What a wonderful visit, Christine. I can feel the increased human presence and care on your land for sure.  A lot is happening quickly.


Your shade garden will recover from the goats eventually. You might ask around if anyone has hostas to give you. They are a shade-tolerant edible-ish plant. I myself plant nettles under trees, but you might not want them right there!


Gray water ideas: simple system, perhaps with an outflow from each building feeding willows and comfrey that act as a screen around each shed? Having the pipe be wide enough is important. Our outdoor sink has a toggle switch, with one side running to the septic and the other side flows to our fruit trees. That way we can toggle the water to the septic tank when the trees don't need water, but send it to the trees in the summer. Our washing machine runs all year round just with a simple pipe out the wall to a group of comfrey plants. The comfrey look a little sad in the winter but are growing back like crazy now, cleaning nutrients from the graywater. I cut the comfrey and feed it to the animals.

Eric Beach is the regulatory permitting wizard in King County. Here's his contact info.

Be in touch with Bob for more rabbit butchering tips. He knows about the little leg glands you will want to remove. I'm glad you're enjoying them. I don't have any amazing wisdom on the group process around who gets the meat, but I hear you for sure about how contentious it can be. It's worked best for us to have certain people be in charge of certain animals--but the catch is that the people need to be around to care for the animals, and want the responsibility in the first place. "No one who has a servant is free" goes the saying--no one who is caring for an animal is completely free of that responsibility. One example is that I asked someone here to be in charge of the goat's water. It's important enough that she's motivated to do it, but since I am also in the goat pen every day, I can double check that the goats are okay. It really helps that she loves to drink goat milk!

Azomite is the trace mineral supplement I left for you. It's great stuff, and seemed to help a lot with the trace minerals in my land. I saw a difference using it. If you don't have lime (agricultural lime aka calcium carbonate) you may want a bag or two. It's cheap at the Monroe Co-op and a few bags will last you years. It's taken some years for the calcium to work sufficiently into the soil, but adding calcium has tamed our buttercup significantly. Try some lasagna gardening or mulching techniques to expand the room available to your garden plants' roots. Some nitrogen, especially for leafy greens in the chilly early season, can do wonders. Test something on one or two plants and see if they look different in a week's time.

The clear plastic only works to kill plants when the weather is warm and sunny. You could put it over your manure pile to keep rain from washing away more nutrients. That greener grass downhill from the pile is a sign that you are losing a lot. Of course you can recoup it by cutting that deep green grass and mulching the garden with it. I wish you ducks in your future, ones that love to eat slugs but are also predator-resistant. If you have only a few you might not need to feed them a lot of supplemental food at certain times of year. The other side of that coin is that a small flock is more vulnerable to predators because they have fewer watching eyes. I was just reflecting today how the ducks are more active when it's rainy out--just like the slugs! A tidy feedback loop.

Steve Solomon's asparagus advice from Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades has how to set up a long-term bed. It's a fair amount of work for a few years, mostly ruthlessly weeding out female flowers and their resulting seeds.

Great ideas about the future of the homestead and listening to the land. There is just no substitute for sit spot and wanders! Maybe set some kind of goal for yourself around that, one that's realistic? Happy to be an accountability buddy for you, like if you want to text me a picture every time you go to your sit spot.

Hope this helps, I can expand on anything here as I feel I've forgotten a few notes.

Enjoy the spring!

Warmly,
Alexia - Hawthorn heals the heart