Just like that, the Christmas mayhem is done and dusted, and it is 2025. I hope you are feeling good, not too frazzled, and looking forward to a purposeful, peaceful and abundant year ahead.
The new year can be a time of deep reflection, and although today I am setting goals and pursuing dreams for 2025, I also find myself looking back at the past and the life I my partner and I have built with our two wonderful sons. I like to do this; when I see how far we have come it keeps me motivated and helps to affirm things are tracking as they should be. It also gives me inspiration to shape my future dreams and desires, adapt and evolve goals, and plan for the year ahead.
All this reflection has had me looking at old photos from when Brett and I first left the city to pursue our dreams.
We had come from the hustle and bustle of inner city Wellington ~ you can read about our former lives here ~ but we dreamt of moving to the country and becoming self-sufficient, so we could raise our family with a healthy, wholesome lifestyle, and a nourishing wholefood diet. (For the record, I now know that full self-sufficiency doesn’t exist, but community sufficiency can and does.)
We settled on the tiny village of Karamea, which is to the north of the South Island’s West Coast, in Aotearoa New Zealand. We bought an insect invested bungalow which to this day is possibly the most run down place I have ever laid eyes on. However, we fell in love from the moment we stumbled across it down a dusty dead end road, and after setting out to find the owner to see if we could convince him to sell it to us, we purchased the house and a hectare of weedy farmland, for just NZ$50,000.
We literally had no money, having just spent it all on the dilapidated building, so we got jobs at a local tomato farm, lived in our van and slowly set about rebuilding the house. We worked hard picking tomatoes by day, and worked hard renovating by night, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning…
We found dead (and live) rats in the ceiling, encountered maggots crawling out of walls, and had more than one accident where a foot ended up through a rotten floor board. The section was overgrown with giant bamboo that had actually begun sprouting up through the floor, and jasmine had been planted IN the bathroom walls to form a living ceiling. The invasive climber certainly fulfilled its brief, destroying all the timber walls in the process ~ I remember having a bath one night and absent mindedly picking at the rotten bathroom wall, until I realised I had made a hole through to outside!
Thanks to our combined steadfast nature, and willingness to literally see beyond the weeds and hold on to our dreams, we created a beautiful home and established large organic gardens and orchards. We also had two boys, and set about raising them on nourishing food from our garden year round.
This upbringing instilled a sense of pride in the food my kids ate. Both boys joined me in the garden and the kitchen from the moment they were able, harvesting produce, chopping vegetables, and measuring out and mixing ingredients. We had a great life and they learnt a lot.
We eventually yearned for something more, and seven years later we left our peaceful valley, with a dream of building our own house in the bush. We bought a stunning piece of native hillside overlooking the Tasman Sea, that had nothing on it other than lots of massive trees, impenetrable scrub, and a tiny one bedroom bach. The only cleared land was a patch of grass, and the first thing I planted in it was a few rhubarb crowns. I knew if I dug a hole and filled it with manure they would grow in no time, and at least we would have something to harvest and cook while we were breaking in this new piece of land.
The bach had a tiny kitchen which was just a small slither in the corner of the building. It was less than a metre wide and only two metres long, with a gas cooker, a sink, and not much else. We had an old pot belly fire in the main area, and although it overflowed with personality, it wasn’t good for much except for heating us (and the occasional jug) up.
We had no oven so we bought a cheap barbecue, and I taught myself to cook all manner of food in it, from bread to lasagna to biscuits and slices. Can you believe River, my eldest son, even WON our annual community Pudding Club competition while we were living like this ~ it was an anonymous judging, so no-one had any idea his pear and ginger upside-down pudding had been made by him under candle light and baked in a barbecue!
We had some really tough times here. Like when my youngest boy Shea got salmonella and became very very ill. The house build had begun, and we were no longer living in the bach as it had been demolished. Instead, we were all squashed into a tiny kitset sleepout that we had just built. We had no bathroom, and the toilet was outside down a dodgy bush track. The “kitchen” area was a run down old caravan that housed quite a few resident mice. And we only had a generator for electricity and candles for light…
Anyway, back to the salmonella. Picture this. It’s 1am, on a very stormy wet and cold winters night. I have a headtorch on my head for light, and I am trying to console my 7 year old who is projectile vomiting out one end and sending streams of diarrhea out the other, all while leaning over our tiny sleepout deck, because he couldn’t quite make it to the toilet in time. This lasted for a long, scary week. Not pretty, and tough indeed.
This is one of many stories, but you get the idea. Life was hard, but we got there in the end. Now we have a stunningly beautiful home, complete with amazing grounds (you can read about the garden development we undertook here) that feed us masses of organic abundance year round.
I have always had it in mind to provide the best foundations for my kids so they can lead healthy and abundant lives, and a big part of this has been in creating a respectful relationship to the food they consume. The thing I am so proud of is that regardless of our changeable living situations, we have always led by example and grown what we could, where we could, and created nourishing wholefood goodness to feed our kids. Even when the odds were stacked against us we found a way. This skill has been priceless.
Now both boys are teenagers, and I admit their diet has changed. Being 17 and 13, they now have their own money and spend way too much of it on junk food and sugary drinks, even with their wholesome upbringing! But I feel confident that their food foundations are strong, and I know that as adults, their reset will always be towards good nourishing wholefoods. This is something I’m really proud of, and part of the reason I’m so passionate about sharing my recipes and gardening tips with all of you too :)
If, like me, you have a dream to nourish your family through homegrown, homecooked wholefoods, I would love to hear how your journey is going! Go to my contact page and flick me an email, or send me a direct message through socials ~ I’m always keen to meet others who have similar outlooks on life :)
And if you have this dream but are struggling to achieve it or feeling overwhelmed with where to begin, please reach out too. I’m here to help in any way I can.
For now though, hears to a happy new year, and a productive, peaceful, and dream filled 2025 ~ Aby x
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