Paul Pham

Hello from over a year later! I am a teacher who lives in Olympia during the school year and loves permaculture, mushrooms, composting, and biking.
Are you still around and looking for permie connections?

Timothy Norton wrote:I wish I had a bigger plot of land not located in a village so I could utilize wood heat for my boiler instead of relying on oil. One day!

You might be able to import or truck in waste wood or wood pellets at the same price as oil, depending on your location. Maybe when you're oot and aboot your village, see if there are any fallen trees you can take off your neighbors hands 😉

Nancy Reading wrote:Hi Paul and welcome to Permies! I hope you find yourself a place that suits.

Thank you, I'll post more here and see if there is any interest in a land trust / cabin-village-building collective, as I build my chops, (or chop by builds? no) in this area.

Hans Quistorff wrote:Welcome Paul:
I will be so near and yet so far.   People have a hard time understanding the geography here and AI refuses to consider anything but a circle around a dot on the map.  I am on a long peninsula running from North to South and you will probably be on the peninsula running from south to north so we may be less than ten miles apart but 90 miles to drive from one to the other.  Can you live on a boat?  That is one inexpensive option for this area.  In that case you could just move your habitat to the park dock during school breaks and be in walking distance of my farm.

Thanks for the suggestion and hello neighbor. I didn't consider living on a boat until now, but compared with land buying and rent prices, it would be roughly equivalent to get a used yacht and rent a slip in a marina. Hmm...

I will keep looking into it and developing plans, and in any case, would love to visit your farm.

I lived on some land in the Arizona high desert for one winter, and spent most of my time gathering wood from fallen trees. The climate was very arid, so junipers would grow very crooked, without extra watering beyond 12 inches of rain each year (mostly in summer), but ponderosa pines or anything else substantial for milling / construction was a no-go.

I was allowed to gather over 40 acres, and I steadily depleted / cleared about 2000 sq.ft. (liberal estimate) of fallen wood around me and my makeshift rocket mass heater over 4 months. It was a J-tube, so no burn barrel or super-efficient pyrolysis was happening, and my shipping container was un-insulated.

Once I left for a month and then returned and noticed some regrowth of the living trees around me.

Assuming no regrowth and same rate of harvesting, I would deplete all fallen wood in 7.25 years. I would be interested how long it takes Junipers to mature or die in this climate, which would determine whether I would consider wood a sustainable source in this situation.

Hi permies,

I'm a teacher moving to Olympia in a few weeks to teach at The Evergreen State College for the next two school years.
I'm a permaculture and composting enthusiast, and I'm renovating a house in Detroit currently and in the summertimes, building up skills and inspiration to build my own tiny cabin / house.

Is there community land near Evergreen in Olympia where a permie can rent  a place to live or work / trade as a way for new members to join and get to know the land and its inhabitants? I've lived in a shipping container with limited solar power and had to haul in my own water before, so I'm okay without a lot of creature comforts, and okay with helping to build more facilities for everyone who lives on land.

Paul