Dear Aggie,
I am eagerly looking to move somewhere I can create an independent and
sustainable living arrangement. The only thing I am looking for
regarding location is somewhere that is within an hour driving
distance of a city with decent hospital services as well in either
Oregon, Washington, Colorado, or somewhere in the New England area
(some place close but not technically part of New England). However I
live in Arizona and want to avoid spending all my money traveling to
find a place. How do you recommend I find the right place? Should I
move to the state I think I would prefer best and then start looking
for the best property? I'm a suburban and desert girl so I have no
practical knowledge on how to find the type of property I'm wanting or
how to transform a place into one. My husband has done some work like
that and is exceptionally handy but I still feel completely lost but
I'm not ready to give up.
Please help!
Sincerely,
Wendy
Dear Wendy,
There are probably a thousand different ways that you might
approach finding an ideal place. A trip around the country first
would give you a lot of ideas, as well as a lot of experiences, and I
think you should give it some more consideration, but if that's
completely out of the question, you may as well remind yourself that
your success will depend more on you than on where you decide to
settle.
I don't think you
should move to another state and start looking for land unless you
have traveled extensively in rural America in the past. I think
you need to research the country first.
Why not narrow your choices
down to perhaps three areas, then make a camping tour of those places?
It sounds as if you're
anticipating making your living off the land, and of course nobody
ever said that was going to be easy, so you need to get the most bang
for your land buck, so to speak. It would be best for now, for
you to create a general plan around what ways you can produce income
and what sort of property that would require. Simply put, what
do you plan to grow, raise or manufacture?
If you plan to be growing
things, you'll need a certain amount of level, tillable soil and/or
productive pasture, and of course, the more of it you have, the
better.
Consult the
USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map to see what areas will support your
plans and which climates you'd prefer to live in. (Things will
also be easier and cheaper if you buy land with an
easily available water table.)
Also, you need to consider an
area that offers a place to market your crop or product. You can
use this link to
Farmer's Markets around the country.
Dear Aggie,
I was searching the internet and found your website. I know that a
previous visitor also received a delivery of mulch and then had ticks. The same thing has apparently happened to us. We had a
delivery of mulch and have now found one tick on each of our dogs.
How can we treat our yard to get rid of the ticks?? We have a
mosquito system that sprays HydroPy twice a day? Will that help??
Do we need to spray our home also? Your advice is greatly
appreciated.
Thank you.
A.R.
Dear A.R.:
I'm sorry, ticks just don't come from
mulch.
Ticks are tiny little things that can fit
most anywhere, so it's hard to say with complete assurance that the
ticks didn't come with the mulch, but there's no logical reason why
they should as there is nothing present in what we generally consider
mulch that would have any appeal to ticks. Unless your mulch was
previously used for livestock bedding or something similarly close to
warm-blooded animals, there no reason to think this is the source of
your infestation.
However, if your dogs are
running free outdoors in the country, they WILL get ticks.
HydroPy is generally recommended for flying insects, but of course
chemicals frequently kill things other than those they were intended
to kill. That's why I think trying to eliminate ticks chemically
is more trouble and less effective than simpler, safer methods.
Ticks are attracted to warm-blooded animals and move around, not so
much in loads of shredded wood, but on pets and livestock.
Put flea collars on the pets and ear tags on the livestock.
As for yourself, avoid walking through tall grass and when you're
outdoors, check your legs occasionally to see if any ticks are
crawling on you before they bite.
