Category: Blog

As mentioned before growing your own food is one of the most important steps to living a healthier and self sustaining life. All our circumstances are different and not everyone knows where to begin. We began ours with getting on the list of our local allotment whilst living in a flat in London.

In the UK, allotments are small parcels of land that are rented out to an individual for the purpose of growing food crops. These are available to anyone to rent and maintain. Just because you live in a apartment building doesn’t mean that you need to stick strictly to growing indoors, or give up all together. One of the main benefits of an allotment is that it’s a great starting point in terms of size. Having a farm is no small feat for a new beginner. The reality is cultivating and maintaining the land takes a lot of time and energy, if you have the financial freedom to do so. Having an allotment enables you to start with putting all the theory of growing into practice in a manageable space. The yearly fee is generally a small fee, in comparison to what it yields.

This is just one example of where to grow that worked for us, as a starting point. We also grew various herbs & aloe vera etc in our flat. Now we are growing everyday fruits and vegetables that we eat such as: tomatoes, onions, ginger, pumpkins, bok choy, melons, yam, beans etc. in belize. We are learning what works in this climate whilst incorporating what we have had already picked up. What you grow is mixture of what you like to eat, what grows in the climate you are in and what you would like to add to your diet. Self sufficiency is possible for everyone and anyone.

In urban dwellings you can use containers, trellises or hanging gardens for those that are limited on space and many more creative ways to make use of whatever space is available to you.

Growing your own food may seem like something that is unachievable or it has not crossed your mind because we take food for granted. We have supermarkets that have almost everything under the sun and most of it doesnt seem to cost much. So why the hassle that comes with the initial start to growing your own? As we have all learnt over the years a lot of food is brimming with pesticides and all sorts of harmful chemicals. Is our health and our childrens health worth the few pennies we supposedly save? The other route then would naturally be to buy organic. Unfortunately organic food is expensive and majority of people cannot afford to buy organic food regularly to feed a whole family. Organic food always costs more than conventional foods, anything from 40%-120% in the case of vegetables such as carrots and broccoli.Growing your own organic produce means that you save money. Which means that you are able to allocate your finances to other areas in your life.The key point here is to do your due diligence, make a plan & prepare to put in the work.

What may seem like a lot of work right now will be your saving grace in the long run. Investing in the food you eat and growing it yourself is the best investment you can make. You will be healthier, a analysis of over 300 studies published in 2014 by the British journal of nutrition (www.britishjournalofnutrition.co.uk) researchers found that organic crops have a substantially higher concentration of antioxidants and other health benefits. You know everything that came in contact with the food you put on your table. As a parent my ultimate goal is to protect my children to the best of my ability, children are way more susceptible to pesticides and other chemicals put on food than adults. According to the National Academy of Science about 50% of lifetime exposure occurs in the first 5 years of life. You are more likely to avoid cases such as E. coli outbreaks linked to spinach in 2006 and lettuce more recently when you grow your own.

Having your children grow around food and cultivating the food that ends up on their table is one of the most valuable lessons you can provide as a parent. This is the ultimate skill in providing them with essential life skill, growing food and being capable of providing for themselves. We introduced food growing and maintaining a garden to our son from the age of two, at 5 he has his own corner of the garden. He collects seeds and is always eager to plant and identify different plants. Our younger one is just over one and as a result of where we are and what we are doing shes already become accustomed to the garden. One of the first things she did when she started walking was to pick tomatoes and eating them. This is just the beginning but as the saying goes “start as you mean to go on”. This is not by all means the only way to go, every family is unique in their growth and development. As a family wer always striving to grow and want to share the lessons we have picked up along the way and hopefully serve as a guide to others.

On a more personal level gardening in great for your mental health. Although indiginous people had known this from the beginning of time, science now confirms the immense benefits of gardening and its therapeutic effects.

For a more in depth information on growing your own please feel free to drop us a line, wer more than happy to share resources on what will suit your circumstances best.

A few books on starting to grow your own:

• RHS Grow your own veg and fruit year planner

• Allotment Month By Month- Alan Buckingham

• Grow vegetables: Gardens, allotments, patios and balconies- Alan Buckingham

• The grow your own food handbook- Monte Burch

with love,

From me and mine to you and yours.

One of the main reasons that has triggered us to embark on this leg of our journey as a family i mentioned before is to live a holistic life. Holistic living is a concept that has got a lot of light in the past few years. What holistic lifestyle means to different people differs. To us it is to take care of our entire selves: body, mind, spirit/soul and environment.

So keeping this in mind we started our focus on growing our own food. We started educating ourselves on the process of growing food when we still lived in london. We were fortunate enough to get some space in our local allotment. It was here we first introduced the process of planting and maintaining a food garden to our son who was 2 years old at the time. This was also the start of familiarising ourselves with the practice behind the theories of food growth for us both. Our children are growing seeing hours of our lives spent cultivating the land. This is their normal. Now being in central america we are in the first stage of learning what works here. No matter where or what time as humans we live in, it is important to learn the skills associated with growing food and sharing these valuable lesson with the generations that follow. Growing your own food isnt something that will only save you money, provide you security, contribute to a healthier life, ensures mental clarity and connection to mother earth but small scale farming is best for the environment.

The other main component was to continue our education on natural medicines. Doing different courses on natural health remedies, collecting books to further our education. I am by no means saying there is no good in conventional medicine but it is not to be taken lightly. More often than not equipped with the right information we can heal our bodies from many of the ailments we go to our local GP/health care provider for. Conventional medicine is important to understand but to always ensure you do your due diligence on possible side effects. We have been blessed to be given a temple that is immensely powerful and has the capability to self heal. There is a solution for every ailment in nature.

The second was to take stock of what products we put on our bodies, what products are in our homes which cause more harm than good. This is a journey i had started on prior to our sons birth. Setting up my natural skin and hair care business started off as personal project to eliminate toxic skin and hair care from our home. This also lead to all cleaning products being re examined and replaced. Understanding how much of what touches our skin, the largest organ in our body, goes into our bloodstream. This was a major overhaul all the way to our mattresses.

We also started designing our family home. Making sure that we continued this approach of health over convenience/conditioned behaviour. We wanted to ensure we would live in a building that didnt do us nor the environment any harm. The building process and journey i will go into more depth as it is far too long to fit into one paragraph.

This is a brief glimpse of our journey and what holistic living means to us. All of the above will be broken down further in future posts of course. If there is any specific aspect that stands out or you want to know more of, please feel free to give us a shout.

Until then,

WIth love from us to you

The idea behind decentralized investor is to share the financial part of our journey, how we got to where we are now financially, and importantly how we are increasing our financial stability going forward. We think we’re doing remarkably well, however we haven’t yet reached our goals yet.

Our goals are:
1-maintain our standard of living and
2-ensure our personal freedom.
our readers will know it’s not all glitz and glamour, nevertheless to maintain even a basic standard of living permanently requires significant amounts of money.)

We share our ideas with the hope that our journey will help contribute to our readers achieving their financial goals.
Whatever they may be, probably quite different from our own and maybe more glamorous but equally as important, so if you haven’t set yourselves some important goals yet, now would be the perfect time to start!

We offer two newsletters at present,

Decentralized investor
Our weekly despatch is emailed out to our free subscribers sharing ideas on the current economic climate, how to make sure you are financially literate and the many investment opportunities that we come across, especially the ones we are currently taking advantage of ourselves. we share our insights into market trends and emerging profit opportunities,
ideas on how to improve personal income and other ways in which we continue to secure ourselves now and into the future.

Decentralized portfolio
our paid subscriber service is our comprehensive guide to investing for a real prospect of very good returns, often the goal is to at least double our money or more over time.
Our current focus is in the resource sector, emerging technologies and crypto, with a few other opportunities mixed in.
Often we intend to hold our positions for many months, years or even in some cases decades, buying as low as we can, harvesting profits on the way up and selling when we think further profit potential is no longer viable, risk factors have become to great or when the market variables have changed.
Complete with the names, ticker symbols, where to buy, buy up to price and monthly updates.
The decentralized portfolio let’s our subscribers know exactly where we’re putting our money and saves the subscriber the hard work of countless hours of research. We share our opinions on which brokerage firms we like best, how to sign up, and all the relevant info you’ll need if your joining us on this journey.
While the current cost of the subscription service ($250 annually as a one off payment or $25 a month for 12 months (total $300)) does not compensate us for all the effort that goes into it, we are confident, as the word spreads and our portfolio sees solid profits, in time with increased membership it will do quite well.

I think we decided to decentralise ourselves and our finances in 2015 while living in kenya. Although at the time i don’t think we fully understood what this meant.

Earlier that year we’d left Somalia for Kenya to wait for our sons passport, (Living in somalia and the technicalities of processing his passport is a story for another time). We had moved to Somalia to try living and investing in a completely different socio-economic & political climate. Asli having lived in London most of her life and me in USA, we knew that we wanted to try a different lifestyle. Since Somalia is Aslis birthplace it made sense at the time.

It was during the period of time in Kenya that we realised we wanted more than one place to live and call home. We needed to diversify our finances to enable us to have multiple streams of income in several countries. Had we not moved from London to Somalia and onto Kenya, we may not have been able to experience the pros and cons of each place. This experience taught us putting all your eggs in one basket leaves you exposed and at the mercy of one economy and one government. The cross continent moves we did several times, shipping our belongings all over the place taught us the importance of not leaving ourselves nor our finances overexposed in one place. Each place we have lived has some amazing advantages which are brilliant, the key has been how to get the best out of them all. It’s important to understand you don’t have to be “wealthy” or travel around the world like crazy to diversify and decentralise, that being said, it does take a fair amount of work to know how to use laws in different countries to your benefit. A decentralised life does take some serious thought into what you want out of it for your life and for your loved ones. Once you figure that out then begins the research.

A decentralised life in a day to day setting for us is striving to live a holistic lifestyle.

For us this has meant making sure that we work on securing our own source of food. We have started on our tree nursery on our temporary house here in Belize. Also started our vegetable garden. It is and has always been crucial for us to continue using food as our medicine. Building our medicinal herbal cabinet. Educating ourselves and constantly updating our knowledge on how to best support our bodies to heal with the help of nature, as intended.

We are building our home, with natural materials. Our first temporary home, which will become our guest house eventually for family and friends that visit, is a woodhouse. Our bigger family home will be rammed earth. This means that we will have minimal impact on our environment. When the day comes these building will go back into the earth with minimal damage to the environment. It will be all off grid.

We have started homeschooling our 4 year old and will continue to do so for him and his younger sister. We want to empower them to become critical thinkers. To give them a varied education that does them as WHOLE beings justice. Pass on the tools for them to navigate this world as the free spirits that they are.

Ultimately it is responsible, sustainable living. That is our aim.

In the following posts i will go into each part mentioned above in more detail. It is all work in progress, like we are as human beings. We are currently working on the Belize stretch of our over all decentralised life. We will go into more details about the other countries we have land that wel build in at later dates. For now, this chapter is focused on Belize.

The take away from all this i hope for you is how can you detach from what doesnt serve you, by taking small steps and actions each day. Start from where you are.

With love,

from me and mine to you and yours.