He quit all to build off-grid village, mountain-long Earthship

oh they're big wow it's nice in here this is really Lush to get out here you're not close to a town right the supermarket is how far about 45 minutes so you're really planning ahead like you don't go every day to the supermarket no well we between now and October we eat nearly completely from our land whoa I moved here in May of 08 so it's been 15 years were you looking for something remote you know when I drove down this road with a steep Cliff going on so nervous some people are white knuckled but I love the mountains and I love the dense Green Forest and when I drove down here I did before I even got to the land the decision was made I I already knew on an internet search so you're doing a lot of driving around I was looking at vacant land of my options it was one of the more affordable 225 000 for 160 Acres you know probably because it has access problems I think the real estate agent told me it was just not easy to get to but that was a plus for me what do you mean by access problems well in the early days there was no bridge going over our Creek so I waited but my chainsaw over my head and waded through chest High freezing water to get to my land are you gonna drive I am that's your Bridge that's my bridge after I think the next year I built a bridge I'm a Michigan boy I really want to be away from large population centers we're seven hours from Portland seven hours from San Francisco I looked between Eugene and Redding and I think I visited about 25 properties and you know I think in the early days if I could have put this property outside of a major metropolitan area I might have done it I was a little more attached to the world then that's our Solarium wow and you picked it for Sunday exposure I'm guessing yeah the Mountain Ridge runs East and West so you have a south facing slope for agriculture now now I feel strongly that this is the exact perfect place for me growing food and living in nature and sustainably is it's what I want to do it's it's it has awe and curiosity it was the right land for the project that I wanted to create I would say for six or seven years I've called us self-sufficient The Hobbit Hall okay and this has a name treehouse very fancy naming and what do you have on the back I have a rebar and t-posts and that's just because you're building something it's an Ever evolving project to contain goats so I've developed three coming up on four pastures for our goats keeping them away from our fruit and nut trees My Goats forage and if I say b-a-a-a-a they come right oh really yeah it's very exciting [Applause] we used to spend what haters becomes really expensive it used to be five bucks a bail it's 33 dollars a bail now so uh we don't spend much on any more and we have I'm gonna need all of this [Applause] milk is such a great survival food you know milk and potatoes are nutritionally complete on their own you can live forever but the Irish tripled their population with milk and potatoes right how much time do they have out they were out for an hour this morning okay an hour and a half hahaha I'm craving some more fencing infrastructure right now so that I hope I can actually just let them go forage all day and that is a xagonal hexagonal and it's a place to stay it's where I live I came here for what I call the right reasons I wanted to live simply I'm a Henry David Thoreau fan oh wow it's great nothing too fancy you know Henry David Thoreau said simplify simplify simplify and I found deeper satisfaction in my life when I simplified I started by throwing out clothes I didn't wear and decluttering and every time I did that it felt better I don't really need much I have a place to sleep it's actually it's way more space than I need I don't even have electricity but you have something over there now I do it's a portable power station and in fact I have a Wii boost that boosts my sell signal we get like one bar but now I get two or three bars with 4G which I only use about 10 minutes a day it's funny that's your only plugin [Laughter] huh yeah I don't even like this whole Space down here I hardly ever use it I could live in a tent what's ironic is when I live back in Michigan my house how big you know I think it was about 2 600 square feet myself you know um I just didn't need a house that big and now this is I think this is 150 square feet 25 squared for you to be found in me all of our our kitchen our bath for all shared facilities so I don't really need much this is my first Greenhouse that I built it's super hot yeah I built this to get as hot as possible it has black granite floors we actually use it mostly for drying for making raisins and drying fruit and nuts oh it's just really hot it's hot oh I lived in here for three years did you really all year round yeah in the summer I just don't hang out here in the day I would just come here at night yeah I lived in here for three years I have lived primitively I've become Wealthy by making my needs few and providing one for myself but now we just have an extra bed for anybody that wants to sleep in it a little brown bed too yeah that's another holiday we have around college and these are acorns and filberts when you dry them and you let them sit for a year they can have no loss of nutritional value for over eight years acorns they crack and process better cool and then you make Acorn what but yeah I also got free tile I really tried to use all recycled and donated materials so all my Tile and Granite I got for free and yeah it's got lots of mirror to reflect light and um the granite you get for free why well they have to pay the ticket to landfills the countertop shops so all these are pieces that are too small to make a countertop and they have pallets and pallets of of beautiful Granite that they're so happy for you to come and pick it up because they don't have to take it to a landfill so you thought okay floor will be Granite because I want it to be I wanted to absorb heat to absorb heat but in the end it ends up being too hot for most of the year for a greenhouse but it ends up being really great for drying okay lose weight while you're in here sweat lodge let's go look at the solarium wow this is huge what is this the earthships solarium you know I was always intrigued by the concept of the Earthship right it Heats and cools itself and especially when I built that one and it was too hot the Earth Sheltering of the building like you know it should be 120 in here right now it feels good exactly I thought it was going to be really hot it's not it really regulates the temperature I have a lot of thermal mass in this building the sidewalks the water features the the Earth sheltered wall so it absorbs all the heat during the day and then it gives it off at night so it has an even temperature a lot of food comes out of here I've got some squash and some pumpkins in here and some broccoli Chinese cabbage Chote and brown cherries how long did it take you to build it took me a little over a year though yeah yeah but we have grapes kiwis and passion fruits going up the uh and I'm amazed at how fast they actually went up into the rafters yeah uh they seem to plants seem to like it yeah I love it it keeps going how long is this did you say it's 200 feet long wow why so long why so long it's what fit into the landscape you know past this point you were starting to get into less light because it was shaded by those trees actually in the beginning I wanted to go farther and I still may I still may continue it I did it on a shoestring budget like all the wood comes from the land right every single post and beam and rafter all came from here so it was a pretty big job which would be probably the most expensive part you took it from if you were gonna buy it would have been sixty thousand dollars too just to build it to buy all these beams and boats for sure what you get for free and and I got all these for ten dollars each these windows what are they is it glass yeah you go to a glass shop and they're uh when people recycle their sliding glass doors they're the inserts and uh I got 131 of them for ten dollars each so you put in here so this is the kitchen and living room right so it's it is a home as well it's a greenhouse home and have you lived in it or will you I lived in it while I built it for two years when I first started building I I put a mattress on the floor over there on two pallets and I lived in here for almost two Winters and how was it it's good I look it has wood stove in here and I could I could frame this out and insulate it okay it would be a whole different experience so you could keep this separate from the rest this would be only insulated yeah and putting a bedroom in here was was sort of part of the premise I thought it would be really interesting to live in the jungle right you know when we go for Redwood walks people say oh my God I love to live in there and you really wouldn't because the Redwoods it's so damp your ears and your shoes would turn green with molds but you know I've created enough ventilation in this building that you don't really have that problem I just thought living in a greenhouse really sounded interesting yeah like your minimalist kitchen sink in there that was an afterthought because I didn't Plumb it so it just goes into the bucket right because you have so much water coming into here you see it all there it's part of the line yeah yeah maybe one of the most valuable features of the land is that we have gravity-fed water systems from Springs if there's a solar flare or an EMP or a Cyber attack and suddenly there's no electricity for whatever reason if you're pumping your water up from the ground using electricity you don't have a fob I always have irrigation and water supply I just put these pumpkins in here I have a sprinkler system installed I don't want that plate have it down yet it's still working on that you don't seem that concerned though I like to water it by hand it's really not a lot of time and I can be specific with plants she has a lot of this whatever it is they're potatoes potatoes oh so this is important I mean this is a source of carb that you're growing yourself yeah so they're such a great they store well all winter right so if we don't have electricity when the explorers came back from South America they brought back potatoes to Europe and the Irish double tripled their population and they found out that milk and potatoes are nutritionally complete you can live your whole life on milk and potatoes so we have milk and potatoes here this tub here is what well that was a fish experiment a fishing pond plant experiment I'm actually I'm going to grow coffee in here if I put my coffee there but it didn't like it it was too close to the windows coffees like shade and they want a buffered climate they don't want anything under 32 degrees okay so I think we're going to experiment with coffee plants in there well this is a carob and chocolate the cacao tree is doing great my idea with the parakeets is I'm going to let them out in the fall and they're going to fly all around and hopefully even eat bugs you know eat the the non-beneficial bugs so kind of pest control yeah natural Pest Control we had over 400 pounds of grapes last year I made a lot of rain I love our homemade raisins are amazing we have little turtles and frogs that come here so I'm I put a couple little ponds in for them do they do anything for the ecosystem or is it just bun well I think everything does something for the ecosystem right as much biodiversity like we have a bat house on the side of this building to promote bats but every bat eats a thousand mosquitoes a day so yeah you know who wants more mosquitoes whoa look at this ducks and fish and you created a fish pond yeah we got a little baby ducks just born four or five days ago and they ducks for eggs or well they do produce eggs but they also they eat slugs as Bill Mollison famously said you don't have a slug problem you have a duck deficiency and the fish well the fish keep the mosquitoes otherwise the mosquitoes would be tons of them here a little even there's mosquito fish and even goldfish they eat all the mosquito larvae well come on and I'll show you our Our Community Hall [Music] yeah it really changed when I built this building we had a place it became a community after we built this how did you build this this doesn't look like something you could do by hand on your own really now this is my only rectilinear structure yeah everything else is odd shaped attention when it came to building things so but I also made lots of mistakes a lot of building is intuitive right like you know about what a board will span wherever I can I use logs from the property so that the the ridge beam is a log just figured that you don't know architect read it out just figured it out we have our community meetings here most of the year it's nice to have a wood stove and a place to no grease in our country Plumbing explain that what's your Country Plumbing it's just a pipe it's nothing fancy I'm going weird I'm not going to some it goes down the hill right yeah you're not connected here obviously no no no no no did you say how many people are here now I'm in the community there's four here and there's four more that's joining us we basically have eight people yeah this is where we do laundry and Refrigeration and storage we've got about six million calories stored I'm an unabashed prepper I'm not shy about it at all I can feed about 20 25 people just in case things change drastically we definitely do buy groceries I mean we buy bread and Grains but at any given day if suddenly there were no grocery stores and electricity we would barely blink or in case like you can't make it to the Supermarket or as simple as that and then to all some sort of disaster like is there a range of prepping there is a range like for instance in 1859 the Carrington event happened we had an x 30 solar flare there were auroras at the equator and an ignited Telegraph wires all over the country or brownouts blackouts like the electric grid can be messy right like Cyber attack EMP there's just a lot of things going on that point to the fact that being self-sufficient is not a crazy idea anymore yeah I'll show you our Root Cellar and our pastors back here you know I think 20 years ago if you were looking to do this people kind of look at you funny like you were in a cult no no matter where I go if we end up talking about this project nearly everyone is inspired I bet you eight out of 10 people say oh my God I would love to live off the land this looks big it's a 10 by 20 Root Cellar so I built it into the hillside okay yeah it's nice and cool in there okay I think that's a good place to go oh nice it's a short tool it's a dark cool place to store root vegetables and a lot of our flowers and cooking oils and salmon we just made oh I put my kimchi in the fridge um I just made a bunch of kimchi from vegetables here okay it's quite a hike to get up to the top up to the lodge this is a road that was right here uh this property was logged in 1969 so it had even though there were trees this big around in this road there was still a Vestige of a road so it made it easier to clear and there was something of a rock base underneath so the loggers helped me out and Timber processing Zone I had it rezoned to live here oh you did how complicated was that easy simply are you filling out a form stated I had to have a biological and a geological study to make sure there was no Northern spotted owls things like that so maybe I did spend I don't know twelve fifteen thousand dollars to actually get the permit approved so when you came the road was just covered in stumps or Fallen logs that they've left behind but no it was just trees trees and bushes and you know couple days with a chainsaw and a bulldozer and it was clear the fourth takes over I guess it does nature reclaims what's hers my first task was when I first got here is I started down by where the bridge is at now and followed this road all the way up to the top I know you wanna 140 Acres 160 Acres oh wow this is big you have a tent on your roof yeah David likes to sleep under the stars who's he one of the uh David's one of our members Colin members members yeah yeah community members yeah and the round why round it's the most efficient space to heat insulate low maintenance knock knock hello thank you oh nice feels good in here yeah and like I I even I had a mill at the time so even the dimensional Lumber I milled from logs on the property this is great it just dips down you just you just created a well conversation pit because you wanted to create Community here yeah it adds a little Dimension to the building a little uh depth and and so down in here you wanted to sort of almost Force Community uh forces strong word but yeah you know Frank Lloyd Wright designed for socialness right he uh made all the rooms we should hang out with bigger ceilings in your bedroom with little ceilings and you kind of design in a social functionality yeah yes a lot of these houses have like you call the conversation pay exactly yeah does it work I mean do people use it do people really get in here and like they really do but I used to rent this out as well we had a couple of orchestras and a couple of bands that came up here and made CDs so we've got a lot of use out of the lodge oh wow and it keeps going up I see all the books shelves this is incredible like you decided to have these these bookshelves that are uh exposed yeah you needed a rail there so uh so you didn't fall into this section so why not bookshelf we have tons of books yeah it grows every year our library does yeah you want to go up well hello hi so this your your home then yeah your bedroom yeah do you have one bed one of the beds that's great how long have you been here um two weeks do you plan to stay or is it a short-term thing I'd like to stay if I can does it take getting used to being in a a communal space like like this with no and there's no barriers between the bedrooms we respect each other's space do you is this a communal kitchen down here or no it is okay these beans are huge from the property yeah yeah well everything came from there did you Mill some of this I milled a bunch of it yeah yeah I had a I had a a single blade Mill um in the early days three stories then yeah three and a half really if you count the conversation pitch there's four different levels well under tanned up top so yeah yeah is there a seniority with the beds the very first person here is the captain he's upstairs you gotta be very careful coming up here if you get any steps are very narrow they're narrow aren't they yeah yeah I just moved here from Chicago so I've been like all my stuff like pretty much crammed in here you know this is a stove I don't really use it during the summer because it gets too hot up here yeah but this is my little power station so my two solar panels charged that a hundred percent every day and that will run my lights charge on my devices and everything it's great oh my gosh look at that you see the uh yeah right the real this is this is funky this is funny this is the solid roof and if you're actually very gentle about it you can yeah okay look at my little solar setup it feels like you're right in the forest because you have the thoughts on the Birdsong the stars at night are crazy which is why I sleep in the tent it starts do you want to watch animals that just come up here because it feels like part of a us being a coyote you haven't seen a bear but they're all uh you know it's all part of the balance of the habitat oh and there's somebody back there in a tent uh well that's unoccupied at the moment okay but you've had there's been people right yeah yeah so what made you think to put a tent out here did you just one day say wow this would be like a that's the beauty to having the sodded roof do you how do you access this tent just you don't walk around do you precarious oh my God I would never want to walk out here too late at night but and actually what I use it primarily for you see I got my little chair in here I come out in the mornings and I sit and I meditate then I take the chair out and lay my mattress down at night and look at the stars three months uh I do yeah yeah I just retired I wanted to find a community that wasn't like super ideological in any way you know like any like spiritual banter political band that was mostly just about sustainable farming in a beautiful environment hmm I should be able to do that just kind of invite people onto land our summers are so easy it's so nice to sleep under the stars it's just a neat thing and I mean it seems It's kind of everyone's dream in a way like okay I want to buy some land and grow my own food and start a community right you know that was one of the most surprising things like I didn't tell a lot of people what I was doing here like for instance I I bought my house back in Michigan from the police chief and he stopped by and he said oh I see you're moving and I said yeah and he goes well what are you doing and I told him what I was doing and he was like oh my God I always wanted to do that and you know I bet at least five or six out of ten people when they know what it is that we're doing here go oh my God that's my dream and probably you know like eight out of ten it's very interesting to them I think it's a truly a zeitgeist something new coming in yeah I hear our friend David is building a cabin so he's somebody that wants to be part of the community under this building his own yep he's a Community member and um it doesn't cost anything to live here you just build the cabin I have an application process on our website hi how's it going just got in yeah yeah made it fine you found it oh yeah directions we're good yeah The Hobbit hole I built really as a rental it just seemed like a fun project apply for this oh cool a little underground cave and just yeah so fun to create wow what do you have in here you have a bed a round bed because hobbits live in round beds don't you know that everybody knows that yeah and okay and then a wood stove yeah it's kind of a damp cave in the winter uh with our heavy rains so the wood stove's a must then other than that it's a nice cool place in the summer right all of our Granite that we find and this is water coming from Springs gravity fed grapes wow sorry yeah Vancouver Washington yeah nice have you stayed in the hobbitable before and you're ready for this place because it's off-grid you have it's composting utilities no utility bills yeah yeah thank you you built this into the hill well there was a little level spot I have to find you know I go to regular Farms that have 30 Acres of flatness and I drool oh my God like all the things I could do here in this particular land it tells me where things can go and the Terrace yeah I ended up terracing this so I could put some mixing Gardens edible yeah there's Rosemary and lavender look at all the grapes in there it's gonna be a harvest wow yeah in here it's quite clear you earning some trees that are protecting you and down below you are planting some trees you can get food from yep and then you are getting down to the housing part and to the gardens right look at the edge of a forest it looks just like that there's Big Trees smaller trees bushes and and then you know Meadow and the yet of a forest is productive it's the most productive part of a forest so why do you build all these cabins for other people for yourself I don't know I love engineering and building different things like the first building I built was the little A-frame cabin and the second one was shaped like a half moon and my next one I'm going to build is a pyramid I just like engineering different structures rectilinear is kind of boring to me Maybe is someone staying in there I don't think so we can go up and find out Knock I'm pretty sure there's nobody up the kind of person that wants to rent a cabin out in the middle of nowhere it's my people right hello you do that because that's a way to kind of help cover costs yeah it funds projects and it keeps it interesting especially if there have been sometimes months here where I've been by myself built right around the tree it is so did you use like the Garnier bolts we just started with him a long time ago or what did you use for uh this particular tree house has Garnier limousine it does a Decker yeah yep there I don't even like heights very much so I was going to build this and I got up here and I was white knuckled uh pee my pants so there's a buddy of mine who does this for a living in fact he used to work with Michael Garnier not your ladder yeah I built the ladder yeah I built the stairway and the ladder I built everything on the land except for the treehouse my how many feet down a little a lot it's got to be 30 or 40 feet I don't even like to be out on the edge like this I even have in mind to put a tree house and then and then a rope walkway from here to over there that'd be kind of fun the disadvantage of this land is that it's mountainous and hilly and you have to Terrace so right for instance here this is our Apple Terrace where there's 14 apple trees and you had a Terraces did you have to dig I actually dug by hand how long did it take it took me three days it's not as bad as you might think pickaxe and of course I was 15 years younger than that so you just kind of dug into the dirt it's not clay clay our dirt is Clay okay it's a little harder yeah Clay and rock it's not that easy to dig into but the nice thing is is you can cut it like that and 30 years later it'll look just like that we have very stable soils here you can see the gummy berries you plant them because not only are they nice berries to eat they're what gummy bears are based on because they're kind of chewy and they kind of taste like gummy bears but the birds quite like them so the birds will come here and eat them and drop their little fertilization bombs and it's a natural way to keep your soils fertile it's a nitrogen fixing Bush oh wow oh there's ton up there according to permaculture principles you put nitrogen fixing bushes in between the trees so there's well it's succession planting so you have big Oaks and dug Furs behind to block the wind and then you have your fruit and nut trees on another level and then below that you have berry bushes and then on the ground you have vegetables so you're using all of the Sun we have about every about every kind of fruit tree you can think of these are kiwis figs Hazelnut and grapes and creating biodiversity I'll plop we have pluots and apricots and meddlers and um yeah about anything I can get to grow we have over 100 fruit and nut trees so it keeps going yeah we have all this terrorists the only reason we live A Step Above The Flintstones is that we have a Wood-Fired sauna it's our major luxury we actually have a Wood-Fired hot tub too but we use this as a cold plunge it takes too long to heat this up so it actually ends up working out well I'll show you of our steam room we get this stoked up to 145 degrees and then we go do the cold plunge it has a cold shower in it but we're working on a fancy wood burning hot shower you uh get a fire going here and you throw water on the stove it has a receptacle and then it steams up yeah pretty fancy huh yeah for us you can't kill these Maples uh the goats Maples are they will go nuts for it so I cut these branches off and give them to the goats and they're they love it ecstatic yeah they get all excited my favorite permaculture guy is sepultzer and he talks about mimicking nature and in nature there is no waste there's zero waste in nature I mean I dumpster dive for that tile to we don't throw away or flush down our human manure but it's just a simple bucket system for composting but we fancy it up a little bit one of the things the nice things about our cabin rentals is first you have to develop an economy out here if you're going to exit the system you have to pay property tax right it also is a nice way to just forward the ideas and share you know the principles so we have why and how we we compost our human manure and use it as a valuable nitrogen resource right we have to unlearn all the stupid things that we've learned and then go back to the old ways I've been here for 15 years and when you live year after year there's a different kind of Knowledge from living it and sort of the cost of all this like being sort of more self-sufficient what kind of bills you're off grid but what kind of builds do you have well overall it costs about five thousand dollars to live here for one person or ten people for a year thousand bucks a year or five thousand dollars that pays for property taxes and some propane and some feed because you can really live off the rest oh my gosh we're not going to grow our own coffee um certainly not going to grow our own grain for bread so we'll probably have about 70 80 percent of our food comes from here but yeah you know actually I sometimes say that societal collapse would be one of the best things for my diet there'd be no sugar there'd be no bread there'd be no you know sometimes I indulge in sweets and if I was only eating from what our best thing could happen to my diet and possible which is the amazing thing it is possible yeah we developed some pastures for the chickens and goats this is like a very steep chicken run right not to them the goats and chickens don't care about hills a chicken's ducks lots of eggs yeah and lots of firewood lots of firewood thins the forest creates fire safety and warmth it's a lot of work cutting wood oh we don't call it work we don't use four letter word work create we're always creating things so even chopping wood is creating you're creating warmth and comfort if you leave it to me I would just say I like work but I think it's more precise to say that I'm always creating things this is a cherry bush sorry Bush refried tree Cherry Bush oh takes all kinds of people to run a community and I always whether I'm milking the goats or taking out the ship bucket I always see the big picture I'm always doing something Grand we haven't really fully developed this Garden yet just getting ready to put some more broccoli in here throw some more potatoes and squash and tomatoes and corn and what are all those in fact garlic ah garlic oh wow you eat a lot of garlic 200 of them yeah we'll Harvest it in August and probably eat it for a good year [Applause] you know we're so used to stimulation right the stimulation of traffic lights and all these people and all these businesses and the internet here you can hear your own thoughts and you get to be with yourself [Applause] I mean it takes an adjustment going from that life to this life when you have a constant stream of distraction and stimulation I mean go ask the next 10 people down your street if they're busy they'll go oh my God they're just they'll basically just say they're overwhelmed here where we have a slower Pace we only work in the mornings you know we stop around noon you've got lots of time to be with yourself there's no hiding from yourself [Applause] what kind of starters are these yeah some carrots and cabbage and broccoli and you started them in the greenhouse well I started them right there oh right there okay I built that little cubby because you really need some shade to you know the sun dries out your soil so quick your seeds dry up they kind of want to be protected are you gonna plant them as bed no I haven't decided yet sometimes we do all this as a team we got some space in this gardening my seeds didn't come up so well I went to work all day and it was a hot sunny day and it all dried up these are a little strangling Vine oh yeah maybe I'll plant this bed out I oftentimes tell people just to slow down just walk slower chew slower just slow down you know there's just generally a lot of people that are dissatisfied either with their cubicle or whether it's their job their cubicle or materialism or you know something in our culture that's just not satisfying I think we gravitate we feel at peace we're you know we can relax in nature and it's a different life

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,315,297

Keywords: biotecture, earthship biotecture, norcal off-grid, intentional community, self-reliance, permaculture ecovillage, remote ecovillage, norcal ecovillage, prepping, self-sustained community, experimental construction, underground construction, food forest, geodesic dome, jedediah smith redwoods, california redwoods, permaculture design, waves, spirals, streamlines, permaculture patterns, dan schultz, flint, california-oregon border

Id: YOXkcz8j3Gc

Length: 45min 22sec (2722 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023