Added: Feb 10, 2012

From: IndependentJoPodcast

Duration: 22:21

Big changes this year. The first big change is that in April I will either be moving to Montana or to Florida. I am expecting a job promotion which will require me to move to Florida. If we do end up in Florida we have decided on the St. Augustine area. We are hoping to find a nice 5+ acre piece of property there for about $500 a month rent. The plan if we end up in Florida is to grow and raise as much food and livestock as we can to live off of. We will be visiting our homestead in Montana about 1 week out of every month to design and implement a Permaculture system into the land. If I do not get the promotion I am quitting my job and moving to our existing homestead in Montana. The Montana homestead is on five acres of land and costs about $500 a month. All that needs to be paid there are property taxes and utilities, i.e. propane and wood. It will be difficult to do the second option because we will no longer have my source of income but I think we can do it. I will be going to local businesses and either offering my help for free, like an internship, or for minimum wage just so that I can learn the skills. Some of the skill set jobs I will be trying to get there are: 1. Mechanical work on cars and trucks. 2. Furniture craftsmanship 3. Carpentry 4. Well and septic systems maintenance and installation. 5. Plumbing 6. Masonry 7. Butcher 8. Anything else I can think of. Let me know what you can think of. I will also be taking trade classes or trade school and collecting from my G.I. bill to help with some of the expenses. The second big change in our lives is that we are looking for a new dog in our life. Our current dog Sandy is now thirteen years old now and doesn't have many years left. We are looking for a good livestock guardian dog. The problems we are running into with this is that we currently live in the opposite environment that our livestock guardian dog would live in. We are in an apartment complex now and that can be extremely difficult for a dog to get used to because dogs here find it difficult to find their boundaries and territories. The dogs we are looking for are territorial by nature and have to be in order to stick around the homestead and to have the need to protect us and our livestock. In the apartment life there are lots of dogs and not a lot of territory. Also all dogs are on leashes which is not normal in Montana. Being on a leash makes them more stressed out and more protective of its owners. We have had two big failures in finding dogs. We took in a half chow half pitbull (it looked like an Australian shepherd). We loved that dog but it would try to kill any dog that showed aggression. It almost killed our neighbor's dog. So that dog went back to his foster home. The second dog we tried was a sweetheart German shepherd but hated our dog Sandy for some reason. That dog also went back to its current owner's home. We will try again with this shepherd this week. I have been researching the different breeds to look into and found these great resources: http://www.lgd.org/ http://kerryg.hubpages.com/hub/Livestock-Guardian-Animals The third big change if our lives is that we have started a primal lifestyle. I was looking for a diet and the more I read about diets the more I hated the idea of a diet. It's all just a very big marketing scheme, it seems. Diets also look like they have a very high failure rate. I do not want to count calories, carbs, fat, etc, etc. I didn't want a diet change I wanted a lifestyle change. The only diet that looked good enough and met my standards of what I believe to be healthy was the paleo diet. But I did not want a diet so I started investigating different people in the paleo world. I finally found three people that do paleo for a living. Those three were: Robb Wolf from The Paleo Solution Sarah Fragoso from Everyday Paleo Mark Sisson from The Primal Blueprint and MarksDailyApple forums. I have been listening to both Robb and Sarah for great information both scientific and practical. I love listening to their podcasts "The Paleo Solution" and "Everyday Paleo". The one that really struck me as perfect was Mark Sisson and his MarksDailyApple forum. The Primal Blueprint isn't the paleo diet, it is a lifestyle that changes the way you eat, live, and think about how you interact with the world. The way you eat in The Primal Blueprint is most closely related to a paleo diet. The fourth big change is Permaculture! I really started getting into gardening and planning how I was going to build my garden in Montana and /or Florida. I started reading and listening to experts in the field and finally stumbled upon a GOLDMINE! Permaculture is, I believe, the way of the future in farming/gardening. I have been studying it greatly and taking a Permaculture design course. I will have many more shows on all of these topics. I hope you like where things are headed. I know I am very excited for the future.

Channel: People

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