Living sustainably
I have been thinking alot about the way my brother and I grew up recently and I thought I would share wee bit with you 😊
My parents (Susanne and Theo) were born in Germany. They decided to sail a small Yacht around the world. After about 2 years of sailing, they came to NZ. They instantly fell in love with the nature and the people. They decided to make this their home.
They brought 54 acres of land out of Whangarei. For 2 years they lived in a small shed with no electricity. When they found out I was on the way, they added a room to the shed and then continued to build a house themselves.
My brother was born 4 years after me. We grew up in nature. We would explore the land and the bush. We would go swimming in the creek, we paddled a dingy in our dam, and we climbed trees.
We lived a complete sustainable lifestyle. We lived off our land. Everything was made from scratch, the way nature intended it. The vegetable garden was huge. Every meal included fresh produce, meat came from our land, eggs came from our chickens. We didn't often have medication. When we had a cold, we would have lemon, orange and honey drinks. When we had an earache, we would get a couple of drops of onion juice in our ears 🤷
Grocery shopping was only for a small amount of canned food and flour etc that was used to make our own bread. Mum and Dad made home brewed beer and mum made homemade salami (even the red wine for the salami was homemade).
Once we got a bit older, Mum and Dad built (yes, built it all themselves) a restaurant on our land (Morepork cafe).
The restaurant over looked the water and native bush.
I feel so proud to have been brought up in in such an environment. My parents did everything they could to ensure that we had an amazing up-bringing. As the years passed, we somehow lost that connection of how we had once lived. Only in the recent years, have we really begun finding our way back to our roots and trying to live as sustainably as possible.
My Dad passed away years ago.
I know that he would be so proud of us, and he would have been a great part of our Eko hub tribe ❤️
Jane