What we started with

Well, we started with a typical suburban tract home. Not quite cookie-cutter and a little larger than most, quirky definitely describes our house and barren describes our yard.

Two large pine trees in the front yard plus some sort of flowering bush thing. Not much yard, but I dislike mowing anyway.

The trampoline mowed over half of the trees in the back yard one particularly windy night. One choke cherry down and one to go. They are sort of pretty trees as far as foliage color goes and spring flowers, but the fruit is rather inedible and leaves a huge mess. Plus the plant sends out suckers all over the place. Very annoying.

Our lot is approximately 13,200 square feet, a good 60-75% of that is house, deck, concrete and a shed.

My daydreams for the property include:

For the outside greenscape

adding rows of raised garden beds in an effort to provide most of our own produce

possibly getting chickens, ducks or goats

changing the raised area in the back of the yard to accommodate berry bushes, grapes and maybe fruit trees

For the outside hardscape

turning the shed into a greenhouse

adding a greenhouse on the south side of the house for four-season growing

composting all our food waste and recycling what we can so we produce a minimum of landfill waste

figuring out a system to harvest rainwater

For the inside

totally changing the inside of the house

building our own hot tub

What the hay is going on around here?

Back in grade school we had a unit on the Home of the Future. I don't remember too much about it, but I do recall the fish. I'm sure the home was full of energy and labor saving devices, nifty technology and ways to use the natural elements to the owners' advantage--however I forgot those details. Out in the front yard was a fishpond with a lid growing plants through it so the roots dangled in the water. In this Home of the Future you fattened your own fish for dinner and grew the salad greens hydroponically for the side dish. I don't know (yet) if that's really possible but the image stuck with me all this time. In daydreams about my own some-day home I would invariably have a moat around the house to act as a facsimile river for fattening up trout or bass for food (and for keeping out invading dragons).

We had a garden when I was a kid and one grandmother had a huge garden that fed her quite well. My other grandma had Kroger's and I always loved her cooking. So I've seen both sides of the producer vs. consumer lifestyles. This blog is my record of trying to incorporate what I have learned from them, from books and blogs and my own desire to live a sort-of suburban homestead life. Self-sufficiency has intrigued me for quite a while, but given that I have approximately 36 minutes a day to pursue my own work all these words may just turn out to be pipe dreams, I still want to try anyway.

Because thinking about the Home of the Future is fun.