Taking a stroll back in time through majestic oaks draped in Spanish moss, camellias and azaleas in bloom, down a winding path in the warm southern sunshine was truly enchanting.

Charles Towne Landing is one of the oldest settlement sites that still exists in America today. A group of English men and women landed there along the Ashley River in 1670 making it the first successful permanent established settlement in South Carolina.

This place is now known as Charleston.

A passageway into colonial life in the region known as The Lowcountry, Charles Towne takes you back to the time and place where about 150 original colonists landed on Albemarle Point. They fortified the area with a palisade wall: a wooden fence of sharpened logs lined with a ditch to prevent access. The waterside defense used earthen fortifications for cannons aimed toward the river and mouth of the Old Towne Creek.

Your imagination is invited to create what once was, from the ruins that have been carefully excavated — and archeological digs are still in process. Crop gardens and a period-correct timber cabin help to recreate the simple life colonists lived.

It was fun to see a court set up for a game of Ninepins, a bowling-like game which was common in 17th century colonial America. Henry had carved a set for us to play at home, and gave it to the girls for Christmas.

The garden and hundred-year oaks that lead you on the beautiful winding paths are thanks to a woman named Ferdinanda Waring. She inherited a home built in 1840 that was a part of the Old Town. She made it her life's work to fix the home and create the incredible gardens that are adjacent to the settlement. It is said that when she first came to the property in the 1930’s, the house was dilapidated to the point that goats had taken up residence inside!

This is such a fascinating, enchanting place that even the alligators follow the signs.

The Charles Towne settlement is a contemplative place with enough mighty live oaks and salt marshes to distance you from the bustling, modern city that surrounds. Historic places always remind me to look at how men used the land they needed wisely — to protect themselves, grow food, and build community. I hope we can all learn how to live a bit more honestly like these colonists did almost 400 years ago.

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.”

Saint Hildegard of Bingen

This being the Lake Superior highlands, a sloping topology over which a massive mile-deep ice sheet slid during the melt of more than 10,000 years ago, the landscape is marked with varied low and high points. Moraines, or glacial rock deposits, are common, as are mixed wetlands.

It was July, 2016. Our road onto the property had been washed out by Spring melt, something we were just learning about, having first arrived the past Winter. I was walking the land surveying how it had grown in, the yard filled with wildflowers, and I found a nice surprise at the northwest corner of our clearing.

What I spotted that day appeared to be a natural pond, surrounded by grasses, elderberries, and our old friends the aspen trees. These are a pioneer species in the poplar family which quickly occupy an open space with the reckless abandon of an undisciplined teenager. The pond was pretty, and appeared to be holding water, but I didn’t yet know how important this space would be for our future plans.

7 years later, while much had changed in the form of our master plan for the homestead, much had stayed the same. We had partially filled in the low point I had discovered, to help mitigate the Summer mosquitos so common in our region through to the nearby Boundary Waters. We also had been working on new permaculture landscape structures where overgrown, dying trees had been — permaculture is a philosophy and approach for mimicking nature, creating healthier growing spaces while better managing surface water and nutrients than clearcut fields.

In keeping with this approach, we set about planning a new garden, with a nicely cleared perimeter to protect the structures from falling trees and branches. For scale, the cleared area would be nearly the size of an entire city residential lot. This would also further assist with our mosquito friends. At the same time, we had been considering options to capture rainwater as an irrigation solution for both the garden and our orchard, such as a buried tank with a pump.

After much deliberation and planning, we settled on something more inline with that vision from 2016: to excavate a pond in the existing space. This would provide far more irrigation water than a 2500 gallon buried tank, would be more in harmony with the original landscape, could harbor healthy biological material useful for orchard and garden, and could even host fish eventually. As a plus, where a tank needs to be winterized, ponds simply freeze in the winter, and we love ice skating! I looked into how big it would have to be to allow for a 3-on-3 hockey game, and sized the pond accordingly: it had to be at least 40 x 70 feet.

To collect rain for the pond, we intended to route water consolidated from roof gutters to pipes underground. This expanded surface area would enable much more capture volume than only direct rain.

We talked with our friends at the local sawmill and made a plan for wild-harvested Minnesota tamarack as the wood of choice for the garden structure. Tamarack, or larch, is much more resistant to ground-contact rot and bugs than cedar or even treated wood. Mary and I designed the space to support 16 raised beds, 12 of which would be 8 x 3 ft, 4 at 4 x 3 ft, and with a depth of 18” for comfortable harvesting.

After leveling the space, we rented an auger for our Kubota compact track loader and set posts below the frost line. We used a Japanese technique called shou sugi ban, wherein wood is charred to further protect it from rot. 2 layers of water-permeable landscape fabric were laid, and we set about building the boxes.

Living in the forest, we have plenty of nicely rotting wood material. Following a German mound-gardening approach called Hügelkultur, the first layer we added to the boxes is old logs, wood chips, and sawdust. This has the added benefit of reducing the amount of soil required to fill them to the top. Over the years, the material will slowly feed the undersoil with nutrients, and roots will have an easier time in the voids, much more in keeping with the way plants grow naturally in the forest. Of course, this also means the soil will compact over time, and we’ll add more each season to top them off.

Since we were clearing, grading, and building for the first part of the season, we did end up having to plant later in our already-short growing season, but we were establishing a new permanent space for future years.

Once the garden was in place, in September came the pond excavation. I learned about soil content and the need for clay to retain water without a basin “leaking” and slowly draining underground. Minerals such as bentonite can be used to “seal” a leaking basin as the tiny particles expand when wet, and sink to the bottom. We also could have trucked in red clay from elsewhere, which would have been quite expensive for our design. While digging the garden posts, I saw significant ruddy clay coming up, and hoped for the best that the nearby pond subsoil would be the same.

The pond basin ended up around 45 x 80 feet, and 8 feet deep, with a culvert at the North end to drain to a natural wetland, this prevents overflow. The subsoil did indeed appear to have some clay content, and by the end of the Fall season, a significant amount of water had been collected. The underground pipe from the roof gutter drainage feeds a rocky “stream” which is a fun feature.

With raw soil around the entire area, the pond was very muddy looking, but this is normal. That is caused by suspended clay particles in the water, effectively in solution and with a negative electrical charge. For 2024, if the particles have not settled on their own over Winter, we will use a positively-charged natural mineral to bind to the suspended clay and clarify the water.

As we approach the first full growing season for our new garden, I am also planning various potential solutions for irrigation, which I will share in future posts.

Given our past fun experiences skating on wild ice, we had high hopes that the pond would happen to freeze smoothly enough. By early December, we found a smooth rink under a modest snow cover! With the abnormally warm temperatures, we did have some periods of melt, and of course, rain for Christmas. We are excited for future skating opportunities and a lot more Winter ice activity.

One of our favorite parts of having a homestead is to be able to work with nature to support the surrounding ecosystem while providing for our family needs. Taking an otherwise unmanageable, overgrown lowland and creating a rich natural landscape for our animal friends, family fun, and food production is exactly the sort of improvement we envisioned in those first days here, 7 years prior.

“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.”

Brian Eno

There have been new instruments for as long as there has been music. Imagine, for example, being one the first to hear a lyra, a pear-shaped bowed instrument which appeared in the Byzantine Empire around the 11th century, which led to the emergence of the violin in 16th century Europe. How delightful, or shocking, must it have been to attend a performance and hear a completely new sound in such an era?

Enter electronic music, probably a lot earlier in history than you might expect. Some would take it as far back as the 1700’s, but we know for a fact that electrical signals were being used to make musical sounds in the late 19th century. Two examples would be something called the Telharmonium from Thaddeus Cahill and Matthaüs Hipp’s Electromechanic Piano.

By the 1920’s, a spooky-sounding instrument was invented which enabled control of both pitch and volume by a player’s hand motion. It was called the Theremin. You will hear this in 50’s science fiction films, and it is still used today for everything from sound design to orchestral performance.

Here is Clara Rockmore performing Saint-Saëns: The Swan from The Art of the Theremin:

A young Bob Moog learned how to build theremins while in high school, and ended up selling them through college. By 1964, already well known amongst musicians as a creator of unique instruments, he unveiled something completely new: the first modular voltage-controlled synthesizer.

Created at the request of avant-garde composer Herb Deutsch, the synthesizer allowed for the creation of complex, experimental sounds as well as an ability to replicate the familiar: plucks, bowed strings, bass tones, clanging drums, and more were possible. These instruments remained primarily in use by experimental musicians for some years.

Listen to Hans Wurman’s 1969 recording of Toccata And Fugue In D Minor from a collection of classical compositions performed on the Moog Synthesizer:

Eventually, the iconic Moog sound became commonplace in practically every genre: if you have heard The Doors — Strange Days, The Beatles — Here Comes the Sun, Kraftwerk — Das Model, Gary Numan — Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, Michael Jackson — Thriller, or Daft Punk — Da Funk, you’ve heard Moog. Synthesizers are also used by prominent film composers such as Hans Zimmer.

But to understand what a synthesizer is, and why it is interesting, one must ask, what is music, anyway? All sound arrives at your ear through pressure waves traveling through the air. These waves can be thought of as signals, which are formed into music by their specific frequencies (which we call notes), and their interaction into tonal signatures or timbres. This is what makes one instrument (or one voice) sound different from another. Imagine being able to replicate those signatures, and in doing so, model any instrument!

You can think of the most basic synthesizer as one distinct signal, or wave, set to one adjustable audible frequency, which is amplified (or set to a certain volume) by a simple electrical circuit. This signal is created by another simple circuit called an oscillator. This will be one tone sent over a wire to a speaker, the same as you would get if you sing one note, “ooooooo”. If you modify, or filter, that signal before it is amplified, the wave takes on a more complex form, such as if you try singing one note as “wwwooowww”. Your mouth is doing the filtering in this case.

Large modular synthesizers have multiple oscillators, filters, and amplifiers. They also add sequencers, which you can think about in simple terms as a way to play a sequence of notes automatically. Often, a synthesizer will also have practical controls for musicians such as keyboards which resemble a piano or organ. The keyboard can be used by the player to tell one or more of the oscillators to play the note corresponding to a given key. In a more advanced scenario, pressing one key could trigger multiple notes at once, or something that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard!

We were fortunate to visit the Moog factory where these amazing instruments are built, in Asheville, NC in 2022. I filmed some of our experimentation there and created a fitting soundtrack you can see and hear, here:

I am astounded by the historic engineering achievement that is the Moog Synthesizer, and as a lifelong musician, this was an especially exciting visit for me. My hope is that you have enjoyed this exploration, and have come away with a new appreciation for the electronic instruments that have contributed so much not only to music, but to sound itself.

Thank you for joining us here! If you ever have questions about a post, or want to start a discussion, please add a comment. We would love to hear from you!

— Mary & Patrick

When the days are long and dark, when the cold is especially bitter, and when our hearts feel a deep resignation settle in, we know it’s time to find the sun. We leave the calm, the peace, and the solitude of the Great North Woods for places that feed our bodies, minds, and souls.

The warmth of the southern sunshine helps ignite a new spirit of excitement within us. We are grateful for the chance to explore this beautiful country God has made for us in our little camper. It has taken us from coast to coast on an incredible journey in multiple parts — not vacation, but to live our life in the deserts, valleys of mountains, and at the edge of oceans. Work continues, school presses on, meals must be prepared, and laundry awaits, all keeping us rooted in reality.

We usually find ourselves in places surrounded by elders: grandmas and grandpas. With the loss of both my parents, time with the older folks is so needed and appreciated. Our kids have learned so much from their friendly interactions — age has no bearing. There is such a beautiful wisdom within them that will be lost if we do not seek it out. They see our crew, and sometimes help us out by folding our laundry or by playing cards with the kids. Some extremely patient pickleball players let Hilda join in the fun, and Hanna was delighted to join the crocheting/knitting club!

We’ve made so many great memories traveling in our camper over the years. Like the time we were driving down south, it was late, and I called a campground to see if they had availability for that night. They said yes, but their limit was 4 people per site, to which I replied it would be just a quick stop, just for the night. After a pause, they responded by saying, “Well, I spoke to my manager, and we both agreed… you can have all 4 of your kids with you.” (oh good, because it would be a real shame to have to leave 2 of them on the side of the road!)

Maybe the tiny space allows us to stay close, to be challenged and become stronger for overcoming the inconveniences. We hold each other accountable, and that’s important in a time when temptations and distractions can so easily pull us away. Patrick effortlessly balances an important work call, a funny story, a school question, and an urgent camper situation.

The sunshine draws us outside. It invites us to climb mountains, take long walks on the beach, and soak up its radiant light. It is a gift, and one we hope never to take for granted.

We travel to historic places and sacred spaces which only deepen our love of simpler times. In so many ways, we try to bring these values to the homestead. The level of effort that men of old invested into dwellings and holy spaces is truly inspiring.

Invigorated by the sun, we head home with new plans, new ideas — indeed, new motivation to live more honestly.

Have you ever thought about what it might have been like to be in the presence of a historical figure? What would you ask, and how would they speak? What if you could visit a place where they had stayed?

The Heyward-Washington House in Charleston, South Carolina was built in 1772 by Thomas Heyward Jr., one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1791, George Washington visited Charleston and stayed here for a week.

The house is especially interesting because the 1740’s kitchen building and slave quarters are also open for visitors. Inside, we see the large fireplace and workspaces for food preparation and cooking on one side, as well as a laundry area on the other side of the hearth.

Viewing these buildings reveals much about the brick and plaster construction techniques common in 18th century cities.

I was surprised to find the property had been prepared with a well-designed rainwater catchment and management system with wells, storage cisterns, and drains for wastewater. This allowed for everyday access to water under normal circumstances.

Between the Kitchen and Stable behind the main house is a garden space which has been restored and maintained. This helps visitors get a feeling of what it might have been like back then.

Inside the main house, an archway crafted from mahogany distinguishes between the public-access and private portions, since this was also an office for Thomas Heyward, Jr.

On the second floor, a tea room furnished with period pieces is representative of how it might have been set when George Washington resided here for a week, perhaps relaxing by the fireplace. An authentic 17th-century spinet, a type of 4-octave harpsichord or plucked keyboard, is positioned along the wall in the tea room. These instruments were commonly used for [quite civilized] entertainment in the era.

A beautiful mahogany staircase leads from the first floor to the second, where guests would have been welcome, and ultimately up to the third floor, a space for private family rooms.

The office in the first floor contains interesting artifacts from archeological digs on the property, which trace its history back even further than the 1772 construction of the current house.

Of course, there is a portrait of George Washington above the fireplace mantle.

The house is filled with rare and original wooden furniture the Heyward family acquired from various Charleston area cabinetmakers.

Many interesting old bottles are included among the excavated artifacts. I thought the iridescent copper-blue effect on one of them was quite interesting. I wonder how the glass was treated in order to achieve this color.

“Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

Homesteading for most people today is all about the land: wide open spaces for animals to roam and graze, raising chickens for eggs, growing and canning food, hunting and preserving their meat.

For us, homesteading means something a little different.

Over many years, we prayed that God would bring us to a place where we could be surrounded by His creation, not man’s. We saw the destruction of beautiful wetlands and forests for yet more office/medical buildings, widespread overconsumption, worldly temptations, and it just didn’t feel right. It wasn’t inline with the truth. We are called to seek truth; how can we live honestly in a world that was getting it so wrong?

This led us into the forest where the air is crisp, the birds are friendly, and nature dominates. The trees hold ascendancy.

Homesteading for us meant carving out the forest to live in it — with it, just enough to grow a garden, catch the rain, and feed the birds.

We don’t have animals, we don’t eat meat or eggs, so why would we need a homestead? We truly believe the most nourishing food is what God has provided around us — the honey from the bees, the fruit from the trees, and even some of the weeds (sounds like a poem)!

We delight in the wild passers-by, as if an old friend has come to say hello.

Growing food, harvesting from the land, forest management, homeschooling, slow cooking, and prayer are all parts of living honestly. It is about seeking truth in all we consume, living a life well intentioned with purpose and meaning.

Perhaps every generation has a back to the land movement. These are the people who see how nature beckons us — how it guides us to a life that is far more fulfilling and reminds us of our Creator. But this one, what a glorious generation to be a part of! With all of our modern conveniences, life in nature is far easier than ever before.

Join us as we carve out our little place in this world, so that we can live more honestly.