We’re building a working homestead in zone 7b East Tennessee – a blended family of seven humans, two dogs, and one house pig named Eugene, a food forest more than 2,000 plants deep, a woodshop that mostly builds farm infrastructure, and more wifi devices and sensors than any garden should require.
The short version of how we got here: Sunny and I had a vision to develop a piece of property with several purposes. Rule one of permaculture: everything should have more than one purpose. For me, the purposes were to build something I believed in, something for my family to enjoy, something with sustaining value, and something genuinely unique. Thus, Open Source Orchard.
Sunny has other purposes in mind too – but that’s a different story.
Most of my professional career has lived in IT and analytics. That’s been my trick, but my talent and passion has always been systems thinking: designing whole systems, pulling disparate sub-processes together, and making them work as a unified whole. That’s fun, and it applies to anything – technology, people, and, it turns out, homesteading.
Sunny would say I’m a dreamer, and that at times I invent more projects than I can finish. Guilty. But my brain never stops working. About six years ago it started thinking about plants, and it has yet to stop.
What makes this place a little different is the operating system. The orchard lives in a database we generate with our own scripts – seven rows, 133 guild positions, every plant with its own record. The ducks get fed by an automated feeder I rebuilt three times before it deserved the name. Water comes off the roof into catchment, some of the power comes off the sun, and everything gets measured, because measuring is how you find out you were wrong cheaply.
And we are wrong regularly. That’s most of what this site is for.
Because here’s the thing about homesteading: so much is doable, but experimentation is the barrier – it costs time and money most people can’t spare. My hope is to build things that shortcut that for the next homesteader. That’s the community value I want to contribute. I’m standing on the ideas and research of so many people who came before me – you’ll find a lot of them on our resources page – and this is my way of paying it forward a little.
Why “open source”
Open source is a software idea: publish the whole recipe, let people inspect it, improve it, and pass it on. We think it belongs on homesteads too. So we publish our designs, our data, our costs, and our failures alongside the wins – including a monthly ledger of what this site earns and what it costs to run. If you can do what we did without buying anything from us, the site is working as intended. (If you buy the occasional field-tested guide to save yourself the research time, that keeps the lights on, and we appreciate it.)
The family part
We’re raising five kids on this land, and that’s the heart of the whole endeavor – but you won’t see them here. Family policy: the kids are part of the story, never part of the content until they’re old enough to consent to it. No photos, no names. What we will tell you is what it’s like to grow food at a scale where seven people eating is the yield target, and why we think this life is worth handing to them.
Where to start
New here? Two good doors for now: the latest Field Report, or the About page if you want the short version of who’s behind this. The food forest design deep-dive and the monthly Orchard Ledger are coming soon – the newsletter will tell you when.