Just a quick one today. We're pretty excited because we're a step closer to our dream of living off the land, farming, producing food. This is also moving in the direction of The Hubby's ultimate dream: to help alleviate world hunger, and to prevent food wastage, and to help make sure that food resources are more equitably distributed. Me? My dream was to gallop across hectares of land on a black stallion in really cool leather boots, so I think I'll go with The Hubby on this one.
The land is down the side of a mountain, bordered by a one-lane road on top and a river below
Anyway, we found some land available for very short term lease, just on the outskirts of Baguio City (where we live now), a 30-minute or so drive from our home. It's a great setup, because we get to experiment and put all our theories into action. The Hubby has been researching on and studying all these materials on small scale farming--we've considered everything from aquaponics to hydroponics to green houses to chicken tractors to permaculture to market gardening. Now we get to see if they actually will work.
Also, it's a great chance to see if we can really hack it. We may have this ideal vision of the farm life in our heads, but I'm sure that actual farm life is harder (and stinkier) than what we imagine. We will be weekend farmers for the moment (fortunately the land comes with a caretaker; we're hoping that we can see eye to eye on the new technologies and techniques that we want to introduce), so we can't go full out farming yet.
The former owner terraced the land, so it's been divided into plots. We plan to work on it a plot at a time.
It's half a hectare or so of land, and we plan to work on it plot by plot. Right now, it's mostly overgrown with grass and who-knows-what. We're thinking of getting a couple of goats for starters. We've read that they can work pretty well for clearing the land. And I've always wanted a Nubian goat (ever since I saw the sign advertising Nubian goats for sale on the way to San Pablo to visit The Hubby's family--10 years ago. And I think that every time we'd pass, I'd tell The Hubby, "I want a Nubian goat." Fortunately, The Hubby is used to me saying the same things over and over.)
We brought over a couple of rambutan trees to plant, as well as some malunggay trees. I do hope they flourish. We plan to plant more trees along the border. We haven't really studied what other plants and crops would grow in the area, so we don't know what our next step is, other than clearing the land and acquiring some goats. And maybe some chickens. And ducks would be nice. And maybe fish (the land is bordered by a river).
Gorgeous wild orchids growing on the tree! The beauty of this place has me in awe
And who knows, we may eventually get a horse.
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