21

found

Entries made in May, 2013

Dinner with Dan & Tambra

Friday, May 31st, 2013

This past February, Tyler and I received a message from a woman named Tambra who had found us via our friend Jenna's blog. She and her husband Dan live in the DC area, but visit their property in Sandgate, Vermont every chance they get. We've kept ...

May 2013, in Photos

Friday, May 31st, 2013

Little Hopper, the Bunny from Home Depot

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

While Tara and I were at Home Depot this evening, a little bunny popped out of some corrugated pipe we were buying. Both we and the little fluff-ball sat totally frozen, staring at one another for a good twenty seconds before it tore off down the ...

Buying Herbs at Shaftbury's Clear Brook Farm

Monday, May 27th, 2013

I've been aching to pursue the gardening aspect of our new homesteading life, but alas, it's far too early in the game for that sort of nesting. With large machinery passing through our future garden space at least once a week, and several vehicles...

Struck by Lightning

Sunday, May 26th, 2013

During one of the storms last week, a particularly close lightning strike took out our cheap, walmart-purchased inverter. With a resounding POP, it pushed its final electrons into a low-voltage alarm squeal that warbled for a moment, then dropped ...

Rain Rain Go Away

Saturday, May 25th, 2013

It's been raining non-stop for a week. As a result, we haven't made any progress on our our foundations. Boo! Our driveway and clearing are becoming a mud-pit, too: The only upside to all of this is that we've been able to sleep in a ...

This is David & Andrée

Friday, May 24th, 2013

We are David and Andrée, a French-Canadian couple from Québec City, and longtime readers of Going Slowly. Passionate readers should we say! In fact, we both read Tara and Tyler's story "from cover to cover", and still follow it with assiduity, lik...

A Mountain of Foam

Friday, May 24th, 2013

We received a small mountain of EPS foam for our shallow frost-protected slabs today, and getting it home was a bit of a fiasco. Our shipment was supposed to arrive on a box truck, but instead, it came on a seventy-foot-long semi. Tyler did his b...

Insulating Our Shallow Frost Protected Foundations

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

Assuming everything goes to plan, we will be pouring two shallow frost-protected concrete slabs next month. One for our grindbygg workshop, and the other for a small timber frame cottage. We've chosen this style of foundation because our land is ...

Getting Our Poop In a Group, Part Three: Finishing the Compost Bins

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

With Spring officially here, we were able to spend a day finishing the compost bins we started last winter. We decided to put them against the east side of our clearing, next to where the gardens will be. This is the first real structure we've bui...

Getting Our Poop In a Group, Part Two: Building Compost Bins

Monday, May 13th, 2013

During the first few weeks living in our camper, I'd feel a sense of impending doom every time I lifted the lid of our composting toilet: the sawdust level would be mounting, moving ever closer to the top of the container. Invariably, the sight of...

Cleaning the Drive

Sunday, May 12th, 2013

Today, we spent nearly ten hours clearing logs along the edge of our driveway. We've worked at this project on many occasions, but today we were armed with Rick's dump-trailer, and it made a world of difference. Once we had the wood chainsawed in...

Building Sites

Saturday, May 11th, 2013

So, I've been meaning to write an exhaustive journal outlining all the pros and cons of various foundation styles, why we've chosen to build frost-protected slabs for both our workshop and cottage, what they are, how they work, why we chose EPS foa...

This is Ivica

Friday, May 10th, 2013

…continued from the March 21st 2013 entry, "This is Karina". Sometimes we are all witnesses of how life can be weird and magical… On one fine spring day in 2010, my brother Sladjan came in my room asking me go outside and help him with his ...

Permitting Our Projects

Thursday, May 9th, 2013

This season, we're starting four structures: an 18'x24' timber frame workshop, a 12'x16' timber frame cottage, a small shed to house batteries and electronics for a future solar array, and another small shed to enclose our wellhead and water storag...

Getting Our Poop In a Group, Part One: Our Composting Toilet

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Last year, Tyler and I read The Humanure Handbook, a fantastically eye-opening book about how to safely compost your own waste and return it to the soil as fertilizer. The simple system this book describes uses sawdust toilets (a receptacle with a ...

Off Grid Cable Internet Access w/ Power Over Ethernet

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

I am thrilled to say that I am posting this journal entry from a high speed cable internet connection, on our land, nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont! Today was a triumphant day, and at the moment, I couldn't be happier. It feels as thoug...

The Poultry Swap

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

When our phone alarm sounds at 5:00AM this morning, the sun is already up, and a chorus of birds is cheerily chirping in our newly leafed-out woods. Excited about what lay in store for the day, we throw off the covers: it's time for the Poultry Swa...

Ticked Off

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

Today was rough. All morning and afternoon, I found myself teetering along an emotional knife-edge, often slipping into full-on freak-out mode. Instead of being thrilled to be on our land, or completely enamored by the fact that we're living our D...

We're Home!

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Back to Vermont for Keeps: Part Two

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

The last two weeks in Illinois were wonderful. Our days were filled with cooking projects, restaurant-going, game nights with friends, ambitious cleaning efforts in my parents' basement, long chats at the dinner table, and many quiet afternoons on ...