About Darshan Mayginnes

Fifty years of homesteading wisdom from one piece of land

Darshan Mayginnes has spent more than fifty years living close to the land on a remote 108-acre homestead beside Northern California’s Mendocino National Forest. He began as one of California’s early back-to-the-landers, then spent a lifetime growing food, building shelter, tending trees, preserving the harvest, heating with wood, and learning the quiet rhythms of a self-reliant life.

He planted his first bare-root apple trees in 1975, and those trees still bear fruit today. Over the decades, the orchard grew into a living record of patience, resilience, and long vision, with heirloom apples and a full array of fruits, nuts, and vegetables becoming part of the daily life of the homestead.

The homestead runs on a practical blend of old and new. Wood heat remains central to winter life, with five to seven cords a year, mostly deadfall from the property, stacked two years ahead in an old greenhouse converted into a woodshed. When the sun shines, the solar array powers the homestead. When it rains, the micro-hydro takes over. Darshan has not needed a backup generator in more than three years.

He cans, dries, ferments, and root-cellars the harvest. In February, he opens a jar and tastes August.

He still climbs the cherry trees in his eighties.

Darshan did not write Homesteading for the Mindful Survivor as a theory. He wrote it from lived experience, as lessons learned slowly, sometimes the hard way, through decades of weather, work, mistakes, harvests, repairs, and gratitude. His purpose in writing is simple: to help preserve practical homesteading skills, encourage people to live closer to nature, and pass on what his life on the land has taught him.

This is not just a book about land. It is a book about how to joyfully thrive.

The Mindful Survivor Series

Homesteading for the Mindful Survivor is the first book in The Mindful Survivor Series. The series was created for readers who feel drawn toward simple living, practical resilience, and a deeper relationship with nature, from those planting a first tree or small garden to those creating a homestead of their own.

The books combine practical skills with a quieter inner vision: how to grow food, preserve the harvest, use resources wisely, live with greater attention, and find joy in a life shaped by the seasons.

A windowsill. A balcony. A backyard. A small plot of rural land. The scale does not matter. The willingness does.

Publisher

Homesteading for the Mindful Survivor is published by Project Zenith LLC, the publishing and stewardship company behind The Mindful Survivor Series.