prayers for new orleans

several friends who live in new orleans decided to weather the hurricane and are still there as far as i know. we haven't heard from them. from looking at a topographic map of the city it looks like they're on high ground, so should be spared the deep flooding that's taken a good part of the city. but seeing as the city will probably be uninhabitable for weeks or months i'm praying that they find safe passage out. a picture here of better times in new orleans in the front yard of a friend's house.

chillfested

chillfest was a great success. opening night's screening of the lady in question is charles busch with special guest charles busch nearly filled the house. a great question and answer period followed the screening and i got to meet and eat with the famous charles b. friends daisy and donald came to the opening, too. afterward the crowd walked a few blocks to a beautiful old theater whose lobby has been turned into a bar. and after that dinner at an intimiate cafe. jersey city has come a long way in a couple years. we all had great hopes for saturday, but the great weather and the outdoor glbt festival in jersey city probably drew most of the potential audience away. sunday--the day i spoke--drew a nice crowd. i gave my talk during which i showed clips from four of my films (a couple made with roger mckeever). i had a great time talking with folks after the screening. i'm hoping that i can do more with the jersey city museum. they have a great space with several video viewing stations. i'd love to make some stuff for them. i think my video probably works best in a museum setting. it's awkward screening them in a theater because it sets up an expectation dynamic that i don't like. i'd rather people just stumble upon my stuff like they would a unexpected but beautiful view in nature. several really great films: call me malcom about a female to male transgendered minister; wtc view about a guy and his experience trying to rent out a room after 9/11; No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon about two remarkable pioneers of gay rights. all highly recommend. also, a piece for the new glbt channel, logo, was excellent: the evolution will be televised.

john, charles, charles, arnie on stage after the screening sunday night at the hard grove donald in the garden a beautiful dead tree in jersey city, near a mosque!

after sunday's shows, i visited the episcopal church that friend donald has painted. it's stunningly beautiful and really great to see at this moment because parts of it aren't finished and you get a strong sense of how his painting has brought the interior back to life after having been painted monochromatically. we also visited his house (donald in the garden pictured here). it's a wonderful four floors of eccentric interiors lovingly attended to for over more than 20 years. i love getting away and doing things like this festival. meeting new people, showing my stuff, talking art and exploring new ideas, just being out in the world, is simply fantastic. i thank john and charles for putting me into their brand new festival. i hope to be a part of it next year. and many thanks to linda from the jersey city museum who did my press release and did a great job promoting and executing the festival. thanks to mike for manning (and rewiring!) the projection booth so that it would work for us.

duvee

after disembarking the train to new york i met up with friends john and charles, sunan and bill. we all had dinner at a comfort food place (i had a pear and gorgonzola salad) and then went to this beautiful and inspired nightclub called duvee. when i heard the name i joked, "what, are they going to have beds all over the place?" and sure enough, they do. the club is a bar surrounded by large candlelit beds covered in white cloth and surrounded by gathered white curtains. the lighting system subtly changes color so that at any moment you and your bedmates will find yourselves in a luxuriant red bed, a cool blue bed or a goulish green bed and everything in between. we arrived right as the club opened, which was impeccably declasse, but i'm so glad we did because we got to lounge about with the fantasy that it was all ours. by midnight the place was packed with posing twinks and clubbers with sloganed t-shirts such as "nice shoes, let's fuck." the crowd wasn't completely gay, which i liked, but the attitude was huge and while i didn't mind observing from our very comfortable pad--it's the first club in which i've felt invited to sleep--observing became uninteresting after a couple hours and i suddenly felt myself very tired. we checked out and hopped the path train to jersey city. i did have a drink, contrary to my habit lately. it was a gin and tonic and i believe the first one of those that i've had in a couple years. i enjoyed it.

coming in to nyc duvee john at duvee my drink

njork

i'm here in new york (aka njork, rhymes with bjork) after an epic amtrak adventure. a derailment near new york snarled train traffic north of the city--all the way to vermont apparently--and it forced the normally uneventful trip into a train switching, engine switching, brake catching on fire comedy of errors that, were i not such a calm and choas loving person, could have made for a miserable day. i finished my novel just as we rolled into penn station, as if it were a perfectly backtimed event. here's the press release for my event here: August 18, Jersey City, NJ: On a dare from a friend, video artist Matt Bucy has created a new version of the classic film The Wizard of Oz. His work, Of Oz the Wizard is an extraordinary, mind-altering, syntax-shattering film that reconstructs the venerable classic – in alphabetical order. On a drive from Vermont to Rhode Island, an artist friend of Bucy’s lamented that nothing new was possible. Bucy disagreed and started concocting ideas that in all probability had never been done and began taking incongruous ideas and crossing them. After several miles, the idea of taking an ordinal operation--sorting--and crossing it with an existing work of art came to mind. “I thought we could create a totally new kind of work that wouldn't be original but also wouldn't be a copy by applying database operations” explains Bucy, “the new works would be kind of like a visual and aural concordance!” Then the question arose: what movie to use? “We tried out a bunch of ideas, but The Wizard of Oz seemed the best candidate because we figured almost everyone has seen it and knowing the original seemed critical for this kind of thing to have impact,” said Bucy. He then set about looking for software that might be able to take apart an entire motion picture word by word and found nothing. He ended up writing the software himself. Software comes naturally to Bucy. He spent a good part of his youth writing software and his early career writing digital audio editing tools for New England Digital, producers of the first commercial synthesizer, the Synclavier. He noted that errors in audio software often produced amazing and beautiful sequences of sound, leading to his experimentation with similar kinds of "bugs" in his own video software. Bucy and another friend did the dicing of The Wizard of Oz, which took about a week to slice into about 12,000 pieces. The words were sorted into the computer program “Excel” and then the new, sorted list, combined with some additional software created by Bucy, formed the rough draft. “We marveled at it for some time,” said Bucy, “and even tried it out at a dance party as a projection behind the deejay.” They were encouraged by the creation and further refined it to produce the final version that will be screened August 26-28 at the Jersey City Museum as part of “Chillfest, the mostly gay and lesbian film festival of Jersey City.” Bucy works out of White River Junction, Vermont in a studio located in a 45,000 square foot rambling industrial bakery that he purchased in 2000 and renovated into 40 artist studios. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, receiving a Bachelors degree in Studio Art in 1986, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, receiving a Masters of Architecture degree in 1990. Along with his film and software work, over the last ten years, Bucy has converted two large industrial buildings into artist centers, designing the renovations himself and general contracting the projects. He is currently designing buildings for a Radical Faerie Sanctuary in southern Vermont and contemplating building a self-sustaining homestead for himself somewhere near White River Junction. Bucy will be at the Jersey City Museum on Sunday, August 28 at 2:30pm to participate in an artist discussion on the creation of Of Oz the Wizard. Admission to the discussion is free, and the museum is located at 350 Montgomery Street in Downtown Jersey City. Of Oz the Wizard can be seen on Friday, August 26 from 11am to 5pm, and on Saturday, August 27 and Sunday, August 28 from 12pm to 5pm. For more information on Of Oz the Wizard or Chillfest, visit www.jerseycitymuseum.org or call 201-413-0303.

jersey city

i'm taking the train to jersey city, new jersey today, via new york city and a cocktail party at a club somewhere that kicks off chillfest, the "mostly gay and lesbian" film festival that friends john catania and charles ignacio put together to showcase their documentary about charles busch. i'll be on hand to talk about some of my films on sunday and Of Oz the Wizard will screen continuously during the festival on a big flat screen display. i'm excited to be travelling. i love the time off and time to simply sit and read while being rocked by the train as scenery passes by. what am i reading? Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. card: knight of wands: be createive, courageous, confident, enthusiastic

vershire school

a couple weekends ago, my friend danny and i found ourselves passing by what's left of the vershire school after our weekend at the barra homestead. while some of the school buildings have been kept up the "lodge" hasn't. it's amazing what just 16 years will do to a building. the vershire school closed in 1989, forced by the state to shut down over health violations and other allegations of misconduct. i first visited this place a few years ago with gabriel, who lived here years ago (not in the lodge, but one of the other buildings). i felt such a sense of energy and pioneering spirit in the place that i spent a day researching the school and got the state records about the shut down. some things clearly went wrong here but the place inspired feelings like those i've had while touring ancient ruins and feeling old cultures. maybe it just inspired my wish for peace and love. it's easy to project onto these ruins a wonderful and idyllic history. card: 6 of wands: triumph, acclaim, pride

just a card

today, only a card drawing: star: hope, inspiration, generosity, serenity. i could use some of all of these things!

winter seed

i ordered winter seeds today. it seems amazing to be ordering seeds to plant in september and october but that's what i'm doing! the greenhouse is nearing completion with most of the framing and crossbracing in. i put in a door today. the plastic will go up soon. it's still really warm here so no rush but i know soon frosty nights will be upon us. i retilled one row that had been trampled heavily while putting up the frame. also notice the bucked of green tea i'm brewing. all the weeds in this garden filled most of a five-gallon bucket!

awake

i'm awake now after a very sleepy sunday. i did manage to get some work done crossbracing my greenhouse, which precipitated way too many car trips in search of a decent kind of wire. i ended up at home depot, my first trip to our newest big box on the overcrowded strip across the river in "tax free!" new hampshire. on friday and saturday i hung out with danny, roger, nina and their friends and family. it was nina's birthday, as well as my sisters! happy birthday megan! so i got to eat cake for two leos. on saturday, roger, danny and i visited the place they're thinking of buying, took another walk around the property. they described their ideas for the place and then we sat down and talk about how to make it work.

roger & nina approaching the evil empire

rain

i feel as if i've been knocked over by something big. i slept fourteen hours last night, crawling not into my bed but onto the couch, not unpacking anything after my trip to montpelier, eventually making my way upstairs to bed some time after midnight. it's raining. it hasn't rained much all summer. the sound is refreshing. this morning i awoke feeling just as tired as last night, the rain giving me excuse not to go outside and work, so i settled into reading on the couch, falling asleep every few pages, awaking, making tea, now at the computer.

frame up

today the garden cold frame pieces went together in the morning and in the afternoon we paraded them down the railroad tracks behind my building to the garden and stood them upright. these things are really flimsy until they're attached to the ground. i didn't properly take into account the variation in terrain so the frames need quite a bit of levelling. that's tomorrow's project along with installing the cross-bracing, end walls and the plastic cover. it amazes me how much cozier the garden feels with a frame over it--just the suggestion of structure, really--almost like a little chapel. i might put a small sitting area in it because, supposedly, in the middle of winter, the temperature can get up into the 70s in one of these things. that would be swell. many thank you's to marco, david and randy who helped me carry and install these. i'll be needing more help with the plastic.

frames on the ground frame on the railroad frames up over garden

hoop house #1

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well, it's not really going to be a hoop house if you want to get technical but here's the first section of my winter garden frame--minus a collar tie--leaning up against my garage. i'm building the frame out of wood because i couldn't find a metal frame for less than $1000 ($1700 if you throw in all the goodies like doors, end walls, etc). all the wood cost me $124, the plastic $40. so, i'm way ahead at this point. i'm spacing the frames four feet apart which will overload the 2x4s if there's 40 pounds per square foot of snow on the roof, but i'm betting that's not going to happen because the roof pitch is nearly 45 degrees and the polyethelene cover is super slippery (think slip and slide).

chillfest

ChillFest Poster

here's the poster for chillfest--the mostly gay and lesbian film festival--in which my film "of oz the wizard" will be screened continuously on the jersey city museum's big plasma screen! i'll be giving a talk too. what is the purpose of art? i have no idea. click the pic for a better view.

prozac nation

it turns out that marketing might be the secret ingredient behind prozac and many of the other popular antidepressants currently flooding the market (and now our water supply). irving kirsch, a researcher, investigated the results of 47 FDA clinical trials and found that in only 20 of the trials did the antidepressant produce measurably different results than a sugar pill. in those cases where it was measurable, the difference was on average two points on a 52 point scale, that's 3.8%, aka little to nothing. so, think about the 92 million prescriptions written for antidepressants in 2002 (that's 8.3 billion in sales) and consider that for most people a pinch of sugar with a reassuring message from a figure of authority would have done the trick! check out the full article here. card: 8 of cups: freaky freddy: deeper meaning, moving on, weariness

harvest

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my garden has provided its first harvest--baby arugula. yummy. it's hard to believe that just four weeks ago i planted the seeds. soon it will be time to put up my hoop house. card: knight of cups: mulewood mulengburg: emotional, intuitive, loving, intimate

big yellow taxi

how strange it was to be standing in the middle of an acre of processed food set in a massive parking lot while joni mitchell's big yellow taxi played over the muzak system. card: hermit: introspection, guidance, searching, solitude. yep.

flower & herzog

david ford, esq., prop., et al., of the main street musuem in white river junction, vermont, has two new museum kitties, flower and herzog, making the total known cat population of the museum six. the other three cats are not living. jinx is buried by the riverside where he liked to play. the other two were donated to the museum for zoological display and are probably at least 50 years old.

babs styles bucy

working

i'm self-employed. this means lots of things. it means i have to pay the part of social security and medicare tax that my employer would were i employed by a company, twice what a wage-earner pays. it means that i can do what i want most of the time. it means that some days i sit around doing nothing, usually feeling guilty. sometimes i feel overwhelmed by possibility. lately i've been experimenting with a regimen picked up from the routines of the homesteaders i've been reading about. i work three or four hours a day doing labor directly related to my "bread", in my case it's working on my two buildings--and i mean labor, like scraping paint, lifting things, carpentry, masonry, plumbing. then i spend another four hours doing whatever i feel feeds me, lately reading. i don't feed myself nearly enough and this practice alone has affected me deeply. the rest of the day i spend working on a project or projects that relate to community, in my case, it's a camp project in southern vermont for the radical faeries or helping friends with their projects. i've often thought about how much happened in school and wondered how i could bring that level of accomplishment into my adult life. in school i was scheduled, fed (intellectually and gastronomically) and housed. i really had no choice in the matter. classes happened, information flowed, and opportunities to socialize abounded. so, perhaps, this schedule i'm trying out is an attempt to bring some of that richness into my adult life. so far it's very satisfying, but it's still new and the novelty is attractive. stay tuned for the long term review.

meddling

in the world of speeches and proclamations, my guess is that graduations rate pretty low. can you remember anything from your graduation speeches? i don't even remember who gave speeches at my high school graduation. i do remember that one of the george bushes--i can't remember which--gave some kind of speech, or got some kind of award, at my graduate school graduation (with quite a bit of booing). and i really don't remember much from my college graduation speeches other than the guest of honor was ted koppel, whose daughter, andrea, was a classmate. in fact, my first meal at college was shared with the koppel family, which when combined with the final word from ted at graduation formed a nice kind of koppel frame to my college education. the one thing i do remember was spoken by our college president, olin robison. i don't remember any of the rest of what he said, but this one thing stood out for me: paraphrasing, he said, as part of a long list of do's and dont's: "don't meddle with people's emotions." he spoke of this activity as one of the lowest and most destructive of all human traits. i have often asked myself when in difficult and ego-bruising situations whether i am toying with someone else's emotional ground. it's often difficult to tell, the boundaries get blurred. other times, it's blatant, when for example, someone communicates misleading information with the intent to harm or disrupt, usually in the form of gossip, sometimes in even harder forms, such as photographs or copied emails. all of it seems aimed at protecting the gossip's own ego, sheltering them from some kind of pain. i've done it. i'd guess most people have done it. i think i agree with olin robison that it's not healthy. in my own experience, it only comes back to haunt, and usually in strange and undetectable ways--a slight depression, a lingering pain, a reluctance to engage, a loss of enthusiasm, a lack of intimacy, the building of walls. it may simply boil down to love over hate, for when one truly loves there is no fear and no need to protect.

bunny's

drove to bunny's last night for dinner. david came along too. we stopped in sharon where bunny met us to check out the sweet farm. they both loved it. david told me he thought i was nuts until he saw the land. bunny remarked on how magical it felt. there is something about the place that's inviting, more so than just any hilltop. it just feels good there. the meadow very much holds you with its narrowness. david picked up two more cats from bunny's neighbor. they're black and white, presumably male. so, three cats at the museum now. i suggested he name on herzog, for no good reason. card: 5 of swords: what's up with duckie? : self-interest, dischord, open dishonor

tweaky

i'm feelin mighty tweaky. i've been feeling drawn and quartered by my brain lately, which wants to run in twenty different directions. is this mercury retrograde in action? mercury goes direct station in four days. i think i'm feeling it. i don't regularly pay attention to astrology, but i do notice cycles in my behavior and attitude that often coincide with astrological events. i've noticed communication lately has been choppy. i even played the lottery yesterday. i know that things are bad when i do that!

i trekked down to walpole, new hampshire, for stephanie's birthday dinner. stephanie and her husband, hugh, and daughters kate and sally were there too, also sally's boyfriend (whose name is escaping me), as well as molly and beignet, two golden labs. molly enjoys woofing constantly. they live in a beautiful house overlooking the connecticut river valley. before dinner i toured the gardens with stephanie, played ping pong with hugh, hung out with kate and sally. after dinner i screened of oz the wizard. this picture of stephanie is terrible, but that's the breaks with my cell phone--it makes everyone look strange. stephanie runs a very cool memoir website for women. check it out: memoir cafe.

sweet farm tree

a_tree

i didn't post this picture earlier, but here's a look at a big old tree along the old town highway with the morning sun streaming in through the fog. card: princess of cups: listen

CHILLfest

it's official: i'm going to be taking my alphabetization of the wizard of oz out for a spin at a small film festival at the jesey city art musuem called CHILLfest later this month. the schedule is here. i'll be showing clips of several of my films in an "artist talk". it looks like i'll be doing the same thing later in the fall at the bennington museum in bennington, vermont.

passive solar

i just finished reading this excellent book on passive solar design by james kachadorian, the passive solar house, published by chelsea green, the excellent sustainable living publishers located right here in white river junction. in clear language and through excellent examples this book shows how anyone can use the sun's energy to reduce the amount of fuel needed to keep a house warm--even in the northeast--by about 65% using no active components (no moving parts). the system he describes uses cinder blocks laid on their sides and covered with a slab of concrete as a "battery" that charges with during the day with heat and discharges that heat at night through passive circulation (thermocycling) the house's air through it. the book includes worksheets and all the tables you would need to formulate a specific design, though some of it might be daunting for folks unaccustomed to using a calculator. i found it interesting that the problem with many passive solar houses is there are too many windows! this overheats the house and overcools it at night. my parent's house is a good example of this. so, by balancing just the right number and size of windows with the right exposures and sufficient mass and airflow through the "battery" this system can maintain a very even temperature in a house year round.

busy

i've been really busy the last few days. i'm finding time to sit down and write lacking. last weekend i visited barra, the homesteading project lead by jim merkle and rowan sherwood, and funded by the global living project. my friend danny and i spent the weekend there learning about edible wild plants. we consumed lots of them including stinging nettles (very nutritious), succulent parslaine, a weed i used to hoe from my father's garden, and even daylilly roots, a peculiar but delicious taste, raw! on our way back to montpelier to drop danny off at his place, we stopped in at the institute for social ecology, whose plainfield, vermont campus is for sale. danny and roger are thinking about buying it to start a retreat center of their dreams and nina wants to move in too! it was great to check it out. it's on a beautiful piece of land with a pond, but the buildings are old, mostly, and in need of some tender loving care, as well as more insulation by the looks of it. i stayed over in montpelier at nina's place and hung out with her and her friend linda from colorado (always nice to meet a fellow coloradoan). i drove home yesterday morning, stopping in sharon to visit the town offices for some info on the land i've been looking at and at the prices of similar parcels in the area. the difference between the asking price and sales price can be surprisingly high. the lowest price i've seen in vermont for land, and a huge tract at that, was about $1500/acre. but sales of land has happened for as little as $800/acre. i also stopped up at the land itself and happened to run into the neighbor who was very friendly and encouraged me to "move in!" i got the low down on the history of the area and what it's future may hold. i found that the soil in the field is called pomfret/teago, which is good for agriculture. i also discovered a brook running next to the meadow that "is never dry" according the neighbor, which could serve as a water source. i walked the woods a bit and discovered more heavy duty logging. i don't think there are any larger trees left on the property and the slash the loggers left is all over the place making walking in the woods treacherous. this evening roger is visiting after a four day breathwork retreat. he's going to meet me after i teach yoga for dinner.

frazzed

it was really nice to come into my studio this morning and find a vase with a beautiful flower in it. i think it's from gabriel. we had a nice talk last evening, both of us feeling good about our time off, and both remarking about all the unwinding that's been going on. other than that the morning has been inrritating. my laptop has been acting all messed up. i spend a lot of time keeping windows happy and almost no time keeping my macs happy. quicken forced me to buy a new version of their software. i did and it doesn't work very well on my machine. driving into the studio i pulled out onto route 4 and a white passat with an obviously mad woman whips up on my tail speeding, slams on her brakes right as she's about to hit me, and with hands waving, head shaking tailgates me to the intersection. i waved back and just looked at her in my rear view mirror. i wonder if she was a manifestation of my frustration with the computer?! roger and danny are coming down to white river today. danny's staying overnight and we're going to a workshop tomorrow and sunday at barra, the homestead project of the global living project where i visited a couple weeks ago. roger is going south for a four day breathwork workshop. card: ace of cups: emotional force, intimacy, love. hmm.

RIP Jinx

last night i lifted jinx, the main street musuem kitty, four months old, out of the gutter next to the musuem. he'd been hit by a car not long before. his brother, bernie, was sitting by his side when michelle and michelle discovered him. it's a shame. he was a very sweet cat, friendly and warm and very much into people. i'm glad i got to pick him up. he was still warm and even though he was disfigured, feeling him, lifting him from where he died, felt like a final and honorable ritual.

card: 3 of swords: heartbreak, loneliness, betrayal

books

i've been reading a lot of books, on trains, boats and couches that aren't mine.

botany of desire: a plant's eye view of the world by michael pollan. in four essays, he explores the relationship between human desires and four different plants: the apple, tulip, marijuana and the potato. i especially liked the apple and marijuana essays.
i've mentioned this one in the past, but here goes again: radical simplicity: small footprints on a finite earth by jim merkel. jim, whom i've met and lives nearby, shows how to assess one's footprint on the earth: how much productive land it takes to support you and your habits. for most americans it takes 24 acres. if everyone on earth lived like americans it would take seven or eight planets to support the population. jim addresses practically how one can reduce footprint.
life of pi by yann martel. fiction. a boy and his zoo-operating family in india sell the zoo and board a ship to canada. after the ship sinks, the boy, pi, spends months at sea with a bengal tiger in a life boat. it's a beautiful thing!

Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. This book was recommended by Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity. it's a good read if your finances are out of control, and much like jim's book, it recommends assessment as a way to clarity about your finances and techinque to reduce your debt footprint. i found its investment advice dated--the government no longer issues the bonds they recommend, but the idea that you shouldn't spend your capital is sound.

card: 4 of wands: celebration, freedom, excitement

farm!

this morning i drove a ways out of town to look at an old farm that's for sale. the property is high on a ridge, rising about 400 feet from 1100 to 1500 feet above sea level. it's south-westerly facing, has forest, meadow and lots of roads from the old farm and logging operations. heavy fog blanketed the property when i arrived and the grass of the upper meadow was wet with dew and last night's rain. my pants are still soaked this afternoon. the only sound was of insects.

i wasn't quite sure where the property started and ended, but working off an old survey and a topographic map, and as the fog lifted, i got a better sense of the property. about ten acres is a meadow with views to distant mountains and the rest is forested. the forest has been heavily worked, not a lot of large trees left on the property, but enough maples to make decent syrup i expect.

i came across the old farmhouse and the remains of the barn foundation. there's a cellar hole ready for a new house! but, i think it's a bit low on the hill. i wondered why they had put the house where they did.

there are roads all over the property. a nice old town road passes along one edge of the property giving easy access to one side of it. i thought that with all the maples along this road sugaring would be facilitated.

so, this is a beautiful, quiet place, but it's very remote. getting there i ripped the engine shield on my car on a hidden boulder. i'm sure that's going to cost some bucks to fix. so, i'm already invested! winter access would be difficult, requiring at a minimum a four wheel drive vehicle if not something even more serious. when thinking about this place i'd have to consider walking to the house, like jim and rowan do at their homestead in east corinth. i must admit this scares me a bit. but i know that my fear is largely my own lack of confidence about my ability to survive without all the perks of modernity.

the fog lifted and the upper meadow turns out to have fantastic views to the south and west. a house could be put at the north eastern edge of the property and get plenty of sun all day long and there are some nice spots in the meadow, almost flat, that could be gardens. i'm dreaming.