We are in the Swiss Jura Mountains, where we had below “our little hill” in February 2012 -32°C (the record for a Swiss village is -41,8°) and where they say nowadays, you can only exploit cows…The region is famous for their “Wytweide/pâturages boisés= ca. pastured woodland” in the past, where they not only had cows and horses, but also a lot of fruit trees, shrubs, woodtrees, pollard/coppice trees, mushrooms and herbs. They planted also potatoes and cereals (over 1’000 m on the Moron Mountains). As if “only cows are possible”:
We have young trees of: 1 walnut tree, 2 plums, 1 quince, 1 medlar, 2 pear trees, 1 mulberry tree, 2 pawpaw, 1 serviceberry on our little hill, where we had only -23°C. Below we have several old apple trees, some new one, berries (different kind of currents, honeysuckles, chokeberries, gooseberries, different cornels, hazelnuts…). And different flowering quinces (chaenomeles speciosa) as limonjuice alternative and perhaps one day as a fence for let the deer out of the vegetable garden.
We have a peatfree moor bed (after permaculture ideas) for blueberries, heather etc. We try to plant (organic) heirloom trees/shrubs. Our rhubarb type is the last of his kind, we have given a root part to a NGO to propagate it, so that everyone can have it again. But if there exists a interesting plant from farfaraway, we also plant that like cephalotaxus harringtonia.
Below the new trees we plant herbs and little shrubs. The idea is to plant over the years a forest garden.
We do potatoes with cardboard and 30 cm of our own hay. And we try to plant our own vegetables – with less success than the fruits. What has to do with our lazyness and our busyness (we are homeschooling and renovating vegan and ecologicaly the 250 year old house and do this just as a sideline), not with the ground or climate. But we do not give up. We use mostly organic seeds and heirloom seeds (No F1-Hybrids), but would prefer vegan-organic ones.
We use wild grown plants as salad, vegetables, medicinal herbs.
As we eat normally every morning a Müesli and stick to the Swiss tradition to eat a lot of apple/plum/fruit pie (in our case: the vegan version from it) as an evening dish/lunch, we feed us a little bit more than 33% from our vegan-organic homestead.
We started a little place to try out, to make our own wood for our heating and for eating as salad (linden tree foliage) with pollarding/coppicing.
We have a lot of books about vegan-organic gardening, also a biography about the first vegan-organic farmer in Switzerland (in the 1920 years, before Rudolf Steiner and his bio-dynamic thing): Mina Hofstetter.
Monika can teach you also how to vegan knitting and crochet in a way that the clothes give you warm without using “plastic wool”, only with plant yarn. She can teach you also, what she knows about veganorganic homesteading (in the mountains of middle Europe).
We take in helping people for 5-10 days, not using an airplane or then at least for a long trip through Europe. We talk (Swiss)German, English, French, Dutch and a tiny bit of Italian.
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