so I thought I'd take advantage of the PEP framework to work on/document some skills. I don't see that the PEP skills are fully fleshed out or really organized in a way that makes sense (reading the arguments over what it takes to get a badge in textiles vs. food prep was illuminating), so I'm just going to do the stuff that I already do and document it. I figure I'll get a few badges that way no matter what.


Cook at least two cups grain (or pseudograin) in four different ways

I cooked 1 cup popcorn on a cast iron skillet using propane in these videos.

Video 1: Popcorn begins https://photos.app.goo.gl/yPu2UWk3eiGSoHKMA
Video 2: Oops https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sgvqu6yNomXRMpRdA
Video 3: Taking care of a cast iron https://photos.app.goo.gl/LstPeYznEgMNYC5K6