Reasons

If you have me friended on FB or follow the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook page, you'd know that we're moving. For some people, this is a rare thing. Not so much for me, it'll be my 49th move... As you can imagine, this makes it hard to prep, and yet - I manage it.

My two most important prep considerations are physical security and safety, and food security and safety. And I've managed to maintain those from place to place, to some degree. How, even I'm sure I can't explain. But that won't stop me posting about it at some stage, at great length... %)

For now, this post isn't about all that. It's about mourning, and justification. Mourning, because this is one of only about four places I've ever felt so happy in my life, and justification, because the place we're moving to may well become the fifth place, and perhaps a tad more permanent.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

• New place has a large yard with several fruit trees already.
• It has sheds and outbuildings that will be very useable. 
• It's actually in the outskirts of a town in a dairy region.
• Hard for the zombies (== city dwellers) to reach, so more secure to begin with.
• It's in a town so community is at hand, many of them will be dependent and thus likely to support us.
• Locals used to growing their own food, less need to hoard, more chance to barter.
• Landlord after long term tenants. 
• F-L-A-T terrain, no more killing myself to garden.
• Larger range of foods to barter for. Dairy and meat, for example. 

Reasons To Be Tearful

• This place is like paradise. Temperate rainforest valley.
• Weather is ameloriated by terrain to be less extreme than most places.
• Rainfall is great.
• Soil is rich.
• One advantage to the slope - a range of biohabitats for different species, in the space of a few hundred yards. 

The thing is, it will take us a year to get up to speed with food production. We already have food stored, and our capacity for both will actually increase at the new place.

I already have a plan for an aquaponics greenhouse / rabbits shed to combine ecosystems. Because of being pensioners, we already have to plan for extreme economy, so it's all being done OTC. (On The Cheap.)

A few wicking beds will increase my growing spaces for things like vine cucurbit crops, tomatoes, alliums, carrots turnips etc.

But yep, I will miss this little slice of paradise, although not so much the neighbours...

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