03 — The Practice
Tending the systems that let us live here lightly.
What Exists Now
This is an early-stage project. The structures that exist are modest, purposeful, and chosen carefully. The vision for what comes next is clear. This page describes both — honestly.
Every large thing starts with a shed and a trail. The discipline is resisting the urge to build too much too fast — letting the land teach you where things belong before you commit to permanent structures. What's here now was placed after careful observation of how sun moves through the clearings, how water moves across the ground, and where the forest naturally gathers and opens.
Utility Shed
Tool and equipment storage. The first permanent structure on the property. Simple gable construction, located at the junction of two main trails.
Lean-to
Open shelter for shade and rain protection during work sessions. Three-sided, south-facing, with a metal roof for rain catchment. The starting point for understanding where covered outdoor space is actually needed.
Tent Pads & Decks
A series of elevated timber platforms at carefully chosen sites through the property, sited for different experiences: near the stream, in a hemlock grove, at the forest edge. The sleeping infrastructure for the project as it currently exists.
Battery-Powered Chainsaws & Brush Cutters
The primary cutting tools for most forest work — quieter than gas, no fuel storage required, sufficient for the majority of clearing, trail maintenance, and stand improvement tasks. A gas saw is kept for larger-diameter trees and remote work where battery range is a constraint.
Portable Solar Systems
Folding panels and battery stations that keep tools charged, power basic lighting, and run communications. Sized for the actual loads — not oversized for ego. The discipline of a small energy budget is part of the practice.
Woods Road & Trail Network
Several miles of existing roads and trails connecting all parts of the property, most established along natural corridors and deer runs. The network doubles as a management access system and walking experience. Where roads go determines where the forest gets managed.
"These are the first marks on the landscape, and they were made carefully. A shed and a trail are not a small thing — they are commitments. They say: we plan to come back. We plan to learn what this place needs."
Before the Building
Sometimes tending means undoing what came before you.
One part of the property had accumulated, over the years, what the previous era's relationship with a back forty tends to produce: old vehicles dragged into the trees when they stopped running and left to rust. Not a deliberate act of harm — just the slow accumulation of a different understanding of what land is for.
The cars were removed in connection with the purchase, arranged as a condition of sale. Watching the car hauler navigate the trails, pulling wreckage from between the trees, was the first act of management on this property — before a trail was widened, before a tree was felled, before anything was built or planned.
This is the less romantic part of stewardship. But it's honest, and it matters: you can't tend a landscape you inherited from neglect without first reckoning with what was left here. The ground underneath is fine. In a few years, you won't know anything was there.
Every piece of land carries its history. The practice includes reading that history, deciding what to keep, and doing the work to clear what shouldn't stay.
The Cabins
What's coming: a series of small, non-permanent, off-grid cabins — each dispersed through the forest, each sited for a different experience of this land.
One near the stream, for the sound of water. One on the ridge, for the seasonal views. One deep in the softwood stand for the particular quiet of hemlock in snow. Each will be a different argument about what a shelter in a forest should be.
The design principles are fixed: simple modern architecture — clean lines, not rustic kitsch. Large windows on multiple sides so the forest feels close, almost immersive — the experience of waking up inside the canopy. Small footprint. Low impact on soil and water. Non-permanent construction, built so that removal would leave minimal trace.
Almost all building material will come from the property. Managing the forest for composition and health produces timber as a byproduct. The portable sawmill will turn that timber into lumber. The cabins will be built from what the tending produces — buildings that will know where they came from.
"Forest thinking shelter isn't about protection from the forest. It's about calibrating how much of the forest you let in. These cabins will be designed so the answer is: almost all of it."
The Forest Soaking Tubs
Rock-built soaking tubs, heated by small woodstoves, placed at carefully chosen sites throughout the forest. The experience to aim for: immersed in hot water surrounded by trees — steam rising into cold air, canopy overhead, a stream audible nearby.
The tubs will be sited the way any structure on this land gets sited: by walking the property in every season, in every weather, until the right place becomes obvious. Where does cold air pool on still nights? Where does the canopy open to sky? Where is the stream audible without being visible? Where does the ground drain naturally so that the area around the tub stays clean?
The stoves will be small, wood-fired, efficient — burning wood that forest management produces. Water heats from cold in two to three hours. You arrive with a load of split wood and some patience, and the forest does the rest. Not consuming the forest — participating in it.
"There may be no faster way to arrive in forest thinking than sitting in hot water in a cold forest, watching your breath and the steam become the same thing."
Barn & Workshop
The barn and workshop will be the central working structure — the operational hub for forest management, building projects, and community skill-share. Where the sawmill feeds lumber, where tools are maintained and repaired, where workshop participants come to learn to read timber, sharpen a blade, or mill a board.
Not a house. Not a retreat center. A working building for a working landscape. The design will reflect this: high ceilings for timber work, good ventilation, durable floors, wide doors. A wood heat system that burns what the property produces. South-facing windows for passive solar gain in winter, deep overhangs for shade in summer. A rain catchment system feeding a cistern for washdown and irrigation.
The barn will be built with timber milled from the property — primarily white ash (being removed as the emerald ash borer continues its work through the forest) and red oak from gap-filling harvests. The building will be a record of what forest management has produced in the first decade of this project. You will be able to read the management history in the wood of the frame.
The barn site has been chosen: a south-facing clearing at the junction of two main access roads, close enough to the trail network to be useful, far enough from the stream corridors to avoid wetland permitting. Siting work completed. Engineering drawings in progress. Construction: when the sawmill is operational and enough timber has been milled.
The right sequence matters more than the right speed. The sawmill comes first. The lumber accumulates. When there's enough, the barn rises. The forest sets the pace.
Equipment
Current
Quieter than gas, no fuel storage required. Sufficient for the majority of trail maintenance, stand improvement, and clearing work.
For large-diameter trees and remote areas where battery range is a constraint. One machine, kept sharp and well-maintained.
Folding panels and battery stations for tool charging, basic lighting, and communications. Designed around actual load — not oversized.
The tools that don't need fuel or charging: loppers, hand saws, mattocks, and rakes for trail work. Sharpenable. Repairable on site.
Planned
The piece that changes everything. Turning timber harvested on the property into lumber for building projects closes the loop between forest management and construction. Ash comes down for health; the lumber builds the barn. Same tree, two acts.
The versatile workhorse. A property this size, with these needs — mowing and brush clearing, log hauling and skidding, light excavation, road grading, potential farming attachments — needs one capable, simple machine that one person can operate and maintain. Guidance welcome on the right platform.
For processing firewood at the scale the property produces and the soaking tubs require. Manual splitting is meditative but slow when volume matters.
"The right tools let one person tend a lot of land. The wrong tools make you a servant to maintenance. We're still learning which is which."
Outdoor Living
The spaces between structures matter as much as the structures themselves. The goal is to make being outside in this landscape easy, comfortable in most weather, and genuinely pleasurable — not austere or punishing.
Outdoor kitchens for cooking and gathering when weather allows. Fire pits placed where they pull people together and where the fire can be safely contained — which, in a forest, requires attention to site, wind, and season. Horseshoes and bocce in the clearings. Simple pleasures that don't need electricity and don't require explanation to anyone who shows up.
Hammocks and seating at viewpoints and listening spots. The ridge with its seasonal views. The stream bank below the hemlock grove where the water is loudest. The south-facing rock face that holds warmth past four in October. These are places the forest offers, if you walk long enough to find them. Getting there is part of it.
Forest thinking doesn't separate indoor from outdoor. It asks: what's the minimum shelter needed for this activity? Often the answer is a flat spot, a fire, and something to sit on.
Energy
Solar and battery systems, scaled for dispersed small structures rather than a central compound — the energy architecture the off-grid cabins and working buildings will run on. The design question is always the same: how much energy does this specific activity actually require?
The tension between canopy cover and solar access is real. A forest shades itself. South-facing clearings are carefully managed to maintain solar window without opening more than necessary. The answer, increasingly, is portable systems: folding panels that can be positioned in available sun, carried to where power is needed.
Wood heat is appropriate at this scale — the forest produces fuel as a byproduct of management. A cord of firewood cut from an ash log removed for forest health is not a carbon cost; it's a carbon cycle. The stove in the soaking tub. The woodstove in the workshop. The campfire in the pit. These are not primitive fallbacks. They are appropriate technology for this landscape.
Tending energy systems in a forest means accepting that the canopy comes first. You design around the trees, not the other way around.
Water
Everything here is downstream of the canopy and upstream of everything else. The streams are coldwater fisheries habitat — brook trout holding water. What happens on the land above the stream determines what the stream is. This is the foundational constraint.
Rain catchment from existing structures. Spring potential on the upper slope — visible in wet years as a seep that runs through September. Stream access for non-potable uses. Filtration for any water intended for drinking or cooking. The system is currently simple: collect what the sky provides, treat it where necessary, use it carefully.
The more ambitious plan is gravity-fed from a spring box on the upper slope: water collected at the emergence point, fed through a buried line to a covered cistern, distributed by gravity pressure. No pump required for delivery — just slope. The whole system would run quietly, with almost no moving parts to fail. That spring needs to be proved out through a dry year before committing to the infrastructure.
Water scarcity in a dry July is not a design failure. It's a signal — one worth learning to hear before you engineer around it. Tending these systems is adaptation: redesigning how we live in response to conditions as they actually are, not as we wish they were.
Seasonal Calendar
Maintenance follows a seasonal rhythm. The calendar below records what the land and its systems require, month by month — not as a rigid schedule but as an orientation. The work is always in conversation with the actual conditions of the year.
Monthly Tasks
Select a month
Bird breeding season (May–Aug) — avoid clearing, trail-cutting, and loud machinery near nesting habitat.