What is Nine Bean Rows? It is an experiment, a lifestyle, a journey, a dream. Sharon and I have no experience with country living. We are not your typical homesteaders. We both work in an office environment, and always have. The opportunity to purchase a piece of land near Innisfree, Alberta, Canada came about quite by accident.
After purchasing the land, what to do with it? 44 acres of trees, wild roses, wild raspberries, wild saskatoon berries and no power, no road. Just raw land!! As I said we are city folks with no experience in country living, building or any skills that would help. That is why this has become our journey and our dream. We are building and developing a lifestyle from scratch and whenever possible with our bear hands.
Nine Bean Rows is a record of our trials and tribulations. What we tried to do, what worked and what didn’t. It is not a “how to guide”, because we don’t actually know how to ourselves! But learning “how to” do it ourselves and doing it without expensive equipment is part of the fun.
We are not environmentalists or hippies, but we also did not want to destroy our land and be wasteful. We are off grid, because off grid just makes sense. We don’t want to squander what we have acquired, because when resources are hard to come by, you don’t want to waste them.
And the name, Nine Bean Rows, well, that’s a line from the Yeats poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. The town of Innisfree changed it’s name when the CEO of CIBC bank saw the island on Birch Lake and it reminded him of the Isle of Innisfree in Ireland. He agreed to build a bank in the town if they changed their name to Innisfree.