So yeah, we have been away for about 6 months. We are deeply sorry for having to postpone our projects. Although we were not busy posting projects for you to see, we were quite busy. In fact, we have been away so long you probably don’t believe we bought a house…well we come with proof! A picture to be precise.

Our new house!

Since we moved, we had to tear down all our systems and attempt to put them back in the new house. We finished reinstalling the rain water collection system this weekend. Lucky us, it rained yesterday and the rain barrels are full again. We now have water for our new garden. The sand filter is attached to the top of the rain barrels like we had last time. This seemed to work out really well for us.

Image of the rain water collection system hooked up to the gutter on the new house.

We have also been building a new garden in our back yard. This is so that we can grow larger plants that might be too cumbersome to grow indoors. We now have 8 raised bed gardens in the back yard and plan on making all the landscaping of the house out of edible plants. To this endeavor we have started numerous large trays of food crops indoors. Once the sprouted vegetable plants are large enough, we will transplant them outdoors to the garden beds.

Plant starts: tomatoes, onion, herbs, cabbage, celery, loofah, artichoke, peppers, and strawberries!

Here is the garden we started in order to grow larger food crops that cant be grown indoors.

The aeroponics system is on the redesign again. We are going to use sprayers this time to see if this prevents clogging. Hopefully, we get more uniform mist production. The new aeroponics box is made of wood and is coated with a food safe water sealant on the inside. We have no idea if this will leak, but will find out soon

New aeroponics system as described above. It is made of wood.

In other news, we have started plans to build a tilapia tank in the back yard. This is to raise fish for the production of meat. We don’t know if we will be able to build it this summer, but in the very least we have plans for it. No pictures for this yet, but they will be coming.

We also added an egress window to the house as soon as we first bought it. This allowed is to call the downstairs room a “bedroom” legally. Now we can rent out the basement to people and gain back part of the mortgage, which makes us very happy! Sorry the image below is so crappy! This picture was taken just after we put the last bricks in the retaining wall by the window, so we were pretty excited.  Your looking at a hole next to our foundation that is about 4ft deep, 4ft wide and 5ft long. The project was a success, and the new window went in beautifully. The only bummer about the project was finding out that the yard is literally made up of clay and large round river rock. This kind of soil sucks for digging holes and gardening.

This heaping pile of work is lovingly referred to as”the pit”.

The long gap between posts and the new house have caused us to re-evaluate the goals of this blog. We want to continue to work toward a sustainable home, but many of the systems that we are building will not be modular. This is because there is no longer a need for us to make them modular. We are also still working toward reducing our living expenses, thus the massive production of food this year. We plan on posting an updated goal list for the upcoming summer. No, you wont have to wait six months for it!

Take care

Pam & Stan

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2. Rain Water Collection Remodel We know that we promised to come back to the...
3. Aeroponics Phase 1 Now that we are done with the reverse osmosis system...