In some previous entries I wrote where we are and where we are headed in the CRYPTOFARM project. A couple of weeks ago me and my wife draw our project on a white paper and hung it on the living room wall. It's a circle divided in four: veggies and animals (what we eat and what serve us), our talents (what we are meant to do and what we do better - arts for my wife and writing for me), energy that we use and community (exhanges that make us richer).
Today I'm excited to write the following update.
Veggies and animals
Inspired by @luzcypher post about the profitability of growing food and flowers, I opened up to the idea of planting flowers. After I thought it, I met a woman - Serafina - who lives nearby and is growing saffron since seven years. Saffron is dubbed "the red gold" and here in Italy sells between 20-30 euro per gram. It requires a huge amount of human work (that explains the insane price) but immediately fascinated us for its history, its nutritive qualities and the possibility to use it to colour textiles. Its name comes from the Arabs and was planted in my village even in the XV century.
Credits
Energy
I bought a chainsaw - this is something I really needed as every day I'm burning so much wood to keep the house warm.
This was the first valuable thing I bought with cryptocurrencies through all4btc.com. Paying something in advance with some bitcoin to someone I will never know and waiting till the box arrived by mail to believe it was true: that was exciting!
Me opening the box
Talents
The open-air markets where my wife sells her creations (in this period scarfs made with wool) are paying better than before and are a good occasion for meet new people. We met a guy who would sell us wool for cheaper and Serafina too: she was there to popularize saffron gardening - flowers lobbying!
My wife in our market stand
In my case, as I want to have more success on Steemit, I decided to learn how to edit pictures. At the beginning of this post, you can see the first picture I ever edited with a software (GIMP) (I’m very proud of it – it took me so much time to accept that a photo editor could be so much different from a word editor).
Community
They say that one of the major tenets of permaculture is "Get to know your neighboors". Though I'm much more a farmer who loves to experiment rather than a permacultor, I love that line. So this morning I went to my neighbor Beppe as I've often been concerned about the borders of my land. “Do what you want" he told me "You can even plant on my land – I’m happy if someone keep the land in order”.
We are preparing the Christmas theather play for the children that attend the Church oratory. Tomorrow I’ll go asking to a local center that host adolescents that are not living with their family to see if they could play live music during the play.
And here it's us again, as I'm writing this post...with the computer, our creations and our precious stove. Stay tuned and embrace cryptofarming!
