Knoxville Urban Homestead Co., or something generic like that

Say hello to Knoxville's newest urban homesteading/sustainable agriculture/other buzz words entrepreneur! I vow to last longer than two months! I even have a blurb: 

While you no longer have to worry about neighbors ding-dong-ditching zucchini on your front porch, the gardening season is far from over in East Tennessee! Fall is the perfect time to grow delicious veggies while leaving behind the sweltering heat and aggravating insects of summer. It's also a great time to give your soil a boost for next spring with a healthy dose of compost or organic fertilizer, or maybe even build a raised bed or two that will be ready and waiting come spring.

Whether you want to break ground on your first garden or expand on a self-sustaining urban homestead, I want to help! Services include, but are not limited to: custom raised beds/planters, drip irrigation, rain barrels, compost systems, season-extension, and general garden maintenance. Contact me for a free consultation.

when we last left our heroes...

Despite what the blog may read, I am not still in Boise (although it was a great town). Many friends have remarked that the roadtrip posts went from terribly lengthy affairs down to briefer and briefer updates, then finally the occasional batch of photos.

Frankly, I got so far behind on posts and my memory banks began to overflow, so that by the time I left Boise I wasn't really looking for inspiration. There was certainly cool stuff between Boise and Knoxville, including Mormons and a killer brunch in Denver, but my mind was mostly on getting home. It's a bitter-sweet feeling to be homesick on a trip, but I took it as a comforting sign that I was looking forward to life in Knoxville. 

So I pushed pretty hard from Denver, and made it across the midwest in two days, arriving home in the wee hours of the morning, almost exactly a month from my departure, and a stone's throw from an even 8,000 miles. I hit the ground running, though, and started scheduling house-viewings the next day, as our lease was about to expire.

Fortuitously, a group of guys from church were planning on moving out of their 4 bedroom house in Parkridge at the end of September, so I called up the landlord and snatched it up before he had a chance to put it on the market. Then, somehow, we cobbled together a group of 4 to move in.

On Monday we started moving in, and on Thursday I left for a wedding in Wisconsin. After the Kansas-Knoxville leg of my roadtrip, the 13 hour drive north felt like a trip across town. The wedding weekend was a blaze of  testosterone, reminiscence, and good company. I was sad to leave old friends behind, but I had to rush home to wrap up the move and get ready for an art show I'm participating in at Carson-Newman this weekend. I've got a couple of shots from the roadtrip framed up and looking pretty. They'll be on display in the Class of 2010 Alumni show for the next month or so.

With the new house we inherited a couple of raised beds in the backyard, and I spent awhile today cleaning up a jungle of tomatoes and clearing out a pair of beds for planting. Onions? Garlic? Greens? We'll see.

In the works:

-Designing a board game (working title: Terraformers), think Catan meets Carcassonne meets Civilization meets Risk

-Jotted down the beginning of a short story during my trip back from the wedding, might amount to nothing

-About to put out the gardening business ad, see if I can't get a couple jobs in before winter

one month and a couple of dreams later

I know it's been awhile.

It was a busy time, what with finishing up at the Farm, and transitioning into whatever was next. Potentially moving to a new house, applying for long-shot jobs, postponing a roadtrip.

By the last couple of weeks of my AmeriCorps term at Beardsley I'd begun to help out my friend, Levon, with some house-painting, when I had the time, with the comforting incentive of employment insurance should none of my post-AmeriCorps plans pan out.

After my last day (June 29th), I took a little time to buff up my resume and look for exotic job opportunities. I got excited about a couple of positions, then got un-excited about them. So I've been painting.

Levon's a good boss, and I'm glad to have learned the basics of the trade from him, but it still feels like work, and not a job. I know that life isn't always about the follow-your-heart, supremely fulfilling kind of jobs, but I still want to do something I love.

Summer squall rolling over downtown Knoxville.

Here's the dream that's been hopping from back burner to front burner, on and off, for the past couple of months:

Custom garden & sustainability consultation, design, installation, and maintenance for those who want to garden/live more sustainably, but may not have the time, diy skills, or know where to start.

Seeing it written out like that my mind immediately jumps to the words "market over-saturation", but I feel like I've gleaned, out of the past year at the Farm, that what I love about gardening is the design and construction of gardening/sustainability systems, and I want to do what I love.

Surely someone out there wants to pay me to build some raised beds for them to grow vegetables in. Right? I sure hope so. And before long we'll (we? I have employees now?) be able to offer chicken coop building, and beekeeping, and rooftop vegetable gardens for urban restaurants, and other neat stuff.

But for now, I just need to find a couple folks who need a simple wooden box built to plant some beans in, and maybe some advice on heirloom vegetables or composting. Don't be shy.

Sorry the pictures are so foreboding. All I had.

sow, weed, water, wait

Guys, I planted my plants. Not in containers. In the ground. Crazy, right?

So about a month ago, Levon (noroomforhipsters.com) asked if I'd be interested in helping him re-start their garden. They're lucky enough to have a big sunny yard, and had a garden that they shared with a couple other families, but when they left town and rented out the house a couple years ago, the renters mowed it over and let the bermuda grass go wild.

With talk of Levon & Ashley skipping town and renting out the house again, they saw fit to rope me in as an equal-shares protector and maintainer of the garden, with the incentive of pretty much giving me free reign.

So we tilled up a big patch of grass, and then let it sit there for a couple weeks, while I scrounged up a rag-tag bunch of plants and the weather made some characteristically unexpected turns. Then, finally, on Saturday the planets aligned, and Levon and I both had free time, plants, and a sunny day.

Six hours later there stood something that we could pretty unashamedly call a garden. A pair of mounded beds full of peppers and tomatoes, a nearly level raised bed (without the soil to fill it, as of yet), a fledgling bramble of raspberries and blueberries, and brick-lined pathways connecting it all.

It is, at the very least, a start, and will hopefully continue to push back the lawn, until we're ding-dong-ditching zucchini on every porch within a mile radius.

from the labs

Sneak-peak of a project I've got in the works:

Drip-irrigated, portable, raised planter.

Probably gonna post it to Instructables if it works out.

The endless summer.

Peppers! Guess what? They're perennials. Yup, you heard it right. If you protect them from frost, both sweet and hot peppers will grow and produce fruit for years. One local farmer and pepper guru has a 4-5 year old pepper tree that he claims produces as much fruit as 18 first-year plants!

So this winter the Noise Temple will be festooned with Doe Hill Golden Bells, Sweet Chocolate Bells, and some other Bell I don't know the name of. These plants are all coming from Beardsley, where the greenhouse also features a handful of the same. Why pull up and throw away perfectly healthy plants?

I'll try to keep you updated on the peppers's long journey through winter.