We live on 16 acres and have, until now, been very light on the land. We built our house 11 years ago and have not done anything else with the land. We have always looked out the back windows and wondered when we might begin to make a garden and a kid-safe play area.

I have tried gardening the soil and the forest floor is completely unarable. If you try to even dig a small hole, the roots make the ground like iron. We also have extensive ledge that makes it hard to do much of anything but build raised beds.

In this post, I am going to show you some images of what the land looked like just after the tractor guys cleared the brush and began to ready the ground (bringing in fill, pulling stumps, etc) for the day the loam arrives.

This is what it looked like when they started to scrape away the forest floor.

We built the wood shed. Next to that we will be building the shack for the generator and then across from it the chicken/quail house/fenced in yard (we have wicked predators).

We are moving even closer now to self-grown organic veggies, meats, and eggs, year round!

This spring we are getting a slow start with planting for at least two reasons:

• I have not been too inspired to do the deck container gardening, I cant really say why, I just cant.
• We are finally getting our backyard “reformatted” so that we can build the beginning of our self-sufficiency gardens.

What I mean by that is that we will be building/installing/configuring:

• A high efficiency biomass electrical generator
• Raised beds (and later greenhouses) that will be 4 season, with the use of circulating heated hydrolics run off the excess heat from the biomass generator
• Aquaculture pools that also will be 4 season, warmed in the winter by pipes from the generator
• A heated chicken house so that we can have chickens that dont freeze half to death

I am going to use this static page as a home for photos and updates on this project. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to drop me a note via the contact form.

Check back often because this will be a fast moving project, with chicken-cams and aqua-cams, perhaps.

The backyard is where a lot of the action will be.

This is what it looked like before we got started.