**INQUIRIES BY EMAIL ONLY: skyhillfarmny@gmail.com** [2nd property nearby also for sale at 184 Bush St., Cobleskill] SUMMARY: 40 acres with stream, waterfall, orchard, meadows, and woods. Currently an egg and permaculture garden farm with large barn with solar panels and glass greenhouse. Passive solar house – 3b/2bath plus family room and enclosed porch. Special features include cathedral ceilings, 3 skylights, 24 windows, 3 heat pumps, wood stove, well water and custom 14 ft. built-in bookcase. For more photos and info: skyhillfarmny.com and email owner. HOUSE FEATURES: Unique house designed by Adirondack Alternative Energy to reduce fossil fuel use. Built 1990. South-facing, passive solar house. Spacious yet cozy, efficient, easy to keep up, and on one level, except for the open mezzanine floor. Extremely comfortable in winter. The cathedral ceilings give the house its spacious feeling, The 2-story height of both the open kitchen / living room and the master bedroom don’t cause heat loss, and in-wall venting system recirculating air from ceiling through floor (and filtering dust and allergens) is rarely used. Windows cross-ventilate each of the 8 rooms. This home’s thick six-sided insulation plays a large role in its winter warmth, summer coolness. On hottest days, drawing the curtains is all that’s needed. The heating system is 3 electric heat pumps, and a central wood stove and chimney with large thermal mass. A drip irrigation system for watering the garden is available but unused here, as water shortage is mostly not a problem. A 1,000 gallon in-ground cistern collects rainwater and is topped by an old-fashioned water pump. Dug drainage surrounding entire house assures water doesn’t build up around the house. The spacious kitchen-living room sets off its 20’ ceiling with a lovely 14’ bookcase/music//TV custom structure. Two bedrooms, plus a mezzanine now used as a bedroom, a family room, two bathrooms, attached unheated porch with 5 large windows, and garage all surround the living room/kitchen. One-car garage with backup generator and wiring for electric car charging. PERMACULTURE GARDENS: The gently sloped lawn downhill to the road has been replaced by a large raised-bed garden curving around the front of the house and fenced in from the chickens during growing season. The well-mulched raised beds host a mixture of diverse, interplanted, perennial medicinal plants, flowers, herbs, spices, small flowering trees, fruit trees and annual vegetables. Below this garden lay nine semicircles of swales and berms, each on-contour (same-level ground). The swales collect and hold water when rainfall is excessive, and the berms are interplanted with diverse fruit shrubs and trees that absorb the swale water as needed. The berms host currant, chokeberry gooseberry and elderberry shrubs and low trees as native/American plum, sour cherry, cherry-plum, filberts and more. LAND FEATURES: A stream parallel to the road runs east along a deep ravine the length of the property with a 16’ waterfall at its midpoint and a former beaver dam at its eastern end. This stream flows from the nearby headwaters of the hills dividing the Mohawk and Susquehanna watersheds. This bodes well for water safety. It separates the front 4 acres of buildings/gardens/meadows from the back 36-acre conservation easement (with tax deduction) of uphill woodlands, natural meadows, and maple stand. This front acreage drains gently south toward the road or north toward the stream. The soil is deep with few rocks, has never been compromised by synthetic/chemical inputs, and has been mulched with chicken compost (chicken and human diets strictly organic since 2014). The orchard of standard apple and pear trees (not dwarf or semi-dwarf) is planted on mostly level land to the west, as is the nearby un-mowed meadow where many birds nest and raise their young.
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