ExBlog

Who are we?

We are two Dutch people, both born in 1961, married in 2014. We both had the same dream all our lifes: to live a simple life, away from the ratrace, with and from nature, doing all those things that our ancestors did like baking bread from our own homegrown wheat and warming ourselves in the winter using a woodstove.

We also have some sort of apocalyptic view towards the future, not from a religious point of view but more a realistic one: mankind is destroying earth and we are not so very confident that this destructive behaviour will improve soon, so we want to prepare for the worst.

Our farm, our village, our life

We now live off-grid on an old farm in Portugal, trying to become fully selfsufficient, our income is way below poverty level but we are happy with the choice we made. We use only ten percent of the electricity that we used to consume, hardly produce any garbage and we minimised our carbon footprint as much as we could.

Our farm is situated in a valley at the slopes of the Serra da Gardunha, in the centre-East part of Portugal near a small village.

The valley used to be agricultural land, but when the last farmer left around 2000, the land was lying there, dried out by the sun with no protection at all. The top-layer of leaves and other natural materials was gone and the soil had no skin to protect itself anymore. It was a field full of yellow grains and grasses, in which nothing but some pine-trees, broom and brambles could survive the hot, dry summers.

In the beginning of 2015 we went over several times to get some idea of how to start, from 2017 we moved full-time.

Nowadays many new species of animals and plants have started to live with us and we, our pets and all the other lifeforms around us have become one big happy family.

Join us on our journey to try and restore this beautiful valley even more into a paradise and to live a totally different life of what we were used to: we are well on our way, but far from finished.

This is a redo of an article on wordpress.com from 2016, on the Portugal-section of the website is a newer page about us and our life here.