In 2007 my best friend Ginny and I bought five acres of land, ten miles east of the pacific coast town of Manzanita, Oregon. Our goal is to create low-impact off-grid housing and a small permaculture farm, an education center, a place to stage the revolution, one fistful of dirt at a time.
In the beginning there were blackberry vines, and there are still blackberry vines. Wicked and tenacious, every few weeks we chop them from the fields only to watch them magically spring from the stubble.
So we fenced in the stubble.
...and tilled the stubble,
...and bought pigs to eat the roots of the stubble.
If you've never been amazed by a chicken, you may not have looked close enough.
This cute little chicken is called a brightlight banty, perched on my girlfriend Jackie.
Water from the creek, home built hydraulic ram pump
Solar power
Outdoor kitchen
Wood fired bath tub
We stripped a rotted and bug infested little shack down to it's bones,
and replaced it with something much nicer.
We were given a free 24' diameter Pacific Yurt to live in. Attractive, insulated, spacious, and cheap, it was everything we were looking for. A habitable engineered structure with a very light footprint on the land. Then, one day we arrived to find a little red tag on the yurt platform ordering us to stop work immediately. Busted! Over the next two months we discovered that it is illegal in Clatsop County to live on your own land in anything other than a code approved house. No tents, no trailers, no teepees, no huts, no mud houses, no tree houses, no yurts. No exceptions. We dissasembled the platform and began work on a small, code approved house.
Unlike the Yurt, even our small house requires a lot of excavating, concrete, wood, metal, and energy intensive toxic crud. More than anything it requires a lot of money. Borrowing money to build the house made us both feel queasy. The irony is that when we finish the code house then we can build our cob houses and yurts as auxilliary structures and live in them.
Otis, our framer, building the roof.
The greenhouse at dawn, when finished this will be the new boat building shop, complete with garden beds, solar and hydro electricity, and a wood fired hot tub to burn the scraps and store heat. Onion Peak in the background.
A rare winter moonlit night, timed exposure with my DSLR.
Our greenhouse / kitchen in the moonlight.
My halloween pumpkin, click here to see me carve it exclusively with power tools.
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