Running Hen Microfarm : Two non-farmers' experiment in sustainable living in Shepherdstown, WV

Ruth & Mike Raubertas (February, 2010 in front of Philadelphia Art Museum...we country folk on a city vacation!)

We are independent booksellers in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (a small college town northwest of Washington, D.C.), who also care deeply about our environment, our food choices, and our quality of life. In addition to our book business and Ruth’s piano studio, we have personally been involved over the past several years in designing and building a sustainable home on three acres, planning an ecological organic garden and more.

In this site we hope to show how ordinary people like us, with no agricultural background or special training, and with a minimum of physical energy (we are over 50) and material resources, can live more lightly on the earth, grow our own food, and nurture beauty and wildlife with (ideally) a minimum of effort.

We both grew up near Philadelphia, PA, and met on New Year’s Eve, 1975. Mike attended Penn State and U. Penn and studied history and law. Ruth went to Indiana University for music education. We were married in 1978. In 1984 we moved to the Washington, DC area where Mike was employed by the Board of Veteran’s appeals. In 1985 our daughter Clara was born. In 1986 we moved to Burkittsville, MD, to a 2 acre lot where Mike did some organic gardening in his (rare) spare time and Ruth continued giving private music lessons. In 1991 we moved to Shepherdstown, WV, and opened Four Seasons Books, an independent, family-owned general bookstore carrying new and used books. What began as a one-room operation has grown to 5 rooms of books including a generous children’s section run by our long-time employee, Kendra Adkins. We have three other very capable employees as well.

Our daughter went off to college in September 2002 and we needed a new project. Mike had been collecting books for several years on the subjects of home building, architecture, energy efficiency, gardening, homesteading, farm animals, and the like. We had talked about retrofitting our existing house for more energy efficiency, but it became clear that what we really wanted to do was just to build a new house that we could design ourselves.

We began combing through hundreds of house plans, including books on home building by Sarah Susanka, Christopher Alexander, Daniel Chiras, Greg Pahl, and others. We even found some out-of-print books from the early 20thcentury with designs of homes that we liked. Mike was especially interested in the Arts and Crafts style of architecture. We knew we wanted large overhangs to keep out sunlight in summer and large, south-facing windows to allow plenty of sun in winter. These are both features of passive solar design.

You can find out more about our house and farm planning here.