Heirloom Homestead: August 2009

Since we’ve moved out here, I’ve had several friends, acquaintances & family members express interest in buying their own piece of property. I highly recommend it, for countless reasons. The number one reason is the fact that I so often feel like I’m on a permanent vacation the pace is so much slower here. Once Jeff is able to quit his city job, he can also enjoy this perma-holiday feeling. For now, he vacillates between learning how to slow down on the weekends and feeling the usual city/suburban rush during the week.

Then there’s also the potential for supplying a lot of your own organic food, keeping animals for food or pleasure, having your kids grow up without the heebie-jeebies over every single bug that flies next to them, crawls over their bed or even lands on their plate! Opportunities for exercise are abundant, as are opportunities to shop locally, learn all the different regional birds, collect wildflowers and wild edibles, track different mammals, or just sit and have sun tea on the back porch.

It can be a lot of work, and it’s certainly not always idyllic, but the benefits far outweigh the irritation. I suppose those of you who are interested in moving out to more land already suspect this.

So, I must urge you to do it now.

Recently I had the opportunity to research our state’s Multiple Listing Service to see what land prices were like in our area and I was floored to discover that the value of our lot had increased to nearly double its value since we bought it. The reason we moved “this far out” (as my family members like to say) was plain and simple: land prices. We couldn’t get the land we wanted at the price we wanted to pay unless we were willing to drive for it. And when we moved here, our land was considerably cheaper per acre than land in the other two states that make up our tri-state area.

Now, though, they say the Amish are moving in and driving up land prices. I don’t know. All I know is that when we purchased ours, we paid $3300 an acre, give or take. It’s now going for $5000 to $10,000 an acre. Back nearer to my hometown, the more rural outskirts were already at $10,000 an acre when we bought this lot. They’ve now moved closer to $15,000 or even $20,000. Farther north, I’ve not priced simply because that state has some fairly bureaucratic homeschooling laws I never wanted to mess with.

I think it’s amazing that you can still buy farmland so cheaply in this country. Obviously we still have more land than our population needs. If we were in, say, England or Ireland or France or Greece, would the farmland be this cheap? Could we have ever afforded an abundance of fertile land as a one-income family whose sole provider was a blue-collar hourly worker? I have no idea, honestly. But I don’t think it will last like this here forever. If it’s already doubled in 3 years, then act! Act now! Act as soon as you have money! I won’t mention it again, over and over. I won’t be a broken record on this -- promise! -- but you’ve been advised and urged.

Now, what have we been up to? The garden is still coming in, and we’re still waiting on tomatoes to ripen. I canned pickle relish today. I want to can hot pepper relish tomorrow. We are searching for an old hard-sided wrecked, gutted, moldy and/or rodent-infested camper that we can turn into a mobile chicken coop for the ladies for the winter. If you have any connections, please let us know!

Jeff built the dogs a pen and finished his fence, finally. He’s glad to have that project off his plate. We’re gearing up for school to start soon.

My magpie is sitting up fully without support now and she has two bottom teeth. My Sassy must have given her hers, since she has two missing.

I collected grapevines this week to make a wreath and was so pleased at how it turned out! While allowing myself to practice flowing, I finally gave into the urge to start decorating instead of putting it off to be “a winter project.” The deck looks especially lovely.

I planted fall vegetables in the raised bed in front and two herb gardens, one for cooking and one for tea. Sassy has been into herbal tea lately, so we wanted to start a tea garden.

And that about wraps up the homestead as of late. I’ve had little alone time to write lately, but Jeff starts first shift again next week, so a change in routine might allow for more me-time again soon. Enjoy the pics!

the new dog run