It has been far too long since we shared a proper update here.
When Kirsten and I first moved to My Home Farm, this website became a place to document our new life in the countryside. We wrote about sustainability, gardening, our home and the many lessons that came with leaving our old lives behind and starting something completely different.
Over time, My Home Farm became Kirsten and Mars, but the spirit of the site remained the same. It was our little corner of the internet and a record of the things that interested, challenged and inspired us.
Life, however, has a habit of taking you in directions you never anticipated.
As our interests grew into much larger projects, this website gradually received less of our attention. It was never a conscious decision to abandon it. We simply became increasingly absorbed in other things, and before we knew it, months had passed between posts.
We have therefore decided that it is time to breathe a little life back into Kirsten and Mars.
This site may no longer document every gardening project, change around the house or experiment in sustainable living, but those things are still very much part of our lives. We continue to garden, grow things, work on our home and enjoy the countryside. We have simply chosen to keep more of those everyday moments to ourselves.
Instead, Kirsten and Mars will become a place where we occasionally share updates from the very different journeys our lives have taken us on.
Where My Journey Has Taken Me
For me, the interest in renewable heating that began on this website eventually grew into Renewable Heating Hub, something that has come to dominate a huge part of my working life. What began with our own experiences of heating a rural property developed into a much wider interest in heat pumps, renewable technologies and the realities of transitioning homes away from fossil fuels.
Renewable Heating Hub has since grown into a large community and an important part of the conversation around renewable heating in the UK. It has brought countless challenges, fascinating conversations and opportunities that I could never have imagined when I wrote those first heating-related posts here.
In many ways, the path I am now on started with this website.
Kirsten and Womankind
Kirsten’s journey has taken her in a completely different direction.
Her own experiences with endometriosis, a medically induced menopause and, later, perimenopause led to a deep interest in women’s hormonal health. What began as a search for answers gradually became a determination to help other women find the information, understanding and reassurance that had so often been missing from her own experiences.
That determination has grown into Womankind, an independent women’s hormonal-health platform built around a simple belief: women deserve better information about their bodies and their health.
Womankind looks beyond a single hormone, symptom or stage of life. It explores the many ways hormonal health connects with menopause, mental health, gut health, skin and hair, vaginal health, sleep, nutrition and a wide range of often overlooked or misunderstood conditions.
It is an ambitious and rapidly growing project, and one into which Kirsten has poured an enormous amount of work, research and personal experience. Seeing it develop into such a valuable resource for women has been incredibly rewarding, and I know there is a great deal more still to come.
And Something Completely Different…
Alongside Renewable Heating Hub, I have also spent more than two years working on something I have wanted to do for a very long time: writing my first novel.
It has been an entirely different kind of challenge.
I have now finally reached what I would cautiously describe as the final editing stage. As I am discovering, “final” can be a rather optimistic word when it comes to editing a novel, and the process is still taking considerably longer than I expected. Nevertheless, it is something I am enormously excited about.
I am not going to say too much about it here because it deserves a post of its own, but I will share more about the book, the experience of writing it and what happens next very soon.
For now, this is simply our way of saying that we are still here.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to visit, read and follow along.
There is plenty more to come.