Boy, do I have a fun surprise for all of you! Okay, here is a little something new. I’ve been feeling inspired to feature some simple life nature lovers on Wooly Moss Roots, so here it is: Meet Lara!
I met Lara through mutual friends and through the Saturday Market. I immediately liked her bright smile and happy nature- and it turns out we have a lot in common. I’m so inspired by families connecting with nature and where their food comes from and finding joy in life’s many treasures. Here is one of those families.
I thought of some questions to ask Lara (I could have asked so many more) that are in bold below, followed by her answers and beautiful pictures of her family and homestead. Enjoy!

Tell us a little bit about yourself (where you grew up, your passions) & your family.

“I am an outdoor girl from Port Angeles, Washington. In many ways, I still think of the Olympic Peninsula as my home, although I’ve lived in Oregon for the past 6 years. My childhood home was in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains and we were on the edge of private timberland that bordered the Olympic National Park. These hills and forests were my playground, and I ran wild through the creek bottoms and tall Cedar trees. My parents took my brother and I camping and backpacking a lot, and we always enjoyed exploring the outdoors together. My mother is also a very creative person, and we were always doing crafts together. I was always making something, whether out of mud and sticks, or beads, paper or clay. I used to take my barbies camping and build these elaborate villages with bark and moss for them to live in. My cousin and I got American Girl dolls when I was about nine, and we spent hours making clothes, food and other fun things for them. I have a lot of fond crafting memories.
I aspired to be a writer, and english teacher, or a backcountry ranger. I ended up studying classic literature at St. John’s College in New Mexico, and then changed course for Horticulture and Natural Resource Sciences at W.S.U. Then I met my husband, had twins, finished college with babies, and changed course again to being an at-home mother. It felt like focusing on creating a home was the right thing for me to do. I take homemaking seriously, and view it as a social art, so I have applied myself industriously. We created a beautiful house bus as we were graduating from college, and had some adventures living in it for awhile, which ultimately brought us to Oregon. I almost went to Graduate School to study literature at the U of O a couple of years ago, and was accepted, enrolled and ready to go, but decided that it wasn’t quite the right time yet.
So, now I am focusing on things I can do that are based at home so I can continue to tend the hearth fires and have time with my family. We go on abundant outdoor adventures. We camp, hike, explore and backpack all around the Northwest. It really feeds our souls to be out in nature. Recently I have been combining my passions for writing, outdoor adventures, and crafting with my online Etsy store and my outdoor blog. I have some freelance writing projects up my sleeve, and I am excited about this possibility. I feel like I have gathered all of these skills and experiences along the way in life, and I am now trying to coalesce them into something both creative and sustaining.”

Tell us about buying your first home, your farmhouse.

“Buying our first home was quite an adventure and a great example of manifesting a long standing dream. We started looking last January and we were determined to buy a house with some land out in the country on a shoestring budget. We tried a couple of realtors before we found just the right one, who lived out in the country himself, raised goats, had homeschooled children, and liked building barns. We did a lot of driving around, and looked at many places within a half-hour radius of Eugene. A lot of the listings in our price range were too far away from Spencer’s job and the kid’s school, or needed more work than we could do. We made an offer on one place out in Fall Creek that we really wanted, but it was a short sale, and things were not moving along at all. By the spring we were feeling discouraged, but still held onto our dream of a country life. In May, we saw this house in Elmira on the listings and went out to look. It was a foreclosure, so the
price was manageable. I wasn’t thrilled with the land. It was about an acre and a half, and very open without a lot of privacy or topography. We went in the house, and fell in love with it. It was a 1930’s farmhouse with all the trim, farm kitchen, built in cabinets, and a big front portch. On top of this, it was in good shape. This was not the case with most of the other places we had looked at. The amount of work the house needed was manageable. Then I opened the door to the old-time walk in pantry off of the back porch, and that decided it for me. The kitchen was already painted the color of red I had always wanted and had chicken patchwork curtains (I have always had a chicken themed kitchen) so that felt like a sign right there. We figured that the land was something we could work on, but we did not want to spend all our time working on the house. So, we made an offer, and it went very quickly and easily. We spent a month fixing it up, and moved in
during August. It was one of the best feelings in the world to finally have our own place and fix it up just the way we wanted to.”

What things have you done around your homestead already?

“First, we removed the major hazard by capping the gaping open hand-dug well in the driveway. We were glad to have it as a secondary well for future irrigation, but did not want anyone falling in it! The next project, before we did anything else, was to build the sandbox of our kids dreams. I put big log rounds standing on end in a crescent shape against a wall of the horse barn, lined it with shade cloth, and had a dumptruck deliver three yards of beach sand. Since we are on a well with good flow, the kids could run the hose and make creeks and dams to their hearts content, and be occupied while we were fixing up the house and moving. This was the smartest thing we did. They were very happy in the sandbox all the rest of the summer. Then we tore out all the carpet downstairs and sanded the fir wood floors with a lot of help from my parents. We painted the rooms that needed painting in colors we had been wanting for a long time. Since none of the bedrooms had closets, we turned one of the tiny bedrooms upstairs into one big closet with closet bars and shelves all around the walls and two of our dressers in it. It worked out very nicely. We put a liner in the chimney, built a river rock hearth, and installed a Jotul woodstove. We converted one stall of the horse barn into a deluxe chicken coop with an enormous enclosed chicken yard, and the other stall into a garden shed. I made use of a nice large pile of rocks on the property to build a garden bed all the way around the house. I put soil in the front part to transplant my perennial herbs into, and we sheet mulched the rest with cardboard and leaves for later. Rosemary helped me plant bulbs all over our property, so in the spring we should have daffodils, snowdrops, and camas everywhere! A neighbor came over one day with his tractor and tilled a huge garden space for us which we planted in a cover crop for the spring, and this is the start of our
wonderful giant garden. It feels really good to look around and see all these things done.”

What do you love about country life?

“I love the quiet and the space. I love that my children have some room to run around outside with their chickens. I love seeing more trees and open spaces than houses and hardscape. I love the sense of freedom. I love being close to the woods so we can go on nearby adventures. I love the frosty mornings with woodsmoke curling out of the chimneys and all the birds flying overhead to and from the resevoir nearby. I love feeling closer to the earth.”

What does your family do to live simply and close to nature?

“Food is a big part. We eat all organic food and get our veggies locally from a CSA during most of the year. Our meat is elk my dad hunts, and we get pork from a local farm. This year I even rendered my own lard for pie crusts. During the summer we pick berries and freeze them, and during the fall I wildcraft and glean tree fruit, nuts and other plants that I can, dry and freeze for the year. We get our eggs from our chickens and give them all our food scraps. We create very minimal garbage and recycle most things. Our recreation is pretty simple, camping and backpacking in the outdoors. We make a lot of things, and give handmade items as gifts. We get mostly all of our clothes second hand, and strive to make conscious decisions about the things we buy. I use cloth re-washable kitchen rags and napkins and glass canning jars for food storage. Our home is pretty much chemical free, and we are very careful about products we use. We don’t have television or video games, and we like it that way. We celebrate the Solstices and Equinoxes as our family traditions, and this also fosters a closer connection to nature in our rhythms of the year.”

What are your future dreams for your homestead?

“Fruit trees, a big garden, a lavender field, berries, a pumpkin patch, a cobb landscape architecture studio for Spencer/guest cottage or a yurt, making the land more private, more chickens, quail, turkeys, sheep?, a tiny roadside farm stand, a quaking aspen forest with wild roses in the front yard, an herb and medicinal plant garden, a willow branch sweat lodge, a cold frame or greenhouse, a cobb outdoor pizza and bread oven, a small pond or swale in the back corner for muscovy ducks, a treehouse for the kids, and more dreams that are sure to come!”

Thanks so much Lara, you are an inspiration!!

To find out more about Lara and see her amazing artwork check out her etsy store and blog below:

Etsy link:  Mountain Hearth Handcrafts

Blog:  A Mountain Hearth