Cristo Balete

You'll have quite a bit of grey water from running cold water while waiting for hot, from showers, from rinsing dishes, from washing/rinsing clothes that you could chase it down through the line with that water.  You'll want to keep that whole diverter clean anyway.   Store the grey water in milk jugs in the bathtub/shower.  No point in using power to deal with a situation like that when all you need is a manual "flush".

A friend of mine bought some property with a 1920s cabin built with a redwood tree growing through the middle of it.  Redwoods live to be a couple thousand...yes, thousand years old, they don't rot, no bugs bother them, he thought he had it made.

But....they keep growing, getting bigger and bigger, wider and wider.  And they sway in the wind like crazy.  He only had one and it just about ripped his roof off it was filling up the space and swaying so much.  Cost a fortune to have it removed.  

You are talking about 4 trees.

If you are going to top them, and it doesn't kill them, everything above can still apply....plus, if you have bark beetles, termites or any other kind of beetles, messing with those trees at all will stress them, and the insects will move in.

And, honestly, from my experience, you aren't going to want to do this again in 5 years, while at the 3-year mark you have to try to fix what is starting to go wrong with it. Wood for a carport will only get more expensive in 5 years.   It will just always be on the list, and in a rural situation it really is better to make the list shorter and shorter.

And one of your biggest investments, one of the ways to get you to groceries, gas, propane, building supplies, to safety in a forest fire is underneath it.  All you need is for one corner to go down and there could be damage.  

There's enough to worry about going wrong in a rural setting.

:-)

Harmony, looks like a very successful project!  

I have a good-sized pond and I would NOT recommend cattails.  They grow rampantly, require yearly maintenance, and are very difficult to pull out, and have tried to fill in the sides of my pond.  Pulling them never entirely gets the roots, and they double and triple with ease.  It was the pond-building technique around here, and they were already on my pond when I bought the place.  I rue the day they ever planted those things.  Where I have managed to keep them at bay, where there roots were needs to be dug out by big equipment which I am not in the mood to pay for someone to do it.

You'll see volunteer plants/pond vines/duckweed that blow in, are brought in on the feet of birds and ducks.  Research whatever shows up because a lot of it is traveling around the world helped by bird feet, like red Azola.  A lot of them will also fill in your pond unless they are immediately dealt with.  A year skipped will allow them to grow and overtake that area.

I really enjoy my pond, but it's a labor of love - a lot of labor!!

:-)

I'm going to bump this back up with an 8-year update.

Thank you both, Eric and Travis, and the rest of you with great road-building knowledge.

My road did not hold up.   On the left side it sank, not too terribly, but it's annoying and not right.  It  will probably just get worse.  So I will put sand first, on my clay, (thank you, Eric,) and then rip-rap and 3/4" rock.   I did put drain pipes across the trenches because digging those out every year was a pain.  I have to cap them off after the rainy season to keep the rodents from putting nests in there.

I can vouch for the rip-rap/3/4" rock solidity,  I did it once under a shed foundation and it has absolutely held up even with ground water flowing over it when the ground is saturated.  The shed has not moved in any way.

Thanks again, everybody.

About preserving post ends, I just ran across something, there used to be metal cauldrons for heating up pitch, and then post ends were submerged in the hot pitch, and this preserved them in the ground.  I don't know any more specifics than this, but it might be worth looking into.

Nancy, rock on!  That looks really great!

Rose, pretty impressive that you guys can grow apricots.  I guess out of all the fruit trees I have, apricots are the fussiest, and I always give them another year to get over whatever issue they had.   Do the other trees have pollinators, or did the bees take a hit from the cold temps, too?

Mine fuss in the drought, even though I water them.  Then we got enough rain, they all had new shoots, then we got too much rain, they sat in water for at least 3 months, and those shoots didn't get a single leaf.  Some of  the new growth was killed.  I'm hoping they are just stunned into neutral for a year.  

They do tend to pull through eventually.

If you have a style already in mind, I would say for two people start out with 8 to 10 feet wide, and 20 feet long in whatever configuration works, and expand as you go.

I built five 10x19 foot quonset hut style greenhouses 25 years ago, and they have evolved to two of them holding fruit trees with just chicken wire covering and some fabric in the winter, and the other three has vegetables.  The reason I say 19 feet long instead of 20 is that the greenhouse plastic comes in 20-foot lengths, and you need 6 inches on each end to roll around the ends to seal it.  (As an example, the ends will be flapping open if you put a 20 foot piece of plastic on exactly a 20 foot frame.)

The trees are frost sensitive, banana, avocado and tangerine, lemon.  

A quonset hut is 20-foot rebar, covered in 1/2" PVC pipe,  bent in an arch, ends 10 feet apart.  Ends inserted into the ground, but the ground doesn't freeze here, so that extra depth beyond frozen soil would be part of the calculation.   It is about 71/2  feet high, arches are about 3 to 4 feet apart.  There are wooden supports going down the middle because the center of the rebar, over time, will start to sink, especially with the weight of plastic or panels or shade cloth on it.  

This style is really good in bad winds.  We had what they call a microblast, approx. 80-90 MPH winds for 1-2 steady minutes, not a gust, everything shook, but the greenhouse had very little damage.  It can be added onto if you want.  It's DIY, so it's not as expensive as a kit.   I put a chicken wire wall between two 19-foot sections so if a packrat gets into one section, it probably can't get into the other section, and I can get rid of it before too much damage is done.  The door is wide enough to accommodate a wheelbarrow.  

Not sure why people want really high greenhouses.  I want the heat down around the plants, not up at the 8 or 10 foot height.  I also don't want to have to get on a ladder to repair them.  I don't want them up in the wind.  Greenhouse plastic comes in specific widths, and a 20-foot width of plastic is what covers an 8-foot wide arched greenhouse.   I put 2-foot wide, 8-foot long patio panels around the bottom and the plastic comes down over the patio panels.  It keeps the animals from seeing all the green in there and trying to get to it.  Deer will try if there's a drought and they are low on food.  Foxes, and rabbits, too, they love tomatoes and fruit.