posted 9 years ago
Hello!
I stumbled on this magnificent corner of the internet a few weeks ago. My external productivity, I have to say, dropped through the floor for a while as I read thousands and thousands of fascinating and inspiring posts, but my internal productivity is off the charts. I'm in my early thirties, which is still pretty young, but at this point in my life I've noticed it's a rare thing to have your mind blown and perspective changed. It seems like when I was younger it was happening all the time. Well, discovering permaculture has done it. How did I go this long without learning about it?
A bit about me: I am a Canadian who currently lives in Ireland. When I was about six, my family moved away from the city and into a more rural lifestyle. My dad always went to the city to work, but we kids were homeschooled, and most of my happiest childhood memories are from those years where I got to raise geese, milk goats, laugh at chickens, fish walleye and bass out of the lake, cry about the delicious but beloved pigs we'd been warned not to name, freak out over tomato plants pelted by freak July hailstorms, and get the pants scared off of me by Giant Raccoon Beasts. I read the hippylicious Grow It by Richard Langer cover to cover a thousand times. It wasn't a particularly successful hobby farm: my extremely busy parents just didn't have the time to devote to it, but it was enormously formational to me.
When I was a teenager, my dad's job moved us to a subdivision. I always missed the farm.
Anyway, fastforward a few decades and I'm an amiable globe-roaming weirdo. I have lived a lot of places and had a lot of jobs. Now I eke out a pretty relaxed living as a freelance copywriter. I could make more money but I prefer the free time. I share a house in a small city with 4 other people and channel my love of making stuff into millions of craft projects. For years I've tried to lower my impact on the natural world and reduce my involvement in what seems like a crazy hostile society to me, though I have never been systematic about it. I'm an artist and not neurotypical (if "typical" is even really a thing) and my somewhat bohemian lifestyle allows me to be quietly weird without too many consequences. But it's a bit rootless and not as satisying as it once was. Recently I've felt a craving for a "bigger project". Something more than the latest writing assignment, dinner, or pair of hand-knit socks. I'd always assumed that a relatively low income single person like me had no chance to buy property. Without a particularly meaningful career or a family I've been wondering what my life is building to, if anything. A random conversation with a friend ended up changing my mind. I found land in my native country, on owner financed terms, that is actually affordable to me, in remote but beautiful corners of the country. It was like falling through a wormhole. I looked up information about affordable, natural building techniques, and ended up here. Wow!
The possibilites are thrilling, and I am absorbing as much information as I can. This forum feels like an inexhaustable well of anecdote, experience, and valuable knowledge. I only hope that in time I can contribute even a fraction of what I'm gaining.
So! Research. I have a lot of great skills homestead skills already, because they have meshed with my own personal interests, but I'm missing a lot of important ones. I live cheaply, but no where near as frugally as I could. I have never saved any money. Now seems like a time to start building up a nest egg and thinking in terms of a 3 to 5 year plan to purchase property, while building up the knowledge I'd need to make it work. I've started doing some simple, tiny things here at home to help. Cutting my liberal wine and cheese budget way back. Paying extra for the organic option wherever I can. Growing half a dozen herbs and a tomato plant I nursed back from a "half dead in the clearance section" state. Trying to reserve laundry for our rare sunshiny days so I can dry them outside. Starting my own sourdough and eating the gooseberries in the back yard for breakfast. I learn well from reading. Even as a child I could do anything if I only had a book about it and some supplies to improvise with. And now there's the whole internet!
Thank you all. I'm really looking forward to learning more as I build towards my dream of starting my own permaculture project.
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