… or what have we NOT? (That might be a shorter list)
Here’s a short photo-tour of the happenings this spring:
That’s it, pretty much. We’re growing bunnies, ducklings, piglets, and a calf, besides our regular posse of children. Babies all over!
Summer has been very, very busy. I write something in my head, and before I have a chance to sit and write it out, something else happens that is Even Better, and causes the previous thing to be uninteresting. Right now, chickens are The Thing, but we’re hoping to get the cows moved in before the end of the month, and maybe ducks next week. Goats need to be here before the end of the month. And everything takes longer than we expect, and requires at least twice as much talking as we anticipate, but the things we do are so much better together than they would be if we were making decisions individually. Here’s a few pictures of what’s happened over the summer:
And now, I think you’re mostly caught up. We are having Such A Good Time.
I was going to call this “On Construction” but we haven’t really constructed any buildings yet.
But we are getting things done! Really!
With Jasmine’s help we have moved our Big Steel Boxes that I mentioned here back in May when we got the property (Wow! Only 2 months!) onto our boneyard. (Erin already covered this, but still! Berm, yard, gravel pad for the boxes. Plus, our stuff!)
Now, the first pic in that post was the Sunriver sign at the gate. Well, we couldn’t leave it like that, so with some chalkboard paint and chalk, and a ladder, and Christiana’s artistic flair, now that sign looks like this:
But wait, that’s not all! We need roads to get places, and we have a creek( really just runoff flowing down a trench) which means we will need a bridge. So, prep for a road and bridge:
Sounds like lots, and it is, but there is more! Those darn pesky fields keep growing grass! Oh wait, it’s a farm, that’s a good thing. If you can get it into bales. So, a quick call from Tony to Roger Hodgkins, who has been haying these fields for years, and the hay has been cut, dried, turned over and dried some more. Now it is in rows waiting to be baled. Which I hope happens today! To be followed by moving the bales (let’s see if I survive that!).
Of course, we still have a farm with no hookups to power, gas, water or any of those things. But we do have the ball rolling on that. In fact, We have a well in the process of being drilled right now. The steel casing through the sand and gravel and clay is actually more expensive than drilling through bedrock!
There is also the barn which is being prepped to hold hay and livestock. (Will we have cows?) Christiana ran into a young couple that have done WOOFing, and they helped out by clearing the rotted boards from the barn floor, removing the bee nests, and leveling the dirt floor. Thanks Tomas and Naomi!
The bees actually cleaned up, and you might not notice them now. Which reminds me, I have to flag that, so they don’t get stepped on!
That’s it for now, but more to come, as we get there. You know what I mean 😉
Scott.
The Bees have completely moved, so I don’t need to flag them.
Drilling still going, down to the 80-100 foot range…
(updated tags and Categories)
We’ve had the marvelous and adept Jasmine at our farm, for the past little while, and she drives Big Machinery.
Jasmine has scraped away the two inches of soil on top of the driest and least living part of our farm, so we can use the space for materials storage and parking. She built an earth berm, filled with brush and old wood, so we have a bit of privacy and delineation (dogwalkers like to know where to go, and we made a nice path) in the short term and a decent place to grow things (hugelkultur!) after a wet winter. We had our containers delivered, on to cement blocks on top of carefully leveled (by Jasmine) gravel. Of course, the containers weigh an average of 15,000 lbs apiece, and so they crushed the cement blocks immediately and settled comfortably on the gravel. Due to Jasmine’s expert leveling job, we didn’t need to do any adjustments to the ad-hoc, not quite-as-planned delivery.
We’re planning to make a roof between them, for a workshop space and materials storage. Solar panels on the roof, though that plan is still developing and may change.
Having some heavy machinery on site definitely makes things go faster. We’ve discovered that the bottom-most field, where there isn’t much growing but trailing blackberries, patchy grass, and alders, was used as a dump site for excess rocks and gravel. “Lots of road-base!”, declared Jasmine happily.
We’ve got a second berm underway, and a proto-goat-yard. We’ve planned two minimalist access roads (though no road is minimalist with Jasmine around – she has to make sure it’s level, and won’t get potholey or mucky, and probably has to dig down a meter or so and add some of our newly uncovered road base to make sure it will continue to be a road. “I’m just returning the land to what it was, before those developers messed around with it!”, says Jasmine, “And don’t you want it to look nice? How about a nice road, here, and clearing out all that brush?”. She’s an artist with a backhoe, and it’s awfully nice to have her, even if I have to keep convincing her that some of the plants are fine just where they are.
Great Things Are Afoot!
Sometimes it’s so hard to stop doing fun things in order to document them.. but now, we have a new format!
We painted over our “For Sale” sign in chalkboard paint. Of course, for the reason enumerated above (also a distinct lack of ladder), we have not yet written on it. But we will!
The wonderful thing about having lots of people is that when a project is started, it can move ahead very quickly. The tricky thing about having lots of people is that there is a lot of talking, considering, and (necessary) faffing about to do before projects are started. From this vantage point, I know that we’ve been doing a lot of work, but it’s mostly been the talking sort of work that, as of yet, has little to show for it.
Here’s some things that have happened, though: we have a small RV on site, so that kids have a place to play and so that we have a locking place to store tools. We have done more of the cleaning necessary to make the two existing structures more useful. We’ve determined where our shipping containers are going to go. We’ve built a fire pit and had a number of fires. An hugelkultur earth berm has been started, both to absorb some rotting lumber and to make a nice privacy border on one side. We’ve had a lot of meetings with Interested People to help us determine some next steps. We’ve started a fort for the kids, using living alder trees. More things, I’m sure, but that’s what comes to mind.
All good stuff, and all leading in the direction we want to go. Decisions happen slowly, but that way we know that they’re good decisions. Our whole is more than the sum of its parts, and we do good work together. We’re all looking forward to doing some camping this summer and really sinking our teeth into all the things that we want to get done.
We’re almost there! We’ve finished all the documentation for inco-operation, and sent it off to the Office in Victoria on the 7th. We were hoping to get it back soon enough that we can change the dates on our contract, and get started a little early, but it looks like that’s not going to happen.
And now: waiting.
Over the past year, this merry band has sold our suburban houses, moved to Sooke, and figured out how to live together in a too-small house.
On Friday, our fabulous realtor held our hands while we crafted an offer on a piece of land that we’ve been looking at for a while. We made our final agreement with the sellers last night, and are signing papers in about five minutes.
It’s a lovely almost-riverside space with fields on two levels, woods, an old foundation from the original homestead, and a few seasonal creeks.
Almost 12 acres, no buildings (except for an old falling-down barn-shed-thing.
We have been working with a co-op developer on the incorporation of our landholding division (Quiet Day Land Co-op, as per Arundati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”). Our developer thinks that we can be done in a month, so that’s when we remove subjects on the land, and focus our efforts on the working co-op (Cast Iron Farm Co-op).
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t go visit in the meantime.. and perhaps start the difficult work of naming places more imaginatively than we have to date.
Small piece of news: we have engaged the services of a highly-recommended co-op developer, who thinks that we can have things sorted enough to actually move forward Very Soon. Meetings are going well, and everything that we learn about co-operatives suggests that this mode of business would require very little contorting to shape into the kind of thing that would work for us. We were initially going to go with a corporate model, but after speaking with some folks that are familiar with co-ops it looked like we’d be contorting a corporate entity into something very like a co-op. It made sense to start out with an organizational model that was closer to our desired end point. A corporate model is very flexible, but we don’t think we’ll need all those options.
We have a name: Cast Iron Farm Co-operative.
And now, to finish up work on those last few hard bits, for which we appear to have needed a deadline.
Onward!
We are two families and one bachelor, who decided that we were done with the rat race and curious about exploring the feasibility of living in a way that was more in line with our values. We are concerned about food security, climate change, and the negative impact our lifestyles are having on the world. Some of the parents wanted to spend more time with their children, and some of the parents wanted to spend more time in the company of other adults: thus the Mad Plan was born.
The Mad Plan: to incorporate a company, buy land, and use that land to grow as much of our own food as possible, allowing us to work in traditional jobs as little as possible. If we found that an aspect of this project was particularly fun and lucrative, we would grow food for sale so that those that wanted to could quit their city jobs. If we found that it was not fun, we would use our multiplicity of talents to figure out how to be our own employer in another field (Employment counselling? Permaculture planning? Teaching? Building? The future is full of possibilities in creating a patchwork existence.)
We toured parts of BC, met some wonderful people that showed us the best of where they live, and did their utmost to convince us to be their neighbours; we wanted to live next to all of them! In the spring of 2013, however, we went to Sooke, and fell in love. We loved the people we met, we loved the proximity to family, and we loved the way that, if a person even seemed to hint at wanting to cross the road, cars stopped. A long growing season, plenty of moisture (for the west-coast-born moss-dwelling rain-lovers in our crew), and a vibrant local food movement sealed it; Sooke was the place for us.
In the summer of 2013, each family sold their house in Coquitlam, shed many of their worldly possessions and packed the rest into a shipping container, and moved to the Sooke Potholes campsite. After a few weeks, we met a lovely person that was agreeable to us camping on her lawn and sharing her kitchen and bathroom. Living outside got colder, darker, and wetter, and though the moon was lovely and the company congenial we decided that we’d rent a house in Sooke for the winter.
In our minds, we would move to Sooke, find property to buy, and then.. have a wonderful life. The inbetweenness of this current time, once we’d sold our houses but not yet bought anything, was not a big part of our planning. Living in close quarters is working well, and provides lots of opportunities to talk about plans and dreams, work on our social contracts, and learn to live together. This house, however, is not where we plan to stay, and is definitely a little cramped for 10 people. We all want to start building and digging, growing and learning; living in this liminal space is an exercise in patience.
We have a few properties in Sooke that we’re looking at, but we’re all wanting to get a few details ironed out before we make any offers. We are all getting along well, given the close quarters, but we all want to know what will happen if someone decides that they want to leave. We also want to have a legal structure to buy the land, and to figure out how (should they want it) we can easily pass ownership on to our kids.
We initially thought (due to the advice of our marvelous and thorough family lawyer) that we would go with a generic corporate structure, but after talking to the BC Co-op Association and a lawyer that was more knowledgeable about co-ops, we are thinking that a co-op structure would suit our needs better. We’re talking to an accountant to see how to best meet our need to avoid unnecessary paperwork, and a Co-op Developer to help with figuring out the legal structure. And soon, we hope, we will be done with all this boring stuff and on to actually Getting Started.
And that’s where we are, right now. Are you thinking about doing something like this? Do you know of anyone we should talk to? Want to correct my use of The Semicolon? Comment on, folks, comment on.