The homestead that shows its work.
Open Source Orchard is a working homestead in zone 7b, run like a systems project: a food forest more than 2,000 plants deep, its anchors tracked one by one in a database we built, automation where it earns its keep, and honest numbers on all of it. Come for the food forest. Stay for the spreadsheets.
What you’ll find here
Three kinds of dirt under the fingernails.
The Orchard
A food forest designed in rows and guilds, tracked plant by plant in a database we built ourselves. Design logic, plant Field Reports, automation experiments, and the yields – real ones, with numbers.
Builds
The racks, feeders, trellises, and fixes that keep a homestead running – documented with cut lists, costs, and the mistakes we’d rather you make less expensively than we did.
Homestead Life
The why behind all of it: raising a big family on a working homestead, what fails, what surprises us, and what we’d tell you while sending you home with extra zucchini.
The Field Reports
Every plant we grow eventually earns a Field Report: a stat card rating its toughness, payoff, self-sufficiency, speed, guild value, and manners – scored from what actually happened on our ground, not what the catalog promised. Would we plant it again? We’ll tell you straight, including when the answer is no.
We publish our numbers
Most homestead sites show you the harvest basket. We show you the ledger too – what this site earns, what it costs, and how many hours it takes – because “open source” isn’t just a cute name.
One email a week. Real numbers, no fluff.
The new post, what it cost, what worked, and what died. Subscribers can also ask for walking onions: half of every harvest here goes back out to people who’ll plant it. It’s one family’s patch, so when a season runs out you’re in line for the next one.