Did you know that goat is the most widely consumed meat on the planet? Goats milk contains more protein and is more easily digestible than other kinds of milk? If you want to live off-grid and work towards becoming self-sufficient keeping goats is a good way to increase your chances of success. They are tough all-weather livestock that can survive in most conditions and eat a wide variety of food. I have been keeping goats for almost four years and in that time I have learnt a lot but I didn’t need to go to school to learn or get a certificate in animal husbandry, the best way to learn about goats is through observation. By observing their behaviours over time you come to understand their natural rhythms and become a better goat keeper. Thats not to say you shouldn’t invest in a few good goat keeping books but without spending time with your goats and watching their behaviours you won’t really get to know their unique behaviours. This week our Herd Queen Sadie went onto heat and our new buck Noel sprang into action. Probably he didn’t realise that mating with Sadie was going to be such an ordeal but he persisted and eventually got the job done, only took him three days of constant battle. What a champion!
Here at the Freedom Farm Permaculture Homestead in Northern Spain we have 100 olive trees and 100 almond trees. The olives and the almonds that we produce are 100% organic but even better than that, they’re 100% SUSTAINABLE! What does that mean? Well, firstly it means that we do not irrigate our farm using water stolen from natural sources like rivers and lakes. Secondly, we do not plough up the ground, we chop and drop. This helps to enrich the soil, it’s great for biodiversity and the mulch helps keep moisture in the ground. Lastly, but not least, we are making our own fertilizer from human poop which we turn into compost using the Humanure method. Every year at the end of summer we go out with our nets and long sticks to beat the almonds off the trees. We’re doing as much as possible by hand to reduce our reliance on gasoline. In this video I show you how we harvest the almonds without machines and how we process them by hand.
It makes no sense to me that we take perfectly good drinking water, mix it with our poo, flush it down the toilet, and then pay millions of monies to separate that water from that poo in an attempt to make it clean again. Here at the Freedom Farm we are pursuing a plan I like to call RE-POOPULATING THE EARTH and it’s the opposite of what we used to do back home. It takes marginally more time jthan simply flushing but it’s also natural, chemical free, and a literal gift to the earth, it’s called Humanure. In this video I’m going to show you how we poop off-grid and how we turn that poop into valuable compost for our garden!
Gypsum is one of the most ubiquitous and easy to find rocks on the planet and we’ve been mining it for thousands of years to use in art, medicine and construction. The Egyptians even used it for their pyramids! This week at the Freedom Farm permaculture Homestead Off-Grid in Spain we’re using gypsum that we mined on our own property to make plaster of Paris with the end goal of making a homemade DIY emergency survival plaster cast. Hopefully we never have to use it for real but at least we know how!
A quiet week at the Freedom Farm Permaculture Homestead. A gentle rain brings refreshing temperatures and happiness to us, the animals and the plants. This is a relaxing meditation video for you to enjoy.
For four years we’ve put considerable quantities of our blood, sweat, and tears into building ourselves a better life. It hasn’t been easy, in fact it’s been the biggest challenge of our lives so far but it sure beats watching Netflix on the couch and waiting for the Amazon guy to deliver.
Today I’m going showing you how we get milk from our goats and the story of how Stella have birth to a giant baby! I knew she was going into labor so I put her in a stall by herself and we kept watch waiting for the baby to arrive. We’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Stella, as a milk-factory reject she came to us very young with few goaty social skills.
Can dogs and cats be friends? Can cats be friends with goats? Do animals really even make friends? In my city life my interaction with animals was practically non-existent, I had a dog and that was it. Now the animals at the Freedom Farm are my constant companions, I walk with them, feed them, care for them, play with them, and even enjoy watching them playing with each other.
This week I’m trying two new food preservation methods with varying results. First I’m making fig vinegar using a 2000+ year old recipe from ancient Rome and figs from an old fig tree on the homestead. Then, using a big crate of mushrooms gifted to me by a friend from the farmers market, I am going to try using the power of the sun to dry them. I also end up telling the story of the time me and my ten year old friend were almost arrested by the cheese police for selling our homemade goats cheese at the local farmer’s market, busted!
This week for the first time we hatched our own chicks from eggs that came from our own henhouse, it was a bit of a surprise as we weren’t expecting them for another three days but maths was never my strong point!