Somewhere to live and grow food?

I work in the city right now and its dawning on me more and more that it might be a good idea to leave. Live somewhere else, live somewhere that I can produce my own food.

I don't have any experience in gardening or farming. I don't have any land, I don't even know anyone who wants to do this.

So I've been looking online for communes. Somewhere which I could go to and basically just grow food. A place that could provide somewhere to live, would let me be apart of their community and teach me to grow food. I've found lots of communes that are looking for land. Or they have the land but people still work day jobs so you have to pay rent. Or the commune is just like somewhere alot of people live together, but they all pay rent and aren't growing there own food. Or the commune requires some like involved membership process with fees. I don't have any money saved to put in up front.

Does anyone know of, or is anyone apart of a community that is sustaining it's own food growth, and would be willing to accept someone new on the condition that they will help do the work and help the commune grow?

I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump ship on the city completely quite yet. But I would really like to talk to someone who is, or has been in such a living situation to get an idea of the type of thing I'm looking to get into.

 

i have a lot of land area, but not enough sun to grow and food..

 

what do you do for food then?

 

shop..

 

what do you do to make money then?

 

The sad, scary, reality is that it is cheaper to buy food (if you buy industrially produced food, and realistically, unless you're a very careful shopper, most of your food IS industrially farmed) than ti is to grow it, from a time POV. Gardening to supplement your food is totally realistic, but producing enough to be totally self sustaining is a LOT of work. How much gardening experience do you have? I'm not sure a lot of people who have this goal realize just how much volume it takes to grow EVERYTHING you'd need.

Even if you look at 'pioneer' stories from the last century, most folks bought at least some of their staples. If you eat meat and plan to grow your own meat animals, you need to buy food or raise it. (If you plan to raise meat, you also need to either buy young animals or breeding stock; if you buy young animals, that's a new expense every year, if it's breeding stock, you have the expense of maintain them while you wait for your meat animals to be born. And of course there's the whole dilema of heritage breeds vs hybrids with a better feed conversion ratio.) You need land, a fair amount of it, and even if you raise all your own food, there's all the other expenses that are still going to need cash (taxes, medical care, gas for the car and the tractor and the tiller, and if you tell me you are going to work that land entirely with hand tools, I *WILL* think you are completely mad.)

I'm NOT saying any of this to say that your goal isnecessarily an impossible one, just that it doesn't really sound to me like you've thoguht it all the way through. (I think a goal of raising all your own food for a year would make a really cool book, for example.)

Communities which do a lot of large-scale gardening and food raising tend to focus on things which are marketable and run CSAs or sell at farmers markets (or both) are still going to be buying a fair amount of stuff to have a normal diet, even if all things are made from scratch. (Acres and acres of wheat that needs special equiment to harvest effficeiently and will need to be milled to be made into flour, or buying flour? A nobrainer for most folks.) Long-term stable communities of course are going to have application processes.

If you live in the city now, why not look into community gardens or yardsharing? You CAN produce a surprising amount of your own food with a carefully planned garden, and better to start with a smaller garden if you discover you can't cope with how much work it is.

 

I envisioned a communal space with like maybe 50 or so people that all worked to keep food production going.

Theres communities out there that have been all agriculturally subsisted. I mean the Native Americans did it at one point.

 

Absolutely! I'm just saying that true subsistance agriculture is a LOT more time consuming- even for a group- than I think you realize.

 

And there's the problem...

You aren't ready yet, but you would love it if people who are doing it took time out of their life to convince you that its a good idea?

When you are ready, and you want to actually do, instead of just talking about it, there are many people living on the land, who are producing their food, (or working towards it) while you are online trying to get them to answer you, you pick up and go find them... And if the first ones you get to, aren't to your liking, go find another one.

You ignored (or just didn't bother reading) literally hundreds and hundreds of posts by people who had the same types of thoughts you did, but there is a difference... they found a way to do it, then they offered people an opportunity to come and join them.

But as you said, they aren't doing it the way you (whom has never done anything like it) think they should, so they aren't acceptable to you...


Good luck to you...

 

chronictom pwn!! :cheers2:

 

Lots of good info above. We're a four member almost self sustaining community/hostel. Going on 5 yrs. We're not totally self sufficient, about 75%. Cost of living is pretty cheap but the mortgage for the place is a killer. We'd be around 90% self sufficient if not for that. Working on the CSA and farmers market sales. Working on opening an organic diner/pizza type place. Off site business. The 3 acre farm borders a state park so we have good tourist and campers and boaters. Firewood is a big seller. Your welcome to visit and see how were doing it. Working to be free is a great feeling. Being free is going to be even better!

 

Check-out my thread....

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=392246&f=57

Get back to me if you're interested. One of the things no-one ever really thinks of is eating the food that already exists. New England is one of the most food abundant ecosytems that exists. You just have to know where to look. There was once an entire race of people that lived on this continent that figured this out. And just remember, under martial law, Big Brother can waltz-in and take your stupid garden to feed a platoon. This is a fact. If there's nothing there but plush forest, it won't be nearly as attractive to them and you can slip-under the radar.

Work with the land/forest, and it will take care of you.

 

this sounds exciting... maybe one day we'll all be free...slaving to death making our own food living off the land

screw that! I'm buying flour!

 

I share your feelings rygoody. I would give up everything I have just to grow food for the rest of my life.

 

REALLY?!?!?! cause I totally have more excited things I could think of!

 

Look up something called "forest gardening" (sometimes called "woodland gardening". Also, to the guy that says "I have lot's of land, but no sun" then this can work for you too. Unless you're living in the artic you would be surprised.

We have became lazy and think the only way to get food is via the modern agricultural techniques developed in the last few thousand years - that is, the growing and harvesting of high-yield perrenials and vegetables. That has no appeal to me. So much work, so much damage to the land.

We have forgotten that in our natural state (and this is something we should all be fighting to get back to) we were "hunter gatherers". Or I prefer the term "gathering hunters"... we were vegetarians until about 24,000 years ago where food shortages due to climate change (it got colder) forced us to look at other food sources such as meat. But the main emphasis on our diet is the eating of plant material.

Wouldn't it be great if potatoes grew on trees? That is the basis of forest gardening - low effort food harvest via more natural means without having miles of fields at the expense of native plants and trees. Think nuts, berries, leaves, flowers (the fashion for eating flowers appears to have died out in our country, but many other cultures still eat them). Many tree barks can also be eaten, or resins tapped from and removed. Forest gardening uses 7 layers to achieve a high yield from a small space - so much so that "forest gardening" has came into a term because many people use their back gardens to supplement their diet all year round. The guy that originally invented the concept a little over a decade ago had only a fraction of an acre but always had more food than he could ever eat. Visitors were urged "take what you want, I have more than enough".

The 7 layers are upper forest canopy (the tall trees), understorey trees (such as those which give you cob nuts, or hazelnuts for us europeans), shrubs, wild perrenials, climbers, ground cover (creeping plants, mosses, tiny plants, etc.) and the 7th layer is tubers and the like growing beneath the surface. Imagine all those 7 layers being edible! There is also an additional layer which many seem to forget or gloss over, and it doesn't really exist in the other categories because it can exist from beneath the surface to high up on the trees... and that's mushrooms and other fungi.

The best thing is you don't even need land to practice this - given a chance nature most likely already provides you with it's own garden. We forget that the land was often covered in dense trees, and somehow we seem to think that this is not able to sustain society. In fairness, our numbers are now so plentiful that this will be a tall order, but it's not too late.

Modern farming is bad. People go on all about how cattle are bad, but fields of wheat are pretty awful too as you've still had to clear the forest that was most likely once there. When we were natural, we just went about our business and took what we want from the trees as we needed it.

Get a book on forraging. Both this and forest gardening are fascinating subjects. You will learn new stuff for years to come.

 

Although I agree with most of your post and forest gardening, I would like to see some proof of this statement.

 

The Internet. And, I confess I got that from a veggie site. The more I look into it the more it seems it's bullshit, more trust worthy scientific papers actually say the opposite: humans have been hunting for hundreds of thousands of years and only recently had a great use of plant food due to human brain evolution.

I don't want to turn this into a veggie vs meat argument though. My main point is simple - arrable farming, growing vegetables, and so on... it's not the be all and end all of food source.

 

No worries, as I said, I totally agree that people should be looking into forest farming as part of being more sustainable.

I just don't like to see things stated as fact when most evidence says it isn't.

 

I am banging my head against the wall which is the IC directory in the SW U.S. trying to find somewhere,,, Cali has 200+ and most seem in early stages of formation, most in pen & paper stages it seems,,,

Why is it so hard to find a community of folks interested in constructing Earth homes and other alternative dwellings from recyclables in a warm climate who want to grow all their own food and effectively manage a 20 or 40 acre wood lot for fuel as well as act as a selective community junkyard for surrounding cities from which to build the Communities shop equipment, do light foundry work for making items used in getting off the grid, like generators and stirling engines and to be sold with proceeds going to the shared finances of the residents etc,,, ??? :banghead: