Report From Due West, South Carolina

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Our work-for-rent arrangement meant long Saturdays spent with Joe and Lynn absorbing lessons from their five years of homesteading experience. While Susanne helped with the kitchen or garden work, I was learning to build a stall, repair a clogged water pump, mend a fence so the cows wouldn't get loose again in the middle of the night, milk "the Milkshake", drive the John Deere, or jockey the old war-surplus jeep down to the bottoms to gather firewood. I even got a few riding lessons, with saddle sores at no extra charge. Without that experience it would have been hard—if not impossible—for us to be as far along as we are today.

During the fall I signed up with all the local schools—high, middle, and even elementary—as a substitute teacher. Although I have very few college credits in education, the principals gave me a chance, and before long I had a call to teach almost every morning. At first I tried to copy every teacher I'd ever liked in school . . . but soon realized my folly and started to be myself. I spent time in class discussing current events and experiences of my own with the students, and gave a few down-to-earth lectures on subjects that interest me: solar energy, population-related problems, and places I've visited.

I found my job as a professional substitute very satisfying, though not as financially rewarding as I'd have liked. Still, the money I made was enough for our new lifestyle and the flexible hours gave me time to work on the homestead. Believe me, it needed work . . . and still does, and—with any luck at all—always will.

Over the past year we've done little to our home other than make it warm and functional. Instead, we've put our limited capital into our land. The place has worked out well . . . thanks partly, I think, to the basic HAVE-MORE Plan we saw way back in MOTHER NO. 2, and partly to the hours we've spent from the very start in planning what we wanted on our farm. We've drawn up long lists of everything from apples to zinnias, and it's paid off.

For example? Well, high on my list of desirables were grapes, and today we have a half-acre vineyard with 35 young but growing vines of 15 domestic and hybrid European varieties. We both wanted lots of fresh fruit and nuts . . . and we have the beginnings of an apple orchard and several each of all the fruit and nut trees we could think of, hand-planted last fall before we even moved in.

More examples: Susanne pushed for a large garden, I was eager to keep, bees, and both wishes have come true in the form of seven hives and an acre of organically grown vegetables. (Only one colony is mine. The rest are boarded here in return for beekeeping lessons, lots of honey, and a working partnership with a local beekeeper . . . who also happens to be a college professor with a Ph.D. in botany, a teacher of ecology, and a new friend.)

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