Feeling helpless....

Hi all,

I have a great passion for forest gardens, but I feel a struggle to start one.

To put my situation in perspective, I have bought in recent months hundreds of different species in seeds, and I have been growing them. But I have no place for them yet.

I live and have a permaculture garden in Iceland. But we feel (me and my partner) that the place for it is in Portugal, our home country, where climate is much better.

However I do have plenty challenges/struggles. Such as: how I do move all seedlings from one country to another, even if I send them by post (which sometimes I do), I have no one to care for them there. I can't buy a property there yet, because I still have not enough savings for it. Its like I must first wait here and look for properties at distance, while keeping my forest garden plants growing, but not having a definite spot for them!

I have been doing a terrible amount of effort is growing as much diversity as possible, and it is challenging enough to make sure that my plants survive the Icelandic climate. It all comes down to this: I have the biodiversity, knowledge, effort and motivation, but a property!

Can someone give some advice, if already experience this struggle prior to commit to a property and finally start your own homestead? It has been years of my gardening struggles, always gardening in gardens where situation is far from ideal, property is not mine, and I end up moving and not being able to work with the forest garden/perennial concept. Often I try to share plants with a few friends, only to find people do not really take the necessary care and let those rare perennials die. Sometimes I feel I am moving hastily against the flow, but it really can't be, because my heart says otherwise.

I wish I could help! I have the opposite problem of land but not enough personal energy to do everything I want with it. I want to be able to share it but don't know how....

Tyler Ludens wrote:I wish I could help! I have the opposite problem of land but not enough personal energy to do everything I want with it. I want to be able to share it but don't know how....

Both of us are part of what I see as the problem. For a young person, its hard to buy land, when land is so expensive. When you manage to buy it, then we dont have enough time to do everything we want to do. This is why I think people should start their permaculture forest gardens as early as possible, and with as many people supporting these efforts, as possible. But simply, forest gardening is still a fringe hobbie. And buying land is very difficult process when you dont want to ask for "help" of a bank. There is also a huge lack of a true and serious community spirit at least in the western world. This makes permaculture projects often a single and lonely huge personal effort. No help, no cooperation from anyone else. Or very little.

I might feel helpless, a frustated oddball, but on the positive side, I definitively feel a pioneer too.

What did Fukuoka and Thoreau felt?

I had a similar problem, lots of skill, knowledge and seed with no place to put it. I put the word out, talked with a few people who had land bur no skills or seed and now I have more room to plant and harvest from than I can deal with. They learn and I earn, once their knowledge is sufficient I'll have enough to buy what I need to continue on.

Paulo, one thing you may consider is joining one of 8 ecovillages in Portugal listed on the GEN website. You can find them at the following link...
http://gen.ecovillage.org/ecovillages/find-an-ecovillage.html

Joining an Ecovillage would give you many advantages and solve many of the problems you mention.

There are also 3 listed in Iceland.