About Me

We are a family (the Hillmans) of four who have relocated from an average city life to rural Ireland. Dan was a secondary school technology teacher with a physics degree and I was a marine biologist, crafting in my spare time. Our intentions were to build a carpentry business for Dan and for me (Rebecca) to be a stay at home mother to our two young children. Having moved into a beautiful old farmhouse with some land, we began to think about how best to utilise the garden, two fields and oak wood plantation which were included with the sale. After an unbelievably fulfilling year of growing our own organic vegetables we found ourselves happily outdoors for the majority of daylight hours. Paid work began to get in the way of where our true passions lay and we also realized that growing our own vegetables was less than half the potential story! So after a little reading and Googling we decided to produce our own free range and organic meat too. The arrival of our first three rare breed Gloucestershire Old Spot piglets fuelled our enthusiasm and soon after arrived chickens, bees, rabbits and goats.

We thrived on the ideals of providing our own food with minimal impact on the environment … no food miles, no carbon footprint, just fresh organic food with a journey of only a few meters and minutes to our plates. We embraced the ideas of sustainable living via the design framework offered by permaculture. We began to struggle financially as running our farm ate into conventional work time.

Meanwhile, on my crafting blog (An Irish Craftworkers Good Life), aspects of our small farm filtered through in various posts. There was an obvious huge interest in our efforts at living an eco-conscious lifestyle which was enormously encouraging and we quite suddenly realised that perhaps we could make a living from doing the thing we both love with a passion … sharing our knowledge and experience to help others live ecoconsciously, and enabling others to live their dream whether it be in a city or rural dwelling.

At the same time we realized that we could sell our surplus vegetables to local people and also hope to go into the breeding of free range rare breed farm animals and sell our premium meat or honey locally. The woodland also offers a potential resource in terms of sustainable income; charcoal, green wood furniture, wattle fencing, fruit and nuts. We want to think small, keep it local, not expand but develop our food supply within a local network and maintain business on a personal level. These ideals can be implemented in either rural or urban settings. It's not necessary to relocate to the countryside to embrace a sustainable lifestyle.

We are also offering a number of courses, details of which you can see on the right hand side bar and Ebooklets on a variety of smallholding and sustainable living topics for those who can't attend the courses.

The adventure continues, we are starting out small, and hope to keep it that way. Small is beautiful.