Leruo Farmstead

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Leruo Farmstead

Building a subsistence economy.

13/04/2023

Doubt we'll be able to write anything meaningful about this for our blog, , but it feels good to be able to sit with a book again.

All year now, and no time for our favourite things.

Homesteading is backbreaking stuff.

11/04/2023

There will come a day where you just can't take all of it anymore... where you desperately need a shower, and a change of scenery... where the children need to play.

09/04/2023

"Children are like wet cement, whatever falls on them makes an impression."

Haim Ginott

07/04/2023

"It's unwise to waste resources, and it's also unwise to waste capacity. Every system should maximize utilization."

Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

05/04/2023

The water tank stand is only going up this week, so we're still manually fetching water on most mornings from the neighbouring section.
There may not be a lot of it, but there's always enough to share with our pop-up tomatoes.

03/04/2023

“But I’m not a monster, am I?”
- Maddie, 🐍

There have been sightings of Mozambican cobras in our area, and the general attitude towards snakes here is pretty hostile.
I, on the other hand, am fascinated by snakes, and refuse to be fearful. Not until they pose an actual threat to my family, perhaps.

Flipped a rock and found one had come through the yard, very close to the house. Called my children to see the skin and their eyes widened as all sorts of questions jumped from their mouths.

Would have been nice to actually see the snake though. Don’t know what I would have done in that moment, but I tell my boys to try and avoid freaking out. No need to scare the snake into a reaction, I figure.

“I’m ugly, you’re ugly, we should all be ugly. Ugly is the new beautiful.” 💛😁

31/03/2023

Found the date pips we kept from a pack... going to see if they'll grow.

29/03/2023

"What if dogs destroy our shoes because we always put them on before leaving?"

27/03/2023

"I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange."

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

25/03/2023

Shimmy hit a pothole yesterday and got a double puncture. Called us at dawn this morning so we could go get new tyres. We picked him up in this beast.

Were never car people, till we met this monster.

21/03/2023

Doggy, and some apples we're going to try grow.

19/03/2023

Sometimes the days are so long, that all you can do when you get back home from work is sit on a mount of dirt and dig your feet into it.

17/03/2023

It's carpet washing day... and some of us can't resist a tub with water, no matter how filthy. 🙈🙆🏿‍♀️😅

15/03/2023

Stuffed the bread this time... Made very thick, very filling pie.

13/03/2023

"Like a sandcastle, all is temporary. Build it, tend it, enjoy it. And when the time comes, let it go."

Jack Kornfield

11/03/2023

When dropped this date palm off he was furious that we had asked him to pick it up from a family that still suffered from active COVID. But, how were we to know?

Digging here... through dried, rocky clay is a nightmare. 🙆🏿‍♀️

First tree planted on the homestead. 😁

09/03/2023

We started making our own stove-top bread... Diphaphati.

The best part about visiting my aunts in Chikanosi has always been waking up to diphaphati being prepared on the lids of the drie voet pots.

These don't come close to those, but they are a start of a future.

07/03/2023

We haven't had running water since we moved in, despite having connected to a local line in the last year, and having water from there build all the buildings in the patch.

Mom and dad got us a water tank, and we also got a date palm tree gifted to us by Jenny. Put the tree in the water there to cool off after a long day in the car.

05/03/2023

The ability to walk out into the yard and pick fresh and wholesome ingredients for a meal for our family... that's been the ideal for a while now.

03/03/2023

Loads of thatch in the garage. Which is where we sat while fooling around with Nkagiseng's paper mache mask project.

01/03/2023

Dirty hands, all day.

27/02/2023

And, we have a wall up... and managed to get some sawdust for the compost toilet.

Progress, if anything.

25/02/2023

Tussock moth coming through.

23/02/2023

Toilet corner has a floor. 😅

21/02/2023

"Oh, I think I'll just cuddle up in this tub of clean laundry and take a nap."

19/02/2023

We haven't been able to drive into the yard without getting stuck in mud for days now... but, it's still so beautiful here.

Found this dragonfly in the car this afternoon after letting it stay stuck for the weekend.

17/02/2023

Our aunt brought back lemons from gran's house, and we made some tonic.

Have long not been an fan of over-the-counter medication, and have been making this and taking a teaspoon each morning with my kids for years now to keep us away from the doctor.

Lemon, ginger, cinnamon, tumeric, chillie, honey, garlic. We use spices if we can't find them fresh.

15/02/2023

We haven't had a toilet since we moved in, and the rains have put the digging of the septic tank at a hault. In fact, the hole already dug up is now a pond.
We've been getting by with a shovel in the unused space behind the house (because it's the only place you can go without strangers peeping you from the road), but the mud has made that task impossible.

Spent some time prepping this corner for a compost toilet. Trying to make it as user friendly as possible by adding balance to the seat and a floor before the ground becomes concrete again.

Did I tell you? We are working with rocky clay here.

13/02/2023

Wish we were having fun when this happened.

13/02/2023

Made a new friend the other day, and mommy took us on a trip to the library.

09/02/2023

We were late to school on Nkagiseng's birthday.

One of our tyres hit a sharp rock and died as we got on the highway, and we just couldn't get the nuts undone. There also was not signal, so we couldn't call for help. Then along came a lone stranger walking. IWe asked for his help and he were soon on our way.

He told us a sad story about trying to get as far away as possible from his stepmom and her assosciates because he believed they were trying to kill him. He'd been walking from Midrand since the previous night, and asked only for some food.

We gave him our skaftin and let him use our phone to contact his wife..

07/02/2023

We lost one of Atang's new boots during the move.

He's got clubfoot, and can only wear boots at this point. After one of his surgeries went badly and the doctor refused to prescribe a pair of tippy boots, we went ona desperate search fro solid leather boots that would help with his condition.

We replaced the shoes very recently, and they don't come cheap. So we're a little bummed.

His old pair was a little worn, and he didn't want to wear them to school because Doggy chewed off one of the pull thingumies. We spent half the morning calling around for a pair to be sent up from Cape Town.

Today he wore one old and one new shoe.... but you can't tell the difference, can you?

05/02/2023

The plumber who started this project left it halfway. He said he would come back to finish, but hasn't and it's delayed the plas

Also, the outcome is differentto what we wanted it to look like. :(

03/02/2023

This is where our septic tank is supposed to be, but there's solid rock just under there and the TLB couldn't go deeper.

01/02/2023

Welcome home! :)

30/01/2023

Swapped our elecric iron for a sad iron.

When we were children these were what we used at the grandparents places. We haven't used one effectively, but we're willing to learn.

This is the last thing that needed to be moved.

28/01/2023

It's moving day, and this is the last piece to go. Everything else has been moved over the month on our trips to school.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives.

26/01/2023

All that running around and getting dirty is good for them, we promise.

24/01/2023

The days are long, but we still reading.

We found the local library, and renewed all our cards.

22/01/2023

Out and about with the little wolf, buying building material.

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There will come a day where you just can't take all of it anymore... where you desperately need a shower, and a change of scenery... where the children need to play.

"It's unwise to waste resources, and it's also unwise to waste capacity. Every system should maximize utilization." Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

The water tank stand is only going up this week, so we're still manually fetching water on most mornings from the neighbouring section. There may not be a lot of it, but there's always enough to share with our pop-up tomatoes.

If you didn’t make that leap... where would you be now? The boys and I were living in an extremely comfortable cottage when covid hit. We had the entire property to ourselves and the luxury of a large piece of land for our gardening. We hardly left the house that year. I had also taken the boys out of school till I could figure out what in the world was happening. At the beginning of the second year of the pandemic we moved to a back-room in Soshanguve, and Nkagiseng went off to boarding school. I was paying a fifth of the rent I paid before, and had made the decision to stop paying rent entirely at the end of that year. This video was taken a month after I had bought the patch that we now call Leruo. Having just picked big brother up from what was then his tenth school, we drove by to show him where his new home would soon stand. This was important because I had held his hand, sometimes carried him on my back, all of the seventeen times we’ve moved house since he was born. Had I not made the big jump, we would still not be home. #puppylove #homesteadlife #homesteadliving #homesteadinglife #homesteadersofinstagram #ruralliving #sustenenceeconomy #alternativeliving #alternativelifestyle #simplelife #wildliving #welcomehome #homebuilding #homebuying #home #ruralliving #covid #pandemic #school #onlythebrave #maketheleap

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