Where to begin...

Just got my Steemit account approved! Greeting from Bulgaria!

I've been blogging since 2002 (wow, just realized that's 15 years!) and always wanted an English language blog, but mostly lacked the incentive. As my adventure in the uncharted lands of permaculture and parenting unfolds, I find myself more and more willing to put the effort needed into this, wanting to share it with the world. 

We, as a family, are currently transitioning from urban to rural life. A transition many are considering or have undertaken in the recent years. So sharing our experience could be helpful and beneficial to plenty of people, especially those in similar context: temperate / cold climate, small scale permaculture, rural / suburban gardening, working dad / stay-at-home mom, homeschooling, foraging, natural remedies...

A bit of a backstory. I grew up in a city on the Black Sea coast. Summers were spent divided between helping my grandparents with their rural garden and enjoying a ton of sea-related outdoor adventures. My grandfather was a self-taught master gardener! With the indispensable help of Grandma, he looked after a small rural plot overflowing with fruit trees (most of them he grafted himself), grape vines, berry shrubs, nut trees, annual vegetables... I learned a lot from him in my teenage years!

Skip forward 15 years of working in the print & advertising industry and you'll find me just married, with a baby on the way, studying permaculture, ecology, botany, herbal medicine... and spending many sleepless nights with my girl charting the course of our future live.

In 2014 we bought a small property in a village near Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria). That's what it looked like - a lush meadow, full of herbs and wild flowers, that's been used for pasture now and then in the last 50 years. No industrial farming, no tilling, no chemicals and heavy machinery - just Nature left to thrive.

In 2015 we stared creating our future garden, as well as building our future home. By this time (end of 2017) our garden has just finished its second productive year, our baby fruit trees have started to bloom, our home is halfway done and we've got two great helpers, aged 5 and 2, always willing to pitch in... and have a nibble in the garden!

For 6-7 months of the year, we get some sort of yield from the garden and it's only just in its infancy. Once the fruit and nut trees come in production and once we finish the interplanting of the orchard with a long list of herbs and shrubs and beneficial plans (most of those are now present on site and are in process of multiplying), we'll have almost year-round harvest. If we manage to save a few bucks for a greenhouse, it'll be 100% around the year!

 

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Along with our passion for gardening and permaculture, we're also into papermaking. Mostly recycling office scrap, but also making plant-based pulp from scratch. Our paper usually becomes business cards, handmade albums and diaries, wedding invitations and... lamps? 

We also do workshops, demonstrations, we love working with kids in local schools as well! As this side of our life is too large to include in this already long post, I'll just leave you with a link to our site: bghandmade.com - it's in Bulgarian, but Google Translate manages quite well and the photos do not need a translation anyway!

(Yes, that's us, working with a class of children, while our newborn daughter sleeps in the sling!)

 

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I could go on and on, but knowing that most of the readers won't make it even this far, I better leave something for future posts. Thank you for your patience :) !