Starting small community in ozark mountains

Hello all. My name is Chris and I have been making plans to begin a small community on a 100 acre farm in the lower ozark mountains. No structures as of yet but have plans and money to start two structures. Fresh spring water, good farm land, and a lot of game. The entire 100 acres will not be open to us but I will go into specifics to anyone who is interested. The area is rough and will need a lot of work. The main purpose is to be off the grid and away from all this selfish hateful greedy society. Open to all genders and ages. Applicable skills are welcome and needed (especially at first).

I am making a trip to Europe that has been a lifelong dream on march 26th. As soon as I return (sometime mid to late summer), I will begin living on the land and working on the main building and irrigation and landscaping. I want a very harmonious vibe to the place
Good luck to everyone in finding your place in life!

 

This sounds like a dream, If only I was a US citizen...

 

I am interested, though I don't have much to contribute except manual labor.

 

Ozarks Eh?
Hmmm,,, you have odd timing Sir. I like it.

Lot's of limestone to play with I'm guessing. You mind if I use the local stone for more than just being in our way of getting er' done?

http://www.idigmygarden.com/forums/album.php?albumid=24 <-- This was 08' for me. All done with handtools, not as much as a hammer drill, wasnt in a rush,,, should have been looking back at it I suppose, but I like how things are evolving in any event.

Sometimes "fate" has a way of being better with life plans than we are eh'?

And you're even in the Warm part of the Ozarks to boot? I know I have a couple more on my FB page looking. I'll link them here for ya' too.

Me, I'm broke as hell with barely more than a drawknife and a tiny hammer,,, but I remember how those flea markets out there worked (Assuming you have some like the Cabool area in S. central MO.?)

Ears open for sure. We could live on the wild hog out there and wild greens alone like cavemen if we really didn't give a shit about it. lol. (Provided theres plenty of Mullein around to wipe our asses and mix with our tobacco at least. )

**editx2** OH, Southern Missouri Ozarks. lol!

 

So wait now,,, OP and Cliffandtab,,, same place or two different ones, I'm left feeling a tad confused here.

Are we talking Arkansas or Missouri here?

 

Sorry it has been a while since I checked my replies...
The Farm is in north Arkansas. Yes, it will be hot in July or August when I begin setting up for the first structure. Don't worry about tools or the like. I have plenty of that stuff. There is local limestone but most of the surrounding land is farmland that lies adjacent to a fresh water creek. Great for gardening. The water supply will be perfect I think. I am not as interested in skilled laborers as I am people who want to be here for the right reasons and make their new home a better place
I have a history of construction, landscaping, and irrigation so that will help us get started.
Any other questions??

 

Well being the Ozarks, and personally having an urge to do some Aquaponics, how deep is the limestone beneath your topsoil in the more shallow spots and whats the average overall?

Depth to the Aquifer?

Is there a good local dump or wrecking yard nearby for scrap materials to tinker and cobble with?

Any welding equipment?

What is the situation regarding mineral rights on the property?

How bad are the ticks down that way / Lots of Junipers?

Any sizable stands of Mullein for a tobacco filler or emergency firestarter / toiletpaper?

Do you like the idea of earthship construction?

What are your thoughts as to using Methane and Producer gas as a means to provide for off-grid power needs if we companion plant our fuel in amongst our beans and greens?

Plenty more to come, no worries there but I need to make some dinner right now.

 

I have not taken a depth or soil
Sample as of yet. There are no scrap yards near. I have no welding equipment.
Mineral rights are mine. Why? Planning on setting up a rig somewhere??
I am sure ticks will be bad this summer because of the weak winter we are having now.
What exactly do you mean by earth ship construction?
There is not much mullein around.
I thought I have seen here where you are part of a community already Fritz..??

 

And cliffandtab just used this thread to advertise their own community. I don't know why they don't start their own thread instead of jumping in on other's???

 

I had been out in Virginia last year but I found myself having to exert alot more energy than I felt was warranted in circular arguments with folks over ideas they could simply not grasp or see value in so I took my leave.

i.e. everyone hassling over hot water in a 55 gal drum over a campfire or using a bunch of pots and pans on the stove for bath water,,, very cumbersome,,, very simple workaround with some timber, some clay and some simple piping and valves, using the well pump to raise the output to even as low as 6', then feeding the water through an old radiator or a similar type of heat exchanger over a wood stove or fire,,, add a mechanical float switch to activate the well pump when it's low and WHAM, it's just like home almost,,, but people were more content to bitch about struggling to carry water from the well house to the inside of the Cabin in gas cans and milk jugs,,, UNTIL I just opened the valve which fed the waterline to the house one day,,, still they tended to just "glaze over" on discussion of the water heating system even though I could site countless examples of such systems in operation with reference material to back up what to me is already common sense. And in addition, spending all that time till I threw the switch and convinced them that the toilet would in fact work if water were run to it by dumping a 1/2 bucket of water in there to flush with.
Sometimes I was lucky and the lazy shit before me had remembered to do the same in kind AND make sure there was even some water left in there.

And spending a day tilling in green manure (Fresh Horse and Donkey, not plant based / cover crop) to a bed of clay from my understanding of any form of soil building is sheer wasting of man hours in light of the fact the 5 acres of Garden were totally surrounded by 78 acres of forest mulch which we could have spent that tilling energy on moving into place as a topsoil amendment rather than loosen hard clay just a day after the last and a day before the next rain,,, not as much a fan of masturbating as some might think.

AND when you get people asking you to use your one and only $15 multimeter so they can check the direct current capacity across the terminals of a Generator battery with 600 CCA rating and they then get frustrated angry and argumentative because they don't grasp the concept that such a meter at best has a 10A limit in it's ability without an additional clamp on inductive probe,,, yea, not there anymore.

Felt good letting that off finally, thanks for asking.
But keep in mind, I don't blame Sam, the owner for this, simply a matter of her own poor luck in the cluster of random joiners who showed up then out of sheer desperation more than any true search for community. Not all of them were clueless or there for the wrong reason, but enough clueless resistance to logic to sour my stomach on the place from those who had never originally intended to be in such a place to begin with.

These are the risks associated with not being choosy about your "help".

Anyway,

Mineral rights not so much for anything short of small scale quarrying limestone and any clay that might be there.

All the tools you see in the photo were the only ones I had aside from the 6' length of 3/4" Rebar with a spike and my Shovel & Pick.

If I'd had a Generator and a hammer drill I'd be eating deer roasted with smoked Chanterelles and Bolette Stew with some of the weirdest lettuce you've ever seen from inside my limestone castle meets Hobbit home. Meh, fuck crazy relatives in any event Oh but I was the crazy one for pleading with them to dump everything into Gold while it was at $430 an oz... Pffft...



And if you have any good deposits of Red or Grey clay in the ground or in the creek I'm also pretty good at turning raw clay into some good workable material for whatever you may want out of ceramic, easy to primitive fire small stuff and I have some ideas on a few larger items, making a wood fired kiln isn't rocket science.

Mullein isn't a big issue, I know where to grab plenty of wild seed if you have any interest in cultivating a stand "just in case". REALLY beats the snot out of a handful of dried leaves in a pinch (or after one).
Heres a bit of a peek at how I was doing the same a bit further north of you, up by Cabool / Licking MO.
This here is an idea of the soil depth I had on average,


So, something to keep in mind if you have any plans to incorporate an Aquaponics nursery as a means to supplement your soils fertility by using the fish pond as your water source, just as easily break down a small outcropping and use that as the basic backbone of an above ground pond thats rammed with a layer of clay inside to seal it off,,, Or as shown, we can just dig in deeper,,, which is actually preferable when getting your stone as the stone has a higher moisture content when underground naturally making it much easier to split & shear as wanted.

Spend $150 and get a serviceable Mig welder btw, you will eventually need one, on probably more than one occasion and with a little practice are not hard to get used to using, much cheaper than having a welder come and visit you I think.
www.lindsaybks.com will have alot of very useful titles to you in that and many other areas.

So what are your thoughts on any possible, "Communally profitable" cottage industries? Are there any stands of persimmon trees or an abundance of Shaggy bark Hickory we could wild harvest for market, make jams and such, keeping it simple till we get established and start diversifying?

And what is the rate of flow for the spring, and is there any idea as to how stable a source that is /estimates of the aquifers capacity to irrigate your fields?

And just what methods of farming are you intending on employing there? Have you decided on your primary money crops as yet?
Have you checked with neighboring farms as to Monsanto's hand in the area?

Earthship homes come in about as many shapes and sizes as you could imagine and google or youtube will probably give you a better explanation than I can, generally built into ground or built up with it,,, rammed earth sort of stuff. Personally I prefer the idea of using something like the local Limestone for use in the framework construction and then covering it over in earth and "homemade topsoil" and using the same footprint I use for my dwelling as even more room to grow food. And they are generally well insulated which will reduce some of the need for heating in the winter as well as help keep cool in summer if you set up your ventilation right.

And if not having a junkyard or dump nearby, how close is it? And then is there a good picking pile or three around on neighbors land on their back 40 we can harvest? (I've found some useful shit in some weird places in my day.)

 

Come to think of it I guess that's the kind of shit you can expect when you name your place Belly Acres,,,

:cheers2:

 

Fritz, if the situation ever comes up again, here's how you measure a large current with a small meter. You note the size of the wire that the current goes through. Then you go to a website like this one:
http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html
where you can look up the resistance per foot of that size wire. You expose the bare metal at two points some distance apart on the cable. In fact you might be able to choose that distance, with a little middle-school level math, so that a given current will give you some convenient voltage drop over the selected length. For instance, that website says 14 gauge wire has .2525 ohms resistance per 100ft. So a length of 3.96 feet would be .01 ohms, which would mean that you'd measure 10 millivolts per amp of current. You just attach your meter and read it off. Easy. It'll make you a hero some day.

 

Didn't have my pocket ref. book with the awg chart handy and I wouldn't trust his math in any case and I had other pertinent crap occupying me to bother an explanation.

Frankly wouldn't trust him to not just "hop on it" and forget to use that bit of wire,,, OR more likely simply bridge the terminals of the battery with the wire alone and then blame me for the acid burns later. lol

In any event, I had offered to find the actual problem on his generator that he mis-wired in the first place, being in a hurry to see it work but he had more fun just replacing every bit of copper in the damn thing, and I had even more watching him.

 

IN. Living at the Lake this summer, count me in for October.

 

And so will showing people how to restore depleted soil and keep it friable as a waste product of their off-grid energy system as well as provide them with an automatic cottage industry of "Terra preta", but they have to listen and help too or the plot only gets a few inches of coverage if I have to work alone.

I will grow your Mullein, but don't expect me to wipe for you with it.


OOOH! THEN there were those who would sit and whine about the financial contributions of others there but yet when it came time to gather firewood, these same people would rather gather kindling and look to it to burn overnight for warmth in the heart of winter yet had no complaints to me carrying 10'x16" dia white oak logs over my shoulder to the cutting pile over 4 acres of clearcut remnants and mud that could actually be put in at bedtime with a fair amount of cinder remaining in the morning to git' er' going for breakfast.... Yet while their own Physical shortcomings needed to be considered, the financial ones of the Physically able were a thorn in their "communal side".

 

Checking in from Northwest Arkansas...I would love to be a part of your efforts in building a community in the region. Keep me in the loop on your progress when you get back from your trip and let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

 

Oh, another question, local suppliers of Bulk goods, rural Amish or Mennonite stores?

Local Hunting & your thoughts on it as well as your gear for it (i.e. I'd be stuck making a bow or throwing rocks or fishing right now)

Much in the way of those rural warehouse styled flea markets, Antique or resale stores?

 

And get me a shot of that creekbed when you have the time if ya' could Cabals? I want to see what it looks like so pull a bucketfull of the clay or sediment and snap me a picture if you don't mind?

 

Now heres a bass-ackwards idea,,, kill your local soil off,,, grow tobacco until you have nothing but Clay left,,, Process the clay into Adobe raised bed gardens as a means to help isolate soilborne pathogens and make sol management easier,,, OR use these as Aeroponic systems powered by the sun for a PURE Carbon based output to be used for further food crops and energy production without any dirt at all as your starting point.