Outskirts of Seattle, WA says hi (again)

[PennyV]

Merry Meet!

I originally just said hi in another thread, but realized upon later inspection, that everyone new started a thread of their own. Whoops.

Anyway, recycling my essay length introduction, with an update! Looks like we're on our way to maybe securing a shy 5 acre property. We're around 2 paychecks from affording to buy a house. Of course get in debt while we're at it, but at least once we get land, we can establish a little homestead with more than just a container garden.

Blessed be,
Penny

Originally Posted by PennyV

Hello Everyone, ladies and gentlemen alike.

I'm brand new as well, so I thought to hop in here and introduce myself, in stead of starting a new thread. Hopefully DZ doesn't mind. I intended a short introduction, and ended up writing an essay. My apologies.

For those skimming, you can just say I'm new,and found my way here while doing research on meat vs. lard types of pigs. I'm looking for land, and dabble in way too many things to list here, and do it with unbridled enthusiasm.

My nickname has been Penny for the past 8 or so years, so I'm happily stuck with it. The username is the same in multiple online communities, so odds are, if you see a "PennyV" on a homesteading forum, that's me. "Penny" is also my "Starbucks Alias", i.e. when my full name requires spelling, it's just simpler to give them a nickname.

I moved to the greater Seattle area from Finland roughly two years ago, when I got married to an IT guy. We're both avid gardeners, and I'm a "horse crazy housewife", who is slated to inherit my father-in-law's role as the baker of Secret Family Cookie Recipes™, as well as his parakeet some day, as I'm the only family member exhibiting interest in baking, or birds.

My background includes a 2 year stint as an elementary school substitute teacher (I must have done alright, I still get emails to ask if I'm available), service in the Finnish Defense Force Marines, and years of working security full time, and on the side, when I dallied with college studies. I have half a degree in structural engineering, and a first semester of business school under my belt, but I'm still a double college dropout, if you look at it with brutal honesty. I don't mind. I've found myself drawn consistently towards the more artisan professions, as I've matured. Right now, I daydream of apprenticing with a butcher, or a farrier, or maybe learning both trades in the next couple of decades.

On the positive side, since my husband "Mr. V" or "Hubs", when referred to, provides me with the luxury of being a housewife, and us not having been blessed with children yet, I spend my days sewing, knitting, cooking from scratch, baking, gardening in our container garden on our townhome porch, neglecting a sorry attempt of a food blog, canning, volunteering at a therapeutic riding center, and have some ambitions of losing a pant size, if I have time for the treadmill.

We live in a townhome, but are hoping to find a house some day. We're at that awkward point of having almost-but-not-quite a downpayment plus closing costs saved up, but are too close to a big city to be able to afford a "nice" house with a lot of land. Since the man who brings home the bacon gets to draw a line somewhere, our realistic homestead aspirations are limited to a smaller scale, within a sensible commute.

We want a house with 2-4 bedrooms and 1-2 bathrooms, preferably a farmhouse built before 1940, it should be livable at purchase, or livable after an FHA rehab loan and a construction crew is done with it, but doesn't have to look like a runaway from a glossy magazine, as I like putting in the finishing touches with time and thought, and some of the homes I've spent half of my childhood in, could be called "rustic", if you want to be polite to them.

We hope to get 3-10 acres, realistically, we'll probably get around 5 within our budget.

My husband wants a garden and orchard (he has a fondness for annual vegetables like tomatoes; I am just gaga for perennials, such as asparagus, rhubarb and artichokes), I want horses, poultry, bees, and with time, livestock. Neither of us grew up on a farm, but I'm not shy of learning, and I had a chance to interact with farmers enough while growing up, to not look lost around a barn, to look sort of proficient with a manure fork, and that country sensibilities, like a bottle of homebrew, or a basket of muffins when you have to visit a neighbor unannounced. My volunteer work provides me with a great learning experience in barn management. And builds up my strength, as is evident by how much faster I've gotten with wrangling hay bales in and out of the barn.

When I was a child, my sister and I were left with my grandparents for summer keeping while my single mom worked in the city. My grandmother used to bring milk, still warm from the cow, home from the neighbor's dairy barn to make yogurt from, and members of my family have hunted, fished, foraged, grown, gleaned, canned, juiced, frozen, fermented, pickled, brined and brewed a great deal of our food. I actually prefer gamey meats over the bland factory farmed varieties, as I grew up eating those. Grandparents who lived through WWII and the subsequent rationing really instilled a sense of frugality, and craftiness in me.

Our master plan is to buy a house with a bit of land, pay it off and improve the property, and either lease it to another aspiring homesteader or sell it somewhere down the road, and trade a small, expensive piece of farm-suburbia borderlands to a larger piece of land in the boonies, with enough money to spare for building a small farm or ranch from scratch.

Since I'm from a country with a climate in hardiness zones 3-5, I keep being happily surprised by what grows here, that I could never have dreamed of growing back home. I have a running list of everything we want to grow, and what we can't grow right now, I buy from the farmers' markets in my area, and can and ferment and cook from. Once we have a bigger space for food prep, I'm hoping to get more food processing gadgets for increased food independence.

All in all, we're hopeless dreamers, and I'm on a quest for more information, before, during, and after we take the plunge, as I want my "hobbies" to pay for at least part of our mortgage, and provide 50-100% of our food.

And so, that is, in a (large) nutshell, the life of Penny

[KatSchultz]

Welcome aboard! I am pretty new here, too. I don't post often but I am in-love with the information I am able to gather off of these forums! People are quick to help and answer questions.

It sounds like you've got your life planned out. Everything that you're aspiring to be is amazing! I wish more people were interested in being frugal and learning to live off of themselves and their land!

I came from a very frugal family setting growing up. Cooking was a big thing in the home... My grandma had 15 kids, most of which never grew up (it's a good thing most of the time!) and took care of 4 of her grandkids (me included)! You can imagine the toll it took on her financially. But, there was never anything I got hands-on with when it came to making it on my own or living off the land. So homesteading is certainly very new to me.

My husband had a somewhat similar experience, although his family had more money than mine. My husband's family was much smaller and while they were not big spenders, he never had to appreciate a new pair of shoes! Yet again, his life did not include any type of farm living or gardening, DIY work, etc.!

We got the saving money part in the bag... The learning to upgrade the house we bought and gardening, canning, all of that is totally new to us! So I really envy your upbringing and experience!

[PennyV]

I'm not the kind to post frequently, but an account comes in handy for asking questions, and there are times I feel like yabbering a little here and there.

My upbringing is one thing, but applying what everyone around me was doing when I was a kid, versus actually doing it, without someone holding your hand, is still going to be a challenge.

Because of the time difference, it's not unheard of, that I stay up to past midnight so my grandmother's done with breakfast at her end, and call her for a recipe. I have that resource of information available, so I'm doing my best to learn what I still can. Next time I see her in person, she gets to show me how to knit a sock heel, as she's the only right-handed person I've met, who could teach me to knit and crochet without my left-handedness being an issue to either of us.

[PennyV]

Update! We are within days of closing, and mere weeks from moving onto our very own homestead. Sure, we'll be housepoor, but we'll have a livable house on a small acreage, consisting mostly of a 6 acre blackberry thicket.

[Traffic gal]

congratulations and GOOD LUCK! hope to have similar news in a little over a month

[CrazyMooseFarm]

Awesome for you and yours!!

You could train those blackberries to some fencing, though you'll still need to tye them each year. If ya got the good soil, lucky. If its more of the cement stuff, when ya build ya raised beds make sure ya have drainage in the ground too, my sister forgot that part and the water oozed back up and the smell got bad.

Plant lots of raspberries, they sell great, just not the tulameen ones too tart, caroline is
sweeter.

[PennyV]

Thanks for the tips, Crazy Moose. Although we get rained on a lot, we're really blessed with a pretty good property, drainage-wise. (Don't worry, I was planning on putting in French drains under the garden when we finally get to terracing it more permanently)

So if you guys want to know, I can share some ideas and inspiration we're going by. I just think it'll spare my husband's ears for a few!

So dreaming out loud, without saying this is what we end up doing... Apart from my horse hobby, which doesn't provide an income stream right now, we're probably going to end up with a 3 acre market garden/orchard with a greenhouse, that caters to Seattle area restaurants (not to forget my Southern French/Northern Italian/All'round Scandinavian "fusion" kitchen), 3 acres of pasture and barns, and one acre of woods, where I've got a hunch that I can encourage mushrooms and ramps and such to grow, for that little extra income.

Of course, any sane homesteader starts by planning. I've been hitting the books for a long, long while before we ended up buying land. Now I get to re-read everything. We went to a print store, and printed up the aerial view of our property, and had it laminated. We've been using dry erase markers to sketch out what we want, and how much of it, and I have to say, that idea is definitely saving us from marital strife. We can doodle our ideas and suggestions onto the property.

I love the idea of adding more raspberries, if they really sell well. My husband is really, really, really big into raspberries, so I was planning on planting a lot of those anyway. Now I have an excuse to plant more of them. I want to get rid of the blackberries. Even more so, because to tie them to fences would require me to have fences first. We want to plant an orchard and berry bushes during the first year. I've got a passion for steam juicing (it's an extraction method developed in my native Finland, that preserves nutrients), so having Aronia and Blackcurrants and other "obscure" berries to juice can be a relatively quick way of adding a value added product (juice concentrates for the health-minded Seattleites) to the little farm's income stream. Everyone's always looking for the next superfruit, and I'm going for it.

Another project for the first year is to rehab the existing chicken coop and put up the chicken run, and establish a good compost heap. Any other stuff we can pull off is a bonus.

Essentially, year #1 will have to be mostly planting of trees that can take years to be established, and establish a garden patch in the thicket that we hope to convert into a terraced garden somewhere further down the road... Sort of in the style of old English walled gardens, with a greenhouse on top. The photo that inspired our compromise is the greenhouse. The other garden patches are more my idea of a garden, a bit more whimsy among the orderly, like wattle raised beds and such.

Our property slopes all the way through. At the steep end in the northernmost corner, we're looking at a total elevation change of almost 80 feet on what is 300ft of width on the property. That means we have an average angle of 15º where we want our garden and orchard. For the pastures, riding arena and paddocks, I'm dibsing the end of the property that has a gentler slope. Not because critters can't handle it, but because it's cheaper to build on "flat".

The great thing is, I've got access to manure and wood chips affordably, so I can start suppressing weeds and starting up a vegetable patch.

I'm going to start up a blog for yabbering about the little farm and all related projects, but it won't be up and running until January at earliest.

(I've never tried uploading photos before, so if it doesn't work, it's the blonde at work.)

[CrazyMooseFarm]

When you rehab the chicken coop do sanitize it before adding new birds.

Ive never tasted currants. My granddad always talked about elderberries. He grew corn until he couldnt anymore, he gave it to the food bank and got credit to help him with taxes.

Blueberries grow well here.

Im curious, did you stay in seattle's county or go to snohomish. Im near covington, taxes in this area are high and we're in the county. Theres a 19 acre parcel nearby for sale and the yearly taxes are 18,000.

Finland. Is it cold year round? My favorite ice hockey player is Niemi, he's from Finland.

French drains sound like the best choice with having horses.

[PennyV]

I was going to scrub the coop, bleach the crap out of it, air it out, whitewash the inside, paint the outside, and put in deep bedding. All feeders are a rusty mess, and the nesting boxes look like a tetanus infection waiting to happen. Clearly, it's been out of use for a while. And I have to build some kind of run or enclosure outside the coop, before buying chicks or pullets. I'll probably get a small chicken tractor going to help kickstart the garden plot. We'll see. One thing at a time.

We're in Snohomish county, going to pay about $3400 per year in taxes, and that's before any improvements to the land, that is former pasture, overgrown with blackberries. It's a long way to go before we can make an income off the land.

You might be able to find a jam in the Bonne Maman lineup made of "Cassis". That's blackurrants. It's not uncommon to put blackurrant jam on chicken stew types of dishes where I grew up. The juice, when warmed up, is my favorite home remedy for colds.

As far as Finland goes, they had their first snow about a week ago. (Edit, I grew up in USDA hardiness zones 4 and 5, if you look at a map of European hardiness zones. We had some of the northernmost hazel trees in Europe. I can't remember ever getting a harvest from them, the season was too short). I don't do hockey, and don't keep track of players. Girls like me are more into figure skating.

[CrazyMooseFarm]

I will look for that jam.

3400 for taxes with acreage sounds right. I live on just under an acre and the taxes are just less than 3400. But then im in king county, priciest county in the state.

I lived in monroe during the bad flood year when all those farmers lost cows. I think i have cousins in duvall, in a really big old farmhouse. Though that was several years ago, i dont know if they are still there.

[PennyV]

We're getting appliances in this week, and moving in the week after!

We've met two of our neighbors (both the horse properties, that share the two longest property lines of our squished five-sided property with us), and I'm liking them. Which is good, the couple up the hill from us sold us our house, and they took a net loss with the transaction. They actually helped us figure out the property lines, brought us a box with all their records for the house, and invited us over to their place next week.

Our old fence line is 25 feet inside the property line, so I'm going to have to bushwhack about quarter acre more of blackberries to get through to where the new fence should be. Or pay someone to come and do it for me. The sellers went through the trouble of having the property surveyed, after a neighbor thought their woodcutting crew was clearing off her property and threatened to call the sheriff. That's good. I wouldn't want to deal with that thing. Supposedly they're the only unpleasant neighbors who share a property line with us, but I'll try to form my own opinion about it. Turns out, her fence is 100 feet on her side of our property line, so if we wanted to be mean jerks, we could pursue that legally through adverse possession. We'd get another half acre or so of unused blackberry thicket, and bad neighborly relations. I'll just go with a fence along the surveyed property line (minus maybe the width of a tractor for keeping the fence line cleared of blackberries), to keep the peace.

Some good things... We found out there's an underground river running through our land. I sort of want to figure out if it's legal for me to put in a shallow well shaft and a pump, so I can use it for irrigation, or if the quality is high enough to be potable, for watering animals. The squatters who used to live in the house while it was technically "vacant" for the past decade did that, I'm told. That'll be a project for the future. The first recorded permits for our house are from 1945, but there were indications that it may have been sitting there since the 30's. We have shiplap behind the drywall in the 2 story main part of the house. The one story 50's additions on each side of the main house were so poorly built that they were "torn to the studs, then we threw out the studs, too". What saddens me a bit, is that they didn't keep the fireplace foundation. I'll have to postpone my dream of a woodstove. We have a propane fireplace with a battery operated pilot light.

For the garden area, it sounds like I've got as much manure as I need for my garden if I need it, a fellow, slightly stir crazy housewife who loves company up the hill from us, and generally nice neighbors, one of whom owns a small wedge of property that is within our fence line, but they're supposed to be really nice about the use of that plot, maybe even open to selling it to us in the future, if we're lucky. Every neighbor seems to be interested in helping me mow blackberries with their bigger tractor until I can buy my own, so I'm guessing there will be a lot of baked goods changing hands in exchange for a neighbor mowing blackberries every few weeks during the growing season.

[PennyV]

We got a big surprise amidst all the moving and settling into our new home! We're going to get an addition to our family sooner than we thought; I'm expecting a baby! I've been happily oblivious of any pregnancy symptoms until last week, carrying heavy moving boxes, riding cantering horses, and doing all sorts of normal physical activities that "civilized" folks think is harmful for babies.

[CrazyMooseFarm]

Congratulations.