Hippy Questing

So, I've started a hippy quest. 

The irony of this is the fact that I'm from Berkeley, CA (aka, in contention for being the hippy capital of the world) and as a result I've always talked about "dirty hippies" with a bad taste in my mouth.
I now now that what I wasn't keen on was the 'tude, and not the lifestyle.

I dig the lifestyle.

It started when we bought our house.

We have a big garden in which we're growing fruit a vegetables, and every year we're learning new things about what we want to eat, what we grow well, and what's more trouble than it's worth (sorry, onions).

We have a greenhouse, though we soon plan to upgrade (or downgrade, if you're my in laws) to a polytunnel.  The polytunnel will be much less likely to explode due to an errant football/baseball/anything that our as yet non-existent children will decide to throw. 

Greenhouse!  It's full of tomatoes.  Also, kale and poppies!

We want chickens.  A lot.  We will absolutely get chickens once we are a bit more established and once the garden is a bit more setup.

We want bees.  Save the bees, man!  I am much more interested in growing stuff I can eat than stuff that just looks pretty, but I also really like bees.  Fortunately for me the bees really like the stuff that's easiest to grow and I have plans for a wildflower meadow at the back of the garden, around the fruit trees.  As a hay fever sufferer, I love the health benefits of local honey, and I also use beeswax in a number of my hippy potions, so I'd really like to find out more about beekeeping. 

We also have a house, obviously.  We bought it from a woman in her 90s who had lived there for 30+ years, and you had better believe it was decorated exactly how you're picturing it.  We ripped out a lot of psychedelic carpeting, steamed a lot of crazy wallpaper, knocked down walls, built other walls, rewired, replumbed, moved rooms, painted, sanded, varnished, insulated and found ourselves with a pretty cool home.

We put solar panels on the roof.  We've only had them one summer, but so far so green.

We bought a woodburning stove, with a view towards putting in a masonry stove in a few years when a) they become DEFRA approved (it's a no-go on smoke where we live)
b) we can work out how to integrate the masonry stove in with solar panels for year-round green water heating.  Of course by "we" I totally mean my guy, because he's the engineer in this family.

We make beer.  Well, I make beer.  Husband helps drink it.  

We make bread.  Again, this is more or a royal we.

I think I could get used to this whole "hippy lifestyle" business.