Our simple rural life offers the opportunity to enter a world and a lifestyle that today is nearly forgotten, and that never ceases to please us. Indeed, we’ve held these aims of simplicity and self-sufficiency for more than 25 years. The importance of raising animals, the pride in such an endeavour, the pruning, fertilizing, harvesting, and essentially transforming of our vegetable and animal products provide us with varied and continuous work, interests, stimuli, and opportunities to learn.

Our animal products include cheese, yoghurt, and ricotta all coming from sheep’s milk; honey, propoli, wax, and pollen from our bees; and eggs from our hens. Our vegetal products are more diverse, the most important being olive oil, of which we produce around 300 litres with only slightly more than a hectare grove (we have participated in three competitions, winning two for quality of oil); and wine (from the vineyard we also produce grape juice). We vinify ourselves and, beyond our personal consumption, sell around 400 bottles of wine, including both red and white, annually. Our own vineyard extends approximately 6,000 square metres.

We have a forest which provides us with wood – unfortunately never enough – for home heating. There is also the vegetable garden, a fruit grove, medicinal lavender plants from which we extract the essential oils to make soap, and starting this year we raise saffron plants as well. The yields of our various crops vary widely, of course, and depend in large part on the climatic conditions of a given year.

We are not a business, nor do we hope to become one; we simply produce, transform, and either sell directly or exchange our products.

The care of the land and the animals is carried out above all within the scope of maintaining an organic farm and lifestyle, and only when possible for the production of natural or homeopathic goods.

We work constantly with the thought of leaving the world better than when we arrived, and the satisfaction of living sensibly and peacefully with animals informs our decision to be vegetarians, albeit with respect for those who have not made such a choice.

Our farm-life is open to all; we belong to the international organization WWOOF, through which individuals interested in alternative rural experiences can come spend time with us, working and living as a part of our family.

The wilderness in which we have chosen to set ourselves provides us with constant gifts, from chestnuts to mushrooms to herbs to wild berries….certainly enough to live on.

In our home we have a workroom in which we bottle preserves and undertake various other jobs, a carpentry workshop (my former vocation, about which I have been passionate for over 25 years), a wine cellar, and a wood oven in which we make pizza and bake bread. In the near future we plan to add a small workroom to house our potter’s wheel so that we can craft clay as well.

Clearly, the aforementioned laboratories constitute an integral part of our daily activities; beyond building and adjusting as needed, we have planned and constructed a fruit and vegetable dryer which operates primarily via a solar panel, and by way of electricity when solar energy is lacking.

We are very interested in self-production, and participate in product exchanges (never intended for sale) with other farmers, exchanges which are informed in large part by our needs as dictated by the environment and its climate and cycles.

In addition to exchanging products, we operate occasionally by way of work exchange, in which one applies his or her skills in the service of another, and in return receives the specialized help of that person.

We believe that a better way of life is possible in the direction of self-sufficiency, but even we have to go to the supermarket now and again.

Nevertheless we manage to harvest much more than we need to survive, and this is a satisfying accomplishment indeed.