In our first post from Habitable Spaces, I mentioned how when we first arrived and the van got stuck on a tree stump, it seemed like a sign of how would be rooted and grounded here.
It turns out this was more accurate than we knew – our planned three and a half week stay has transformed into a two months, as plans fell apart with the next two farms that we’d lined up.
This could have been a minor disaster, but for two things – we like Habitable Spaces, and they like us.
We’ve been having a great time settling into to the space, getting to know the people, the animals, and the area … here’s some of what we were up to throughout January!
(they’re not really in order, I assume no one really cares ….)
This is Scout, breadloafin’.
where’s Kristin?
the mysterious trophy in the window at Dean’s bar in Kingsbury. Karate racing?
Cleo don’t give a duck
of course we had to build them a rocket stove (this one is for boiling pots of water to dunk chickens in for plucking)
Kristin & Ali working on the bottlehouse walls
bottles must first have their labels removed, before being cut in half, taped to a matching size bottom, and mortared into the walls – here Seth & Kristin work the de-labelling step
Shane peers through the new hole in his home’s roof, in the midst of the wood stove installation (oops this pic is actually from the last days of December)
Shane putting the finishing touches on the new woodstove chimney (oops this pic is actually from the last days of December)
Lynx spider helping us roof the bottlehouse
Kristin working on the bottlehouse roof
Ali & Kristin scavenging free manure
scavenging beautiful big glass doors for a future kitchen addition
every time we go for a walk with the dogs, Mina finds a mud puddle to lie in
harvesting the fruit of prickly pear cacti for making preserves (for some reason these are called “tuna fruit” which is just weird)
Scout and her brother Mister Pettibone
Cleo beholds Bertha in her newly-built enclosure
chicken in the herb garden
Kristin deep beneath the Texan surface
returning to the daylight
BBQ in San Antonio with Jess
RIVER SWIMMING IN JANUARY FOR THE WIN! (the San Marcos river is 73 degrees all year long)things you see out the car window
herding Bertha across the farm to greener pastures we fenced in
Ali mortaring bottles into the wall
excavating the ruins of an old homestead from the cacti it was buried in
seed starting
Sunny & Cleo in the kitchen
the newly-cleaned and organized tiny kitchen, ready for seed trays
Widget tries out the arboreal life
leveling the foundation for a new structure
clearing cacti from the new field
beginning the fencing of the new field (to keep out deer, dogs, wild pigs, etc – and temporarily contain Bertha)
new building rising
Kristin found a wild boar skull, which would later become the center piece of an art project
Jacob’s Well almost claimed our souls
on our walks, Mina usually manages to find a deer leg to parade home for gnawing
metal detecting for cool old garbage out among the prickly plants
decorating a cacti with found rusty debris
Kristin and I enjoy fetching firewood for the house’s woodstove – we like knocking over standing dead snags best …
Mina mauling Ali, affectionately
basking in both sunshine and satisfaction, after completing the bottlehouse roof
Bertha flinging dirt
Widget greets the day from the cabin’s loft
feeding the neighbors in Jess’s friend Ray’s backyard
injured or ill vulture out in the wasteland
Lily enjoys the newly-accessible platform after we took down the old cable spool tower
the petrified wood collection so far, gathered on our walk abouts on the property
preparing the new field for planting
adding a gate to the new field
returning from an attempt at making the entrance culvert a bit more accessible
the rocks n stuff collection is outgrowing the spool tabletoprocks and artifacts and bones outside the cabinpool at Dean’s in Kingsbury
remains of Shane’s grandmother’s old house
unearthed an intact Presto glass container with lid from the 40s
Mr. Pettibone squeezes into the dog food container he knocked over, as Scout observes
exploration
archeologistizin’ the old homestead
the Kingsbury Aerodrome museum is next door … they have many many cool toys
Ali chameleoning
whitewashing Craigslist Free section fence wood for purty interior paneling
colorful western San Antonio
Jess at the altar of an abandoned church
panorama from the bottlehouse roof
So that was January! We’re going to be here through February 19th before we start making our way west toward Arizona – and from there, home again in mid March to get the farm kicking! Its coming fast now … woo hoo!
One year ago we left our home in Minneapolis and dove into our new life.
During the year since then, we’ve traveled for four months working and learning on other farms throughout the southern states, and spent 8 months building up our little homestead farm in the sand barrens of Western Wisconsin.
It’s easily been the best – most rewarding, most interesting, most promising, and most exciting – year of our lives, at an age I feared I’d be settling into an increasingly domesticated rut. Living outside my comfort zone – learning skills and approaches that make me acutely aware of how little I know and how much there is to learn – has been humbling and awesome.
Today, we’re ushering in the new year at Habitable Spaces down in Kingsbury, Texas. It’s been cold and rainy since 2014, although the chill is only by Texas standards – it’s currently 40 here, but only 12 back home on the Que Sehra Farm … I’ll take it .
bottles awaiting de-labeling, halving, taping, and mortaring into the bottlehouse walls
testing the new rocket stove (for heating up chicken/duck dunking water)
Kristin had some good photos on her phone that didn’t make it into the “Inhabiting the Habitat” post last week, so here some of them are …
scavenging fencing
the standard rocks here are mostly gorgeous flintMina loves her body inside the warm kitchen and her face out the kitty door
Happy New Year everyone! Life is short and we’re writing our life stories every day – let’s all make this next chapter the best one yet.
From Yokna Bottoms Farm, it was an 11 hour drive to our next host farm – Habitable Spaces, a “sustainable farm & artists residency,” growing in spaces carved from the scrubby oaks, mesquite, and cacti of Texas, out beyond the outskirts of both San Antonio and Austin.
We arrived in the darkness of the new moon, in the first hours of the longest night of the year – winter solstice, time for openings and new things – and immediately ran aground and became happily stuck (Huey Lewis style) upon a rooted tree stump. How metaphorical! I liked it.
Although I wouldn’t completely feel good about it until I was sure the transmission hadn’t been damaged or something …
(this uploaded upside down but I’m just going to leave it as is.)
We cut the stump down the next day and drove to a more convenient dock.
Our dogs got along great with their three girls (Mina, the giant; Lola, the sweet; and Lily, the wild). Our cabin – “El Casa De Escorpio” – was awesome, and surprisingly similar to the Rust Shack back home in layout. It, too, was a pallet shack with a loft – but slightly bigger and significantly more finished than ours, with insulation, wallpaper, a heater, and meticulously and artfully applied interior wall paneling. And a bottle window!
“The House of Scorpio” – until they’d finished the walls, the place became home to dozens of scorpions .
They had a good junkpile/supply, the native rock poking up everywhere was a sexy glassy flint, and animals and evidence of active construction projects were everywhere.
rainwater collection system – totally going to borrow that sediment trap design back home
– needless to say, we immediately felt at home, and were excited to wake up to the reborn sunshine of the first lengthening day of the year.
While helping out with projects, we met the ducks and chickens, the cats and kittens, the friends and family, the pig and the place.
clockwise from foreground: Widget, Cleo, Mina, Lola, and Lily)
Shane throwin & Sasch shootin
We also did a lot of scavenging; a friend’s family had moved away from their farm, and left behind a rich and satisfying array of plunder for Habitable Spaces to pick through.
We ate great food and closed down the the only bar in town and got to know good people, human and otherwise.
It was a damn fine week.
Kris the bartender trying to animate the singing deer
And today Habitable Spaces got the letter announcing that they are now legally a Non Profit organization, with all the benefits entailed!
This was our third and final week spent on Yokna Bottoms Farm, in the beautiful Faulknerian land of northern Mississippi. Preparing t leave back during the first time we WWOOFed here (January 2014), it seemed weird that we might not ever see the characters here again – which makes sense in retrospect, since fate conspired to get us here again this winter.
Widget does not think the chickens deserve all of the bread.
A year later, we’re not thinking about how weird it is that we may never see the Yokna farm and its cast of human, canine, and kitty characters again – because we assume that someday, we probably will.
mixing up worm castings, chicken manure, and dirt into a batch of potting soil for the strawberry project
potting up dozens of little strawberry plants we dug up from a crowded and un-loved patch of field, with Jeff Gabe chewing through wicked blackberry canes with the flail mower
Kristin bashing low-hanging branches from the pines to make way for the flail mower’s passage
Cleo & Faith in their hours-long staring contest
Widget hunting wabbitsyou can guess how Faith earned her nickname, “Scarf”
Faith does not mind that Gabe is allergic to her. She may even prefer it.
This week we visited Richardson Farm – a startup operation founded by former Yokna intern Nate, who we’d met last year. He is leasing some really interesting land along a lakeshore, and has big plans for what he’d like to get growing and built there. For now, it’s been fulltime work just getting a liveable shack to stay in, a small greenhouse built, etc – things are starting to come together and it’ll be great to see where it goes from here,
and old treehouse failure decorates the woods of Richardson Farm
Another former Yokna Woofer, Reynaldo came to stay at the Farm over the last few days to house & dog sit for Doug, who left for a few days of family time in New Mexico with the ‘old boys,” Merton and Shivas. We hadn’t met Reyndaldo before, but we’d enjoyed his work – he’d done a great painting of the old farm truck and Missy, which graces the living room wall of the house.
While staying in the house, he’s working on a new piece – a vortex-looking spiral which is steadily resolving into an amazingly well colored and rendered hay bale.
When not housesitting here, Reynaldo is WWOOFing on the nearby Canebreak Farm – another up and coming small organic farm. We went to check it out with him – I wish we had a photo of the sweet bamboo cane thicket growing along one edge of the field, where the farmers hope to one day clear room for tables and chairs – a dining space for the Asian farm-to-table dishes they hope to serve from the produce they grow on the land.
We made cornbread and went to a Chili Cook-Off, where most o the entries included Yokna Bottoms veggies, and longtime Yokna Farm staff Betsey took home the prize … but we felt like the biggest winners, with all the delicious food we got to eat.
two faces have I
At the house, we’ve gotten into doing crossword puzzles for the first time
Tomorrow, we leave for Habitable Spaces in Kingsbury, Texas first thing in the morning!
we got matching fortunes when we went out to eat at the local Noodle Bowl … pretty awesome on the heels of last year’s Cookie Coincidence
The second week at Yokna Bottoms Farm was as expected – we worked throughout the weekday mornings, and the rest of the time ate, relaxed, and explored our surroundings in beautiful northern Mississippi.
There was more deja vu from our time here last year, as we dug drainage ditches and continued the pine-tree clearing project (with a new and improved chain rig that Jeff put together), and plenty of hay mulching.
sorting old peppers into keepers and compost
Jeff tests the deer stand we cobbled together from scavenged materials – which we put up on the edge of the field in hopes of harvesting some venison from the cover crop fieldsdigging ditches to divert waterflow off of the dirt road down to the field
not ginger – Jerusalem Artichokes
The dogs, of course, are loving it here … although the Yokna Dog Pack lost one member since last year (Nathan moved out with his dog Ella), it gained a new one unofficially – “Grey Dog,” the neighbor’s year-old giant puppy – plus, there is a stray that sometimes hands out with us by the field, which brings the total up to eight … plus four cats and a shifting cast of primates …
bombs away! Faith, inbound.at least 5 dogs on the bed spread
Cleo in the field up at Jeff’s place in the nearby hills Cleo and Benji the Stray (we gave his shaggy eye-fur a trim to help him better see and been seen) Missy playing with Grey Dog … this is the day that he stole both of Gabe’s work/hoking shoes and made off with them, apparently making multiple trips to bring them back to his house. Over the next couple of days the neighbor found them both (unharmed!) and returned them one at a time … the eyes of a serial shoe thief
We have less than a week to go here before we strike out westward toward new territory … time is flying!
a vine-strangled sapling on its way back to the farm to be turned into a proper Wizard Stick
