Beating Myself Up Unnecessarily, But I'll Get Over It!

Just found this post by Dawn on Doing It For Ourselves In Wales about smallholding and self-sufficiency. Truly inspirational as you normally are, Dawn. 

Jon and I feel so very, very lucky that, in effect, Bronllan came with the field which we now own - we didn't actually pay any extra for it. It definitely needs work before we can use it to any degree as we cannot get any vehicles onto the land before we literally make an in road down the lovely tree-lined, grassy walk-way leading to it. But we are determined to make use of it because so many people dream of having a smallholding or land of their own but for lots of reasons are not able to follow that dream. 

I keep reminding myself and Jon that we have only been here just over six months and in that time have achieved lots of things and haven't failed just because we are not raising chickens, our grow your own plans are to nothing and are without my yearned-for-pantry full of preserved produce! Primarily the house has pretty much had a complete renovation, we have settled the boys and ourselves into school and the community, had our first Christmas, Jon has found himself a job which is close to home and aids our new life as we have access to additional free wood for heating the house and we now have our day to day life.

However, we do want to do other things and living here now is giving us options to, eventually, make the right decisions for us as a family. We are lucky to have established outbuildings on the land of the house and to many people these would make a wonderful business opportunity as I talked about here. 

However a short while ago Jon and I were sitting by the fire talking, as we do much more these days, and we both came to the conclusion. We spent so much time looking for and finding our dream home where we have no part of our land that includes shared access, no near neighbours to take into account and all that we have is ours. And to be honest we have come to the conclusion that we are not prepared to give that up all that to have people traipsing through our precious paradise.

People reading this will probably think, "crikey, make your minds up will you?" and maybe I should learn to keep my mouth shut so I don't look like I'm full of big ideas but putting nothing into practice, but you have to be happy with decisions you make. Before we came here the plan was for Jon to have his own business making things from wood, re-purposing, re-using and recycling items etc and we are now going back to this but he will not be giving up his job straight away.

As Dawn said, until you get to do what it is you want to do you can prepare, read and organise so you are good to go. Therefore in the meantime we are going to be using part of the garden for US for a greenhouse or poly tunnel and maybe chickens - I hope so and see what we can do for ourselves before Christmas whilst I continue to refer to all the lovely people online for help, wisdom and advice who are doing their own thing and whom we hope to emulate in the future. 

Lou.xx