Planting roots 🌱 Omishima, Japan '23 🇯🇵
Restoring an Akiya into a Homestead 🏡
Chickens 🐔 Pickles 🥒 Honey Bees 🍯
Mexico '21-23 🇲🇽 New Orleans '16-21 ⚜️
We built a beautiful 1/4-acre urban homestead in New Orleans from 2016-2021. We sold honey, chicken eggs, and homegrown pickled vegetables (sauerkraut, dilly beans, and various styles of cucumber pickles). We built our farm from nothing, and learne
d many skills, including: beekeeping, chicken husbandry, garden soil health, vegetable production, lacto-fermentation (non-vinegar pickling), composting, bio-char production, pest management, and sustainable practices, without chemicals. As business owners, we managed our own social media, branding, product development, and accounting. We also ran a successful AirBnB on our property, hosting over 1,000 guests, with a rating of 4.9 stars. We regularly volunteered to clean up trash and mow neighboring abandoned lots. We're searching for the perfect place to re-build our homestead, and re-plant our roots. Since leaving the United States in 2021, we documented our Mexico immigration, travels, house-sitting, and adventures, on our website's Travel Journal and YouTube. We enjoyed 14 months in Mexico, driving 9,350 miles through 21 Mexican states! We still hold Mexican Temporary Residency until the end of 2025, at which time, we will receive Permanent Residency. Now that we've chosen to settle and rebuild in Japan, of course we'll continue sharing detailed blogs and YouTube videos, as we navigate Japanese immigration and rebuild our homestead in Japan! We've chosen to live on Omishima island, in Imabari, Ehime, Japan. Our dream is to renovate and restore a number of historic 'akiya' (abandoned homes) and unused farmland, that would otherwise continue to deteriorate, while contributing to the tourism on the island. We're buying our first akiya, which we have begun renovating into a guest house, for travelers and cyclists exploring the Shimanami Kaido in the Seto Sea.
