It is settlement day! The settlement itself was very quick and the signing of papers was finished in around 15 minutes. We had a nice chat with the seller. His agent had told him of our plans to build a cob house and the seller had actually looked up photos of cob houses! He owned other tracts of land and knew the forest officer Michael Kays, who we hope to meet soon. The seller talked about wildlife and tree species and succession – he obviously had experience taking care of land and was almost sounding like the guys who talked during the ‘Woods in Your Backyard’ course! Apparently the land was an orchard more than 50 years ago. The forest that has grown in its place is something that developed naturally. This tells us that most of the trees are native species and it is a mature forest. We got other useful bits of information – e.g., his grandfather had a vegetable garden in the same location where we plan to have ours! The location where we plan to put our fruits trees has stone/bricks (from the small house that was on that spot) buried into the ground; this means we will have to dig them up and put in some top soil as we plant the fruit trees. He mentioned the names of some of the neighbors and from the sounds of it, they are really nice people. Apparently, the house behind our land has a clear view of Frederick during winter – it will be interesting to see what kind of view we get. It did sound like the seller had fond memories of coming to the land when his grandfather and father were around. Hopefully, he will be happy with what we end up doing on the land. We celebrated by having some tea and appetizers at Cafe Nola in Frederick before we picked up the spade and hose that we had located on Craigslist.


#purchase #craigslist