Growth is a double edged sword. Unchecked, growth can be cancerous and destructive. It is this type of ceaseless expansion that has put our society into the precarious environmental and financial positions in which we currently find ourselves. On the other hand, growth can be regenerative and life-giving. Following a forest fire or a bitter winter, the first green shoots to emerge from the earth bear witness to the earth's ability to restore life in the wake of disaster.

My goal for this blog is pretty simple and open-ended: I want to document and share with family and friends my efforts to incorporate an ever increasing degree of self sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, and environmentally-conscious design into my life as a would be urban homesteader.


Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Lay of the land


Whenever I'm looking at other people's homesteading/gardening blogs, I love seeing pictures of what they're growing and building. I get lots of ideas and inspiration from seeing what other people are doing. The thing that I get curious about, though, is how everything is laid out and arranged. One of the things I like the most when reading through garden and permaculture books is the maps that show how the different areas fit together.
In the course of gardening and working around the house, I've drawn countless sketches and plans for the arrangement of garden beds and structures and such, but nothing artsy or nice. Having a bit of extra time at work, I decided to create a map of the 'Burbstead that's nice enough to put up on the blog. I looked up my house on Google Earth and copied the image into Photoshop. Then I cleaned it up and added some gradients and text, and viola!
Not only will give you all a chance to see what the 'Burstead looks like (although to be honest, at this point "you all" consists of my brother, and you're already somewhat familiar with the place, having lived here and all), but having a clean map that's drawn to scale will come in super handy when making future plans.

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