Off-the-grid back-to-the-land homesteading articles

• Introduction to off-the-grid homesteading, living in a backwoods wilderness home
• Back to the Land: In Search of the Good Life
• Living totally off-the-grid
• Year-round gardening, winter gardening in the Pacific Northwest
• No-till mulch gardening in the Pacific Northwest
• Edible flowers for your salad bowl
• The best traditional and exotic fruit and nut trees for the temperate-climate homesteader
• Living on raw organic vegan foods on a self-sufficient homestead
• Organic building materials
• Organic home furnishings: bedding, curtains, bath
• Energy-efficient LED & solar lighting
• Enriching the soil: Compost & humanure
• Life with wildlife
• Keeping chickens, ducks, and geese
• Saving seeds for a never-ending bountiful harvest
• The joys of backyard clay-bottom ponds
• Water, well, and solar pump for the garden
• 2010: Rawganique Flower Garden in pictures
• 2010: The joys of the Japanese Ofuro Hot Tub with a wood-fired Chofu Heater
• 2010: Questions for Touch and some answers & reflections
  
  ©2000-2009 Touch Jamikorn. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without written permission from author.

Back to the Land:
In Search of the Good Life

Armed with just Scott and Helen Nearing's books and not much else, we embarked on our homesteading experience in 2000. We didn't know anything about living life in the country, just some idealized notions of picking beautiful produce from the garden, collecting wild foods from the fields, and lounging on the south-facing porch taking in the sunset to the west. We were in awe of everything and found value in everything, even scraps of wood our neighbors left as trash on the roadside.

Ten years later, we've learned a few things from our experiences. We had thought that we would be able to grow enough foods in our organic garden to make selling the excess a viable source of income. What we didn't know was that while our garden produces an abundance of organic foods, a lot of people in the country also grow their own foods and there's not much market for produce, at least not enough to sustain you. And of course, in the meantime, Rawganique.com happened and we've had to learn to shuffle homesteading with a hectic and demanding work of organizing a web store, selecting products, manufacturing them, and on and on.

But our vision still holds true to the original when we first set foot on our homestead. It's a lot of work trying to be self-sufficient, but it's rewarding and fulfilling work. At the end of a long work day, we actually now find the time to sit in the garden and watch Nature paints her sky — it's a different color every sunrise and sunset. Some days we see the mountains, other days the clouds, but the view is always awe-inspiring. Some days, Nature outdoes herself and gives us a real display of the most amazing colors we've ever seen. The joys in country living are simple: watching seeds sprout, little birds collect their foods through the seasons, water lilies rearing their heads when the blasts of winter cold are over, watching chickens scratch for food, ducks swim and groom themselves, harvesting produce that you've grown from seed. The joys are many. Each is imbued with a sense of wonder. Everyone of them is a treasured memory.

I love clouds. Clear sky is nice, but clouds add so much drama. Never the same twice.

We have learned to slow down, relax, and let things be. To enjoy the moment while it's transpiring. We've learned to love the cloudy days and rainy days as much as the bright sunny days. Each day is unique and necessary, for all the life around us, which is constantly in flux while it plays out the cycles of birth, infancy, adulthood, and death. It's all beautiful.

For many people living in our area, the spring, summer, fall, and winter of 2008 were the Poster Child of Global Warming. Spring was unseasonably cold and late, with people losing their fruit crops to a late frost and long-drawn out cold rains. Summer was extremely warm and uncomfortably dry; many wells ran dry. Fall, too, was unseasonably warm and surprisingly frost-free late into November, which didn't give plants enough time to acclimatize and harden off for winter. Then winter came abruptly with many sudden freezes, violent windstorms, and unusually low temperatures (we recorded minus 8 degree Celsius, which is highly unusual in these parts), which were interspersed with strings of warm sunny days where we gardened shirtless outside in the blazing sun. The weather sure is topsy-turvy. If anything, the specter of Global Warming has strengthened our resolve to live as self-sufficiently, sustainably, and lightly as possible on this planet we collectively call home. We really strive to do our best to reduce our footprint and hence our contribution to Global Warming as much as possible. We are certainly grateful that we are already in the country, growing our own organic foods, at such a challenging time as this.

A January sunset view as seen from the front of the garden and cabin up on the cliff. The creek is in the foreground. Two of the new ponds are in the middle.

How we came to live in the country

I became inspired by the works of Helen and Scott Nearing while I was living in New York City. By that time, I had already been a raw vegan for 3 years and committed to keeping myself healthy. What Scott and Helen Nearing were doing in Vermont and later in Maine inspired me go a step further and be responsible for my own food supply. I myself was born in a very remote village in the South of Thailand and so knew well what rural life was like. I remembered and missed the tranquility and slow pace of the country. But I never had never known what it was like to touch the soil, live by it, be fed by the labor of my own hands. We were not farmers; we lived in an upstairs apartment and didn't even have room to garden. There was no soil in the concrete building in which we lived. We bought our food in the store like everybody else.

The idea of growing your own food appealed to me. Since college, where I'd become a vegetarian, Macrobiotic, vegan, then a raw foodist, I'd always been a firm believer in organic foods and only purchased organically grown produce. But even organic produce is grown using heavy machinery that uses petroleum. Don't the residues from the engine exhaust and the oil leakages go into the soil in which the "organic" produce is grown? And aren't most farms situated on the highway for ease of commerce? And if so, doesn't the air and water pollution find their way into the soil and hence the "organic" produce? Plus the produce has to be transported (often hundreds or thousands of miles from where they were grown) from the farm to the store shelves, where the "organic" produce often sits alongside conventional, chemical- and pesticide-grown produce, even in health food stores? Wouldn't it be better for my health and that of the environment if I grew most of my own food which I can harvest from my garden minutes before eating? Why should I relegate my nutrient intake to big agri-businesses, which are more accountable to their shareholders than they are to me? These questions made a deep impression on my mind and stirred me to action.

It took 6 years to realize my dream of living in the real countryside. Stockholm and Vancouver happened in the meantime. Both are very nice and livable as far as cities are concerned, but I am glad I'm growing my own organic food in a rural area.

Living in the country, you really do feel more attuned to the natural cycles. When I lived in New York, I wasn't much aware of the seasonal doings of nature. Yes, there were the cold seasons where you put on your sweater and jacket, but life was pretty much the same as all the other times of the year. The produce looked sad and uninviting in January, it's true, but otherwise the pace of life is the same as the rest of the year. And I did enjoy living in Manhattan. I liked going to the musicals, the plays, the operas, the ballets. But after a few years, the noise, the crowds, the pollution, and lack of greenery was beginning to bother me. I began to long for the life in the country, with wide open spaces and greenery everywhere.

Spotlight on Denman Island Artists

• Matsuki Masutani (poetry) (page D1)
• Jane Masutani (country life -- with an edge) (page D3)

RawForLife Raw & Sustainable Living Ezine

• Rawganique.com Blogs
• Edible Flowers (page 1)
• Michael McCarthy: En Route to Portland (page 2)
• Rawganique Convergence (page 3)
• Random Ruminations (page 4)
• On Hybrids and Such (page 5)
• Steve Scharmer's 36-day Fast (page 6)
• The Simple Life IS the Good Life (page 7)
• Raw Veganism and the Protein Myth? (page 8)
• Rawganique Diet (page 9)
• September 11, 2001 (page 10)
• No-till Vegan Organic Gardening (page 11)
• Rawganique.com's Story
• Humanure (book review)
• Hemp Facts & Info
• Hemp & Raw Food Books (30% off)
• Free Gourmet Living Foods Recipes

All opinions expressed herein, excellent though they may be, are those of their authors and do not in anyway imply agreement from us or our staff. We publish them here solely in the spirit of sharing and in the hope that they may be of service to others who are also seeking a simpler, more sustainable, and healthier way of life. We do not give recommendations or advice and cannot be held responsible for them. Please seek advice from professionals if you need help. There are also many excellent books out there by qualified professionals to help you on your path to health. May your journey be a gentle, loving, happy, safe, and fulfilling one.

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