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I just read this thread and love it and have a bunch of thoughts, not terribly well organized. What area of Virginia are you talking about? South/east Virginia is hot and humid like the rest of the southeast and much of the advice for sustainable homemade hippie houses I see seems to assume you live in a very cold or very dry place. Evaporative cooling, for instance, pretty much stops working when it is humid in the summer, and mud houses don't work that well if you get 50" of rain every year. Northern/western Virginia or the Shendandoah valley are a cooler climate and your focus is going to be more on lowering your heating costs but it still gets plenty hot in the summer. Also pick your county carefully as far as property taxes go-there's plenty of otherwise profitable farmers in Loudon county selling out to developers because they can't pay the property taxes that are twice what they are in the rest of the state. Living way out in the sticks is awesome, but having to drive half an hour to a grocery store takes some getting used to if you're used to a more urban life. You mention not wanting to cut trees-I get that, but a wood burning stove is excellent free/cheap heat, is basically carbon neutral (you're gonna grow more trees, I promise) and getting firewood is a great workout. 5-10 acres of woodlot well managed will keep you supplied with wood literally forever. A wood stove is also wonderfully homey and comfortable to be around. I get hating clearcuts too-they're very ugly and not great for the soil- but because of intensive forest management practices like plantations and clearcutting, America today has as much forest as 100 years ago, but grows five times the volume of timber in that acreage and continues to grow more than is used. Those trees were probably planted 30 years ago so they could be clearcut today. Trees/wood are basically the most renewable/carbon neutral building material/natural resource we have and they unfortunately have to come from somewhere-even your backyard. Sort of on that note, log houses are totally awesome, but aren't great in areas with hot summers, and since we are not in frozen Scandinavia and you're not going to make your log cabin out of old growth heart pine or white oak, it would probably rot in a hurry. Also termites if you're in southern/eastern VA. Most fruit trees are grafted not to dwarf them (though plenty are grafted to dwarf rootstock for that purpose) but because most fruit trees don't come true from seed. The only way to get a Mcintosh apple tree is a grafted cutting which is a grafted, identical clone of the original Mcintosh apple. If you plant a Mcintosh apple seed, you will get an apple, but it almost certainly won't be a Mcintosh apple, and it may or may not be delicious. If you want to make cider and just have some apple trees, go wild and plant seeds and turn all your sour apples into cider. It's also pretty hard to grow a lot of fruit on trees without a lot of spraying nasty stuff in the eastern US because of various endemic diseases. I know you want to be friends with the chipmunks and groundhogs, but those fuckers will tear up your garden and the fruit off your trees. Michael Pollan has a great chapter in Second Nature about his war with the chipmunks that's worth reading along with the rest of the book. Plant some black walnut trees (not near your garden-they kill tomatoes and other stuff) if you don't already have them-they love to grow in Virginia. Collect nuts from around a tree and plant them-they're easy. The nuts are good, they are good shade trees, they grow pretty fast in decent soil in the sun, they're great firewood, and in 50 years you can cut them down for lumber for some pretty good money. I don't know if they do as well in northern/western VA but chinese chestnuts are also great nut trees. Totally bulletproof, but the pollen kind of stinks in the spring and the nuts leave spiky little husks behind. Deer love them-if you hunt it's a good tree to have around. You could probably grow hazelnuts too, but I have no personal experience with it. You're gonna want to learn to pickle/can stuff or eat cabbage all winter. A basement/root cellar is a great thing to have if you can stuff. Horse poo poo is great fertilizer and even better for soil texture and get all you can and work it into your soil, but it is weedy as, well, poo poo. Be prepared to solarize/till a few times in the heat of summer and still have to weed like crazy for a few years. You do like weeding, right? I think that all accidentally came across very negatively- not trying to rain on your parade or anything, just some other things you might want to think about. Having a real farmer for a father is a tremendous asset you should use as much as you can.
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Jan 5, 2019 03:35
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I don't know anything about aeroponics, but it sounds like tech bros 'disrupting' farming. What's wrong with good ole fashioned dirt? What's the supposed advantage of aeroponics vs hydroponics vs dirt?
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Apr 1, 2020 14:53
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I think terracing the back yard would be a good idea (or just do sort of raised beds, but like stairs instead of actually doing much digging?). I don't think your soil is as bad as you think-just look at all those big, happy, mature trees! Virginia red clay isn't bad soil at all, it just needs a little organic matter and nitrogen and you have to be a little careful about digging in it when it's really wet. Your irises look very happy! Those may well be dwarf, subdivision landscaping azaleas that aren't going to get very big ever. As you seem to be interested in native plants, the mostly evergreen azaleas common in the south aren't actually native-they're native to Japan. However, they do very well here and aren't invasive and have a long pedigree of use in the south, and honestly might as well be native. There are tons of similar plants from east asia that do very well here that got separated from their american cousins by the ice ages and continents moving around etc. There are also native azaleas, but they're mostly deciduous and substantially more particular than the indicas you currently have. I like the idea of blueberries in the low spot by the driveway-they are a handsome and tasty plant. Unless everything is way huger than it looks in the pictures, I don't think your lot is 3/4 of an acre. It's maybe a quarter of an acre, judging by the pictures? An acre is ~44,000 sq. ft if that helps. It doesn't really matter, I just didn't want you to start dumping lime on your yard as if it were 3/4 acre and kill everything or something terrible.
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May 1, 2020 02:25
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His Divine Shadow posted:You got some insane loving taxes in the US for being such a tax-adverse country. There is no way in hell we could afford taxes like that, home ownership would be impossible on our salaries (~30k € for me, SO studies but might earn around the same when she starts working full time). We make pretty average salaries for Finland.
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May 28, 2020 14:15
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