self sustainability vs community abundance
Hi friends
We are already 15 days into March, which means that Winter is almost over, I am so ready for warmer days & more sunlight. I have spent the past week tackling a mountain of bramble bushes that are engulfing some of our olive trees, my arms are bloody & burnt from the bonfires I am having to make, my body is a little beat up but I am full of hope for the next seasons on the land & in our life. It also marks the anniversary of our moving to the land here in Portugal, we have lived here for 7 years now, which seems like such a long time but it has also gone by in the blink of an eye. Everyone says that time moves faster the older you get & I guess as a teen or in my twenties I didn’t really feel it so much, but WOW, where are the weeks going. We have been working our butts off trying to make this abandoned plot into a comfy paradise, we are making moves but we are still quite some way off. It was stunning when we arrived, don’t get me wrong, but it was not set up for an existence beyond survival.
Our first month on the land, living in the tiny van, only bushes around.
We are still building a house & we really need a pool at some point too because the Summers are raging hot & we spend all our time / energy & money driving to the lake & back each day. If you haven’t read it yet then my stack about moving into the wild will explain more about our arrival. Click the link below if you haven’t checked it out yet..
We recently had Workaways stay with us for a week & give us a helping hand with land maintenance, it was our first experience having people here we didn’t know with the sole purpose of helping us with the jobs that need doing. The girls were super sweet & they worked really hard to help us clear land in preparation for the Summer season. It reminded me that it is actually really hard to do everything by yourself, there are 10 acres more or less to take care of & we both have to try to earn a living to enable us to progress with the project & put food on the table. Building a homestead from scratch is not that affordable or quick, you can have one or the other I guess but we certainly don’t have 10s of thousands to invest & get everything done. Marley has gone back to work after spending a year on the land building the house & the new water tower which has a hot shower in, so stoked about this because we finally have hot water, yay! I will never take hot water for granted again, every time I shower I am giddy with laughter, truly.
When we first moved here & decided to settle & give this homesteading stuff a real go I envisioned a fully functioning solar powered farm that provides all the fruit & vegetables you can eat with a food forest, animals for dairy & eggs, a herd of sheep for wool & manure, a nice cosy house, maybe a donkey, a studio for myself & a swimming pool for the Summer months. I didn’t think much about having animals for meat as I was not really eating meat then & I still don’t know if we will do that, but who knows what the future will bring. We made a really successful garden the first 2 years when we weren’t building a house but keeping on top of the watering during the Summer is really hard & again, it costs us a lot of money in fuel for the generator, it works out cheaper to buy the vegetables honestly, which makes my heart sad.
The garden following then was a string of failures & success, between the voles eating all the roots, the water situation being complicated, the burning sun killing off everything, the time & energy required to keep on top of it all we slowly made it smaller & the past Summer we did not make a vegetable patch at all, we wont be making one again this year because we plan to spend the Summer away making pizza elsewhere. Luckily for us we have some amazing growers in our community & they like pizza, so its a win win situation with some trades at the markets, we get our fresh organic vegetables & get to feed happy bellies with our pizza.
The community has also helped us when we needed to build a workshop & put the roof on the tiny house because we couldn’t afford to pay for labour, we could only really pay for the materials. Marley traded his time with some of the guys from around the mountain & with their help we built the workshop in a couple weeks, had it rendered by a friend who is an awesome plasterer & had the electrics set up for the freezer, we also put a beautiful hipped roof on the ruin. Without this exchange of help from friends we would not have completed these huge tasks or we would have possibly attempted it & fucked it up because we didn’t know what we were doing. A few things on the land have been done in this way & now we (Marley, mostly) have the skills necessary we will redo a lot of them, the water tower is one example, which was palettes & is now built in cement blocks & has a bathroom inside, next up the palette block compost toilet is going to be rebuilt next to the bathroom, from wood we will recycle from the palettes.
2021 vs 2023
The kitchen extension is now just over 50% completed.
I asked this question on a few of my homesteading forums to see what other peoples opinion was on community vs self reliance, so I will share a few answers with you as its quite interesting, everybody said that a reliable community was more important.
Q - “self sufficiency or a reliable community?
an interesting topic, I used to believe self sufficiency was the way forward but we have been homesteading since 2017 & we have realised that it is damn hard work to do everything by yourself.... trading skills/produce/time has been a way to make our lives easier while still not relying on big corporations for lots of the things we consume or need... our community provides what we cant make ourselves, for example I make amazing wood fired pizza as a business & my friends grow the best tomatoes or they teach fantastic workshops/yoga etc.... so we trade the two & no money needs to be involved for either party.”
A - The number one thing I would say would be community.  However, finding the right community is key. A lot of people can profess they are community minded, but they’re really not interested in true “community building”. Homesteading can be very lonely. That’s why I say finding the right “reliable community” that you can talk with on a regular basis that you can visit with that you feel comfortable with that will respond when you have questions or support you when you need support and you do the same for them is the best kind of community. You may meet people you have a lot in common with but if you only speak once a year or once in a blue moon, is that really your community or an acquaintance. Community, I don’t think so.  I try to build a community around me and I actually have a group of great homesteaders that I associate with regularly; then there some that I thought would be great homesteading community friends and they have turned out to be nothing at all, fake actually. I have weeded those kind of people out, find those who you see value in and who see value in you, share experiences, sadness and success with; that is a community you can grow with and build.
For us, a solid, reliable community has definite priority. Self-sufficiency is extremely difficult if not nearly impossible, and I am a firm believer that there is power in numbers. He brought history, when times got really trying, the one to survived, and came out stronger were the ones who had community.
I also wanted to share a few examples of some of the barters we have made with our local community over the years, we even had a barter day set up for some time where everyone gathered with their seeds,plants,eggs,honey,flowers,cheeses,clothing to barter with, it was fantastic. I am mostly remembering the trades we made with our pizza business because I am not always involved in what Marley organises with the boys but there are so many more examples I am sure.
locally raised meat in exchange for help / pizza
help building a workshop in exchange for beer / lunch
saved seed & plant exchange
digger work on the land for the water system & the workshop in exchange for Marleys time helping on their project
10 pizzas for 100euros off the price of a secondhand vehicle we bought from friends
olive wood for the pizza oven in exchange for pizzas for a friend & his family
a kilo of beautiful Bahri dates for 1 pizza
a local artist swapped me one of her calendars & some beautiful yarn she had for a crochet top that I made for her
lemons are always gifted & the local man never wants anything in return but we buy him a beer when we see him
pizza in exchange for a yoga class
Marley trades time with a friend who comes to fix our solar systems when they have a problem
fixing a friends beaten up woolen jacket in exchange for some solar equipment because he runs a solar company here
So, I have to agree that without the help & support from others & being able to trade instead of pay out cash our journey here would have been much much harder & I am grateful for that. I haven’t felt a true sense of community since I was young & our neighbourhood was full of kids & we all hung out every day after school or during the holidays & our parents were forced to spend time together too, whether they liked it or not. Since those times I have truly felt that there was no community around me really, I was doing everything by myself & for myself, I lived in London & was studying & had to hustle 2 jobs, nobody was reaching out to offer a hand & I didn’t ask anyone either because I was under the impression that you had to do everything, all of the time, without assistance. I had friends & family of course but this feels like something different because we are all here working towards the same goal, our values & beliefs are pretty similar, we have left normal life for this, we are all aiming for that same destination off the grid & as close to nature as possible & we know that without each other the climb to the top of that mountain is going to be so much harder.
Have a great weekend, J x
If you can support me by subscribing or sharing this newsletter with your friends & family, I would really appreciate it, it is free for everybody to read. If you feel like you can make a contribution with payment then I am forever grateful, your support is going to help us plant more trees & get that roof on the kitchen.