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Homesteading Goals 2018
Last year around this time, I broke my rule of ‘don’t tell people your goals’ and published a blog post about three things I was hoping to accomplish around our little homestead through the year. I thought that this might be an interesting time to take stock of the situation: review what actually happened in each of these three areas last year and think about what the goals are for the next year. February will mark two years since we embarked on this weird little adventure, so this whole homesteading/self-sufficiency thing is still fairly new to me. I am genuinely curious as to what my family will manage to accomplish…
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Brush with a Hurricane
When I was little, I loved the book “I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Solew” by Dr Seuss. If you’re not familiar with it: there is a wonderful land, Solla Sollew, on the banks of the beautiful River Wah-Hoo where they never have troubles, at least, very few. But of course, the journey is weird and Seussian and generally not what it’s cracked up to be. This is how I felt this week. I arrived in San Jose Tuesday evening after a 12 hour flight from Switzerland. My poor brain was jet-lagged and scattered, I had a reservation at a nearby hotel and plans to travel on one of…
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Food Obsessed Homesteading
It is impossible to homestead in any way without becoming kind of obsessive about food. Though I have always been a self-proclaimed nutrition-geek and chef, my day now revolves around food as never before. First thing in the morning, before I even put on the coffee (now that’s love!) there are animals to be fed and watered. And in the evening, everyone needs to be fed again. The scraps go into the compost which the chickens are happily picking through and some tasty morsels get saved out for the goats who daintily nibble the best bits before dropping the rest on the ground and peeing on it. The plants need…
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Homesteading in Costa Rica, 2017
2017 Homesteading Goals Normally, I subscribe to the ‘don’t tell people your goals’ school of thought. Due to my introverted nature, I prefer to work quietly behind the scenes and then appear magically with finished projects no-one saw coming. But this whole homesteading/self-sufficiency thing is new to me and I am genuinely curious as to what my family will manage to accomplish this year and what other families are planning on doing in the same vein. So please, include your homesteading goals for this year in the comments below and let’s see how we can grow our Permaculture community (no pun intended)! Here are three areas where I see big…
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How to get your goat pregnant in Costa Rica
It is more difficult, and expensive, to knock up a goat than you would think. There are interesting perks and challenges implicit in attempting to farm in the jungle. I have been learning everything I can about how to take care of our animals online, but the problem with that is that the vast majority of the information available is written in North America. Everything is just so different here: the climate, the food that is available, the building materials, etc. Add to this the fact that, in rural Costa Rica, animals are meant for food – they are not in any way pets, which means that people care for…
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Goat DIY
Above image: when you take the goat for a walk (as one does) and the hens decide to follow you up the road. While we have had chickens for a few months now, there is something different about having a goat (second one is on the way). As my daughter said, ‘We’re really farmers now!’ It’s like, yes, chickens are farm animals too, but they’re birds. They’re small and more easily managed and don’t head-butt you at every opportunity. In preparation for our goats, we built a small barn with a tiny corral in front of our cabins. We used instructions that I found here at gottagoat.com to build dispensers…
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Costa Rica Confession
Above picture: Me, building a greenhouse while being shot in the butt with Nerf darts from a maniacal toddler. This is my life. I have a confession to make. This is the kind of thing that’s hard for me to say, so I’m only going to say it once. Ready? This life is harder than I thought it was going to be. This is hard to admit, because people make an assumption, when you do something that seems as crazy as sell your home and business, pack up your things and move to Costa Rica, that you are unprepared. In reality, I research everything, and I like to believe that…
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Goat DIY
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Clueless Attempts at Permaculture: 6 months and Drowning
Remember last time I wrote one of these and it seemed vaguely optimistic? Forget all that. We are currently in the depths of the rainy season. The good news about this is that, as it pours for hours every day, nothing needs additional watering. Here are the downsides: the soil just washes away and if you don’t catch it quickly and remedy the situation, it can leave delicate roots exposed. Heat-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers get moldy and rot, and weeds grow incredibly quickly. Now combine that with the fact that my free-ranging chickens have stripped the leaves off of everything they can reach and the leaf-cutter ants on…
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Clueless attempts at Permaculture: 3.5 months
The good news is: food is actually growing. The half-dozen pots of lettuce I had planted as we were getting settled are large and we are consistently pilfering leaves for salads. We’ve had our first little crop of radishes and celery, green onions and herbs are in abundance. Almost every tiny bit of space that could be eked out of what used to be our driveway has been put to good use. Combined with our new little property (see below), this feels like a tremendous amount of plants for me. The thing is, while I have always loved to garden and have always had one, up to now it has…
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Dreaming of permaculture: our journey to Costa Rica
Written for Health Action magazine It started twelve years ago during a Saskatchewan winter. Having just finished my training in herbology and sick-to-death of the cold, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study herbs in the rainforest. It sounded like a whim and people laughed it off, but I began to do some research and my husband and I created a five-year-plan to move back to BC, pay off student loans, and embark on a six-month trip to see what I could learn about medicinal plants somewhere warm with gorgeous beaches. We chose Costa Rica for a few reasons. One, it has more protected rainforest than any…
