In the peach to buff, to orange and red color range with pink; 'Anna Olivier' is the strongest scented Tea, that I have ever smelled and I've had the joy of smelling every Tea at Vintagegardens.com home garden and S.J.H.R.G.. Crepescule' trumps 'Perle d'or for fragrance, and in our garden is more resistant to disease. All year it is nearly clean. -Monsieur Tillier, which is very disease resistant in my garden where conditions favor p.m. over blackspot. I can only detect a light fragrance from the last two. I have loved Mlle. Cecille Brunner' longer than any other rose, both my grandmother and mother grew it and I have the original form, the spray form as well as the climbing form. The spray form does bloom far more than the climbers. I detect a strong fragrance, of damask rose with a tiny bit of black pepper as a scent note finish from all of them. except the white sport, which smells more like a floral blend with a touch of lemon. with 10 feet left of the spread, I would plant a 'Grandmothers Hat' for fragrance, it has a very resistance to disease, here. In cool weather this rose produces gorgeous lilac-pink blooms with the mauve tint being stronger. It has a long bloom season and the quickest re-bloom of any H.P. I've ever seen or grown. Oh what fun, to have so much room still available. I only water my mature Tea and Tea-Noisette roses c. twice a month in spring and autumn and 3 times a month in the hottest weeks of summer. I don't water them at all in winter, because we get a good amount of rain, usually, during that season. When they are mature sized plants, -the partial shade will lessen the amount of water you need to use. -adding 4"+ of mulch to the bed, (kept a couple inches away from the base of the canes, ) will also lessen the amount of water you use on rosebushes. I often forget to water my Teas and I've never seen their leaves droop, which would indecate dehydration. Lux. P.S. I placed a 'Mermaid' in my backyard against a fence where I have espaliered her size within bounds to where she will grow to be 4 and 1/2 feet from the fence outwards, and I've given her an allotment of 25' width. I adore this rose.

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...

Sounds interesting. As someone who built the EarthTainers first time this year and has been using rain barrel water to painstakingly fill the tubes everyday, I wonder if it is better for my sanity to use pressurized municipal water and the AWS to feed the units everyday. It really wasn't so bad to fill 8 each day (three are nested 5-gallon bucket tainers), but as the summer has moved along and we got more rain than usual the systems became overloaded one week with too much water, tomato leaves yellowed and died. I began to question if I was over-filling from that point forward and still question it as we transition into the arid, dry autumns that put us water restriction in these parts. I noticed my tomatoes are not growing as large as they had in the beginning. Each tomato is about the size of a handball now, when in the beginning they were baseball to softball-sized. Since the over-watering with additional rain from the sky I think I reached some point of no return, so the system has remained too wet and certain varieties of tomato plants have not fared as well as others. I wonder if I add 4 gallons of perlite to each mix in each EarthTainer next year.. if that will help keep a drier mix. Will that make over-watering (either by your action or the weater) more forgiving?

K Laurence - I agree, landscaping will make a big difference. I guess right now I’m hoping to make it as good as possible without doing any kind of landscaping, so it looks even better when I do. Not sure if that makes sense, but at least it will be easy to paint without trampling any plants. Gargamel - I thought about removing the shutters, as I’m not a big fan of purely decorative shutters either, but it almost looks unfinished. Below is a pic so you can see what I mean. Pennydesign - I’m interested in stain, but I feel like it might be strange if I just replace the flat pieces of wood with new flat pieces of wood, not sure if it needs an interesting grain or if that is worse- maybe I’m not thinking of the right material. Powermuffin - Got it, if I go with a grey exterior, would you go darker grey or black with the shutters - or something that would coordinate with the front door depending on that color? Emmarene - Good call on needing contrast with the roof and nice photoshop work! The left side of the house is definitely odd. After I paint the next step is landscaping (i.e. a big shrub). I am toying with the idea of removing the gable as well, but that wouldn’t be for a while as I’d be waiting until I got a new roof. I thought about making the cedar shakes level all the way across (pic below), but that looks odd to me as well - what do you think?