Dear ,

Due to a technical malfunction, this newsletter was only sent on October 6, but was already written on September 21. We welcome you back in time a little ;)

The chill winds are returning to the hills and the blooming heather brushes the landscape with soft purples and oranges. This year the hawthorn berries are abundant, richly colouring the landscape with strokes of vibrant red. In these days of the autumn equinox, Mabon in Irish, we move through the doorway to winter. Summer is over and a new phase will begin. A meaningful moment for us to share what we have gained and completed during summer and make our plans for the winter. As we are bringing in the harvest from the gardens, and beginning to prepare for the winter months we have been reflecting with gratitude on ONE YEAR of living at Terranu.

Harvesting & reflecting

What a year it has been; probably the most challenging one we will reflect on. When we arrived a year ago we arrived at a place without electricity or running water, a mouldy smelly cottage, trash all around, overgrown with brambles and nettles and many broken gates and fences. We slept in tents for the first 6 weeks and drank bottled water as we hauled materials through the mud. Since then we have worked (with help of many visiting hands!) everyday on building this place up. As we are harvesting; we also reflect on what we have achieved!

Our first year achievements

• We restored the well and pump so we can have clean drinking water. We feel so grateful to be the highest well in this watershed and drink such delicious fresh water.
• We renovated the cottage extensions so we could have a functioning and warm living room, temporary kitchen, learning room, office, laundry and bathroom. We are so happy we had these spaces to be in! The cottage itself still needs to be renovated but plans are forming.
• We put up 2 yurts and built two platforms and are currently building kitchens and bathrooms by each of them so we don’t have to walk back and forth to the cottage multiple times a day. What a gift to sleep under the stars in these cosy round homes!
• We have restored the old road, including stormwater ditches and pipes. This included removing 2 trailer loads of trash buried in a berm, and clearing 70 metres of invasive rhododendron. We now have road access to all our fields!
• We restored and put in hundreds of metres of fences, built several farm gates and cleared overgrown ditches, fences and other infrastructure. Shoutout to Merijn for championing most of this backbreaking work.
• The children spent hundreds of hours in the learning village learning about trees, birds, celtic traditions, and learning and practising songs, plays, letters, numbers and the best way to climb in the old sycamore tree on the farm.
• We created a vegetable garden with 8 20 metre beds and grew flowers, potatoes, onions, maize, beans, spinach, fennel, cabbage, kale, and much more. With potential to grow to a commercial size once we have more security on possible markets.
• We have put up a polytunnel and planted 5 rows with tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, salads and much more. The two grapes have already grown a few metres and our avocados (grown from a pit and brought from Holland) have never been so happy!
• We planted over 250 trees, including native hedgerow species, apple, pear, plum, cherry, strawberry tree, mulberry, oaks, scots pine, hazel, rowan, elm and many more.
• We welcomed 2 cats, 12 chickens, a donkey and 2 rabbits onto the farm and were greeted by hundreds of ticks and midges that already live here.
• We managed to get farm entitlements for the land and an official farm number. This very paper heavy process took many months, meaning we can finally start to look at a flock of sheep and upscaling the poultry enterprise.
• We submitted hundreds of pages of forms towards health insurance institutions, immigration offices, council desks and other parts of the elaborate Irish bureaucracy. And we are still busy with that.
• We have put up a 2 bedroom cabin for visitors and guests (more about that in our next newsletter!
• We purchased 2 fully furnished second hand yurts from a holiday park and removed them including the decks and other attachments. We will be putting them up for guests next season!
• We purchased a teepee tent as an event space, and can’t wait to put it up.
• We welcomed our first volunteer Evi who helped us with our soil testing, meadow grasses biodiversity assessment, gardening and much more.

Crowdfunding gratitude 

As we round off this first year, we would like to express our gratitude for the many people who contributed to our startup budget through donating to the crowdfunding campaign! With your help we were able to invest in the materials and infrastructure that set us up to realise so many of the projects that we have shared above. There have also been some setbacks, due to the realisation that before we can have more animals on the land we need to upgrade our perimeter fencing. There were also unforeseen infrastructure things that we had to invest in such as fencing around the garden, and new gates to try and keep the eager deer out. 

We are thrilled to have been able to give the perks, and already some of the glamping stays have been redeemed. Giving animals a name was slower than we hoped, due to practical setbacks but we are hoping to offer more animals for naming in the next months! Please keep an eye on this space for the shout-out for names. We are thrilled to have Gilgamesh, our proud rooster and Pricilla, a chicken that was hatched on the farm this spring.

A small note: some contributors perhaps didn’t receive a perk, if we couldn’t reach you for an address. Please get in contact if this is the case, and we are pleased to make sure you get your perk.

With love from the Terranu team,

Nakyta, Sarah, Pieter & Merijn