Home(stead) is Where the Heart Is

My former home has new occupants and all of my belongings have been packed-up and sent to a storage warehouse, due to my pending deployment.

I was originally scheduled to be gone this week, but I have been blessed with more time. I chose to spend this time visiting friends and family, and saying one last "see ya later"  before I head over to the great sandbox. This decision led me on a 3200-mile trek from the Central Texas region to the Rio Grande Valley, western Louisiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Madison, Wisconsin.

On the road... somewhere in Kentucky

I'm sure the monster road trip negated my personal CO2 production that I have so diligently striven to reduce these past couple of years, but I will have to make it up by working harder later. It was well worth it to be able to see and hug the people I love one more time before I go.

For those of you who know me very well, you also know all about my dream of completely sustainable living. I want to be off the grid, live off the land some way, somehow-- whether it's a homestead, small farm ("farmlet," as Peter calls it), or a larger farm I us as a CSA. This has been my dream for quite some time and my hope is that I can begin realizing that dream soon after I return from my deployment.

I'm not going to get into all of the details of my big road trip, but I am going to share one of my stops with you. My girlfriend Serena and her husband Darin are living my dream, nestled away in south central Kentucky. I spent three days and two nights with them, whetting my homestead hunger. It was amazing.

They have nearly 20 acres of land and have chickens, pigs, donkeys, a couple of barn cats, and a little purse dog. (I don't know her breed, but she would be one of those dogs you see Hollywood starlets carrying around in their purses on their way to Starbucks or some hoity-toity clothing boutique on Rodeo Drive.)

They grow hay on a large portion of their land, to use around their homestead and to supplement their income. Serena and Darin are passionate environmentalists who are committed to sustainable living and doing everything they can to avoid using fossil fuels, so they use handmade scythes to harvest their hay and Darin built their own hay bailer from plans he downloaded from the Internet.

Small solar cells connected to a battery powers their electric fencing around the mobile chicken yard to protect them from predators. Now that I have mentioned them, let's talk about the chickens. Their yard  and hen house (chicken tractor) is mobile, so they have a large area for roaming, eating, sleeping and playing. When the patch starts getting bare, the entire fence and chicken tractor is moved to a fresh spot. This allows the chickens to scratch and forage and their droppings to fertilize the ground. Darin collects a few eggs every afternoon, and I tasted farm-fresh eggs for the first time at breakfast the morning I arrived. Although I rarely eat eggs, I thought they were pretty darn good.

The donkeys don't serve much purpose right now, other than providing manure and keeping my friends on their toes when they sneak out of the fence every now and then. The smaller one is the mama and the big girl is the baby. Serena says she hopes to put them to work in the fields someday, but right now, they are fun to hang out with and quite comical when they're calling to Darin for peppermint candies.

Serena and Darin also plan to add goats (and possibly sheep) to the mix in the future. They have plenty of space, Darin loves projects, and after minor renovations to the barn, they could very easily accommodate more animals.

The pigs, on the other hand, have been raised from piglets and are scheduled for slaughter in the near future. I have a hard time with this, although I understand it. On my future homestead, I won't be raising any animals for meat (These piggies had the cutest smiley faces...) because I just won't be able to handle it. (Not to mention that I have recently re-adopted my vegetarian lifestyle. I'd like to go vegan, but this Wisconsin-raised girl loves her cheeses. Alas, that is another topic for another time.)

Serena and Darin go to great lengths to live sustainably. Their average monthly electric bill (yes, they are still tied into the power grid for now) is around $30, and although they get their water from their own well, they use it very conservatively.

They have a hot water heater, but they rarely turn it on. Serena heats water on the stove for washing dishes and they use the sun to heat water for their showers. They have a beautiful wood-burning stove (similar to this one) on their living room hearth that they use for heating and cooking in the winter, and a solar oven that they use in the summer.

Darin built a wash station with deep sinks and a wringer (similar to this, but he built it better), complete with one of these agitating gadgets for Serena, who does the laundry by hand with her homemade laundry soap, and they hang their laundry to dry.

There was so much to see and so much to learn that I could have stayed with them for a year and barely scratched the surface. I can't even tell you what my favorite part of the short visit was. Maybe it was dinner on my last night there, when I watched Serena in her cozy kitchen, make pasta from scratch with organic tomato sauce and vegetables that came from her own garden; or maybe it was sitting on the porch at night, in awe of the millions of stars I never got to see while living in Killeen, Texas, and the peaceful night sounds without so much as one siren or train whistle or traffic to be heard; or maybe it was the overall feeling of goodness evoked by putting my hands in the soil or picking fresh raspberries and tomatoes and eating them off the vine.

Maybe it was just everything about it and the glimmer of hope that it gave me, that I can--and will--one day be able to raise my children on a homestead of my own.

More pictures from my visit to Kentucky 

**DISCLAIMER**

Please pardon my images, for the movers packed my "real" camera and all of these photos were taken with my phone. They are not in any particular order and do not have captions yet.