Dave and Robin's Website on Semi-Rural Living

There is a publication called "Backwoods Home". We like the concept but where we live in one of the more populous counties in Colorado can hardly be considered the "backwoods". Also, while we have 7 acres and all our neighbors have at least 5 acres there are no large farms or ranches around us, so we are more of a semi-rural home.

One of the advantages to rural living (or semi-rural living) is the ability to keep a variety of animals. Horses are very popular in our area but there are lots of other animals here too. Our neighbors to the west have sheep, chickens, miniature horses and alpacas. Our neighbors to the north have horses, chickens and bees. Some of our neighbors have goats. We currently have llamas and chickens. Right now, we have laying hens and one rooster. In other years we have raised chickens for meat and had turkeys and bees too.

We usually have an organic vegetable garden. You don't have to live in a rural setting to garden organically but there are some advantages, like an abundance of free fertilizer. Chickens are also an advantage. You can turn the chickens loose in the garden and they will eat grasshoppers, potato beetles, and other pests. You can also lower their feed bill by feeding surplus vegetables to the chickens. We had a garden this year but it didn't do very well at all. It started out fine but then it was overrun by moles that really did a lot of damage. When we moved here there were just a few of them but their numbers have grown over the years and they are very destructive to the garden and the pasture. We also had problems with the deer this year too. Between the deer and the moles we got very little out of the garden. Several years ago we had a fence completely around the garden but it got damaged and we took part of it down at one point. When we do the garden next year we will put it back up. I'm not sure what to do about the moles. The neighbors think the solution is raised beds with wire underneath them. That would be a lot of work but it might keep them out.

We live in a log home. A while back we built a large addition (also log) on our home. The building process was quite an experience and if we never saw another building inspector it would be too soon. Log houses are neat but if you ever consider buying or building one, talk to us first because they are a good deal more trouble than a conventional structure and those glossy log home magazines don't spend much time talking about the downside of log homes.

We have wood stoves for supplimental heat. We have a Vermont Castings in the main house and it is capable of heating the main house. When it is going the furnace doesn't come on and the temperature in our great room can get as much as 10 degrees higher than where we set our thermostat. We have an Austroflam Wega in the addition. The Austroflam Wega has a baking oven in it. We have baked cookies, brownies, bread and pizza in ours. We use it for pizza so often that when the kids see us building a fire in that stove they ask if we are going to have pizza.

We are also interested in independent electrical generation systems. Because of factors like where we live, our lifestyle and the fact that we bought an existing house we almost certainly never be completely "off the grid". We do have a back-up system for use during power failures. Because energy costs have been rising the past couple years and will probably go higher in the future we reexamined the cost & benefits of an alternative power system. As much as we would like to do something like that you just can't justify it financially. There are applications where such systems make sense but the average American home just isn't one of them (not based on cost savings anyway).

Given that where we live isn't what you would call remote or even truly rural, we have a surprising amount of wildlife around us. We used to have beavers on the creek that runs through our property until a flood in the spring of 1999 wiped out their dams. Beavers came back in the spring of 2005. There are often ducks on the creek and we have see a blue heron there many times. We also have raccoons and skunks (oh joy!) on our property. We sometimes see fox and deer and coyotes on or near our place. One day the kids and I walked out to go for a walk and there were 7 buck deer standing within 50 feet of our front door. We had a couple of good sized bucks in the back yard one evening this fall too. Twice this fall we saw a phesant in the yard. That was the first phesant we have seen in the entire time we've lived here. There have also been bear and mountain lion within a mile of our home and we've seen elk within about 5 miles of the house.

In addition to the topics mentioned above we are interested in most things that have to do with living as self-sufficiently as possible in this modern, interconnected era. People who are interested in self-sufficient rural living are sometimes referred to as "homesteaders".