I am a new member to gw and hope I am not intruding here but Wow! We are attempting this exact same thing right now. We moved to 82 acres of sand and sage brush just over a year ago and are starting with absolutly nothing but what we brought with us and can provide or build on our own. We are 38 miles from the edge of town and we are 100 percent off grid. We have no address, so no fire , police, or medical services of any kind out here. When we moved here our plans were to gradually build up to a self sustaining life style over a period of a few years. We had a savings and job options all lined up. Instaed, the economy tanked and I lost any hope of working due to my health. We were kind of forced to decide on the spot if we realy wanted to do this or if we were going to go back to the city. We decide this realy is what we want to do and have been sticking to it. We haul water, we are building solar panels, have a very small geni for night time power and heat with scavaenged wood and use straw for insulation for both us and the animals. It took a full year for my partner to find any kind of work at all we lived off of saving and my tiny disability income until then and now most of his pay goes for fuel to get to work(79 miles round trip every day) . I was not able to get a pair of goats until Aug 25th of last year. We still need two more does so that we can keep a clean heard of 3-5 goats going at all times for both meat and milk. We have chickens ( the first thing we put out here, Reds, Amercanas,Siklies, and Bantoms) as well as Ducks and Pheasant. We plan on Turkeys and Geese this year. We also plan on rabbits in the future ( the new zelands )but have a large wild population to hunt for now. We will be saving for American Guinea Hogs and Irish Dexter Cattle. If we must, we will do a Dexter / Jersy cross for the cattle. We only want the smaller heiratige breads of the larger livestock since they are much nicer to the land ( I can comfortably range 3-5 dexters on the same amount of land as 1 of the standard breads of cattle and that 3-5 animals is all we will need ) and they can comfortably handle our major temp swings with out health issues. I only managed a small experimental bed last year. It was to see if I could grow all of the things that the folks here has major dificulty with since they are some of the mainstays in most home gardens (tomatoes , peppers, beans, greens, and mushrooms ). With a lot of creative gardening , it worked. So this year will be my first real garden attempt. A large percentage of what others have posted is on our list of things to plant or grow. This is not an all inclusive list but we have also added things Quinoa , flax , sorgums, sunchokes, sunflowwers, barley, oats, rye, buck wheat, soybeans, alfalfa, millet, wheat and clover ( because all of these they are good for both human and animal consumption). Most of these things can be grow together because they devolpe and mature at different times, many are symbiotic relationship plants ( think 3 sisters planting,like corn, beans and squash in the same bed), and they also build and maintaining the soil. We have not yet aquired most of these but hope to soon. They provide food crops and fodder crops at different stages so the production is double duty. With carefull and selective harvesting and seed saving we can set aside next years crop of some of the anuals like the buck wheat. We have plans on a small orchard and I received a gift of a few nut trees for birthday ( 2 hazel nuts a pecan and an almond) and they should arive in june. We will also try to take advantage of the native plants to incourage the continued diversity of wild life we have out here. If the Fox, Cyotes ,hawks,eagles, mountain lions , badgers and other bigger preditor types have an ample food sources, our animals are less attractive to them. We also get better polination , and bug controls. I am an experianced gardener but not in this zone 5 and with these kind of temp swings ( We are alpine high desert with -5 to -15 in the winter , 100 plus regularly in the summer and a last frost date of june 10 ). I can tell you it will be a challenge to everything you think you know. So, Thank you, Your efforts do not just benefit those you seek to help but also some of us at home. I wish you the best of luck with your experiment and will follow your post for any lessons you may be able pass on.

I won't be able to come. We will be in Oregon that weekend. I was hoping we would be leaving the following Sun or Mon, then I could come, but we're leaving on the 12th.

Happyladi, I have a pleasure with that. Funnygirl, how long have people been saying "Happy Memorial Day"? It sounds jarring to me, too, and I think that must be because it's a fairly recent thing. It is still sober, though, if you go to a parade or the cemetery. I think we encounter more strangers on Memorial Day now than we used to. Used to be just family and maybe you'd speak to a gas station attendant but there wouldn't even be a store at the station. Now we shop and work the holiday.

Rockybird, you had some childhood adventures didn't you?!? One of my sisters was always a wanderer as a child; back in the '60s parenting was definitely more free-range so she used to go all over our neighborhood unsupervised, which at the time was a relatively new development with lots of fields, woods etc. We lived in a military town which also meant lots of men around and I remember her at one point coming home to tell our mom that someone she met out in the woods was 'bothering' her. That turned out to be a guy who had been exposing himself to my 8-year old sister, repeatedly! OMG, I still recall how shocked and upset my mother was about that. She had no idea what had been happening and evidently my sister just wasn't fazed by the whole thing. Looking back as an adult myself she and my family are extremely fortunate nothing worse happened. Tish, nothing as serious as your story but here's another Bad Mother memory from my files: both my husband and I are/were not terribly interested in food and eating. We are both eat-to-live types and for a long time our dinners were relatively informal to say the least. Till one night when my daughter was ~7 YO she came to me just before bedtime insisting she was so, so hungry. I couldn't understand why until I asked my husband what he had fed her because I thought he'd taken care of that. He looked at me blankly, then asked what *I* had given her because he thought I'd done something for dinner! Talk about feeling awful...that was the start of my many year 5-night a week family dinner schedule (the other 2 nights were leftover and pizza nights). I never missed feeding the kids dinner again :). And while I'm here, one from parenting my son, teenage category. He, at my insistence, went to the senior prom. He wasn't dating anyone so took a girl who was a friend and he also told me the next day offhandedly that he had driven a group of kids home from the prom which was held on South Beach. A few days later I had gotten annoyed at something he hadn't done, homework I think, and was ripping him about being irresponsible, not doing what he should etc. He lost his temper and blurted out that 'driven a group' meant that all the kids he drove home were blind drunk and he was worried they would get hurt so volunteered to get them home safely which meant he had to drive literally to the south end of our county from the north end (SoBe) taking various people to their houses. Not only that, his 'date' ended up drunk-dialing her ex boyfriend to try to hook up with him while my son was taking her home then proceeded to vomit out the window of the car all the way to her house. I'll never forget my son saying to me 'mom, you have no idea what I had to do because I was the only one who wasn't blasted out of my mind!'. Talk about feeling like the world's worst mother!