You're a hoot. No, the bunnies did not jump into the garden boxes. They were just wandering around them, trying to figure out how to get in. I haven't seen anyone do boxes like this around here, yet. This is my first try, so I have to wait and see if my boxes can beat Kentucky bugs and deer.
So far, the cattle down here have kept the deer away, but once the veges come in that might change. Deer are like sheep, they nibble stuff down to nothing, so they need to eat from the forest. That said, I feel your affections for them, all they way from here. There is a lot of people food in this forest too. Next spring, I'll be ready to put in an outdoor kitchen and can start putting up more food again.
Today, my kids have the auger out, a truck bed full of good topsoil and manure, and are putting in our first fruit and nut trees. I'm hoping to get a chicken coop in by the end of summer.
We are doers and makers, so we are always busy. If we're not making things, we are playing games, studying, repairing stuff, making gifts, sewing, drawing, sketching, painting, or writing in our journals. I love to bake and make money at it too. My kids keep threatening to build a little restaurant and installing me in the kitchen.
JD, you're right this place will be in the family for many generations. My son-in-law's family have been in this area for 200 years. When I'm dead and gone, my house will be rental income. Every ten years, timber will provide income too. There is more than enough food here to get by with a tenth of what it costs to eat from grocery stores. The farmer next door raises grass fed cattle and trades meat for our grazing land. There is a small, mom and pop grocer an hour away, that sells locally raised, beef, pork, chicken, lamb and goat. Since there's no corporate middle man, its half the price people pay at Walmart. They even have a real butcher, who actually knows what cut I'm after.
They don't call Kentucky, blue grass country without reason. It rains year round and stays green. There are ponds, streams, rivers, and lakes everywhere.
We have electricity now, but we lived on generators for a year - and that convinced us to go full solar in the future.
Don't be jealous, half this land is a thickly forested mountain. I still haven't made it to the top, but I will. Our homes are small, and highly customized to fit our unique lifestyles and ways of being. For example, when my daughter designed my house, she used a third of the total square footage for my kitchen, because that is where we cook, bake and hang-out. My bedroom is really tiny, but it has floor to ceiling closets, with custom cabinetry and drawers, huge drawers underneath my Scandinavian style nook bed, and a window seat.
I won't live long enough to know this land and wildlife as well as I knew the Sierras. I'm too old to be a pioneer, but here I am.
Its nice to find someone who appreciates this kind of life (there are not many anywhere on the internet). We may be a dying breed of human, but we might also be the only kind that survives climate change. I can't imagine city people figuring out how to feed and water themselves, without electricity and YouTube - can you?
