elisa rathje lives, writes and films the small work* at appleturnover, a small farm on a small island.
appleturnover is home to a pair of little milk goats, a trio of geese, a flock of chickens and runner ducks, a small homeschooling family of artists, writers and filmmakers, as well as a charming farm cat.
The micro-farm is part walled kitchen garden, part silvopasture. All 1 ½ acres of this century-old heritage apple orchard are filling up with a forest of food, fibre, fodder, fuel and medicinals, with ponds, a root cellar, a tiny summer house, an art studio, espaliers, grape arbours, composting toilets, hazelnut greywater mulch beds, hidden rainwater catchments, untilled potagers and a creek running through a thicket.
Focusing on traditional skills, regenerative living and creative responses to everyday life in an era of ecological emergency, together we are documenting slow, simple approaches to becoming resilient at home and in our island community on ĆUÁN (Salt Spring Island in the Salish Sea.)
We make short films of our experiments in regenerative ways of living on the smallholding and the island beyond. if, like our subscribers, you find it supports you to make the world you want to live in, become a patron of the small work. this is community supported activism.
new audience-supported projects include:
new films that respond to audience questions,
the journal of small work* series which looks at frameworks for approaching the challenge of learning to live regeneratively, drawing on practical, lived experiments to illustrate the possibilities in filmed, written and audio works:
a radio project – the podcast – in both audio and video form that draw on my writings that inform and accompany the films.
the appleturnover letters, new writing that explores the possibilities of living in ways that make more life, while adapting to profound uncertainty and imagining positive, regenerative futures;
an upcoming *bibliography project that gives you resources that ground this regenerative work, and
the journal of small work* book, released to patrons in serial form, page after emerging page. thank you for your encouragement!
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