Were selling our 3.8 homestead in Floyd, Va with our Dutch-Belted Cow Phoebe, our hens and other animals for $185,000. For more information please contact us at this link and watch the following 3 videos embedded in this page.

Our Kefir Grains are spectacular right now. For those of you that our interested in making your own kefir from grains here is a link to our kefir page. Below is a short video of our about are grains in their current spectacular condition.

If you are interested Contact us here.

Britt-Arnhild Lindland is a thoughtful, sensitive, artistic, religious Norwegian who writes and crafts and travels and shares same with many people all over the world through her several blogs. In celebration of turning 50, she has undertaken extensive travels in India for the first time in her otherwise very well-traveled life. I am enjoying her brief blog posts from India complete with vivid photos so much that I thought I would alert any of you dear readers who may also be interested.

Britt-Arnhild’s House in the Woods

My Year in the World

It is fun seeing India through her intelligent there-for-the-first-time eyes. As a matter of fact, reading her posts is making me subject to bursts of nostalgia! So check in with her every once in a while and enjoy the colors and imagine the scents of romantic, spiritual, ancient India.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Astonishingly, I find that I am now washing all of the family’s laundry by hand! There is a story about how I got to this place and there is a still unfolding story about how I am learning to develop the strength to make hand washing laundry a permanent part of the family routine. I will get to both of those stories in future posts. For now I will just share one very telling small event.

When I started to experience how rigorous hand washing laundry for a homesteading family of eight could be - especially for me who is not as physically strong as I used to be - my husband and I agreed that we needed to invest in some serious equipment designed for hand washing laundry. Among other items, I picked up a bar of laundry soap and sent for a washboard from Lehman’s. I chose the glass version because they note that it is by far their best seller and lasts the longest.

I had done several loads of wash in the week or so before the washboard arrived. As I recall, it arrived the very moment I finished washing and hanging a rather large load. Oh well. I just used it the next time and, boy, was I amazed. I am telling you, using a bar of laundry soap and a washboard is like magic. Dirt just disappears! Incredible. So I knocked myself out with my hand dandy new washboard scrubbing my husband’s work clothes and then hung them out to dry. They didn’t finish drying outside that day so I had to bring some of them in to hang on our wooden rack in the basement overnight.

The next morning, I happened to be in another section of the basement when my husband came down to find himself a dry pair of socks. I don’t think he even knew I was down there. A moment passed as he looked around on the drying rack. Then I heard him suddenly exclaim, “Wow, are these my socks???”

‘Nuff said.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We have had a deluge of difficulties lately, with the most recent one being that someone hijacked our blog. I have spent the last two days working to fix the many resulting problems but, as of now, our database is not there. With my wife’s recent onset of severe adrenal fatigue and a host of other problems including many projects that need finishing, a lightning strike that took out our DVD player, computer printer and TV antenna, maintenance around the homestead, a van and truck that need repairs and other financial difficulties, it is likely that we will take a hiatus from our POTF website, blog and YouTube channel for the near future. Hopefully we will at least get the blog posts back up in the next couple days.

Its now been a couple of days and our sever was able to help restore most of the posts. However, there are some more things we have to do to the blog and we just don’t have the time or energy to do them right now. So we are taking an hiatus for awhile while we decide what to do.

All the best,
Paul

Last week I went out particularly early one morning to get some fresh mountain air and milk Phoebe. As I stepped out the door and looked across our yard to the adjacent field of uncut hay, I saw a sight I have never seen before. The sun, just a little above the horizon, was coming in at an angle that lit up the seed heads of the uncut grass. I gasped and walked closer to thoroughly take in what I was seeing. It looked like a large field of frosted Christmas lights swaying gently in the breeze. Not knowing how long the effect would last, I ran back to the house and tiptoed in to get my camera. I raced back and took some photos. As I had to point the camera at the sun, more or less, they were sort of hard pictures to get but I hope you get the idea. It was much more splendid in person, to tell you the truth.

Why this grass is still standing in the field at this point in the summer I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that being greeted by this natural sight every morning is dazzling and shows grass in its true light when you think about it. We modern day humans may find grass to be beneath notice or only use it foolishly to carpet what has come to nowadays be referred to as “lawns“, but Nature knows that ancient grass is life giving and life supporting for the entire planet. Every morning now I am reminded of this - just in case my cows ever let me forget.

Well no matter what this sight might signify to my mind, for my heart it creates a reverential atmosphere for milking our generous cow. What better way to greet and be greeted by a mountain morning?

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

We have added a new service feature to our blog. See two columns over, all the way on the right hand side of the page up at the top? Under “Pages”, there are now three new pages.

POTF Featured Blogs and POTF Featured Web Sites list ongoing additions of featured blogs and web sites we feel could inspire you or inform you on key elements of a future oriented life. The listing will be permanent so you can always easily scroll back through the listings as they accumulate. This isn’t just a blogroll because with each featured blog or web site, we give our impressions and mention why we feel that site may be worthy of your time.

If you have any blogs or web sites that have inspired you towards this “pockets of the future” sort of life or have provided you with useful information, please send them along to us and we will see if we can include them.

The “Our Affiliates” page is still under construction, as they say. We are choosing our affiliates very carefully and want to devote some space to sharing why we have chosen the ones we have and what our experience with them has been. Again, if you have suggestions along this line, please do forward them to us.

We hope you will find this new added feature or service to be full of fun discovery. Happy surfing!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

One of our subscribers on You Tube has apparently been inspired enough by Paul’s homesteading videos that he has decided to start making a similar video series himself. He too is building a homestead and is apparently chock full of old time skills and ideas as well as video making expertise.

Paul and I are encouraged by the number of young people excited about our homesteading/family life videos. With the overwhelming negativity and fear in the world, it gives us hope to see so many young people eager to create more natural lives both within themselves, within their families and with the land. Since the future is always in the hands of the young people, this is an important movement. So if you have a minute, go check out Jeremy’s blog at Oldtime Smith and give him some encouragement and ideas.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie