A clean slate

So here we are, in the beginning stages of our rEvolution.

The blog is a clean slate for us, which is a new concept since we are in the reclaiming business.

We have spent the last year doing a ton of research, which has involved scales of productivity, work input/output, etc., and we've been saying lately that it seems like we are starting in the negative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that we have a long way to go before we get to the point where most people start. A major plus is that we are not too established in our ways or methods to be open to change and experimenting. And let me say that every day is an adventure!





So a little history about who we are and what we are doing.

We are Caleb & Krista, passionate students of life, and resourceful jacks-of-all trades. We have been married and living on site for almost three years now. But our history goes back further than that. Our site was an old state-run gravel pit (which is the unofficial story), before Caleb's family purchased the property for a family-run logging business somewhere around 1989. The site was the central command for anything logging or tinkering until about 2006.

It wasn't until the summer of 2008 that we began living here together, but it really wasn't until 2009 that we had the full summer to dream and plan. Our first dreams and plans were to clean the site up. There was a lot of equipment and "treasures" stored around the property (who am I kidding, there still is), and it wasn't until some of it started to go that we could really see the property and its full potential.

Caleb spent many hours cleaning, scouting, and setting up the swing-blade circular sawmill, and our big summer projects were installing a nice cedar garden box up by the house, and futile attempts to grow grass in a once weed-infested lawn with compact soil, if there even was any to work with.

Before we knew it, the spring of 2010 was upon us. By this time, we started thinking bigger and bigger. We started off in March by getting chicks. We literally went from zero to 60 (57 to be exact) in a very short time. What the heck, we just like to give'r! We established the ol' coop and run, and a few raised garden beds. We did a lot of shoveling, dreaming and research. And Caleb got some Gray Toulouse geese for his birthday, which instigated dreams of a pond. We experimented with a "puddle" area and found that it filled to capacity with every rainstorm (and overflowed many times) and held water for all but three weeks of the summer. A major discovery was that if we controlled where the water settled in the yard, we could avoid a recurring muddy mess in the driveway and log yard. We also minimized the creek we had flowing down the driveway and on to the roadway.

Caleb discovered Permaculture ideas and principles and it instantly became an addiction. Swales, pond areas and new ideas kept us shoveling and dreaming the rest of the summer. I will get in to these ideas and principles in detail later, so don't worry if it all sounds greek to you.

And now we are in the spring of 2011, going full bore in to a place of no return. We have ducklings, a mama goose sitting on a nest with at least 8 eggs (we can hardly get in there to see what's going on!), hugelkultur beds, and much, much more in store.

So stay tuned for more details, photos, rants and informative information about the evolution of our revolution. :)