Forty years of figuring it out — from a South African homestead to a lavender farm in Sicily

Our Homesteading Valley in Sicily

This is not a homesteading course – It’s a journal of my experience

There are plenty of websites that will teach you homesteading in ten steps. This is not one of them.

What you will find here is the account of a real homesteading life — ongoing, imperfect and stubbornly committed to the idea that the best way to learn almost anything is to try it, fail at it, understand why, and try again. I have been doing that for four decades now, and I am still doing it today on our 18-acre coastal farm in Sicily, where we grow citrus, olives and lavender, keep chickens, press our own olive oil and put up more jars of preserved lemons and tomatoes than we ever quite manage to eat.

I started growing food as a child in our backyard in South Africa where I was twelve. I did it because I was excited to see something useful arrive from a small seed. As an adult, I raised my children on food from the garden of a lifestyle block. I homesteaded on concrete yards in the Middle East, grew food on the escarpments of a Papua New Guinean mining town, on a tropical block in Northern Queensland, and on acreage with a centuries-old farmhouse in Tuscany before we sold up and moved south to Sicily to start a lavender farm.

Each place taught me something the previous one hadn’t. The failures, if anything, taught me more than the successes. I write about both.