ground floor

When I bought a house to renovate and turn into a rental, more than half the money spent was to comply with regulations. About half of these were reasonable, and I would have spent that money anyways to make a safe house for my tenants. The other half were more dubious. One concern was allegedly that the windows could have lead paint, but the all-wise regulators would not allow a lead test to be done if there was any chipped or cracked paint anywhere on the frame of the window. The chipped paint of note for our window was inaccessible unless you uninstalled the window, but the windows were old, and liable to break with that much man-handling. We were cornered into nearly doubling our rehab budget to fix windows that may or may not have had lead paint, without being able to test for the lead paint in the first place.

It seems wherever you want to go these days, bureaucracy follows you. No matter what your endeavor is, there's some pencil-pushing do-nothing looking over your shoulder, tapping their foot and shaking their head. Invariably, my work is deficient somehow, and usually the deficiency is non-consequential minutiae.  Working as a nurse, I spend easily a third of my day filling out meaningless paperwork to comply with the latest mandates. Every breath you draw requires a government form filled out in triplicate, signed by a notary, blessed by a priest, and with a permission slip from your mommy.

This blog is not supposed to be a whine fest. Sorry.

Instead of sitting and stewing in my contempt for the world of government and politics, my endeavor in my spare time has been to educate myself in such a way as to provide an alternative for myself and my family. I've become somewhat smitten with the work of authors like Joel Salatin, and the principles of permaculture and homesteading. I like the idea of setting up symbiotic systems that produce food and grow off of one another. Learning and adapting to the law of nature actually sounds like a pleasant (though undoubtedly challenging) process, and it's a problem I'm enthusiastic to wrestle with.

Moving from my home in the Rochester Inner City to a farm that could theoretically sustain my entire family is a bit of a pivot, and it's not something that we're ready for financially, but in the mean time I want to use the time I have to learn what I can about the processes of growing food. This summer, I intend to start 6 4'x8' raised beds in my backyard, plant some blueberry bushes, and continue using the hydroponic garden that I've started in the basement.

This blog will serve as a series of reports on the various specific projects I am researching or attempting. I want to create profiles for the various fruit and nut trees, for the perennial vegetables, for the annuals, and maybe even eventually for the animals that I might want on our homestead. I want this blog to serve as a synthesized hub of the information that I would have loved to have right now. I want to create useful, actionable tips for anyone who wants to follow this path. I may also provide some updates on our progress for fun and as a diary of our successes and failures, but I don't want the blog to be a hot-air ode to what a special boy I am.

The following is a list of the projects I have already started or that I intend to start.

Started:
create a raised bed garden in the backyard. 5 beds.
Start a patch (patch? grove? orchard? parliament?) of blueberries
Continue a hydroponic garden that I've started in the basement.

Intend to start/tentative plans:
when our family has obtained a property, I intend to start a food forest of perennial vegetation in a permaculture style. I want to focus on fruit and nut trees, since I want the process to require minimal inputs. This is a huge tangled endeavor that will doubtless provide millions of rabbit trails, both literal and figurative, to follow as I research.

My next post will be information about blueberry bushes.