WOOFERS NEEDED: APRIL-OCT 2012
Please inquire asap at: chugachfarm@gmail.com

We are an off-grid small scale homestead farm located in the beautiful Matanuska Valley in Alaska. We grow enough food to feed our family year round, sell at the farmers market in Anchorage and provide 5-10 CSA shares from May-Sept. Farmers markets are weekly and require helpers to rise early, harvest veggies and have prepared value added goods the day before. We rely heavily on root cellar storage, traditional food preservation techniques, hunting, fishing, berries and wild plants. Chickens are used for egg production, composting and preparing land for agriculture. Bees are kept and cared for to promote pollination and to collect beeswax for herbal medicine. Honey is used for mead, wine and kombucha. We doubled our growing capacity for 2011, including a new pond for water storage that will come online in 2012. We are currently building a 16x40' 3-4 season greenhouse, an additional 25' long hoophouse, a covered 20x24 ft high tunnel for 2012 and more garden beds. We focus on simple, low-cost methods of living using ingenuity. Examples are chain saw milling, recycling and salvaging building materials.

Spring projects include: Prepping growing area, building fence lines, installing pond liner, prepping the gravity feed water system, installing pump for pond water, broad forking, composting, maintaining wood heat in the greenhouse, soil-blocking starts, chopping wood, making cheese and kimchi, and other various tasks. Note that this farm opportunity is not limited to the growing area, but a large portion of your time should be invested in all the workings of a homestead.

Summer projects include: Transplanting, seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting for market, making value added products, harvesting herbs and making medicine, canning and freezing, smoking salmon, making cheese and kimchi, composting, brewing compost tea, moving chicken tractor-system, weekly bee checks, milling wood and building greenhouse, etc.

Fall Projects include: Vegetable harvest, berry picking, moose or caribou butchering and preserving, making cheese, kimchi, brewing apple cyser, food preservation and canning, clearing land for growing, cover cropping, chopping wood, and winterizing farm.

Meals: Provided: vegetables from the garden, eggs from chickens, local raw goat milk, berries, potatoes, carrots, and a few gluten-free grains. Sometimes an opportunity to work trade with a neighbor will provide extra goat milk, cheese, and chicken meat. We also stock some staples like gluten free grains (rice, buckwheat, etc.), beans.

Responsibilities: Participating in the working system of the homestead. Caring for your lodging. Cooking nutritious meals. Weeding. Feeding and watering chickens. Flexible hours, waking early on harvest day each week ready to work. Clothing yourself properly for the Alaskan weather elements. Taking advantage of the opportunity to learn and share.

Skills Desired: Require a self-motivated, positive, energetic, detail oriented person willing to be flexible with all sorts of projects. Requires someone who is willing to get dirty. Prefer a person with natural building skills, but not essential. This opportunity requires a person wanting to learn from the homesteading model, potentially seeking it for themselves in the future. Living in Alaska is remote by lower 48 standards, so one should be ready to be comfortable in an extremely small community, without the interaction of city life. Books, instruments, hikes, projects and learning how to live in the woods are the leisure activities.

Educational Opportunities: Organic farming techniques including soil amendments, pest management, composting, crop rotation, companion planting, weed mitigation, broad forking, double digging, harvesting and preparing produce and products for market, helping in organization and planning for small CSA, design components of off-grid greenhouse structure, harvest and process herbs into medicine for medicinal herb business, learn off-grid living techniques including chain-saw milling.

Housing: Inquire about cabin. Wall tent or other tent structure. Outhouse. Sauna is available for washing and cleaning as well as an outdoor shower.