Blackhawk Studios

The "Granary" is the old farm grain storage building. This 1 1/2 story, single-wall structure has had windows and a shed skylight added and is now being converted to an artist's/writer's retreat apartment.

The Barn houses our small Jersey dairy herd (one cow and one heifer right now, I said "small") and our heritage pigs. The South bay serves as dairy room and opens onto the barn greenhouse.

The Woodlot (called a "Grove" out here) contains a wide variety of types of trees, as well as windbreak shrubs like Lilac and Honysuckle. We cull for firewood (carbon neutral) and regularly plant new trees. This graphic pattern shows the significant woodlots at various places on the farm.

Our private beach on Plum Creek where we can relax in the heat of August afternoons and feed the "Chubs," a small sardine-like fish native to the creek. We occasionally see snapping turtles, mink, and carp too. We have to protect the young cottonwood trees from the beavers.

Vinyard: 375 Marquette wine grape vines planted in 2008. Marquette is a cold hardy grape with Pinot Noir as one grandparent.

The vinyard rolls down a South facing slope that sheds the worst frosts and provides maximum sun in the summer.

The "Canning Garden" provides most of our own vegitables and any extra is either traded locally or sold at the local Farmer's Market. We practice post-organic methods and do irrigate with water pumped from our pond. There is a solar cell and battery that run a bilge pump to push the water as a gravity-feed system required the tank to be set too high off the ground. We grow the typical local vegitables and also lots of hot peppers, Joi Choy, asian green beans, paste tomatoes, Japanese onions, Cilantro, and Garlic.

Ruth also has a "Kitchen Garden" focused more on what we actually use durring the gardening months. The cows, chickens and pigs get the leftovers.

Farmhouse built in 1904 by Carl Johnson. This is a "Cube" style originally with 5 bedrooms upstairs and one down, a huge dining room and two parlors ("living" rooms being irrelevant on a farm) and a large kitchen that abutted the cube. Two porches, one to the South, the other to the East, gave morning and evening refuges from the August heat.

This is the Earthship. The view from the earth-sheltered building is out across the orchard, or across the North Pasture (where the calves are raised) to the Vinyard. Because of the slope of the land there is almost absolute visual and aural privacy between the Earthsip and the Farnhouse.

The rest of this website explains the details of the Earthship.