About

We’re Mike and Lou, and this is Fruition Forest Garden — our off-grid homestead tucked into the hardwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

After nearly two decades in Oregon, we moved here in 2022 with a U-Haul Ubox 5’ x 8” x 7’ 6", two cats, and a plan: to build a self-sustaining life from the ground up. Our 20 acres were nothing but raw woods when we arrived. Now, we’re slowly weaving together perennial food systems, animal rotations, natural infrastructure, and regenerative land care — all shaped by observation, experience, and a willingness to get our hands dirty.

This site is where we’re documenting what works, what doesn’t, and what we learn along the way. Some older blog posts are pulled from our life in Oregon, and others fill in the timeline since moving here — but all of it is part of the same story: a long-term effort to feed ourselves, steward the land, and create systems that support life without extracting from it.

What “Own the Stack” Means to Us

To us, owning the stack means building every layer of our life in a way that we can understand, maintain, and adapt. On the land, that means planting perennial fodder crops instead of buying feed, and creating a nutrient cycle where the animals feed the land as much as the land feeds them. Over time, our goal is to grow and store enough feed to overwinter our flock without outside inputs. The ducks fertilize the property as they go — their movement, manure, and habits all contributing to a healthier whole.

On the tech side, we’re building tools that serve us, not the other way around. Eventually, we’ll host this website from a solar-powered server right on our land. For now, this website was built after over a decade of trial and error with web tools and finally brought together using AI — turning years of learning into a site that handles dynamic blogging with automatic image processing. The purpose is simple: own our content, publish it on our terms, and use social media platforms as offshoots — not the roots.