Family farm, Homestead & Educational Farm

Toledo

Family farm, Homestead & Educational Farm

Updated 11 months ago

We are an international family working on our own permaculture homestead and dream in the countryside of Toledo, after doing our Pdc (permaculture & natural building certificate course) in Thailand in 2017. We both have travelled intensively in the past 15 years, my husband is from canada and speaks english and basic spanish, while I am swiss-italian and speaks fluent english, french, italian and spanish. We have two daughters, Faye who is 6 years old and Enaya, who is 3 years old, and our farm family includes our sweet dog, Asoka a Border Collie crossed Australian Shepherds, a few goats and a growing number of chickens and ducks. Our family speaks english on a daily basis, although I do try and speak French as much as possible to our daughters. We love laughing and enjoying the beauty of life and nature, we are animal and board game lovers, and we are trying to build our homestead dream day after day. We both work from home most of the time, as a family photographer and as an online English teacher, and we are working on our farm to self-sustain, regenerate the soil and bring it from the organic farm it was with it's previous owner (which had not cultivated anything for the last four years before we bought it) to a permaculture oasis. We have a lot of fruits (plums, figs, peaches, grapes, apples, pears) and nuts trees (almonds, walnuts) on our 3.5 acres land as well as our own 3 water wells, and have been working hard on creating a big food forest as well as some areas of vegetable garden. It is a magical and beautiful spot and there is still a lot of work ahead of us! We are now on our 5th year here, so quite a few projects have been started already, most are still work in progress, while some are getting established. In the next year, we plan to keep extending our food forest, continue the work to regenerate our soil, get our vegetable garden in full rotation year round, build a workspace in our warehouse and keep expanding the comfort of the volunteers area in the warehouse, including a kitchen area, compost toilet and one bedroom, develop our social networks and marketing, all while trying to keep creating community with our neightbours. We currently tend to host 1-2 people at the same time, couples and families are particularly welcome, and ideally someone that would also be ok in occasionally helping us with our daughters, and we offer stay option in tent or in the warehouse room (bed in photos, you might need to share the room, and get either the top or bottom bed to yourself). We usually share meals together and share the household duties like cooking and cleaning dishes on a rotation schedule, on top of the 25-30h farm-related help that volunteers usually offer. In exchange we offer food, accommodation and our passion in sharing about self sustaining and farming (the honest truth), permaculture, and life in general. Car/driving license is not a must, but might be nice for you, since we are in full countryside, surrounded by almond and olive tree fields. Nearest village is 2-3km of unpaved road away, and has all the basics (population 750), and we are about 40 minutes drive to Toledo. We cannot wait to have you as part of our family! Organic methods: no chemicals and pesticides. We have been using herbs, plants and insects so far to control pests. Certifications: the land we just purchased had been certified organic for years, but they stopped it four years ago when they stopped cultivating the land. We plan on getting it back on the certification as soon as possible. Basic Internet access available