InishOge (irish for “young island”) is our new old developing farm in progress here in Sooke on Vancouver Island. It is 20 acres of living and growing space in the midst of a 100 acre woods of magical faerie forest, meadows, wetlands and creeks, with a fish bearing stream running through it. The farm is a small mixed organic permaculture homestead that includes veggie gardens, an old fruit orchard we are renewing, a new fruit and nut orchard we are starting, chickens, turkeys, pigs and bees (to come). Our do-it-your-self back-to-the-land resilience-building re-skilling adventures have so far included soil building, cover cropping, food growing and preserving, animal pasturing, wildcrafting, fermentation, natural building, renovating old buildings, building new buildings, timber harvesting, bushcrafting, water containment, swaling & pond building, passive solar collection, and humanuring. We built a wee cabin in the first year and spent the next three years building our cob-timber-solar hybrid farmhouse, Earthen Tara, using materials from the farm and employing a variety of natural building techniques and passive solar designs. And we have loads of ideas and future plans for micro hydro, solar capture, rainwater collection, root cellaring, greenhousing, community-building, and all sorts of other things, as we continue to ride the exhilarating million different learning curves of transition & resilience, always finding ourselves somewhere messy & exciting, between Here and There, up to our elbows in muck, with grace and finesse and absolute reckless abandon.
