We are located 30 minutes southwest of Pueblo, Colorado. Our 80 acres of land is typical Colorado ranch land. We have a river running through our land in a canyon 200' below the main part of the land but it cannot be used for irrigation. We've lived here off grid since Summer of 2013 and have solved many transitional and ecological problems we've encountered as we built up our home and domain from raw land. When we came here the land was mostly dirt with only 5 known edible wild plants the entire first season. After six years of loving our domain, we've watched that number of wild edibles grow to over 70 each year, and the wide expanses of exposed dirt have filled in with meadow grasses and plants.
Our native trees are are juniper and a few ponderosa, spruce, and honey locust. Native shrubs are mostly squaw berry, scrub oak, and mountain mahogany. Being on the edge of a canyon, we have some beautiful rock fields. As you move further from the canyon edge, the soil gets deeper and deeper. It's primarily silt with pockets of pure clay. Along our river we even have some potter's clay.
This land is not yet ready for farm animals. Our native wild animals are wonderful and many, but are not friendly to domesticated animals, either farm or pets. We don't allow dogs in our community at this time and have found that domestic cats are no match for the range of local wild animals. We do not yet have a garden per se. We've chosen to explore the the native wild edibles first, but we have planted a few vegetable seeds here and there to see how well they grow here. We currently do not have a water supply sourced from our land sufficient for irrigating a full garden of non-native garden plants. We bring water in with large tanks from a local spring. We'd love to see a spring show up on our community land on the upper level. We do have a spring at the base of the canyon near the river, although I think it's technically an alluvial plane cut by the canyon. Although we've tried some methods, we haven't yet found a reliable way to move the spring water to the upper level.
We've planted many trees with many different planting methods but most haven't survived. Now we are more careful of the varieties we plant and in our orchard we give the trees more water. That seems to be working well. In every aspect of building our kins domain lifestyle here, we've found that it is no mall task to learn to live in harmony with nature instead of the ways we've grown up with. It's the most exciting and pleasing work I've ever done