A lot of people have the dream of a few acres of land and self reliance (as opposed to self -sufficiency, which is a myth!). This group is to draw together the experiences of those living the dream and sharing the lessons learned on the way with those still working towards living on the land.
Over doing it!
We bought a 7 Acer block 11 months ago! so coming up to a year we have a Orchard that is constantly under attack by 30 sheep. 16 pigs, 63 chickens, 11 ducks, 2 horses and 6 cattle and 2 Geese. Hardly any fencing and no vege garden as I have no where to keep the marauding sheep! Did all the planning and although I work hard when my health is good I have severely underestimated the work load. Don’t get me wrong I love it but buy the time I get through what has to be done immediately there not…
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Hi, I'm a 4th year Industrial Design student and for my final year project I'm working on a project to try and encourage more people in urban areas to grow their own food. My goal is to make people more reliant and more aware of the process of growing food. I'm currently researching to find out what the end result needs to do/be.
I'm hoping some of you could fill out this questionnaire (its only a few quick questions)
https://urbangrowing.typeform.com/to/J4dVkf
Also I'd really love to hear your thoughts on what you think the most efficient ways to grow are? And if you would consider food swapping to get more of a variety of of produce?
Hi im Natalie from Invercargill we have just bought a place in Invercargill and we have a 1700m section we are wanting to do as much as we can fruit and veges wise also chooks and rabbits
Yes Janine Williams, life would be so much easier if there wouldn't be so much .........nature.
Peter
This is the first summer that we have not had to buy fruit and veggies. Though I admit that we did sometimes, for an occasional variation - never thought I'd crave broccoli buI've discovered it can happen! We've lived out of our garden: eggs, beans, courgettes, tomatoes, capsicum, silverbeet, nz spinach, potatoes, onions, garlic, sweetcorn, leeks, cucumber, herbs, peas, lettuce, apples, lemons, plums, peaches, feijoas, grapes, chestnuts, pears.... I've frozen, dried, made jelly, tomato sauce, 'sun'dried tomatoes, fruit-flavoured water kefir, lemon honey..... there's still pumpkins to harvest. The only disappointment has been my bees - they go very badly infested with varroa and took a long time to recover, so I'm leaving what honey they did collect on the hive as stores for them to use over winter. Hopefully next year will be a better year for them. I feel that at last we are actually making a worthwhile dent in our reliance on outside sources for our food. We don't have milk of our own, but I do get lovely organic, raw milk locally. It's a wonderful feeling.
Aren't rats horrible? Shame about the cucumbers. Your garden did well this year :-) We just got rid of the wasp nest under the big tree root, they were little wasps the size of honey bees. Now I see these huge bright yellow and black ones with long wings eating the fallen apples. The wax-eyes peck holes in the apples then the wasps move in. On the whole though, the self-sufficiency thing has been successful.
It's hard yakka for the first few years, but harvesting your own produce is wonderful. So happy our bees had a good year, too :) I haven't made much cheese this year as the drought kept milk production down. Still harvesting spuds, pumpkin, beans & tomatoes, but the rats found the last of our huge cucumber crop. Oh well...
Harvest Time
Isn't this a great time of the year? We are eating a lot of our own produce - potatoes, pumpkins, apples and pears, our own honey, meat...
I would like to encourage those starting out, that it's is very sweet when it starts working, it just takes a while. We have been here almost nine years now.
And we just sold the calf and started milking again, yay!
Koha Healing Sound workshop This Saturday 10 am in Grey Lynn.
More details here: http://provennaturalremedies.info/sw.html
Cheers Tom 021 251 3058
I am looking for an Intentional community based on growing food, healing and working towards an alternative economy. Just a good bunch of live and let live people is the most important thing though.
We are now half-moved from town to country, with our house on the market (and fingers crossed for offers this week). We've been very lucky to be able to rent an off-grid house across the road from our land - a winter of living on-site will most definitely inform our design decisions. So far we've spent a disproportionate amount of time keeping our water-line (and hence pelton wheel) running. We're also learning how to get a shacklock range hot enough to cook and heat water with wood.
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