We live on a beautiful piece of
land in Southwestern Wisconsin's Driftless region. We grow and preserve a lot of food in no-till gardens and we grow culinary
mushrooms. We have hens for eggs and we plan to raise around 50 meat
chickens this year. We built our own off-grid high-efficiency house,
chicken coop, outdoor kitchen, and have long term plans to build more infrastructure like extending our gardens, a
root cellar, animal buildings,
greenhouse, sauna, and other outbuildings. We enjoy working in our garden, taking care of our animals, cooking delicious meals, laughing, reading, playing music, and raising our young son Leonard.
We are offering an 8'x20' tiny house and/or camping platform as well as meals in exchange for around 20-25 hours of help a week.. We have knowledge of things you may want to learn such as
beekeeping, woodworking, building, preserving, growing food,
solar energy, music. You will get some basic
experience with contours and planning a long term design for our property (buildings, gardens, silvopasture, etc)- your input would be welcome.
Goals for 2023:
-inoculating mushroom logs in Spring (April) for culinary mushrooms
-creating new garden area from scratch including contouring, earthscaping, hauling of
compost, sheet mulching, fencing, growing, preserving
-Installing an earthen floor in our house, which includes washing a lot of sand
-rainwater collection (including system design)
-winter root vegetable storage without electricity
-Contour the area surrounding garden, lay foundation for basic design of surrounding buildings and pathways
-Raising 50-60 meat birds- building a structure for them and rotating them daily.
-possibly a
solar dehydrator (lower priority)
-Enclosing our back porch area so we can have some outdoor storage and a place to work on engines in winter
-Using an alaskan mill on a couple large oak
trees that fell
-Build a small
greenhouse from mostly recycled materials
The ideal person(s):
We understand not everyone will have all of these qualities. However, the ideal person or persons will:
-Be dependable and responsible
-Communicate clearly
-Be able to do physical labor and have some experience with farm work
-Be interested in what we are doing
-Be interested in off-grid/simple/rustic living (ex. how to live with less electricity, maintaining an
outhouse).
-Be able to live in community
-Be open to new ideas, friendly discussion
-Be open to helping with child care for our toddler
What else to expect:
The tiny house is most comfortable in warmer months. It has a small kitchen but no running
water inside. It has a 2 burner cooktop. It has
enough electricity for phones/laptops/lights. There is internet on the property. The main house does have a
shower and conventional toilet inside, but we like to
shower outside and use the outhouse when possible in the warmer months.
Day-to-day tasks are not always focused on what you may want. The learning process takes a while and by sticking around you will eventually learn valuable skills. There are daily and weekly chores such as taking care of
chickens, mowing, taking out the
humanure, moving compost, taking out parsnip and thistle, childcare, etc, which we will ask for your help with. Both of us have lived and worked on farms and homesteads through both
WWOOF and Workaway and Courtney has also been an employee at a
local veggie farm. We understand what it means to put work toward someone else's property and we will try our best to help you on your journey while working toward our goals.
We have references from past helpers and would appreciate references from you. If this is something that may interest you, please get in touch via
courtneyjarman@gmail.com. Thanks and have a nice day!
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