Get to Know Your Land | Live Free or Die: How to Homestead

[Music] [Music]

Hello there! Well, hello there! We're hanging out in the forest garden, being cool homesteaders.

So, when I first came here, I had this idea from looking at pictures and books of what my homestead was going to look like; pictures that were taken in very different landscapes than Western North Carolina. I said, "Well, if it looks this way in the book, it should look this way here," right? And that's not at all the case. The land already has momentum.

Okay, the land already has a direction that it's headed in. Right? So, you can learn what the land is up to by just looking, listening, smelling, and tasting.

So, when I showed up here, as I was clearing, I was noticing a lot of pine trees. So, from that, I figured that, oh, then I can grow pine nuts. There's also American hazel growing here, which don't make too much food, so we replace those with European hazel.

Okay, so if you intend on getting some land and growing some food, don't have an idea of what the land is supposed to be doing. Look at what it is doing and just help it to do that better.

So, ask what you can do to help the land out to do a better job at producing food instead of demanding that it does something for you that it might not want to do.