We have been at our new home for two months now, and we’re loving it. It’s sometimes hard to imagine we were ever anywhere else.

Everything is moving along, though the house itself has definitely been slowed down by a couple of kinks in the learning curve and the onslaught of rain season. But we’re overcoming any problems and we hope to be out of the tent in a couple more weeks.

• This is the tent we are living in right now. It does its job pretty well and keeps our clothes, our little computer area and us dry. There has been a few water issues to overcome, but we’re pretty much there. We have buckets under two of the edges and we have caught up to 40 gallons in one rain.

• Our Kitchen is still outside, and cooking with damp wood is getting old!

• Our first tent was a couple of tarps over the scaffolding. We hadn’t really thought too hard about rain, coming from the desert and all, but it rained the first night. It was Abe’s dad’s idea to use the scaffolding, and it saved our lives for the first week, until Abe went back to get the goats and an old tent we had lying around the place.

• Our stuff lives in tarps too.

• We have several garden patches planted, at various stages of growth (most recently is some terraces in front of the home site planted with beans as a food and soil conditioner).
• The goats give us and the dogs milk to drink, and we are also making a ranchero style cheese every day.
• We help a friend cut his alfalfa field in exchange for alfalfa for the goats. Plus we have abundant grass for them to graze on.
• We need chickens, as the grasshoppers are abundant, but have decided to wait a couple more weeks. One step at a time.
• Until we are self-sufficient, the food we eat is local and fresh, and we don’t seem to be suffering too much!

Squash and Melons	Beans and Corn	Terraces

We have batteries, solar and a wind generator set up, and can go online with the satellite. As yet, we do not have a power house, so the system is kind of camping too. It will eventually live in part of the room we are building now, but that will be a while.

We catch water off the tent when it rains. Anything else we get from the village. We started off getting water from the river, but the hike out of the canyon with 5 gallons of water each on our back seemed like less and less of a good idea. Now that it rains pretty much every day, we don’t have to worry too much about water.

Here is the building from the beginning. Give us a couple more weeks and it should look pretty different.  In the last photo, you can see the wind generator!

       Our Grassland

      View of the Valley