Thread:
This is going to be a self-publicity post, so I apologise to those who don’t like such things; as I will explain, we need this appeal to the fediverse to enable our financial survival this coming year.
A brief history:
I came to this place young, idealistic, and naive over 30 years ago. My dream was to live a self-sufficient life with as low an environmental impact as possible, the dream of living off of the land. 1/9
I would have preferred to have done this in the country of my birth (South West England) but such a thing was impossible with the very small amount of money I had saved and so I became a reverse economic migrant, searching for a poor life in my mother’s country of birth, Italy. After much searching, (for the money I had was very little even in the depopulated abandoned countryside of rural Umbria in the late 1980’s)
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I finally found and fell in love with this beautiful place with its’ abandoned and demolished old stone farmhouse. And so I spent my life’s savings to buy it, leaving myself with no money, no work other than irregular casual work, and a young family dependent on me. And then I had to build a house for us. No money to pay for help and constrained to use only the materials that were at hand, stones, a lot of them, plus 2 bags of lime and 1 bag of cement per week
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@chrisshaw probably not, but as I have vastly increased the number of orchids on my land over the past 30 years my conscience is clear!
I also think the laws against picking wild flowers are a bit of a distraction away from the real cause of their decline- industrial agricultural practices.
I grew up in a community in England where cowslip and dandelion wine had been made for generations, it wasn't the winemaking which caused their decline!