Hendrik, what type of person are you looking for in this endeavour? Also, where are you?
I ask because my girlfriend is expressing the feeling that living in a
city is making her less happy. I feel that, myself, and so if there was a possibility of that, I would jump on it.
My main issue is that I currently work for the Peel District School Board. It is a good, unionized, pensioned job, and until I am ready to make my living off of the land, it is my best choice to acquire and begin development on that land.
My girlfriend is a glassblower. We eventually want to have a hotshop, and I want to use the heat exhaust for a number of projects, including a permaculturally designed four-season hothouse suitable for full-sized
trees, and a ground-source heat pump that will probably extend the season on my zone 1 beyond any possibility of frost.
I have a number of more basic permacultural interests, including soil building and composting, forests, pasture,
beekeeping, animals in a variety of sizes, and growing anything I can derive something from, even satisfaction and bee forage. At the moment, I am teaching myself how to make beer and cheese (in separate processes, I'm no wizard).
I would love to keep
bees,
chickens,
dairy goats, and some kind of fibre ruminant. My girlfriend's mom wants alpacas, and if the climate and situation lent itself to them, I would do that in a second. A couple of sows, probably a bacon breed, would do well, but that would depend on access to mast-producing forage and orchard products. I also want to grow a food forest system alley cropped with
perennial pasture, a jackpine/chanterelle
shelter belt, an aquacultural
pond system (potentially using salmon, but I would settle for trout), and if possible, I want to build a WOFATI design using some combination of earth building techniques (rammed earth, earthbag, or compressed earth block) for the wall and pillar structure that will hold a split log ceiling and
enough earth above the membrane that I can grow at least pasture, but hopefully forest, atop my house.
I would love it if a contact through permies was the in I needed to get access to land I could eventually own, along with all the benefits of like-minded community. And if it could happen sooner rather than later, well my girlfriend would be overjoyed to have a place to go to for now to escape the city.
I have selected a number of my more out-there ideas. Please give us more info. It would be such an amazing thing to find a land opportunity in commuting distance from my work.
-CK
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
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