Welcome to Mountain Homestead!
If you're interested in biodiversity, ecology and modern homesteading, we hope you'll find some good info. We're constantly adding new stuff to the site as we continue to experiment ourselves. We try to keep things up to date, but we don't always have time to get to the computer. Feel free to click, scroll and browse around the site to see what we're about. You'll find info about our workshops, apprenticeships, how to visit, our forestry products, and some really great gardening and homesteading resources.
The Homestead
Mountain Homestead is in the midst of 365 acres of preserved temperate rainforest in coastal Oregon. We are committed to permaculture design and are completely off grid. We produce our power with micro-hydro and photovoltaic (solar panels) systems. We have gravity fed water from a small constructed pond and separate spring. We get almost all of our food locally; from fellow gardeners and farmers, a small organic goods store in town, and (depending on the crop and harvest) an increasingly large percentage from our orchards and garden. All of our buildings are built with local materials (as of yet, we haven't begun smelting our own nails) using techniques such as timber framing, cob, strawbale, bale-cob, and milling our own wood onsite. Our main source of land based income is from commercial Eco-Forestry; with the health of the forest taking priority.
Events
FIRST ANNUAL HOMESTEAD SUMMERCAMP REUNION PARTY EXTRAVAGANZA! —August 6-15 2010
All Homestead friends and alumni are invited for the festivities. It will span two weekends in August; the 8/6-8 and the 8/13-15. During the week in between folks are welcome to join us for a *standard* homestead work week. Come for all or any of this! Bring your friends, family, enemies and co-workers!
Annual Circle the Bay 30km run — Saturday August 7th 2010
Put on by the South Coast Running Club. This will be Chip's first ever official race in Coos County and anyone else is welcome to join the run! There is also a 3-person relay option, for walking or running. If anyone wants to join me for the relay, let me know and I'll sign us up! If you don't want to run, come ride a bike or just cheer on the other running homesteaders!
Current Projects
(Updated 6/28/2010)
Forestry —
- Opening Forest Roads
- Harvesting, Processing and Marketing Lumber
- Thinning Alder for Firewood and Mushroom Logs
Food Forest —
- Irrigation installation
Nursery —
- Bring plants and logs to Coquille farmers' market and other events
- Organize nursery information (inventory and growing info) for website
Building —
- Cathedral floor mosaic
Other —
- Plumbing the 2009 pond into the gravity water system
- 2010 firewood