- Three years ago, I
drove down to this house, which I did not own, and
was a completely barren lot. And now here I stand three years later with a pretty impressive garden
if I have to say so myself. But not only that, a thriving homestead where I'm capturing my own water, producing a lot of my own electricity, growing my own hens for my own eggs, and developing a ton of
these homesteading skills. So in this video, I wanna take you through
some of the things that I've learned that I find to be the most important when
you're starting out on a homesteading journey. One of the first things I did is replicate my original Epic Garden back in my small front yard urban space. And I found that it was super
rewarding to have the space and to grow all the vegetables,
to have beets, kale, carrots, whatever you can imagine, popping out of the garden. But when you talk about homesteading, you have to learn what to
do with all that produce. Take this plot right here. Right now, it is actually our
Epic top secret test garden. In fact, Paul in the background, he's working on a top secret project, but it used to be a wheat field. I grew a ton of wheat right here, and the proceeds of which are in my hand, I still have a little bit left, and I had to figure out, okay, cool, it's fun that you like to grow all this crazy weird stuff, Kevin, but you have to figure out how to use it. And that's where I
discovered a love for baking. So when you grow your own wheat, you obviously have to
do something with it. And the way I found to use it was to get into making my own sourdough bread. So I stole some sourdough
starter from Jacques on our team. I've kept it alive for a year
or so. Pretty proud of that. And then proceeded to make one of the most aesthetically disgusting
loaves you've ever seen. It was like a manhole size and Jacques called it the horseshoe crab. But I still was hooked, much like I was hooked when
I first started gardening. So what I've started to do is use some of my own homegrown product, whether it be the actual
wheat itself or the potatoes and the rosemary and
the herbs and the eggs that we produce here at the
Epic homestead in recipes. And I've been doing this pumpkin
brioche that I really love. (gentle hip hop music) By the way, this video
is sponsored by Bosch, which unbeknownst to me, I seem to have a ton of their gear in my house. In fact, my dishwasher is also a Bosch. But this mixer, which I've wanted to try for a very long time, which kind of doubles as food processor, ice cream maker, et cetera, that's what I'm gonna be
making this pumpkin brioche in. So we're super thankful to
Bosch for sponsoring the video, allowing us to bring you
some really cool content. This is a cool mixer, guys.
I really am a fan of it. Tons of crazy attachments you can add to really extend the functionality. But in this case, we're gonna be using it to make the brioche,
so let's start mixing. So I had 80 grams, it looks
like, of the whole wheat. So I need about 270 of all-purpose. So the crazy part I learned about brioche is you cut in like a ton of butter, which I'm not mad about. And so in goes one stick. Okay, I've got my little ball of brioche, and now it's going to go into... (dough thuds) For about two and a half hours, we're gonna rise this thing
till it about doubles. So I'll see you then.
(screen wipe whooshes) Powering a homestead is no small feat. It actually takes energy,
surprise, surprise, and you wanna have a plan to develop at least some of that
energy on your own property. So for me, here in sunny
San Diego, California, that was solar up on the roof. Welcome to the roof, my friends. 24 solar panels pumping out
juicy, juicy wattage, 24/7, 365. So solar is obviously a topic that is very dependent on where you live, not only for the sun
conditions of your area, but also for the regulatory climate and the energy climate of your area. So for example, here in
San Diego, California, it's quite sunny, so
it's a great opportunity to install some solar. We have a tax credit of about 22% or so, at least when I installed my panels. And my energy company allows me to do what's called net metering. So let's say one month
I use 1,000 kilowatts, but I generate 1500 kilowatts. What's gonna happen is my
energy company will say, basically you're about
500 kilowatts credit that you can use for a future month when you actually consume
more than you produce. So I can't cash that out for
cold hard cash unfortunately. But I basically have a bank. So in the sunny months
when I'm really not using a whole lot of energy to
heat the home, et cetera, I'm generating a massive surplus, basically spinning the meter backwards. And then in winter right now when I actually do want
to heat up the house, 'cause this is a 100-year-old house that isn't insulated well, I'm actually using a
little bit more energy than I'm producing because
especially in winter, the solar energy production drops off. That's actually not
light for as long, right? The days are shorter. So it's this very complex math. But generally speaking, I'm gonna be able to pay off
my investment in the solar in about six to eight years, after which I'm more or less generating all of my energy for free. Just a few more things on
solar, maintenance wise, every quarter, maybe every half a year, you want to come up, wash them off. Had a lot of crows on here,
kind of pooping on them, a lot of dirt. You'll actually get an
efficiency production gain of about 2 to 3%. I've measured it before
just by hosing these off and then you might have
to replace your roof. So something to consider
when you're pricing this out. Really important to be cost conscious. In my case, like I said,
it's in a 100 year old house. The solar installer said, "We won't do it unless you replace your roof." So I had to price that in and
that was an unfortunate hit. Even still, it ended up being a pretty net positive investment, like I said, after about
six to eight years. And then the final thing I will say is go in clearheaded on this investment. There are a lot of
different ways to go wrong, a lot of different ways to do it, but if you value producing
some energy at your own house, to me there's really no
other option than solar. And then you can get into solar batteries, which allows you to
actually, truly live off grid for a period of time,
should an emergency strike. The next thing I need to share with you is how important I've
found water harvesting, specifically rainwater harvesting. And no matter what I say, no matter how many times I talk about it, someone will always say, "That's illegal." It is not. Actually in
any of the 50 states, you can capture at least
some of your own rainwater. In Colorado, unfortunately, my friends, you can only have either
55 or 110 gallons. I forgot which, but you
kind of give us your water. So thank you for that. Either way, I think it's very important to say thank you to Mother Earth as it rains the life force
of life itself down upon you. And so what I've done here, this is just one of three
different water capture systems I have on the property. This is the simplest one to understand. So you have a little awning right here, think of that as your roof. You have a gutter that captures the sort of pure unadulterated rainwater and all the debris off of your roof. That's gonna come down into
this system right here, which is called a leaf filter. So if I was to pop this off, I've got a bunch of debris here that would've gone into my tank, probably clogged the lines up. So every so often you
wanna clean that out. But you might be wondering how is the water gonna get over here? Because isn't it just gonna
fall right down this pipe? That's how water works. It
follows the rules of gravity. And the answer is yes, it's actually going to
go down this pipe first. Why? Because there is particulate matter, little tiny little bits of dirt that's actually smaller than that filter and it's gonna fall into what's
called a first flush filter. This is basically just
three or four inch PVC pipe that holds a column of water, the first column of water
that falls when it rains. And the reason that's important is because that's gonna be your
dirtiest little bit of water. When it fills up to this level, water's of course gonna divert into here and go into your tank. So something I have to do when it rains is I come down here, there's
a little hose nozzle, and I turn that nozzle. And what that's gonna do,
making use of my resources here, is that's going to drain off into a productive patch in my garden. In this case it's going
into my artichoke patch. I wait for that to run out, and then I'll turn this back
off, thus plugging this, emptying it, and setting
it up for the next rain. And whenever I want to
use my actual rainwater, I can hook a hose attachment
up here and just let this go. (water gushes)
And there you go. I have about 200 gallons
of beautiful rainwater. So this is a small system, but let me show you what
this looks like at scale. Welcome, my friends, to the backyard. This passion fruit vine, in fact is hiding one of my most prized possessions
here at the homestead, which is a 5,500 gallon rainwater cistern. This is what's collecting
almost all of the water off of my main home. The roof that I was on when I was showing you the solar panels, the same system will capture it, but it's actually coming
down a buried pipe that will drop into the
other side of this cistern, and it filters it much the way
that the smaller system did. The only thing I'll say,
and this is something that I didn't think I, I
don't really think I knew when I came into the homesteading journey, is that rainwater capture is almost always going to be more expensive
than just using your city tap. So on a cost basis, you're
making an investment that you're probably not
going to fully recoup. But the way I think about water capture is when you need it, it's priceless, right? And so that's the way I've approached it. I wanna show you, how do you get water out
of this thing, right? I got 5,000 gallons in here,
how do I actually use it? Well, there's a couple of different ways. First of all, the water, you can see your level
by just popping open this little top right here. It's quite full right
now because it's winter and it's been raining. Secondly, you can get the water out much like you would in
the cistern up front, but I've actually added
this pressure sensitive pump and I'll show you how it works. It's actually on right now, but what it requires is water pressure to trigger from this side
to actually fully activate. So this looks like I'm just
pulling from the city hose, but I'm actually not. The second I squeeze this
nozzle, it turns on that pump. And I can use this to
irrigate my pond area, to irrigate the garden,
to water the test garden, to refill the pond. There's a lot of different ways to use it, and believe me, I use it. And so the thing I'll say
about rainwater capture, just to stress it, you can usually get some kind of rebate from the city. And usually for a cistern or a barrel, you can get maybe at least
a couple of hundred bucks, which, that's not nothing. For something like this, it's
a little bit more expensive. It's like one or $2,000. You maybe have to get
some labor to install it. But again, it's one of
those things where like if you need it, you really need it. And on a suburban homestead like this, in an area that's traditionally
very drought stricken here in San Diego, I figured
it was worth the investment. Alright, let's see what
we got going on here. That's about a double rise. What I need to do is divide this into six roughly even pieces. The thing I've learned to make these brioche balls really easily is you basically create the claw. So you come in with a
claw, you come around and you just go... (friction rubbing) And it should get a little
bit of debris on the bottom. That's okay. And then you get a nice
little ball, just like that. Basically those little balls
need to rise into one another and that's what creates that
beautiful brioche pull apart. So we'll see you in a sec. You know, there's a part of
the journey into homesteading I don't think people talk about a lot, and that would be the stress and burnout and overall, maybe anxiety
that you might sometimes feel trying to make all of this stuff happen. I know for myself over the
last three or four years, things have gotten pretty crazy. You had a global pandemic, you had a boom in interest in gardening, obviously that's the business that I run. That's the channel that I run. And so it got very hectic
and very stressful. And I found myself for
the first time in my life experiencing true anxiety
and true panic attacks. And I found that having a hobby that has nothing to do with anything, it almost doesn't even matter, is one of the most helpful things I've found in my homesteading journey, even just my life journey. I've turned to wood carving. Actually, Jacques got me into it. He kind of picked it up and
was talking all about it. And so I really got into it and I've been making, you
know, my own little spoons and a butter knife and I'm working on a
slotted spoon right now. It's not that good, but I'm working on it. And then I really got into like, making little figurines and stuff. And so my point here is to say
that it's not life or death. You know, you gotta figure out a way to live the life that you wanna live. And if you're killing yourself trying to get all this stuff done, you need to have a hobby
to allow you to de-stress. This one's great because you actually have to do it with friends,
hang out by the fire, get a pizza, whatever. But whatever it is for you, I highly recommend prioritizing it. Or three, four years down the line, you might find yourself
like I found myself 30 or 40 pounds overweight, more than I ever thought
I would be in my life. Stressed, having all these panic attacks, and something as simple as
this has really helped me. You may be wondering why are
we in your laundry room, Kevin? Well, that is because it is
about resource management, guys. What better way to use water
twice than your laundry? It actually puts out quite a bit of water and it has its own built-in pump. So it's like the perfect
thing you could ever imagine to create what's called
a gray water system. Now you do have to change your detergent. I use a detergent called Oasis, and I just kind of pour a
little dollop in it right there, do my laundry as normal. But let me show you this. A little magic. Look at this. So there's a system here,
it's called a three-way valve. And if I pull it up like this, I am telling the system,
which is the laundry pump, hey, pump all of that laundry water through this system right here and have it drop down under the house and go out and water something. And this is a really, really clever way to make double use of water because you can almost always get a rebate on installing this, sometimes up to about $500,
(register rings) which is about how much
it costs to install. So you might not even be out of pocket. And let me show you where it goes. So if you look very closely, you will see a little PVC
coming out of my house. I actually drilled a hole
in the side of my house and that is where the laundry water pumps. Now, where does it pump? It actually comes straight
down this line right here and into this patch with these absolutely
beautiful artichokes. These are about three years old now. You can see there are these
little irrigation valves here. That's where the water sprays out. One, two, three of them
kind of in this smiley face. You dig a little trench, fill
it with wood chips as mulch, which allows that water
to kind of spread out. And every time I run the laundry, which is like once or twice a week, I will have water perfectly
irrigating these artichokes. They never get watered by anything that isn't the laundry water. And you might say, that's kind
of gross. Whatever, whatever. It's really not, guys. I
mean, it really is not. I'm using a biodegradable soap and it's a few gallons of
water every single time, and I've had some of my
best artichoke years yet. But that's not the only way
I'm using a gray water system. So I'm kind of crazy. And I actually had a magic
switch installed in my bathroom, in my shower. So if you see this right here, it's up, which means it's going to the sewer water. But if I press it,
(switch clunks) you can hear a little
actuator beneath the house turning a valve that's
actually sending the water out to one of my most prized possessions. So this is one of my prized possessions. It's the outdoor shower. It's
not the one I wanna show you, but this one as well, will
rain down beautiful water, actually quite a relaxing experience. All of this water goes into my productive front yard orchard. Now we get into a part of
the home setting experience that it's still gardening,
but it's fruit tree care and orcharding, and it's so, so rewarding. But it just requires a different mindset, a lot more patience, and frankly, a lot more
planning and knowledge. So take this side right here,
this is one of my peaches, did really, really well this year. This is the first stuff I ever put in, which would be my 15 or so citrus that maybe two, three years later are finally starting to pay off. I mean, look at this Satsuma,
absolutely delicious. If you're a California person, you know them as California Cuties, which I used to eat all the time at recess back in elementary school. But the thing I wanna
stress here is the planning, thinking ahead. Because in orchard care, you're not gonna get a fruit for two or three years sometimes. Maybe you get it a little bit faster if you buy a bigger plant,
but you wanna make sure that your plants aren't
gonna run into each other, that you've selected the right varieties. That if it is a variety
like an apple or a nectarine or a peach, that requires what's called cold hours or frost hours. You wanna make sure that
you actually get that amount of chill hours in your area. So in this case, there's
basically like two apples I can grow in San Diego
that work really well, similarly with peaches. But then daddy citrus just came home because this is the type of stuff that I can really grow in my climate. So I went buck wild with it. Now if you have small
space, I really recommend a method called "Backyard
Orchard Culture". There's a guy named Tom Spellman
out of Dave Wilson Nursery I've learned a lot from, and that's why you see
me doing the unthinkable and planting my citrus four feet apart. There's about 15 citrus in this row, guys, and they are all very close together. Why? Because I actually
don't need 270 limes, lemons, oranges, blood oranges, et cetera. I'd actually prefer like
40 or 50 a season of each. That's what I can do
by keeping these trees a little bit smaller,
a little bit tighter. So every single summer,
it's called summer pruning, I'll come through and I'll
just chop the canopy down. Actually, I'll do that with
something like the peach, the apple, these
pomegranates you'll see here. Because yes, I am reducing production, but it's a backyard or front
yard homestead approach in a suburban setting. So I just don't need that much. I wanna really stress that
it's such a rewarding thing, having a productive fruit orchard. But you do have to change your approach in how you manage it. Speaking of things that require patience, these little nuggets, my hens. Getting into chicken keeping has been exceptionally rewarding, both just sort of personally having all these little animals around. It's been very enriching. But of course you get the eggs, right? And you get the chicken manure and you can use that manure
in your garden system. So I've raised nine, actually 10, 10 hens from baby chick level.
(hens clucking) We lost one of them, our poor Gucci. But it's been so, so rewarding and it just brings a
richness to the experience that I think I don't
think I can do without. I don't think I'll ever
not gonna have chickens in some capacity. So the things that I would say, we've done many a guide
on keeping chickens, is really decide how hard you're gonna go, and start, I would say kind of small. Because there's something
called chicken math, and I thought I'd never fall prey to it. I was like, you know what? I
have six, I don't need anymore, now I have nine, right? And I'm thinking about maybe 12. So it's part of the journey. Butter, you wanna say hi to everyone? (cartoon whooshing sound)
Nope, she does not. It's part of the journey. And you're gonna have some high highs when you see your baby hens
kind of raise and grow up and you know, mature and
start laying and producing, and you're gonna have some low lows. We've already lost a hen, unfortunately, it was a very sad day. I really did not take it
very well for a little bit because I thought maybe
I was responsible, right? And so it's just a part of the journey I think is so valuable. I'm gonna show you the
henhouse over here in a second because not only do you
get to interact with them, you get their eggs, which like
I said, my girlfriend and I, we have not bought eggs in over a year, but you get the manure, which is gardener and composter's gold. So here's the henhouse side of the coop, and it's probably a little bit dirty, so I'm a little embarrassed
to show it to you. But you can tell there's quite a bit of chicken manure in here, because the chickens, they'll roost on these little roosting bars and at night they're dropping droppings. So you can see, let me
grab a little fork here, what I can do. So I can come in, scrape
off this top layer with a bunch of chicken manure. And what I like to do is I don't apply this directly to the garden. It is what's called a hot manure, which means that it's
actually quite active. And if you were to just apply
that directly to the garden, in my opinion, not a great idea. You can burn your plants,
but if you cycle it through a traditional
hot composting system, it works really, really well. So that is what we tend to do. This is the five bay composting system. Very traditional composting method, roughly three cubic feet,
or three by three by three. You can go bigger, but you don't wanna go
much smaller than that. And so we use it in a
left to right system. So you'll build a pile. As that pile starts to break down, you use your compost fork and turn it, bring it down to here,
then bring it down to here. And you can see you start to
get some really fine stuff. So that's how the chicken
manure plays into the compost. And the compost really is your catchall for all of the organic matter waste that's coming off of
the homestead property. Whether it be the food that
you're growing in the garden or the food that you might
be buying and supplementing that you have waste and scraps of, it all ends up here. So you can start to see how the homestead, suburban or otherwise, becomes
almost a philosophy, right? The sun is shining in the sky. Let's capture what we
can and use what we can. The rain is falling from the sky, let's capture what we
can, use what we can. I'm taking a shower? Well, I'm gonna reroute
that to an orchard, which I'm going to use that fruit. Once I use that fruit, well I'm not eating
the rind of the orange, and I'll throw it in here, or I'll give it to the chickens. The chickens will eat it.
They'll convert it into eggs. They'll convert some of
that waste into droppings that will then come back into here. So you have this whole
catchall sort of cycle, circular, whatever you
wanna call it, system that just really works well. And when you have them all
running, it is a beautiful thing. In a moment of truth, my
friends, look at that. The rise. There is one more thing to do though. We're gonna use one more of my hen's eggs. Make an egg wash. Kind of fun. A little water, one
egg yolk, mix it all up and we're just gonna
brush this over the top. Give it that nice sort
of golden brioche vibe. (gentle music) The time is here, my friends. Look at this. Tell me I shouldn't start a
baking YouTube channel, right? I mean, come on. I'm gonna let this cool. Look at that. Look at that. Pumpkin brioche. We're gonna let this cool for a second and I'll share with you
my most important lesson. The journey of a homestead
is not really complete if you're just doing it by yourself. That is why my final lesson for you, the thing that's most valuable
is the power of community. (smoke plume puffs)
Here we go. The garden boys. - It smells amazing in here. - Yeah, a little brioche.
- Yeah, I'll say. - So, Jacques, you guys know, he's been on our team for quite some time, Paul, he has been on the team, but you haven't been on the camera. - Yeah.
- A little bit. - We're getting there.
- Shy guy Paul. (they chuckle)
We call him Cactus Paul. Now Paul is the new Jacques. He is the guy behind the camera. There's a ton of people here at Epic and also in a community
that I think is important if you are enjoying the
home setting journey, you have to share it with someone, right? - Yeah.
- So here you go, guys - Good to see we're all very excited. - Little brioche.
- Oh my gosh. - Dude, it's steamin'.
- That steam. - I don't know if you could see that steam vision right there. - Thank you to Bosch for
sponsoring this video. By the way, I have a new book coming out, "Epic Homesteading",
coming out in January, so you can check that
out if you wanna learn a little bit more about
how to do all this stuff I just showed you in this video. What do you think guys? - Same.
- I like that. Woo! That's delicious, man.
- That steam. - My hat's literally
off to you, right now. (they chuckle) - You'd never see his hat off.
