Abies lasiocarpa var. arizonica 'Glauca Nana' is a good one but it may become larger given time than say Abies concolor 'Archer's Dwarf' which makes a pyramidal shape sort of similar to Picea pungens 'Sester Dwarf'. About the red and yellow twig dogwoods. They form colonies with their roots and are better used for projects such as erosion control or on large properties where they are beneficial to nature. They are a burden, otherwise... and often do they succumb to leaf diseases. Substitutes for consideration might be hollies with persistent red-berries; Acer circinatum ‘Pacific Fire’; Hydrangea quercifolia; Regarding a smaller flowering tree, the problem with crabapples, again, are leaf diseases. I'd probably stay clear of those and use Stewartia pseudocamillia or another species. I won't mention it again, but Cornus officinalis is a great candidate. Dax

I am really sorry to hear about your community. It sounds like you wouldn't want neighbors that short sighted and oblivious anyway, would you? Me, I'd love to have you as a neighbor. :) You are dreaming big but I honestly would suggest you pick a place, move there and rent for a while to see if it suits you before embarking on a homestead project. Since I am currently planning a green home and have been fixing up this rural property, I may be able to help with estimates a bit, but local costs can vary widely, particularly with utility service. So these are just general numbers. On that 80 acres, going off-grid might be cheaper than pulling utilities in if you want to get back off the street a-ways. Providing, of course, you can generate sufficient energy in your location. Out in the boonies, you just need power, and maybe phone and cable. If there's even cable access -- otherwise you'll need satellite internet/TV. And there are always cell phones. You'll have a well and septic system for water and sewage disposal. First, you CAN move homes. Purchasing a small older house is often cheaper than the actual fees moving it to the property. You could use that as a base of operations while building a new home, and then it could be the guest house. The boys can fix it up as part of their free room and board. :) Alternately, people always want someone to come and get rid of an old trailer. Not high class accommodations, but as a temporary home it would be fine. You do want to be nearby while the house is being built to keep your eye on things. In my area, construction costs for stick-built un-energy efficient homes are about $100/sq ft including lot cost. ICF construction with Icycene roof is about $115/sq ft including lot costs. (I don't yet know the raw figures without lot costs, but I just purchased 1/3 acre, unfinished, for $30k and it will be $50-$55k by the time I put a building pad in. FWIW.) Those prices can vary a lot depending on the finish level you want and how much you do yourself or if you act as your own contractor. Which, unless you've done it before, I don't recommend. Or at least get a good consultant. I can't recommend ICF as a construction material enough, especially if you are in a tornado or hurricane prone area. ICF will also work for bermed houses and daylight basements extremely well, and be completely dry inside. A typical ICF home uses less than half the energy of a comparable stick frame home -- and even less if you try harder. SIP construction is another energy efficient building method -- also a premium price over stick frame. Don't forget to look at passive solar home designs. Choose a pro; a poorly designed passive solar home is an uncomfortable nightmare. My chosen architect has a web page at http://www.sunplans.com with many of her plans online for viewing. Passive solar homes don't have to look funky or ultra modern. Digging a well is about $5k-$10k or more, depending on depth. Plus pumps, tank and trenching up to the house. There's no guarantee you'll hit water when you dig but you have to pay anyway. When I looked as restoring my well, the well was good and clean and very wet, but the other bits would cost about $2000. Solar hot water heating is not very effective for radiant heating and when you include the backup systems are usually not energy efficient at all. The people I know that have it have 3 problems -- 1) it heats the house in the summer much better than in the winter, 2) the hot water for showers is never hot and 3) the amount of solar capacity needed to really heat the house is just too much. In most areas, an electric geothermal heat pump is more cost effective and works better. You'll have to do core samples to find out if it's suitable for your land, but you can also lay the lines in a nearby pond even more cheaply. I'm not sure if that's compatible with livestock using the pond, but I would guess not. If you have a PV array to supply that electricity, all the better. Stand-alone solar hot water without the heating, provided you have the proper exposure and required sun, can be a big energy saver. Before getting on the solar bandwagon, be sure the property is in a latitude and climate where solar is effective. Many places in the US are just not good for active solar, either hot water or PV arrays. (Passive solar works anywhere, as does daytime solar space heating.) That goes double for wind power. Unless you have a strong, unidirectional prevailing wind, putting up a windmill is going to be more pain than help, and windmills take a lot of expensive maintenance. They are generally not effective at the home level. Outlying greenhouses are fairly cheap to build if you aren't going to a fancy glass or acrylic one. You do need to replace the plastic every 2 or 3 years. In reality, most climates don't need a greenhouse to produce food all year round. Come down South and you'll prefer winter gardening when there are no bugs. :) Or, design the home with the greenhouse attached (a conservatory) and enjoy the benefits of the plants all year round. Just provide pollination. Making a pond will not be too bad. You just need a local operator. It's cheap to hire a guy with his own backhoe; often cheaper than renting one and attempting to do it yourself and taking twice as long. Call it $500 a day. He'll probably dig a 2nd pond, then at the end, break the dam between them. However, if the pond is fed from groundwater or an underground spring you may not be able to go very deep because the equipment won't be able to operate in the water. Of course, if the water table is that high, a daylight basement is out of the question unless you have a convenient hill. Septic tank costs depend on the number of bedrooms in the house. In most areas, expect now to build an engineered mound system; ~1000g gallons for a 3 bedroom house. $20k-ish. Do consider coming down South. The climate is mild and many people here are not far from their rural roots, if indeed they ever left. Most places are livestock and farm friendly and hunting and fishing are just normal recreation you can do nearby. Land prices are still affordable but unlike what you may have heard, the place is not filled with gun-toting Klan members. (But yes, all your neighbors own shotguns and you will too if you don't already.) It's suitable for solar, and most of the unincorporated areas don't have building codes and inspectors so you can do anything you want provided it clears the health department. I think that's enough for now...

Rebecca, I am happy your drought is gone too, but sorry this dreary weather contributes to your aches and pains. I am hoping for warmer, drier weather for all of us, but not sure when we are going to get it. January always seems like the dreariest month to me. Stock will grow here, but it is pretty picky, and I have better results from it when I plant it in October or November which is the same time here in my area that you can plant pansies, flowering kale, flowering cabbage, dianthus, and snapdragons. Stock is not only a cool-season plant, but it is a bit pickier about the cool weather than some other cool-season plants seem to be. For example, dianthus goes in and out of bloom cycles here pretty much year-round, whether the temperatures are high are low. Stock doesn't do that. Stock blooms when the weather is cool, period. I believe it has to have temperatures in the 60s in order to set flowers and bloom. Once your temperatures are hotter, then it is pretty much done. If you can find some transplants in flower or ready to flower and plant them in early Spring, you can get a few weeks to a few months of bloom from it if the weather cooperates. I like stock but don't plant it often in Spring as we get too hot too early down here most years. It also tolerates cold less well than the other plants I mentioned above, so may need to be covered up in the winter and early spring on nights going very far below 32 degrees. It will tolerate some light frosts but not real heavy ones. Lupines? I haven't tried the ones that grow in northern parts of the country as I don't think they'd do well in our hot summers but I grow the kind of lupines that God gave us....Lupinus texensis, aka Texas bluebonnets. They either are perennial here or reseed in our clay, and some years we get big stands of them and other years we have smaller stands. Our clay really is too dense for them here at our house and I knew that when I planted them, but I figured that maybe if I was foolish enough to sow the seeds and plant them here, then maybe they would be foolish enough to grow and bloom at least a little bit....and they do. I also have grown the red-flowered variety of Lupinus texensis called Alamo Fire and it does pretty well here. In our area, all kinds of Texas bluebonnets do better from seed sown in the fall than in the spring. The bluebonnet seeds have a hard shell and sprout sporadically over a period of a couple of years. I do see fairly large (maybe one gallon, maybe two gallon) pots of Russell hybrid type lupines in stores each spring. They have them around the same time they have delphiniums in bloom in large pots, so maybe in April. To me, these are the kinds of things you buy, bring home and plant for instant impact, and you do so knowing they are likely to be relatively short-lived in our heat. If you don't expect them to thrive and flourish in our heat and can be content just to enjoy them while they last, I don't see anything wrong with buying them and planting them. I suppose they could be a big disappointment if a person bought them thinking they would bloom all summer. Yet, you never know---what if we had a cooler than average summer and they did bloom and survive? Cool summers aren't common here, but we had one in 2015. Nancy, I've grown Drummond's Phlox here and it did okay, but not well enough that I continued growing it. Drummond's Phlox is one of the smaller varieties and it needs well-drained sandy soil (which I really cannot give it). As for the taller garden type phlox, there's a handful of heirloom types that thrive here---we had someone in our neighborhood in Ft Worth whose home was just surrounded by the old magenta-flowering one grown back in the 1960s and prior. I don't know the name of it. There's a few of the taller garden phlox, like the variety "David", bred to be mildew-tolerant, but I haven't grown any of those. Jennifer, We have a fenced chicken run. We always have had one. I wouldn't have a chicken coop without one. I believe our run with the only coop now in use (we have four coops, and each has a fully enclosed chicken run) is 10' x 20' and it is fully covered in sturdy fencing, including a fence type roof. The chickens are fine when they are in it, but they hate being confined because they are used to free-ranging. I think that if they never were allowed to free-range, they wouldn't know what they were missing and they'd be content to be in the chicken run. We have lost more chickens to predators in the last 5 years than we did in the first 15 years, and I'm just done with that. If we buy more chickens, they are not going to be allowed to free range because it really is just setting them up to eventually become some predator's meal. Our predator problem probably is 20 times worse now than it was when we moved here. As land a few miles from us continues to develop, the wildlife gets pushed upriver to us. We have to change how we manage our chickens, or there's no point in having them any more. Tim is gone from home roughly 14 hours a day on work days, so he barely sees the chickens except on weekends and he is out of touch with our current reality with regards to the predator issues. I wish we were in a nice, quiet semi-rural neighborhood where chickens can free range and be relatively safe within their own yard, but we live in a wildlife jungle. It would help if I could convince him to fence our entire yard, but he hates fences with a passion. I don't know how to have chickens any more without an 8' tall fence around the whole yard. Dawn

Once again, an easement IS the OP's property and they are well within their rights to erect a sign post/mailbox within that easement, provided it does not interfere with access or equipment. A boulder - unless massive - will be covered in in snow in winter and any post set in anything other than concrete will be subject to wind displacing it. Even malicious kids could easily knock that over (they like to knock down mailboxes here). If you can't (or don't want to) dig, you might consider getting a galvanized metal tub and filling that with concrete and erecting your sign post in that. Although not done easily, that could even be moved should the need arise.