Well! It has been a long while, hasn't it?
Unsurprisingly, a lot has happened in the 2.5-year interval since I last posted here.
Our beloved Fettler has long since gone to her new home with some lovely folk down in the southeast of England. I had an exceptionally fine last sail with her on the delivery back down the east coast in October 2013.
We've been busy homesteading since. We left Edinburgh towards the end of October (2013) and pitched up here in the rural southwest of Scotland. Our new place needed a lot of work to put it in proper order and we've been hard at it. The hens are laying and the garden is yielding well. I've even started to do a bit of hunting, so we're reaching a decent level of food self-sufficiency.
The lifestyle is obviously quite different but there are interesting parallels, as I believe I may have remarked before. The surroundings are peaceful and a high degree of self-reliance is called for. Granted, we're not constantly moving around (not at all, truth be told), but I came to realise that in a less apparent if perhaps more important sense we had reached a standstill with the voyaging.
Seeing new places and meeting new people all the time is wonderful, but there came a point when we wanted to build and develop and deepen our relationship with a place for the long term. Creating a garden is an extraordinary experience. Putting it together piece by piece and watching it advance from one year to the next. Observing the play of the seasons and the years over a single location is after all another form of travel.
We recently reached the point where we could spare a bit of time and energy to start writing about our experiences here and sharing the knowledge accumulated in living this life on the land. Do drop in and catch up with us!
Unsurprisingly, a lot has happened in the 2.5-year interval since I last posted here.
Our beloved Fettler has long since gone to her new home with some lovely folk down in the southeast of England. I had an exceptionally fine last sail with her on the delivery back down the east coast in October 2013.
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| "Let us take care of our garden." - Voltaire |
The lifestyle is obviously quite different but there are interesting parallels, as I believe I may have remarked before. The surroundings are peaceful and a high degree of self-reliance is called for. Granted, we're not constantly moving around (not at all, truth be told), but I came to realise that in a less apparent if perhaps more important sense we had reached a standstill with the voyaging.
Seeing new places and meeting new people all the time is wonderful, but there came a point when we wanted to build and develop and deepen our relationship with a place for the long term. Creating a garden is an extraordinary experience. Putting it together piece by piece and watching it advance from one year to the next. Observing the play of the seasons and the years over a single location is after all another form of travel.
We recently reached the point where we could spare a bit of time and energy to start writing about our experiences here and sharing the knowledge accumulated in living this life on the land. Do drop in and catch up with us!
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