Dareios Alexandre wrote:Hi everyone,
I am planning a long trip to France starting next month for the purpose of exploring different areas to see if there's a place that calls to me to move and start an permaculture homesteading project. I am hoping to focus my exploring on the less populated central regions of the country and I would like to spend some time at different homesteads and projects that are already established to learn more about the culture and increase my skill base at the same time. If anyone here has a place in France that I could come and visit for a few days or weeks ( I'm flexible) and help you with any aspect of homestead/off grid/permaculture life please contact me, I would love to meet you!
Cheers, Dareios
The village where I live also has the cachet of being known as 'the highest village in Brittany' being a Community of Communes. Being so high up it also has the honour of being a place where, on a clear night, you can see the whole glowing Firmament in millions of glowing stars, as there are no street lights after midnight to pollute the night sky. Owls hunt overhead and the forests beckon walkers and animals alike...
Hello Dareios
I'm a pensioner, disabled; with a garden that has seen no chemical or non organic anything for nigh on twenty five years. Except for a few bits of dumped ironmongery, e.g. a Sitz bath on two legs with a big belly for your feet and lower legs to soak in, and a deep shelf you could sit on with hot water up to chest high or deeper. I turned it into a raised flower bed but some enthusiastic 'helpers filled it with hedge trimmings so it became a pile of unrecognisable dead vegetation. Then some other helpers emptied it...
There's a lot of untouched nettle plantation, a forest of rampant bamboo for the creatively minded, and beyond there is a thicket of unknown composition, erstwhile rhododendrons, various trees and undergrowth and hidden wildlife havens.. all in a small wilderness up to the mature trees at the end. About 0.6 hectares.
If you'd like to challenge yourself with creating the bare bones of a permaculture garden that even a disabled pensioner could navigate, you would be welcome to free lodging for your couple of weeks, or at least some of that period, whilst you looked around the green and glowing permaculture efforts of the community living in the Monts d'Arrée in Western Britanny, actually North Finistère.
It's about 30 km from the coastal town of Morlaix (with its marina and port on the rivers Queffleuth and Jarlot) and the North Coast. Magnificent wild beaches and granite cliffs, or inland lakes with tiny fish that nibble your toes, and an imported silver sand beach... Part of the National Parc Armorique which is a wilderness of forest, wildlife, and traditional building, farming and conservation.
Stone, slate, 'chaux' or lime-walled houses, some thatched long houses. A lot of the buildings use very old methods to create variety and some dwellings are heated using ecological and traditional methods. People really do use compost loos indoors, and take the product outside to create beautifully rich manure! Some have rain water captage, as the 'nappe phréatique' (aquifer) can actually drop in weeks of hot summer weather, although the climate compensates in autumn. I have a well next to my house, and I'd love to set up a system to draw water from it!
There are virgin and plantation forests, occasional deer and infrequent wild boar; and above the treeline the land opens to wide, vast skies soaring to infinity over heather and stone crags... Buzzards, kestrels, hawks, wetlands and marsh, lakes and tundra, and beautiful views where there is very little evidence of human occupation from the heights, the Crêtes des Montagnes... like the backbone of a semi submerged sleeping dragon... They're really old mountains, and ground down like old teeth. Older than the Grampians or Stonehenge, and were once joined to Cornwall...
Inbox me if you feel inspired to visit and discover the charm of Permaculture in Brittany, and if you'd like the chance to pioneer a virgin territory in organic luxuriance ! There are chestnuts, apple trees, fig, cherry, plum, apricot, and others, all jostling for space. In harvest, only the apples and tiny figs produce, as the spreading chestnut tree hogs all the sunlight... Come and meet them, Dareios, you're welcome ! :-) Crystal Jane
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Crystal Jane 
