My Own Piece of Land

The entrance to my little paradise

At long last I have acquired my very own little piece of paradise (cue celebratory trumpets), which will soon be my new farm. If all goes well, I hope to begin construction on my straw bale dream house (about 700 or 800 sq. ft.) in 2013.

The lot is about 5 acres and has a sun-flecked wooded entrance (a must for a Woodland Elf), with the remainder being mostly open meadow. It’s even on the same road I’ve always lived on, just the other side of “Poppy and Gramma’s” farm. I’m stoked!

The plan is to live totally off the grid, producing my own food and electric and maintaining as close to a zero-waste policy as is humanly possible. There are already a few wild apples trees, (prime for autumn cider), some wild strawberries (which are still better than any domesticated varieties one can find), a slew of blackberry bushes, and even a few of my favorite nut trees. (At the moment there’s also an ever-flourishing crop of poison ivy, but I don’t plan to carry that into the future!).

At this point I still have time to come up with a name for my future farm, but I’m leaning toward calling it “Crickhollow,” in tribute to the house Frodo bought after selling Bag End. (No, it wasn’t in the Lord of the Rings movie; it actually had to be read in one of those small, rectangular things called “books”). The only hitch in that idea is that a few of my Frodo-hating relatives might never speak to me again if I named my house after Frodo’s (honestly, I don’t understand how anybody can really hate Lord of the Rings). But I guess I don’t really have to worry about that until 2013.