Field notes
Guides and honest answers about buying raw land, living on it, and making the most of your acreage. No jargon, no pressure, just what we would tell a friend.
Articles tagged water. 6 articles.
Three tiers, not one, and the cost spread between them is the size of a house. What off-grid actually saves you, which is less than you have read, what the statutes really say about rainwater, and how to test the life before you commit to it.
Rainwater harvesting is not illegal in Colorado and has not been since 2016. Here is the real state-by-state picture, the arithmetic for how much water a roof produces, and the parts that go wrong, including which roofing materials poison the water.
Nobody should buy a water filter before they have a lab report. Private wells are unregulated, about a quarter of sampled wells exceed a health benchmark, and the cause is usually geology rather than pollution. Here is what to test for and what each treatment actually removes.
Most articles on this explain two legal doctrines and never answer the question you actually have: can you drill a well on this parcel. Here is the exempt well rule for all ten states we sell in, the two acreage thresholds that decide it, and how to check before you buy.
Three things decide whether you can grow food on western ground, and the first is the well permit. On a Colorado parcel under 35 acres it does not cover a garden.
In several states you are not the one who files the well permit, your contractor is. And owning the ground does not entitle you to the water under it. Here is who permits what, what it really costs, and the free hour of research that tells you how deep you will have to go.
While you are here
Pima County, AZOcotillo, cholla and prickly pear crowd a raised, flat pad across the middle of this acre, the natural spot for a home with a view of the Tucson Mountains. It sits in Diamond Bell Ranch about 33 miles west of Tucson, at 3,297 feet where summers run a little milder. Cell service is strong, and the zoning lets you build when you're ready.
Putnam County, FLArea photosHoot Owl Road is paved and power runs right past the lot, which is more than most of this old Satsuma subdivision can say. It's a quarter acre in St. Johns River country, twelve minutes from Palatka and a short run to Dunn's Creek and Crescent Lake. The lot is mapped wetland and most of it sits in a FEMA flood zone, so it's priced for what it is today.
Hudspeth County, TXArea photosGuadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, sits about a half hour east of this ground, and the salt flats that set off a war in 1877 are closer than that. It's open desert outside Salt Flat, Texas, with no zoning and no HOA, so you can pitch a tent this weekend and build off-grid whenever you get around to it.
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