Ben Carver

Hi, currently gardening in VT til Oct and would like to see what's out there to keep up the gardening lifestyle this winter. Been learning a lot the past few years with research, playing with my own gardens, organic farming, and a hand tools decorative gardening job. Wandered around quite a bit over the years through HelpX, Coolworks, NOFAVT, ic.org, and luck so I'm used to living minimally in new places. Like many, I'm just trying to find a balance with the ways of the world today and camping out, biking around, gardening, eating delicious food, and chilling with cool people is good enough for me. Wouldn't need much for shelter if it's warm enough to do much gardening, just a campsite. Ideally within biking distance of a funky coffee shop and enough population to provide enough paid gigs to cover luxuries and travel

I'm interested, Charleston seems like a good area to area to escape the cold VT winter. I'm less experienced at building than gardening. Well-versed in living primitively and with work exchanges, mostly through HelpX. Haven't taken a PDC but I've been intensely interested for years now so most of the principles are integrated. Past few years been getting hands-on experience organic vegetable farming, decorative perennial beds, and playing around with stuff in my own wild little gardens. Currently into volunteer plants, growing in compost piles, seed saving, and wild foods.

Yes, it does indeed look familiar. Thank you for being less lazy than me and sharing some of the details. Not quite done reading it yet but while in the midst of it I felt a strong need to make sure other people knew of it, especially those who feel resonance with Fukuoka. I'll look through it later for some choices nuggets to share.

Hey, I'm reading A Vision of Natural Farming by Bharat Mansata, about the natural farming of Bhaskar Save, an elderly gentleman in India. Fukuoka toured his farmed and called it the best he's ever seen, even better than his own. The book is a bit disorganized but it presents many similar notions to Fukuoka. I loved Sowing Seeds in the Desert for the philosophy and feel like this book covers more of the nuts and bolts in a general sense, especially for the sub-humid tropics. But many principles remain the same no matter where you are, essentially that nature is perfect and needs no improvement by humankind, though some GENTLE nurturing in tune with nature's greater flow (based on much more observation than action) is fine. I've been experiencing many farms and gardens over the years and now feel ready to create by own long-term establishment based on fiddling with nature as little as possible (growing what naturally WANTS to grow in my area) and doing it without any livestock, only the natural animal interactions of the local ecosystem. I want any animals I decide to eat (mostly just insects and small fish) to have lived they way they were born to, and to be of genetic stock that hasn't been messed with by mankind for millennia, steadily weakening them.