Crazy Good Link

Have you seen this farming family’s channel? Based out of Azerbaijan? No? What!? You must watch it!

https://youtube.com/@country_life_vlog?si=adfBXIRFHZx0Wr8B

I’m going to add photos of my food forest. Some of what they do is achievable. But even I am jealous of the variety of food they can grow. This is a pomegranate flower.

I accidentally stumbled on this channel several years ago. It is the dream we all have of going back to the land. It’s a delicious, bucolic lifestyle. I think their son films it and it is above professional quality. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

But before you decide to sell everything and follow their lead, as a full time home gardener I can tell you a few things you may not see. For one: they don’t get a break. This is all day, every day. They don’t have time for anything else. No grocery store, if they have a bad harvest. No evenings watching TV. No scrolling through YouTube videos (ironically!) They started out without electricity, although they have it now. Their original house looked like a one room, partially underground, hobbit house. They cooked with wood, which meant they had to gather it, split it and dry it.

However, there has to be something that is not shared on this channel. They have endless gardens, endless orchards and she cooks to feed an army. They are probably a part of a communal village. You can hear Muslim calls to prayer occasionally, so they aren’t completely isolated. I also saw, in one video, some royalty (or government officials) come to thank them for increasing their tourism. (Azerbaijan is also in the middle of ethnic cleansing of Armenians, with Christian communities caught in the crossfire. Take that however you want. I don’t think these people are involved in that, in any way, but it is an issue their government has created. So, it isn’t that they live in a heavenly, peaceful, perfect country, although it sure looks like it from this side of YouTube. Plus, the majority of Azerbaijan does not look like this. Most of it is dry desert.)

Second: they grow everything. I mean everything. Stuff that shouldn’t make it through their snowy winters, like citrus trees and pomegranates. They have to be in some sort of sweet spot where everything grows. It is amazing the variety of trees in their expansive orchard. I only dream about having what they have. Plus, they don’t net anything! Where are the animal pests and birds? Where is her vole problem? It’s got to be some sort of magical spell. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature will send things in to feed on abundance, as a way to fill in any gaps. Somehow, they get around that.

The closest place I’ve ever lived to absolute abundance is Kansas. It is not a flyover state. Don’t buy into that. There are parts of Kansas that are absolutely beautiful. Plus, you can also easily grow just about any fresh fruit or vegetable, that you can find in a grocery store, in Central and Eastern Kansas. It’s why it’s called one of the “breadbasket” states. Wheat and other grains grow prolifically in the deep, black, Kansas soil.

Third: they raise and butcher their own animals, large and small. If you think you have the wherewithal to butcher your own animals: I will point to my mother as a good example of why you probably won’t go there (unless there are no other options.) My mom raises chickens and ducks. She needs to get rid of some of them, but she raised them from eggs and they look at her with the trusting eyes of pets. She just can’t do it. My uncle is fine with it. He raises and harvests all kinds of animals. But, you may be in my mom’s situation with too many males and no good way to get around that: because she can’t bring herself to “do them in”. Watching my mom, I realized: I don’t want meat animals. I pick up bugs in the house and throw them outside (well, other than mosquitoes and spiders) because I’m such a pacifist. Or a ninny. I’ll admit to either label.

Four: her husband works as hard as she does and there’s no problem with who does what. My husband is useless outside. But I am useless with computers, so: fair trade. The Azerbaijan family has to do what they do, to survive. That’s a lot of work, and a lot of pressure, to succeed.

At this point I think they do everything, for the channel. They have to be incredibly wealthy from the royalties from these videos, they each have millions of views. I mean they went from building their mud hobbit home, to creating many beautiful brick and glass buildings and running in electricity, (probably for the first time in that village.) I still watch them, because we’re looking at skills maybe only the Amish have, in the US, now.

Five, it’s a multigenerational experience. It’s why none of us have time to do what our ancestors did. We don’t have enough hands. (Plus, none of us want to live with our in-laws!)

Six, I think they are in charge of feeding multiple families in their village. I believe the orchards are also shared between families and even the humongous vegetable garden is communal in nature. I can’t figure out any other reason that they would be cooking so much food in each episode.

Lastly, they have a cookbook out, in English, on Amazon.

https://amzn.to/3VUfzMI

But the recipes are not scaled down, plus they are not native English speakers. There are probably things lost in translation. I own this book. I bought my copy as soon as it came out. I love the cookbook, but boy, I’d really have to work hard to learn to convert everything down for a family of four. I bought it because I love the channel and I have never cooked the kinds of food they eat. It’s more for inspiration, than following directly.

Plus, I don’t know how to cook with wood. I’m not going to be able to aquire that kind of knowledge in this lifetime. If I lived with them, I’d learn quickly. But I live in America, and I am an unusual girl as it is. I cook from scratch every night. My kids don’t know what spaghettios or hamburger helper is. Even with the amount of cooking that I do: I would not attempt a lot of her recipes. Especially the ones for bread, cooked in a wood stove. Nope. I would be completely useless at that.

So, here is the greatest gardening/cooking/visually relaxing channel on earth! But, don’t think you can run out and duplicate this. It would be nearly impossible. Mainly because: we don’t live next door to her and she isn’t teaching us how she does all the stuff they do off screen!

Here is the video channel, back towards when they started it. She is building their mud hobbit hut and brewing tea.

And this is the first video of theirs I watched. (If anyone knows where to get extra large, pretty, enamelware or the glass jars, like she uses: LET ME KNOW!)

I bought a camping samovar, just because of their videos. The one in the above link has thin metal, but I don’t care. Nice ones for daily use, are hundreds of dollars. I’m fine with mine!

PS please don’t follow her canning recipes. We have no idea how quickly she uses the jars, how they’re stored and according to American canning: what she does is not considered safe. (If you want to learn how to can safely: look up Rose Red Homestead on YouTube. She’s a retired university professor and she’ll show you how to do things correctly: https://youtube.com/@roseredhomestead?si=5nFFZKrO5LQR8Bi6

You should also own a Ball Blue Book Canning and Preserving Recipe book)

The Azerbaijan vlog has a sister site, if you are interested:

https://youtube.com/@kend-dadi?si=KjOt0Nk0bXHLP5t5

It used to have different content, but I haven’t kept up with it.