February 2024
We made it to February 2024! Things have slowed down as I mostly wait for my house in Portland to be able to be sold so I have more financing available.
But I have some updates on the property I hope to buy here in the city of Duluth and some of the cool things I’ve been learning while putting together the proposal to the city planning department about what I’d do with the land if I bought it.
Above you can see the property again, with the photos taken December 30th on the left, and those taken on February 10th on the right. Going forward I will probably stop sharing these photos - my original idea was to document the changes month over month to the farm, but in practice things change on more or an annual scale. I’ll share photos of specific things I build, but I’ll stick the side by side photos into quarterly or annual updates.
In terms of changes to the land, the only real one is that I covered more of the grass with cardboard and yard waste during a brief warm period in mid January, continuing my mission to remove all of the lawn and replace it with native plantings and wood chips. I haven’t tackled the remaining logs to inoculate due to the cold, but now that things are more mild I hope to finish up the current batch of maple so I can begin working on inoculating some logs with pioppino.
The big progress has been on the property search and logo fronts.
My realtor and I walked another property, using my drone to scout areas that were hard to reach. The property is in Gnensen Township, which is north/northeast of Duluth by about 20 minutes.
The property was actually 3 properties being sold separately — a 12 acre, 20 acre, and 40 acre property. As I mentioned in my last post, I generally look at a few aspects of a property when evaluating it: location, zoning, landscape, cost, and existing infrastructure.
All three of these properties were similar enough that I considered them as one property for the sake of evaluation. They were pretty well located — about 20 minutes from my house, putting them about 30 minutes from downtown Duluth. This is a great distance — far enough out that folks staying there can feel like they are in the woods, but close enough that city trips are comfortable and I wouldn’t have a long commute.
The landscape has some challenges with how uneven the ground is, without being hilly, but the woods were gorgeous and diverse and would make a great vacation home and mushroom farm.
The properties were also priced comparably with the property I am looking at in the city of Duluth, meaning that they are much cheaper per acre.
Unfortunately the good news ends there. The properties were busts for a couple of major reasons. They have no existing infrastructure, and no sewer or water lines. This is standard for country properties, and on their own aren’t a pain, but because of the lay of the land there aren’t great places to put a septic system that wouldn’t bleed where it isn’t wanted.
But the biggest problem is zoning. Gnensen, like many townships in the area, has specific zoning and permitting requirements that make a project like this difficult. The biggest issue is that I’d have to have my primary residence in Gnensen in order to even be considered for owning vacation rentals. I understand their thinking entirely, it just means this township, and many like it, is out of the running as a result.
While I’m sad to say that that property was a no-go, I’m exploring a very promising one in the city of Duluth proper, and am in the middle of putting together a proposal to share with the city planning department about how I’d like to use that property. You can expect a deep dive into that process, including working with a construction architect on layout plans if those proceedings wrap up one way or another.
The other area I’ve been putting time into is the design of a logo for Living Proof. I’m working with two friends on the design, and while I don’t have any iteration to share quite yet, I’m already learning to think about logos in a lot of ways that I hadn’t considered.
Farming logos come in a huge variety, some leaning into the folksy charm of a small business, some focused on a specific crop grown on the farm, and some really minimalist ones designed to get out of the way to bring focus to the product.
In this case my business isn’t just a farm, it’s a hospitality business with a large community outreach aspect, and who knows what else I may want to do. It’s challenging designing a logo that can be that flexible, or at least introduces a core design that can be adapted to the various use-cases. Then we get to the question of “in what contexts will the logo be used?” A logo that looks good on a dark blue background can be very different than a logo that looks good on a white background.
I was simply unprepared to go this deep into the design process, and I am appreciative of my two friends for their patience as I try to navigate it. In the end we’ll have a logo to share with y’all, with a potential second one focused on the hospitality aspect of the business.
Thank Yous:
I’d like to thank the following folks for helping me with everything I mentioned in this post, plus one shout out I forgot last post!
Angie Stier from the Economic Developer for the City of Duluth for talking through my plans, as well as passing some connections on to me.
Grace Benson for providing so many ideas and reviewing my plans with your expertise in forestry and forest management specifically.
Martin Ventura for feedback and edits for my proposal for the City of Duluth planning department.
Matt Mullins for feedback and edits for my proposal for the City of Duluth planning department.
Connor Riva for working with me to design my logo.
Patrick Kovacich for working with me to design my logo.