Homesteading Couple Hasn’t Bought Groceries in a Year of Self-Sufficient Living

[Music] this project has taught us so much about what we value and what we enjoy doing what i love about this journey is just feeling a new connection to the animals and to nature loving off the land is a self-challenge for ourselves that we're doing for 365 days to only eat what we catch grow harvest to raise so it's everything from raising chickens and growing our own vegetables harvesting salt from the ocean you know we don't have olive oil so we we store our chicken fat to kind of use our cooking oil stevia for sugar as a substitute we grow all of our own herbs and spices so we haven't had anything from the store that we bought at all we haven't had coffee we don't have enough flour to make bread so we've had no baked goods unless we can produce it or harvest it ourselves we haven't consumed it so yeah we're not buying anything from this store that we can consume we do still buy hygiene products and that kind of stuff from the store but nothing that we can drink or eat is being purchased it's always been something i've wanted to do and i've always had a garden and sort of grown some food and uh yeah when things shut down in 2020 it just kind of put things in perspective for us with grocery stores running out of items and and how much we rely on corporations to provide our food for us it really kind of made us want to go for it and see if we could do it and survive on our own chris was the main driving force behind us and the more he talked about it and the more he expressed his passion for it i think um i really saw it as just a really incredible opportunity to see if we could do it so we are over 10 months in so we made it through the winter which was definitely the most challenging uh time and got a little bit monotonous with a lack of variety and things to eat but uh we're through that and it's mid-june now and just had six weeks to go and we've done it which is kind of crazy just about a couple of days before our challenge began we went through every single cupboard every single drawer took out anything that was food related or could be consumed and then for three weeks we gardened like crazy and tried to prepare as much as we could we didn't start at the ideal time it was already beginning august luckily we're in a really nice growing zone here where stuff grows through the winters so yeah we're doing a bunch of different uh elements on on how we can produce food for ourselves so it's anything that we can catch grow harvest or raise living on the ocean a big part of our diet has been seafood and fish and shellfish and things like that we catch a lot of different things from the ocean that provide us with a lot of our protein so the other thing we do obviously is grow a lot of food here on our property so we're trying a lot of new things this year like kiwis and lemons and have an olive tree and artichokes and things that we've never grown before and we'll we'll kind of see how they do and then of course also have your staples that do really well here your kale beets swiss chard lettuces asparagus broccoli cauliflower all the sort of things that do well in the colder months as well so those were kind of our staples through the winter and now trying to broaden that into some more unique things as well part of our challenge is that we are harvesting some of that harvesting comes from foraging things that we've foraged are seaweed we've been doing a lot of blackberry we've also foraged some mushrooms from the forest and learned a little bit about the kinds that we can eat and cannot eat because that's a big part of it one of the things that we've harvested has been hazelnuts what we'll do is we'll take the hazelnut blend it with water strain out the liquid which turns into hazelnut milk which is delicious and then the pulp that comes out of it that then we can turn into hazelnut flour and then also we've been raising some chickens and turkeys which have been a huge part of the protein that we've been consuming it's also been super eye-opening to see the whole process from start to finish how your meat gets on the table and it's i'd say probably been the hardest part of our challenge so far we have six hens right now that are laying and they've laid really well throughout the whole winter so they've been a really huge part of our diet our diet was very protein heavy over the winter when we were lacking vegetables so this year we have planted a lot more things you know growing chickpeas and growing black drying beans um and some different things that we can sort of keep to to become a little bit more plant-based over the winter as well so we did do a little bit of studying on nutrition off the bat but to to be perfectly honest we kind of jumped in and rushed in so a lot of it was on the fly and i think in a facebook group someone commented what are you going to do for iodine we got i don't know what i'm going to do for ion giants we go because it comes in table salt normally it is added so we didn't have that so did some research and it's in a bunch of seaweeds we're like let's go get some kelp that's now going to be in our diet and that's how we're getting iodine one of our staples has been wheatgrass we'll chew on it or maybe blend it with a little bit of water and kind of take a wheatgrass shot but then also we can use the grains that come up grind that into flour and we get a tiny little bit of flour we made apple cider vinegar or apple scrap vinegar that's our dressing which is super tasty some new snacks that we've come up with lately has been um we've had bladder rack dehydrated kind of tastes like a chip sort of sort of it's crispy and we put salt on it which is delicious so these are all our crab traps and prawn traps that would normally be in the water but we just pulled them out to do a little bit of uh work on them and some repairs so the crab traps normally stay out pretty much year round we'll take them out if we're going away for a period of time or sometimes we just want a break but normally that they're sort of out there and we check them every every day or two so one of our new kind of sections here is hostas which is another plant that we just found out this year is edible which is great for us because it's a shade plant and the majority of our property is forested and we really didn't want to clear cut trees and cut down stuff even though we were trying to produce food so anything we can grow in shaded areas is wonderful so this is one of our mushroom logs as we call it so unfortunately we just had to harvest a bunch because they were starting to curl up but um we filled the stump with mycelium and coffee grounds that we get from our local bakery here on the island who gives them to us and it's done a great job just fruiting mushrooms for us and these are also some logs that we have uh inoculated with plugs so these will hopefully be fruiting with shiitake mushrooms in the fall well this is our upper forest garden as we call it which isn't a true forest garden but it's in our forested area that gets sort of filtered sunlight throughout the day we just put this in this year and we've got some things like raspberries and blueberries that do okay in the acidic soil that we get from all the pine needles that fall down and trying everything from lettuce and broccoli brussels sprouts bok choy beans uh you name it so we've got a whole kind of mix up here uh just see what works and we found some recycled drip tape that we got from one of the local farms here on the island it's half installed now and we just get to turn a tap it helps us save water and also saves me a good 45 minutes a day which is definitely nice too steph and i both really feel it's important to give back so we are planting a ton of trees this year as well so we've kind of got a mix of seedlings some we've grown from seed and then we'll find them permanent homes in the fall so our goal is to plant 4000 trees by the end of the year which will help give back to the environment that we're taking from so this is our chicken coop we built it at the beginning um it is housing a lot of our little feathered friends we have our six original hens as well as 10 meat chickens some turkeys ducks and some heritage breeds as well so this is our new garden bed that we've put in just a couple of months ago this was all lovely grass but we find vegetables to be a little bit more useful we have quite the variety in here um jerusalem artichokes are at the back then we have tons of strawberries some yellow onions and then lots of celery on the other side and some new tomato plants as well so we have tons of starter plants that are waiting to get planted out into the garden um it's kind of our second flush of vegetables that will eventually go in the garden and start to produce tons of variety here we planted a bunch of tomatoes because that was one of the things that we were missing the most these are our bees it's our first year keeping bees and we're learning so much about them it's been great to see their growth and their progression and also they've been amazing pollinators of our garden so we're really excited to see the difference between last year's harvests compared to this year's harvest because of the bees so this is the first garden that we started out with it's our lower garden um it's where chris spends most of his time there's a huge variety as well in here a lot of it is from last winter actually which is incredible that it survived that long but uh yeah one of our favorite gardens that we have here yeah so we're super lucky to be in plant hardiness zone nine which is a sub-mediterranean climate so pretty lucky to have moderate climate through the winter and keep a lot of things going so if we were doing this in a really winterized climate we probably wouldn't have been able to do it and having access to the ocean has been such a huge help as well there's never been a scenario where we've been we have nothing to eat today we're starving i definitely don't want to say it's easy like it's it's hard and it's a lot of work but it's it's 100 achievable in this in this climate where we are for sure i think we're definitely delved into the self-sufficiency path for sure now there's still things that we want to do we want to provide more of our own grains for our chickens and things like water are a big issue on the island so can we start catching more rainwater over the winter to water everything which takes a lot in the summer and going solar eventually is something we're looking at the next year and the next two years will be really interesting and how far we come on our self-sufficiency journey we've definitely saved money not eating out and not drinking and and buying anything but it hasn't been as much as you would think i think with the infrastructure obviously being our first year a lot went into building garden beds and building chicken coops and and getting things started but next year i think we're going to see a huge amount of savings we were sort of both out of work at the time when we first started so for the first four months we were able to put sort of full time into the infrastructure and and what we were doing but uh we've both been back to work now since since january and have managed to to do what we're doing while managing jobs uh both of us it's amazing how much garbage and waste and recycling comes from our food and beverage products which we never really thought about before and the first three months we kind of at the end of it were sitting there be like we only have two small bags of garbage that we produced in three months and normally you produce at least one a week of those i would say if not if not more so it's that's been another beneficial thing i think we'll focus on and take into consideration a lot more definitely not everything's worked and we've had our sort of challenges as well and uh um we've tried things like making maple syrup from trees which we were out there checking every morning and be like did we get any drip of sap and we're like nope we got nothing and i think we had idyllic plans of making sunflower oil at the beginning of the season from sunflower seeds and put them downstairs and forgot about them for a little too long and it got moldy so then that went out the window so definitely had some some failures and some challenges we've sort of made this public and been sharing it with people so we do weekly videos on youtube of our trials and tribulations and what's worked and what hasn't and what's been our challenges so i think for a number of reasons obviously but one of them i think was just to hold ourselves accountable so uh yeah loving off the land is is the youtube channel we're loving the lifestyle and loving what we're doing so we'll keep going for sure won't be quite as strict and we'll start introducing a few things and enjoy a meal out once in a while and probably have a new challenge in the work as well i think we've really fallen in love with what we're doing and it's created a sense of purpose almost we have to get up in the morning to feed the chickens and to care for our vegetable gardens then i think it's just such a rewarding process from start to finish [Music] subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this you can also follow steph and chris on youtube at lovin off the land thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 2,779,025

Keywords: living, off, the, land, sea, catch, grow, harvest, forage, raise, garden, livestock, homestead, homesteading, tiny, small, acre, BC, Canada, Exploring, Alternatives, couple, Lovin Off The Land, growing, food, vegetables, foraging, fruit, salt, seaweed, eggs, meat, birds, hens, produce, self, sufficiency, scale, farm, farming, hobby, challenge, no groceries, hazelnut, milk, security, local, wheatgrass, protein, sufficient, inspiring, story, one, year, 365 days, new, 2021, documentary, mushrooms, bees, shade, forest, grass, lawn, lifestyle, green, eco

Id: gxIwtHbrHIQ

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sproutwarrior]

Are they in Canada?

[u/h9716]

lifegoals