Jupiter Garden...our "yardie" home for the summer

The place where we're living in Anchorage is pretty interesting and worth its own post.  We found it on VRBO advertised as an "urban homestead" and that it's an "eco-friendly accomodation at the foot of the Chugatch mountains"  It's "a 1-acre hobby farm" the owner told us when we spoke on the phone before arrival.  And that's all true as advertised.  But also an understatement.  It's a community of "yardies" and we're living in a fishbowl in the middle of interesting projects and people and animals coming and going.  It's an experience as much as a place to call home here in Anchorage.  And we (mostly) love it.

Our home for these 2+ months is the lower level of a duplex, but since it's built into a hill we still feel high up, and actually have something like 25 steps to walk up to get from the driveway to our mudroom door.  Usually the owner, Jerami, lives on this lower level and rents out the upper level in the summer tourist season.  But he decided to rent out this lower half of the duplex as well, starting this summer.  If someone offered to pay me thousands of dollars to rent out my house for 2 months I'd consider that option too.  (I think we paid somewhere around $6,000 for our 10 week stay here.  And that was on the low end of our options for Anchorage in the summer time.  Winter is cheap though!  How we're affording this could be another post...)

So...we have a duplex to live in, but where does Jerami live now that he rented out both floors of his duplex?  The plan was that he would live in the tiny house that he built on his property.

View of the tiny house from our side deck.

BUT (a recurring theme), he just bought a flock of 25 chickens, and the chicken coop wasn't finished yet, so he moved an old bathtub into the tiny house, and the tiny house became the temporary chicken coop until the real chicken coop was completed.  So Jerami instead moved into the bright structure on the right in this photo:

You may wonder what that is.  One lady who came to visit said it looks like a UFO landed here.  Actually it's a workshop on the lower level, with a greenhouse on top.  And this thing is HUGE.  I'll bet three of the tiny houses could fit in here.  You walk inside and there's a massive ladder in the middle that still doesn't reach the top.  The plank leading up to the greenhouse is to keep the moose out...the plank is too wobbly and unnerving for them so they leave the yummy plants alone.  Bonus is it mostly keeps my kids out too.  So with the duplex rented out, and the chickens in the tiny house, Jerami set up a tent in this backyard greenhouse and called it home.

BUT...what about when Ele was scheduled to arrive?  Ele is a 20-something lady from California.  She enjoys sustainable gardening and met Jerami through Workaway.  She agreed to do 20 hours of work per week here on the property in exchange for free room and board.  So....(we wondered), if the tiny house is claimed by the chickens, and Jerami is living in a tent in a UFO (greenhouse), where is this free room where Ele will stay?  We waited in curious wonder.  So now Ele is here, and she calls the tent in the greenhouse home (the price is right!) while Jerami wanders and patches together places to stay between family and friends, and lives upstairs in the duplex when that's not rented out.

Not your average kitchen window view.  I love it.

Now that the real chicken coop is done (happily funded by our rent money as Jerami told us), the chickens have moved in there and the tiny house is empty.  BUT, the tiny house now stinks of chicken poop, and is uninhabitable until it's cleaned up.  That would seemingly be an urgent project (cleaning up the tiny house) to get Ele out of the greenhouse BUT there are a million other urgent projects.  The chicken coop needs siding.  The chickens need a fence so they're not pooping everywhere in the yard and on walkways and decks.  The property needs an electric fence to keep the bears away from the chickens (and my dear children).  And Jerami mentioned yesterday that the roosters are old enough and thus starting to crow now, and it's illegal to have noisy animals here in Anchorage.  So they'll need to be butchered next week in our back yard and we are all welcome to help with that, including Timothy and Matthew.  (They know that some of the chickens are meat chickens and will be butchered.  I am curious how much they will want to participate in it, or watch, or run away...)  Just put it on the to-do list around here.  Honestly this just starts the list of interesting projects going on around here...more on that some other time.

With all of these projects, Jerami said he considers himself a "yardie"  If you (like I was) are unfamiliar with this term, they describe themselves as "Alaska-based, outdoor-minded subsistence, gardening, permaculture and homesteading nuts."  You can check out the Alaska yardie facebook page, featuring our backyard and chickens: https://www.facebook.com/yardiesak/   or their website here.  I love it.
 
For now, Grandma and Grandpa O'Neill just arrived for a visit (babysitters so I can blog!) so we're off to eat dinner and go to Timothy's soccer game.

Timothy protecting this chicken from Joshua.  All of the boys adore the chickens and love to hold, chase, feed, and/or pet them.