The skills inventory for this property comes to twelve themes: power, water, shelter, steel, earth, timber, growing, livestock, preserving, repair, whole-property design, and the first year on raw land. It is tempting to put all twelve on a calendar. We’re not going to.
The arithmetic
The eastern Upper Peninsula gives a reliable outdoor working season from roughly late June through early October. That is about 14 usable weeks.
Twelve sessions in 14 weeks means near-weekly delivery with no recovery time, and it means twelve separate curricula to write, test, tool up, and stock materials for. Each one would be taught exactly once a year. Nothing gets good when it is done once a year.
Three, repeated
So the launch is three sessions:
| Session | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Power | Where does the electricity come from? |
| Water | Where does the water come from, and where does it go? |
| Shelter | What keeps me warm and dry? |
Together they answer the question a landowner actually has: can I live on this piece of land without the grid?
Three curricula instead of twelve is roughly a quarter of the development work. More importantly, each session gets taught several times a season, and the fourth running of a course is a different thing from the first. The schedule tightens. The tool list gets right. The part where everyone gets confused gets rewritten.
How the rest get added
One new session per year, and each one is proven as a two-day Field Day before it becomes a week. A session only makes the list if it passes three tests:
- It produces a permanent installation on the property.
- It can be taught on the property as it exists that season.
- It has a paperwork module: the permits, the code, the cost-share.
Steel is a good example of the second test. Welding needs a covered shop and adequate power. The Shelter sessions build the shop and the Power sessions build the power, so Steel comes after them, not because it’s less interesting but because it isn’t possible yet.
The full list, with honest status labels, is on the curriculum page.