Our farm, like two other farms, was built in 1952 from post-war rubble and rubbish. My grandparents lived here with their chickens and made a living from them. At that time my mother and her sister were born. When my mother was six years old, her father died and the farm was in the hands of women. When my grandmother also died, my mother took over the farm and gave birth to me in 1984.

Like probably many farm children, I grew up surrounded by farm chores. Weeding, potato harvesting, mucking out the stable or helping in the fields were part of my everyday life. When I look back and see how much knowledge I unconsciously learned, how much skill and self-confidence I was able to gain from it, I am very grateful for it – even if it sometimes got on my nerves as a child 😉

I left home at the age of 20 to be able to stand on my own two feet and explore the world outside the farm. WG life, city life – everything I didn’t know before. But sometimes things happen in life that you can’t plan or predict. So did the sudden death of my mother. When I was 23 years old, she passed away unexpectedly and suddenly I was alone.

I broke up my tent and moved back to the yard. A house, three acres and a lot of cluelessness and desperation spread. Even though I was familiar with the work on the farm and was always involved, I was never solely responsible for it, so the early days were anything but easy. I tried my luck with various shared flats, but quickly realized that most of my friends were unfamiliar with farm life and could therefore offer me emotional but no practical help. So many came and went. So my hope of making it all faded more and more and in some dark moments I thought about just giving up…

And then Anton came around the corner. An absolute city person with a secret passion that had been hidden until then – court life. Suddenly we were two people who were passionate about one thing. Now it was no longer “I can manage somehow”, but “we can do it!” – a team. Together we had ideas and the strength to implement them. To create new instead of just getting the bare minimum.

Nature had recaptured her land – through the years in which I was not able to use part of the area. A piece of untouched, wild nature called wasteland. Here, for example, blackberry hedges and thus many birds and insects, which have now become very rare, have their home and retreat. As a result, animals such as hedgehogs, foxes and deer come to us and, at least in this place, can lead a wild, quiet life – a small ecosystem of their own that we protect, maintain and expand every day.

But if this story didn’t have a turning point, we wouldn’t have to ask for your help… My mother’s sister – my aunt, who has been living in England for decades, wants to sell the farm. She owns the legal half of the farm. Whether it’s talking, writing, making contact or inviting people to the farm – she doesn’t want to be talked to, which is why communication only takes place via the lawyer.

It brings tears to my eyes and breaks my heart to think of how the habitat of so many animals is being destroyed, how the wasteland is being destroyed simply for the benefit of humanity, which is hogging everything anyway.
After a short phase of complete helplessness and inner powerlessness, we have now decided to fight and raise the required purchase price of €500,000. We don’t want to and can’t lose our home, so we’re going to do everything we can to pay off my aunt’s money.

This is how our project “Save the farm” came about, in which every donation, no matter how small, helps to get one step closer to our goal! Even if I am far from asking others for money, unfortunately we have no other choice. Because together we can manage to get this wonderful little hidden piece of freedom – please help me!