The Vision

Increased Self Sufficiency

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Fulfilling Dreams

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Reduced Costs of Living

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A Simpler Life

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After nearly 8 years

I got interested in PERMACULTURE shortly after we decided to buy our place here, and found some wonderful resources – and the principles are aligned with our vision – of producing our food healthily, eco friendly, not wastefully, including humanely keeping and processing livestock.

And after this time we simply KNOW that the food that we grow and eat tastes infinitely better – and is infinitely better for us – than anything we could buy from a regular store.

Growing Fruit & Vegetables

In our “past life” we had very little experience of gardening – a bit of salad and some flowers! But in the past few years we have been successful – following the advice of a few online “gurus” and in 2021 we estimated that we were growing between 70 and 80 percent of our own main crop vegetables. Not only did we learn how best to grow them but also how to store them – so for example our potato and onion and garlic crops last us from June to February the following year. Each year we aim to do better!

We have not been so successful with our fruit trees, and we hope each year it will be better – we have to do better at keeping parasites off the trees and bushes. But the blackberry and raspberry plants are doing great – and we had apples and pears in 2023!!

This year we are also making a big effort to “prettify” a lot of areas including outside our boundary wall. More info will be in the blog as we make some progress.

Raising and Breeding Livestock

Nick had a dream of keeping pigs – where that came from we cannot work out! But when we moved here permanently getting our first 4 piglets was one of the first things we did. We managed to find an almost pedigree East Balkan Black boar, who gained a great reputation. From him we bred and raised over 60 piglets – fattening some for our freezer, selling some for others to raise, bartering some for things we wanted or work we wanted doing. You will find lots of posts and pictures of pigs in this website – just search for “pig”.

We have been very succcessful with our flock of geese, Indian Runner ducks and mixed breed chickens – all kept for eggs not eating, and we sell the young stock each year as bird keeping is very popular in Bulgaria.

We have also kept and fattened lambs for the freezer very successfully, but are not interested in breeding them. We also trialled a couple of goats – and while they were lovely to eat they are dirty naughty beasts!