A very exciting step in our lives

For some time now it has been our dream to get a little land in the mountains and to start our farm and homestead. We already own a little bit of land in the north of Ghana but it is only one acre and it can be very difficult to deal with the heat, culture, and politics of living in the north at times along with the logistics of picking up and moving there which is about a 12 hour drive from Accra.

After visiting an area to the north of Ho in the Volta region about 2 years ago when we did a bamboo building training I was in love with those mountains. My wife's father lived in this area of a while and knows the language so he was able to make contact with an agent who had access to some farm lands for sale. So we took a trip last week to check it out.

Ho is about 4 hours from Accra. When we got there we checked into a guest house and then almost immediately linked with the agent and headed into the mountains. He said they had sold 50 acres in this area and another 10 in the previous week. The road was a simple path that the farmers would usually ride trikes or motorbikes on. We went as far as we could in the car. We did get some scratches along the side though from all the tall grass.

The land is located in a big valley between the mountains. It is not right in the mountains directly but kind of surrounded on all sides by them. We got to one area initially. But we needed to meet up with the land owner and surveyor so we had to backtrack and take a second path.

Bjorn took the chance to explore the tall grass.

The second path was very tight with tall grass as you can see in the video. We eventually parked the car and continued the rest of the way on a motorized trike. We climbed a gentle hill and stopped where the forest started to get a little thicker. This is where we were told the land still for sale starts. It was near the top of a gentle hill and had numerous trees along the first side of it. There were views of the mountains to the far side. And even to the side shown above but those were largely blocked by the trees.

The land was green and lush as the rains had recently started.

We took a little walk around the main path we came on went through the land and there was a second path that branched off and went down one side of the land. We walked those paths with about 50 mentors or so to get a little bit of a feel for the place.

I loved the larger trees. So often land for sale in Ghana is just bulldozed bare for land developers or has been logged already for agriculture. This piece had a thicket and some nice mature forest running through part of it.

We opened out heart and the land did speak to us and so we chose to continue. We talked some numbers with the agent and agreed on a price per acre we would pay for the 5 acres we wanted.

The surveyor then started measuring out the land. We followed along the perimeter to get a good idea of where each corner pillar would be. I also got rough whatsapp GPS locations on them so I could later plot them on google earth.

When we get the land documents in the next week I will be able to more carefully draft the exact corners of our land.

In the middle of the land, there is a bit of a meadow. It looks like yam and cassava have been grown here in the past.

This is the view at the top corner of our land it faces the mountain in the first picture but it is hard to see through the beautiful trees. I hope that whoever owns that land will survive. In time if we find the resources we may need to try to buy more land around us.

This is looking down the back line of the land.

After it was all mapped out we went back to the landowner/chiefs house and poured some libations from a bottle of dry gin we brought them. We then talked about the rest of the details. That was Thursday. We made a mistake and the bank that we had the money for the land in did not have a branch in Ho. We had to try to do a same-day transfer of the funds on Friday to an account my wife has at a bank that has a branch there. We ended up waiting all day. And the transfer ended up coming about 30 minutes after the bank closed which was a huge inconvenience as we had to then stay over until Monday.

Saturday we took a field trip to a monkey sanctuary which I will post soon.

When Monday came around we got the money and headed back to the landowner to complete the deal.

Here we will be in the future building a home probably a simple roundhouse to start with using cob and bamboo and doing some permaculture farming. We will save as many trees as possible and plant hundreds more trees that would bear fruit creating a food forest. We will have the trees in some what of rows following the contours of the land and working with what trees are already in place. Between those rows will be small long fields that can be planted, and worked over by pigs, goats, and chickens in a rotational fashion.