Real Skills for Natural Living

The wild wood around the homestead during an early October snow last deer season.

We are soon to open the Twa Corbies Hollows School of Bushcraft & Homesteading.  That’s quite a mouthful, which I suppose is appropriate for our undertaking is grand.  We will endeavor to provide real and meaningful skills for competent enjoyment of the outdoors and successful, sustainable living.

Unfortunately, bushcraft as presented on television and online, has become something of a circus.  There are televised “expert” bushcrafters pulling risky stunts like eating raw animals, or who seem competent but manage to enter the subarctic wilds during summer and starve for days, which to me is much like managing to emaciate oneself at a buffet.  Likewise, in various bushcrafting magazines and online resources, an endless parade of knives, firestarting gadgets, tents, high tech clothes and innumerable other gizmos are paraded as essential to the bushcrafter’s (and the homesteader’s) success.  It’s a good thing I didn’t know this when I was growing up on my grandfather’s bayou farm, or living at our cabin deep in the Alaskan wilderness.  I would never have managed to get by with a simple flat-bottomed boat and rifle, an ordinary axe and camp knife.

What we’re going to aim to do is something a little different–we’re going to aim to teach people real skills, not sell them on stunts.  Want to venture competently into the woods?  We’ll teach you to find your way navigating by landmarks, stars and compass, how to make shelter with what you have on hand, how to stay warm when it’s cold or start a fire when it’s wet, and how to make your own food for outdoor adventures or identify edible plants and mushrooms in the natural setting so you never have to starve.  Want to learn to live sustainably?  We’ll teach you to grow a garden without chemicals, how to create your own compost, press your own cider, or buy a good horse at a reasonable price and train it to be a reliable work animal and trail horse.

In short, we’ll teach real skills real people can use to get out and live green and well.  That’s what the School of Bushcraft & Homesteading is all about.

We offer a beautiful site.  Twa Corbies Hollow is a semi-secluded homestead in the Nova Scotia highlands.  Set in a valley atop a mountain, surrounded by woods, brush lands and glens, rich with ponds, brooks and springs, the homestead is over a mile long.  We maintain organic gardens and grow nearly all our own food, or forage it from the wild country.  Students will have the chance to learn in a wild setting of intense natural beauty, offering four distinct seasons each of which with its own special challenges and opportunities.

Stay abreast of the site for news on upcoming classes, and welcome to the adventure.