In the beginning..

We purchased our house and 2/3 acre in January 2011 after 3 years of scouring the real estate listings each week. We wanted enough space and light to produce our own food, but we didn't want to leave the area and the people we love. Finally we found "the one," and got our little place in the Santa Cruz mountains. Our area has an active Transition community, and we're walking distance from friends, a seasonal farmers market, and the small community garden that we coordinate.

Welcome

I'll be blogging about our family's experiments in home-scale, sustainable, subsistence farming. We're embarking on this little adventure for a whole slew of reasons ranging from simple pleasure to social and environmental responsibility. I'm hoping to keep the content here practical rather than political - what we build, grow and raise, what works and what doesn't. But suffice it to say that while I am not a doomer, I am also not a fool. For our family, consuming to the point of necessitating the deprivation of others (now or in the future) felt irresponsible, and I suspect that change is coming whether we adapt to it gracefully or not.