Touring My Overgrown Land in Rural France | The Beginning

This is my little piece of wild land in rural France. It’s around 800 square metres, and as far as I know, it hasn’t been properly touched for more than fifteen years. At the moment, I can barely even get onto it. It’s completely overgrown with brambles, trees and goodness knows what else, and I don’t yet know exactly what I’m going to find underneath it all. Lots of people have told me to bring in a tractor and clear the entire thing, but I don’t want to do that. There may be established trees worth keeping, places that naturally offer shade, plants I haven’t identified yet and possibly even an old stone structure somewhere beneath all of this. So my first job is simply to create a way in. I’m going to begin at the entrance and start clearing it slowly by hand, metre by metre, so I can understand what is already here before I decide what this land needs to become. Eventually, I would love to use it to learn how to live a little more self-sufficiently. I’d like to grow fruit, vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants; find ways of collecting and storing rainwater; create places for wildlife; and make a quiet little corner where I can sit and enjoy it all. I’m not an expert in any of this. I’m going to be learning about growing food, restoring land, collecting water and creating something useful without destroying everything that has grown here in the meantime. I don’t have a huge budget or a perfectly designed master plan. What I do have is a piece of forgotten land, a collection of hand tools and a real desire to see what might be possible. So this is the very beginning. Before the paths, before the vegetable beds, before I even know what half of those trees are. If you’d like to watch me uncover it, learn as I go and hopefully turn this wild little patch into something beautiful and productive, come along with me. Let’s see what’s hiding in there. #LittleHouseWildLand #SelfSufficientLiving #LandRestoration #OffGridJourney #RuralFrance