Category Archives: building our home

Rejoice and Sing!

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Guess what I did yesterday???

I made Bread!!

With my Bread machine!

Which requires electricity!!

OH YEAHH!!

We have electricity! After 10 months living without electricity, we are finally wired up! (not to solar, unfortunately. But we will get there!) We have a pole out at the new house site so that we can run our electric tools and equipment. So, Toby wired the cabin for a few lights and outlets! It’s so nice only having to pull a string to turn the lights on! I can’t tell you how many times in the last 10 months I have mumbled to myself (or screamed out loud) “I am not a fucking pioneer!!” It’s amazing how different the house feels with lights (and the smell of bread baking)! Very exciting!!

Toby begins laying the block for some of the exterior (underground) walls tomorrow! We are expecting 50 and 60 degree weather this week!!

Prof. Maria

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Thanks everyone, for your concern about Kaia. She is totally fine! She was over and done with her fever within 24 hours and asking to go back to school! Her immune system is amazing! I’m really liking Boneset, by the way, for how quickly it seems to help with cold/flu-y symptoms.

House-wise, we have the new footings poured… 30 feet from the old one. We have all the concrete blocks ready to go (north side wall), but the ground has been frozen, so we are on hold until it warms up a little.

Hey, I’ve been asked to start teaching at the local community college! Well, I’m covering a class for another herbalist, but that’s a start right? Asheville-Buncombe Technical College has community classes about herbs, and will soon have Continuing Education classes for nurses (herb related). Right now, I’m going to do a 2 hour Materia Medica class covering Valerian, Ginger, and Saw Palmetto (3 of the top 10 selling herbs). And I am helping to set up the CE classes. Pay is nice too! 🙂

So, tomorrow is my birthday! Toby’s mom took Kaia to play for the weekend. So, tonight, Toby and I are heading to the local hot springs for a soak. Tomorrow, I get a day at the spa, followed by a nice diner and maybe a movie!!! Wooohoooo!

house woes

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I’ve spent a little time off the blog for fear of saying nasty words that should not be typed. But, now that I am feeling a little better, I shall vent.

Well, we finally got the soil engineer out there to take a look at the last footer that we needed to pour so that he could tell us to dig it a little wider so we could finish pouring. Well, he told up that we need to move the whole house!!!! Yep, that’s what he told us! The footer, it seems, is over old fill dirt that was never compacted correctly and we would have to build an enormous retaining wall if we wanted to keep the house in the same spot. It looks like it will be cheaper to just move the whole dang thing ~25 feet to the east. So, we keep going and will hopefully pour the footer (again) this week or next. Bye-bye bank account!
On another land front, I got a call from this guy who said he is under contract to buy 130 acres east and south of us and he plans on developing it. He wanted to know if we wanted to sell!! I have to say, I thought about it for a second, and then I remembered the promise that I made to this land to try to preserve it. So, I am trying to look on the bright side. Hopefully, he will build without tearing the mountains apart, we will get a good road to our house, and we will have some nice, new neighbors.

We all spent the night wide awake last night while kaia hallucinated through her high fever. She does that when she gets sick. She is totally fine one minute and then, BAM, she has a fever of 104! We put potato slices and some yarrow essential oil on her feet, which brought the fever down for a while. Then it went up again. I gave her some herbs and a tea, which brought it down for a while. Then it went up again. Finally, when she woke me up with her laughing at the “movie” (aka hallucination) she was watching on our window about a “tiny little flying black man who was stuck in glue and blueberry jelly”, I decided to pull out the motrin and knock it out for a few hours so she could get some sleep. She’s running around right now like nothing happened last night. Her immune system amazes me! Hopefully she is over the worst of it. I’m at the clinic right now getting some boneset and elder flower in case it happens again.

Happy (Almost) Thanksgiving!

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I spoke too soon about Suki and her good chicken behavior. Friday, Ruby got out of the pen and Suki killed her. We didn’t see it happen. Toby came home to find Suki strutting around with Ruby in her mouth. So, Suki is back on her 30 foot lead, we have clipped the chickens wings (although Sweetie still got out this morning), and we are trying to figure out what else we need to do. We have tossed around the idea of giving Suki to a family with lots of room to run, and no farm animals. But, besides the fact that Suki is great protection, I feel like I will have failed her if I give her away, without really giving proper training a good effort. She’s just so stubborn and I am too lazy to follow through.

We had Toby’s dad, brother, and a friend out this Sunday to help cut up some cord wood for the house. I think we are about half way done. Unfortunately, it is too hard to bark the wood right now (it’s much easier to bark in the spring, when the sap is running more freely). So, we will leave the bark on and hope that it will come off more easily after the wood has dried.

We also got the structural engineers stamp for the house plans and we should hear back about final county approval early this week… hopefully.

Nikki and I are having a hard time finding the right space for our herb clinic and apothecary. So, until the right place presents itself, we are working on an official Business Plan, and getting information about funding our little venture. Anyone know of a grant for women business owners, funding a health venture, specifically geared towards women and children???

Girl time

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It’s been a fun filled few days! Toby is away at a wedding, so Kaia and I have taken the time alone to do anything but house projects! We have played, gone to the mall(!), snuggled up in bed and watched movies! It’s been really nice for both of us to have a little down time. I will be at the AHG symposium next week and I hope Toby takes the time for some down time too!

We did have a great find for the house though. Kaia and I visited a building that use to house a marble/granite cutting school. The school moved and left all of their granite… free for the taking. SO, we loaded up the Jetta with everything I could carry (probably enough to do a marble kitchen counter top and bathroom sink) and plan to head back there when Toby is in town so we can get the heavy stuff! There were some pieces that are 6ft by 9 ft in perfect condition! It’s just that it would take a crane to lift them and very strong truck to carry them. I can’t wait to see what this house looks like when it is done!

We tried to turn the house plans in for code approval on Thursday, but there was one paper we still needed to fill out. So, hopefully next week!

Today I attended a class on 5 phase theory and how to apply it to my clinical practice, as well as in my own life. For those of you that don’t know, 5 phase theory is Chinese based and stems from the belief that everything in this world is a part of the ‘one’. Broken into 5 non-stagnant phases there is Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal. They are all a part of us, and often times we may have imbalances in them. This class really helped me see how they all embody certain aspects of life and that they are in constant motion. Hard to explain in a blog, but really cool stuff!

A little Root with your sweets?

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Kaia and I spent today preparing for next weekends “RootsFest!” that I am helping with. In celebration of the first annual National Herb Day (Oct. 14th), we (the NC chapter of the American Herbalists Guild) are putting on a festival. I am working the kids booth for a little while and wanted to do more than just have them color or something. So, I made up some Ginger syrup, “root beer” syrup, and home-made marshmallows (with Marshmallow root). I am going to let the kids try all of them and talk a little about how marshmallows, ginger-ale, and root beer all use to be made from herb roots. I thought it would be fun. I will post the recipes when I type them up.

The storage building is going up much more quickly than the cabin did. It is also a 12×16′ structure. Last weekend Toby and Eric worked on the foundation.

This weekend, Toby and his dad worked on the walls. It’s ready for the roof and siding now! Yahoo!!

Picture update

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9/15 – Here are a few pictures of our latest accomplishments.
We are doing lots of design work on the main house and hope to pour the foundation next month. In the mean time, we are trying to finish up on the siding for the little house. It’s been taking forever ’cause it is usually just one person at a time working on it. But, if we can get a team of three, it goes really fast. So, I have put together a “work/party day” for Toby’s birthday. What he really wants the most is to have some of these projects done. So, tomorrow we are going to try to finish up some of the siding, winterize the house, and cut up more wood for the cord wood walls in the main house.

Kaia starts at a Montessori school (3 days a week) next week and we are all very excited. She has really been getting the shaft with all of our work and no play. So, we think school will be really good for her and give her some time to be a kid. We still hope to home school, but it’s just not feasible right now.

9/17 – OK, so we didn’t finish up the siding, but we did put in the stove chimney and enlarge the chicken run area (to ~1600 sqft!!!. So they are pretty much free range now. Hey, how do you get them to stop sleeping/pooping in their laying boxes?? I put up netting and they tore it down.) We also put up a porch yesterday!!!! Wahoo!! A bunch of people showed up to Toby’s “workin’ birthday”, so they decided to throw up a porch in an afternoon! It looks great and makes this place feel so much more like a ‘home’. We spent this morning relaxing on the porch and even hung up the hammock.



Kaia’s friend came over yesterday, so she was occupied the whole day while the working was going on. At one point, they both came out of the camper with huge smiles on their faces and not a stitch of clothes on! They collectively decided that it was nudey time. 🙂 The place was completely trashed, with toys everywhere. But, they had a blast and kept themselves very busy.

Here’s a little fairy house that Kaia decided to make. She wanted to see if she could entice them with yogurt covered raisins and chocolate peppermint.

And look who can write her name!!!

Here is an ity bity mushroom I found. I can’t identify it except that it is a polypore and looks like a porcini. I will have to bring it to my mushroom friend and see if it is edible.

Yay for Habitat!

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We hit the jackpot at the Habitat for Humanity Home Store yesterday. I have put it on my list to go by there and check as often as possible because they get in so many good home building supplies. Well, yesterday we took home 15 medium to large windows!! Brand new and low-E!! So, that brings our window total up to ~20. All for ~$150!! Yahoo! That should be enough to outfit the whole house!

Bock Bock

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Well, I think I am almost, almost done with the chicken coop! I’ve painted it, added laying boxes, put in a screened floor, screened in some of the windows, made a ramp, fenced in an area for the chicks, and cut myself numerous times! But, we are scheduled to go pick up the little ladies this sunday! I can’t wait! Monday they were 4 weeks old! Hopefully they will eat all the poison ivy first so that we can go and sit in the field with them without having to watch ourselves so much! Here is a link to the site our friends (who are currently raising the chicks) have.

On the herb front, I graduate this Thusday from my clinical program! Wahooooo!! My friend Nikki and I are thinking about getting an office in downtown Asheville to see clients in and make medicine a few days a week. I want it to be completely stress free, so we are only going to rent the place if everything feels good. The office is a two room place in a cool, renovated old building on a street in the middle of all the stores and restaurants. So, it would be a nice break from primative country life. (To bad it doesn’t have a shower:-) We would share it with a massage therapist who only uses the office a few days a week. It would also be a great place for me to study when I start up with Aviva’s course again. We’ll see…

Toby got back from NY this weekend. He was up at a cordwood conference and had a blast! We are hoping to have our house plans done and in the code process by the end of August. Building with cordwood takes a while because the wood has to dry for months before you can put it into the walls, but it is much cheaper than conventional methods, and it looks pretty cool. These pictures are from Toby’s adventure.


Here’s what a cordwood panel looks like. Toby and his dad worked on this section.


This is Toby’s dad.


Here is a finished house wall.


This is an inside corner with glass bottles in the wall


Here’s another outside shot.
Cool, eh?

I’ve been trying to use the solar shower up on the land, instead of going in to shower where Toby works. The shower gets hot enough, but I feel a litle, um, naked standing out there in the great wide open. Toby is going to build me a little enclosure to hang the solar shower in so I don’t feel so exposed. But, it was kind of nice sitting a few inches away from the Maple tree while I was trying to wash my hair 🙂

Our goals for August: Finish the house siding, design the house, and begin to tackle the “code” process.

Today’s recipe: Sumac “Lemonade”. Use fresh or dried ripe sumac berries (not poison sumac) and simmer them in water for ~20 minutes. Strain out the berries and add honey to taste. Pour over ice and enjoy! It’s that easy!!

A break in the chaos!

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Hey there! I’m getting a little break away from home life while I am on a little outing to the laundry mat (Yahoo!) Actually, it’s pretty nice… air-conditioning, nice benches to sit on… unfortunately, there is no internet connection, so I will have to go to the bakery/book shop after this to post this entry. I may even have to order something yummy!

Ok, well here are some pictures of the house siding. I think it looks awesome!!! I can’t wait until it is all up. We will stain it with a red stain and do the trim in a pale yellow. We are picking up pallets wherever we see them on the side of the road and cutting them up for the siding. There is a place near where Toby works that seems to throw away 10-20 pallets a week, so they are keeping us well supplied!!

The chicks should be coming home in a few weeks. They are only 6 days old in these pictures, but they are growing so fast!! We are going to try to haul the coop up to the land tomorrow and get everything set up. I can’t wait. (We found a great organic feed supplier that has a local seller!) I really hope that Suki gets along well with them! We have been trying to train her with the turtles that she keeps finding. Initially, she would find them and then start chewing on their shells. We got her to stop chewing on them by offering her treats when she would just stand by them without chewing. Now, she just brings us turtles and drops them at our feet:-)


We have been getting some black raspberries from a couple of plants I found. The black berries are all over the place and should be ready in the next month or so. I have also found St. Johns Wort (Hypericum punctatum) and Pleurisy Root (Asclepias tuberosa (which I love!)

I’ve been seeing clients in the clinic for a few weeks now and I really like it. It feels so natural. I will have my first child client next week. And I graduate on July 27th! I am so glad it is almost over (and I can’t believe it is almost over!) I have to teach a class to the level one students as part of a requirement for graduation. Since I am already teaching them so much science, I thought I would make it fun and do a class on “communicating with plants”. Lots of meditating, drawing and discussing. It should be fun.

Oh, and Full Circle Herbs officially sold this weekend! I met with one of the new owners (who was very sweet) and handed off all of my inventory and stuff. I have to say, I am glad to let it go. When I see other people in the area making a go of their home businesses, I feel a little twinge of jealousy, but really, I am glad that I have one less thing on my plate to try to juggle!

Newest pics

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OK, so here are the most recent pictures of our little cabin. If you walk in the front door you will look into our living room:

If you walk across the room to the futon and turn around, you will see our kitchen:

If you turn your head just slightly to the left, you can see the dining area:

If you climb up the stairs and look you see our bedroom (the bed is up on a platform so that we have lots of storage underneath):

Turn your head slightly to the left and you will be in Kaia’s room (her bed is on a platform too. The rooms are seperated by a large bookshelf):

If you walk into Kaia’s room and turn around, you will see the closet and my office space, as well as the stairs (behind the bureau).

This is a picture of the outhouse we are building… Still not done yet, but our first party is tomorrow night, so it has to be done by then! Kaia wants to paint it purple with sparkles… anyone know if a good source of purple, sparkly paint?? 🙂

We had been keeping track of all our expenses on a spreadsheet to figure out how much this house has cost us, but a magnet go dropped on our computer and erased the hard drive… SO, my best guesstimate is that this hosue has cost us somewhere between $2K – 3,500 to build (depending on if you include the lost wages for Toby going to collect wood from arkansas and all that jazz.) Of course there is also the cost of the land and the road being built, but that will also be repaid to us as we sell off spots for the ‘community’ we build. Not too bad, eh?

This Weekends Progress

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Just got back from the land a little while ago. We are pretty much on schedule… and exhausted! We put up lots of insulation this weekend, and I am so itchy! I hate that stuff! We also have all the tar paper up, and I painted the doors and primed the windows. (We put a door on both floors so that once we move from the ‘little house’ to the big house and convert the little house into offices, we will both have seperate entrances.)

The garden is going well. I think we will have some red strawberries sometime in the next week or two! This weekend I planted tomatoes, eggplant, squash, melons, peppers, basil, oregano, onions, skullcap, mullein, and chamomile – all from the organic gardening class I was taking. And the oats, vetch, peas, and clover that I seeded the garden field with are all coming up.

One of our neighbors was trying to take down some of the trees we put over the dirt bike paths on our land so that he could ride. I went down to talk with him to ask him not to ride in that area since there are endangered plants there (the lady slippers patch is right where he keeps trying to ride!). He was very abrupt and informed me (while riding away) that it was his buddy’s property and not ours and we need to check out the “blue prints” and stay on our own property and he will stay on his. Well, “Porky” (yes, that is what he told me to call him!), I checked out the ‘blue prints’ and that is our property!! So, now Toby is going to go have a talk with him and walk the property line so he knows exactly where it is (and so do we), so that there won’t be any questions. I think he was really abrupt because he knew he had just been caught doing something he shouldn’t have! But, man, I hate it when people blow me off like that and make want to go beat them upside the head with a wooden spoon!!

On a doggie note, we let Suki run around off-leash this weekend to see how she would do (she is not good with listening to commands and likes to run off). Well, she took little morning jaunts and then stayed around with us almost the whole time. She even came with me on a walk Sat. evening! It was pretty cool. But, this evening, when I went down to talk with “porky”, Suki discovered that the neighbors have two little girls and kept trying to go back over to play with them. I don’t think their mom, or her yappy Pomeranian cared for that!

Oh, and I’m not sure what is going on with our bees. One hive looks like it may have a laying worker bee, ’cause there are a ton of drones but few workers (a laying worker bee may take over if there is no queen to lay eggs, but all they can lay are drones… so there are no bees to work the hive.) The other hive was the one that swarmed, so they have a new queen, but we found her ourside of the hive yesterday, unable to fly because part of one wing was missing. We think it was the new queen on her maiden/mating flight and she couldn’t fly. So, both hives are in trouble. We are going to give them a little more time to see if they can fix the situation.

too tired…

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So tired…. can’t type…. arms too sore…. must sleep…

The upstairs walls go up


The roofing begins


The roof is almost done (No thanks to all the rain today!!)


Most of the sheathing on the first floor is up.

We are soooo tired!


The bees have a new home too.

Long days!

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Ooooh, the last few days have been long! We are spending every spare moment up at the land… What do you think about “Dandelion Homestead”? Is that what we should call the new place?

Anyway, yesterday I got those strawberries that I bartered some herbs for… there were supposed to be ~100 of them, right?? Well, the woman who dropped them off showed up with a 55 gallon bag full of them and there had to be ~600!!! I planted 150 yesterday morning and couldn’t find any more space! I hope they take!! Yum!! (Am I using enough exclamation points for you?) T has also layed out the site for the temporary house and dug the post holes.

Anyhoo, I taught my first class at the school yesterday; Male Anatomy & Physiology for the herbalist. I think it went really well. Sometimes I felt like I was just rambling on, but everyone seemed to be paying attention and asking questions. I also brought the extra strawberries and gave them to whoever would take them!

Right after I taught my class, I sat in on an organic gardening class. We are going to get to take home seedlings from this class, so I really need to get my raised beds going. I wasn’t planning on starting a garden this year since we have so much going on with building the house, but it looks like life has other gardening plans for me 🙂

Oh, and you know that class I am taking with Aviva Romm? Well, she has asked if she can use a personal story of mine in her next book. It may not happen, ’cause the book is alreay 1200 pages long, but still, isn’t that cool!

So many other things have happened in the last week, but my brain is fried, so I will go sleep first and write more later.

Sleep tight!

Beautiful day in the neighborhood

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Well, we closed without a hitch! We are now caretakers of 25 beautiful acres! We went up there today for a trash pick up… we go two large boxes full of beer cans and bottles, two 55 gallon bags of trash, and 260 pounds of scrap metal! And we didn’t get it all!! Tomorrow, we will try to finish with the trash and throw down some seed on the banks where the trucks have torn up the grass. Things are looking so lush up there. I found a weeping cherry, some blood root (Sanguinaria canadensis), lots of bulbs, and the dogwoods are blooming white and pink! Kaia decided that today she should have her first ‘nuddie in the creek’ experience. She ended up head-to-toe covered in mud!

On the bee front, both hives are doing well. One is going so strong that we had to split it ’cause they were about to swarm. I can’t wait to get the bees (and all of us for that matter) up to the land. Our lease ends at the end of May. So, we have 2 months to make ourselves comfortable up there and get started on the main house.
(And Kaia keeps saying she wants a baby sister!! Umm, I think we have enough on our hands:-)
FUN, FUN, FUN.

catch up

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Sorry I’ve been falling behind on my herb reviews. It’s been really busy around here and that was one of the things I let go of. I hope to start again next week. We are having lots of visiting friends during November, so right now I am enjoying my socializing!

We have gone out to do some land searches, but haven’t found anything that’s right, yet. There have been a few beautiful pieces, but they were way too far out, and those that are closer to town are too expensive, or too trashed.

Our house in Chapel Hill is set to close in one week! (yeah!) And we just sold one of our cars (the gas powered one. Now we are left with two bio-diesels). All of that will help ease financial woes a bit! Toby and I don’t lead an extravagent lifestyle by any means!! So, it’s very frustrating when you always feel like you are barely making ends meet. I guess the one place we really do spend money is food. I buy mostly organic foods and preferrably local, so, it bumps the price up.

Speaking of foods, I have been thinking about adding meats back to my diet. I have always felt better when I am eating animal protein as opposed to soy or bean or grain proteins. I am also learning a lot in school about nutrition and diet and how so many people have reactions to grains because we eat such a high carb. diet, that our bodies are reacting to it. (It’s much more indepth than that.) But, I feel like, if I am a part of the cycle of birth, life, and death, and I have known the animal, or atleast know the people who have raised it, and the animals have been treated well, and are not fattened up with hormones, or over loaded with antibiotics, then maybe I could feel better about eating meat. I have been eating poultry since I got pregnant with K, and it’s only hormone/antibiotic free and free range. It’s hard though, ’cause Toby is still vegetarian, and I don’t want to have to cook two meals. I am the type of cook who throws everything into one dish anyway, so it’s not like there would be side dishes for him to eat. So, I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it…. I did order 5 pounds of hemp seed, though, so that will help add some protein and Essential Fatty Acids back to our diet!

Out for a drive

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I took a drive this morning to go look at some land that a friend has for sale. I puttered along in my biodiesel/vegetable oil car thinking how I have been paying $3-3.50/gallon of biodiesel for a year now (when we can’t make our own) and gas has finally reached the same price. I think everyone has felt that this was coming, no matter what the cause of price increase might be. I realize that most people in this country are totally dependant on gasoline to help run their daily lives (myself included), but I can’t say that I am not glad that the prices of gas are so high. Maybe it is just what this country needs to make a change for the better. We have traded in our souls for the ‘convenience’ of a system of travel that cannot go on indefinitely. And Biodiesel isn’t the answer either. We would just be putting a bandaid on the wound and not really dealing with the problem. I realize that I am preaching to the choir here, but I feel it must be said again… we have got to start supporting our communities!!! If we bought locally produced food and clothing, if we rode our bikes, walked, or car pooled, if we lived more sustainable lifestyles in harmony with earth and her cycles, if we were all a little more present, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Change must happen! So, here is the challenge:
1- grow just one plant your house that produced some food (think tomato, lemon, potato, herbs, banana, whatever!) and then share that food with your neighbors!
2 – If you are going to eat out, eat at the local mom and pop restaurants instead of the chains, and hound them to buy their food from local farmers (then, no trucks needing gas to haul our food from California).
3 – buy recycled clothing or make your own (there is nothing wrong with a thrift store special!)
4 – get out and walk or ride your bikes as much as possible. If this just can’t be done, than extend a hand to a neighbor and offer to carpool (to work, for errands…). Or try to get all your erands done in one outing instead of multiple trips.
I know there is so much more that can be listed here, but I think this is a good start!