A family swapped their suburban home in England for a rural homestead in Co Mayo - and now grow their own food and chop wood for heating.
Amy Johnson (34) and husband Peter (46) decided they’d had enough of the rat race during the Covid-19 pandemic.
So they moved their four children to Mayo - buying a six-acre property for €230,000 after selling their previous property in Lincolnshire for €317,100. The family now does its best to live off the land, growing fruit and veg and fetching water from a well.
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They estimate they’re now saving roughly €327 monthly on utility bills and hope to slash their current €500 monthly food shop to €200 after harvesting their crops. And Amy, previously a receptionist but now a full-time homesteader, said they couldn’t be happier following the July 2022 move.
She said: "Throughout the pandemic we re-evaluated our lives. We’d paid off our mortgage of our first house and we realised we didn’t have as much life satisfaction or job satisfaction.
"We looked in Wales, but prices had gone up and we saw the opportunity to move to Ireland and we just thought, why not? We fell in love with this one. Packed up, quit work and moved over."
Amy and Peter - a self-employed builder - had always craved more space and growing veg in their previously small garden gave them a desire to move. They lived in London before moving to Lincolnshire.
She said: "I grew up in London and whenever we left London on a day trip I always wanted to live elsewhere. It gives us peace and opportunities that we’ve never had.
"We’re growing a lot of our food and our children are growing up around animals. I do feel more at peace here and more at home."
When they need essentials, Amy will nip to the supermarket. But the family has made an active decision to grow as much as they can.
Amy said: "We’ve got a veg garden, poly tunnels and a greenhouse. We’re looking at in excess of 200 tomato plants, 150 pepper plants, potatoes, sunflowers, corn, kale, cabbages, 100 strawberry plants, fruit trees, apples, cherries, plums.
"I just think it’ll be nice once we’ve got guests that we can offer a pick your own fruit and veg when they stay. I’d like to create an off-grid experience.
"We kind of just buy the essentials. We make oat-milk at home and we try to use local butchers for meat, but we don’t eat a lot.
"Once we’ve got a good supply of stuff, I plan to store it, freeze and dehydrate it. I want to bring the shopping bill down. I do plan to get into canning soon too."
Electricity is the only utility that Amy and Peter pay for, though they say it can be quite strenuous chopping up wood for their heating.
Amy said: "When they said about the heating and electricity bills going up in the UK I was so worried before we moved, so we’ve definitely been quite fortunate that we’re only paying for electricity now. We’re paying around €175 a month on electricity and we were paying at least €288 a month before we moved - and that was before the price went up."
Amy home-schools her four children - Summa (14), Oliver (13), Gracie (9) and Amelie (8) - and said they’d "never had so much freedom before".
She added: "I think they love the space and the freedom they have to go and play. They tend to go and run off with the dog."
Amy and her family are well on their way to completing their Irish homestead, but the land contains a number of other buildings that they hope to renovate and one day turn into an Airbnb.
She said: "We’ve got a two-bed cottage to renovate. The walls need re-doing and the bathroom needs renovating.
"We want to create nice pathways and gates too because there’s a lot of streams."
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