WWOOFing Part 3: Homesteading House Projects

Because the season isn’t quite right yet for planting at the community garden, I’ve been working at my hosts’ new homestead, which they hope to move into within a few weeks. Their property will be used to produce their food – including vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk, honey, and cheese – as well generate their own electricity, collect rainwater, and more while serving as a model for community education purposes. In general they hope to increase self-sufficiency, decrease environmental impact, and upcycle and repurpose used materials in innovative projects. But before they can tackle all these problems and get started on manifesting cool ideas they need to finish construction so I’ve been helping out with a variety of projects including painting, packing, clearing the yard of overgrown brush and saplings, moving materials such as old wood, carpet, and doors from the house that they hope to reuse, cleaning out the barn, and installing wood ceilings. We’ve also started other projects such as building compost bins out of recycled pallets which will eventually have a hinged door and closed top – though that project isn’t finished yet.

They hope to rent or borrow goats soon to chew down the remaining brush in the yard but after that we should be able to work on building garden beds and maybe even terraced plots in the back as well as start worm composting, building a small greenhouse from recycled window panes, making earth bricks, and setting up the barn for use as a workshop. I know my hosts are anxious to start all these interesting projects but I am too! I hope to be able to update you soon. But for now below are some pictures of (some of) my recent activities from the past few weeks, in no particular order: