My neighbours have agreed to sell me the bit of land behind my house. It will put me up to about an acre. It is funny how it is making me kind of hesitate because it means a lot of my plans on the original property are now going to switch in some challenging ways. I have to move stuff and build a bridge and a road through my original driveway. That’s going to be a lot.

I don’t have the money to turn this into a big fancy project right now. I really and truly need to cut spending because paying for the land is going to hurt. I didn’t want to come up with this money. It’s going to need a mortgage and that’s going to be complicated. I am going to need to look closely at our spending and figure out how to do less.

This is a different project for me. I want to build a forest. I want to learn regeneration. And I’m going to have to do it by walking around. I’m going to have to observe. This is going to come very slowly. I am going to need to figure out how to catch water. I’m going to have to build up the layers slowly. Turns out it was good I read all those books this winter. As much as I threw a lot of the planning out for the garden around my house… I can’t manage an acre without caring about water. I can’t. I also don’t want to just put in a pipe from the house and do it with council water. I want to figure out how to make this work.

And it’s going to involve a lot of days, hundreds of days, thousands of days of walking around and watching. And also researching composting toilets. Because otherwise I’d have to walk back every time I have to poop and that sounds really obnoxious. Apparently you can get them in Scotland for about £1,000 and they are worth using with a system instead of just going in a bucket because of cross contamination and health.

I feel almost frozen in a way. There is now a huge wave of uncertainty. How should I change what I am doing around the house? What will have to move and will that be a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. I feel like I should just let it ride and make my start across the burn next autumn and winter.

And I’ve been working on this a paragraph at a time for over a week. Bah.