- By the end of this video,
you're gonna know everything you ever wanted to know and more about building a productive
suburban homestead. This isn't gonna be your
everyday homesteading video. I'm gonna go into excruciating
detail on this one, on every single thing I've done to set up this suburban homestead. From how to find the
space in the first place. Setting up your first outdoor
garden, indoor gardens, designing and building
a productive orchard, the energy systems, how
to put solar on your roof and start generating
some sustainable energy. Capturing rainwater, recycling water with grey water laundry,
and shower systems, starting to keep chickens,
using those chickens to help develop better composting systems, building composting
systems and so much more. All of that info is also in
my latest book out right now, "Epic Homesteading" with
step-by-step guides, visuals, graphics, designs, diagrams, charts, everything you could desire. It's out where every books are sold, but if you get it from us, we'll ship you a free pack of seeds too. When it comes to site selection, where to actually build
your homestead out, I've always been of the mindset
of starting where you are, whether you own or rent, do as much as you can in
the space that you have. In my particular case, I was able to secure a
house here in San Diego, very small house, but the lot
happened to be a double lot and I could do what I wanted on it. And that's what's really important is, can you do what you want
in the space that you have? So when you take a look at the
front yard of this property, what you see is again about a thousand square
foot house over there. It's very, very small, located
on the corner of the lot. And what that means is
I have all this space to do whatever I want with,
but then you need to talk about can I do what I want with it, which means HOAs and zoning laws. This is one of those
things that it's boring, but you have to pay attention to it when you're setting up a homestead because if you don't, you might find out that you can't keep chickens, for example. So look up your zoning laws
in your particular area, see if there's a limit on
the chickens you can keep. Or if there's a height to the trees that you're allowed to
grow, do all that first 'cause that will change
your plans dramatically. Once you found a spot, the next thing to do is
start the planning journey, which is both exceptionally exciting and also quite intimidating
because this is a place that is hopefully gonna
be very productive for you for many, many years to come. And if you make a design
mistake like placing a shed in the wrong place, you
could be kind of upset. And so take the shed. For example, the way that
I've approached designing this space, which is
about 13,000 square feet, is going with the things
that I know I needed earlier on in the process. So one of the first things
I put in here was this shed. And the reason why is 'cause I
just simply had a lot of gear that I needed to store in this shed and I wanted to put it
really close to the house. And that is probably the
most important design lesson that I've learned over
the last three years is the things that you access a lot. Something like a shed, an herb garden, a front yard raised bed garden, you want to put as close
to where you always are, let's say in your home as possible. I don't want to be walking
all the way over there to go get a trowel or go get some basil. I want that to be as close as possible. And then another rule that I've followed, and it seems like it worked out, is designing from the outside in. When I first moved in
here, there was a shed and it was right there
and it was about this big and just plopped right
in the middle of the lot. It doesn't make a lot of sense, it's kind of far from the house. It's blocking anything I
might want to design here in the future. So I took that shed out, moved this right up next
to the property line, made sure that I was
following my zoning laws, and there you go. So if you design from the
outside in, based on proximity, you know that this kind of has to be here. That's what I look for in a design, what kind of has to be where it is. And then you can get creative
with the rest of the space. So let's say you have a
couple of design elements in maybe you started to put those in. You need to get something growing because in almost any area, especially a suburban lot like this one or one that you might have, the
soil may or may not be good. So I'd always recommend
getting a soil test, but regardless, there's a lot
you can do to make it better. The very first garden I
ever put in at this property was right here, and it
was an in-ground garden, not a raised bed garden
and not a container garden. It was with the soil that
was already on the property, but I had to do some things
to make that soil better. It's a little bit sacrilegious
in some communities, but what I did is I
decided to till my garden. So I took a device and
that moved the soil around, broke up some of this harder
clay soil that I have, and I worked in a healthy
amount of compost. Compost that I got from a local provider. You can also get it in
bags from a big box store or a local nursery. Any of those options is okay, whatever gets you started
and worked this soil. So it was loose with a
little bit more fertilizer or organic matter in it. And then I started to just plant stuff. And year one, on a homestead
is really not as productive as you might dream, but
you need to start getting that soil working, right? You need the soil life to come back alive and start throwing out
some incredible produce. So this garden right here might
not look like much right now but that's because it's spring. You've seen on this channel
many different iterations of this garden that have
been absolutely thriving and productive. And if you look, this is my
backyard in-ground garden. Again, very close to my house. This is the produce
I'm gonna be coming out and harvesting most often. If you look back here,
later in the season, you'll start to see the
things that don't require as much maintenance going in
the back, maybe some peppers, some eggplants, some tomatoes, some of the stuff that
harvests really quickly might be up front here with
some herbs or some leafy greens. So if you're starting an in-ground garden, which is probably the most
cost effective way to start, all you really need is soil,
some compost and some time. Now if you don't have as much space or you just prefer an aesthetic look or you just wanna make
gardening a little bit easier, certainly is a lot easier to
work and rip off this cabbage if I want to, you can
start a raised bed garden. And all that means is you have a container that allows you to put soil in it and then you can grow
directly in that container. So this could be as big
or as small as you want. Again, it's right next
to the front of my house, which beautifies the space because I personally don't
really want to have a lawn here. I want to have productive
broccoli and garlic and chard and cilantro coming out of my front yard. So I'll show you exactly
how I set this up. When you're designing a raised bed garden, there's not too much to keep in mind, but there are some things that will make your job a lot easier. One would be spacing. So you want to have enough
space to walk down a row. So in this case, I can
just kind of jet down here and I have about 30
inches between these rows. That means I can get
a wheelbarrow through, I can get my big self through. And you also want to design
the bed dimensions themselves to be easy to work in. We're not trying to make life super hard, we're trying to make life super productive and harvest some beautiful vegetables. So if you take a look at a
raised bed like this one, this is a three by six foot raised bed. This is a four by eight foot raised bed. And what you'll notice is none of the beds that I have on this property
are wider than four feet. Why is that? Because take a look. This is four feet. I can reach in here
really easy on this side, I'm about two feet in. If I want to come around this side, I can also reach two feet in on this side. So I have no problems getting
in to any part of this garden. Now, when you talk about
the overall placement and design of the raised
bed garden itself, you wanna make sure that
it has exposure to light, has exposure to sun. So if you take a look at my
garden, north is this way, south is this way, east is
this way, west is this way. The sun rises in the
east, it sets in the west, and nothing is blocking
this southern exposure here except for that jacaranda tree, which honestly it's not that big a deal. And in the winter it's actually
not even a leafed out tree. So a lot of light will still come through. So there's a couple rules on spacing, but as long as you don't violate those, you're gonna be in a really good spot. But now we have to figure
out how to fill these beds up with productive soil. So this is a relatively tall raised bed. This one's 29 inches. These are actually our raised beds. They're called Birdies Raised Beds. We sell them on our store. We absolutely love them
and we stand by them. We have one that's about
15 inches tall as well. That's a more standard size. I'm personally preferential
to the larger ones. The question still remains,
how do you fill this with soil? Well, there are two ways to do it. In a tall raised bed like this, I really love putting filler
material down in the bottom. It could be logs, twigs,
sticks, branches, food scraps, extra compost, anything like
that or you could put soil in. But that ends up getting
somewhat expensive. If you're talking about
a smaller raised bed, I am really a fan of just
getting the highest quality soil you can get, whether that be
in bags from a local nursery or sometimes from a bulk delivery. If you have one in your area,
you can give 'em a call, they'll come and dump a bunch
of soil on your doorstep and you've got a little bit
of a shoveling job to do. But it is way more cost effective. And often the quality of that
soil is also a lot better. So this is probably the
most labor intensive part of setting up a raised
bed garden is building and designing the system,
then getting the soil in. But once you do that, it
comes to the fun part, which is planting it out. Growing out your own vegetables is a topic I could do hundreds of videos
on, and in fact I have, that's what this whole channel is about. But a quick primer for you
beginners out there is, the most important thing, know where you live and
know when you have to start and stop your gardening. Here in San Diego, I'm very fortunate that we
don't actually have temperatures cold enough to kill most
plants, which means in January I can grow something like
this mustard right here 'cause it loves colder temperatures. For you, if you're in a colder climate, this might be a fantastic
spring or fall crop. But really the easiest
way to think about it is whenever the snow starts to melt off, the ground starts to get a
little bit easier to work in, that's really the start of your season. And whenever that trend reverses and the ground starts to get colder again, that's really sort of the
general end of your season. And you can grow a lot of
different plants in that window. And the question then becomes, well, what plants should I grow? And I always say, grow
what you like to eat because we're trying to develop a self-sufficient productive homestead, which means you actually want
to use all of this produce. I enjoy eating mustard,
I enjoy eating bok choy. I have a carrot right here,
let's see how that looks. Not that great, but we'll try next season to make that one a little bit better. Nevertheless, you grow
what you like to eat. And then there's so many
different guides available for how to grow a beet,
how to grow a carrot, how to grow a tomato
that you can dive into because all plants want the same things, light, nutrients, water, soil, good soil, but they all are a little bit different. And that's kind of the fun and the joy and the
beauty of the gardening and homesteading journey
is the deeper you go, the more fascination you start to have. So dive in and set up a garden
and have some fun with it, but this is an annual vegetable garden. It'll change over roughly
every single season. But if you want to set
up a productive orchard, that'll pay you off for
many more years to come. One of the first things I did
when I came to this homestead was start planting an orchard
as soon as humanly possible. This is one of my favorite
oranges of all time. This is a Satsuma orange. Sometimes you'll see these at the store. They're called California Cuties, and I used to eat them
by the bag in college. Now I grow them by the bag. But an orchard is easily
the lowest maintenance, highest yield thing you
can put in a homestead provided you set it up correctly. And that really was my
personal intimidation point when I first started
out on this land here. So down this line, you have about 15 different
varieties of citrus. Down this line, you have what
looks to be a dead orchard, but it's actually just all
of the deciduous fruit trees, the ones that actually lose
their leaves in the winter. So I have two pomegranates and
apple, a peach, a nectarine, and another nectarine. And even behind us, we
have a beautiful papaya in the backyard I have
bananas, grapes, berries, all sorts of different things. I did not start this way. I started with what was easy. And in my climate, citrus is easy. In your climate, it might be
stone fruit, your peaches, your plums, it might be pears and apples. You kind of have to figure
out what works in your area. But the most important thing for a suburban homestead style orchard, I think is planting closer
together, pruning more actively and making sure that you're
getting what you want outta the orchard. So for me, what's important,
it's not important that this cara cara orange produces 700. I'd actually prefer variety. That's why I have 15 different citrus and I've planted them in
insanely close, four feet apart. No one would ever do that
if you're growing them up in Northern California for production. But I'm not. All I want is about 40,
50 amazing cara caras, limes, satsumas, peaches, pomegranates. And so I can cram these
way closer together and just pay the price by
pruning them more actively. This is a method that I learned from a guy named Tom Spellman. It's called Backyard Orchard culture. And what I'll do in this
case is keep the trees to about six or seven feet. These ones haven't even
reached that yet and prune it. So they kind of form a
nice hedge style structure. And then I just don't have to worry about overmanaging an orchard where these things are
getting totally outta control and I feel overwhelmed. Fruits dropping to the
ground and being wasted and it's different for every single tree. So in the case of citrus,
that is a family of trees that really likes a nice
tight canopy as it's called. It wants to be grown in sort
of this bushy structure. It does not want a lot of light coming in and hitting that main trunk. But as we come over here and
take a look at the pomegranate, but more specifically something
like an apple or a peach, you can see the structure of this peach really well right now 'cause
there are no leaves on it. And if you take a look, you'll
notice it has this sort of bell or like vase style structure where I'm pruning out a lot in the middle. It's nice and open and then as it grows, it's gonna put a lot of
leaves out on this side and produce a ton of fruit. In fact, so much fruit
that Jacques on our team, and I could not even eat it all. We had to give some of
it away, which you know, always good to give to family and friends. So if you know you want fruit
trees in your budding suburban homestead, I'd say get on it ASAP. Notice I designed from the outside in, I wanted a nice citrus hedge. Maybe it blocks this view a little bit, makes me feel like I'm in a citrus jungle. That's kind of the vibe I was going for, but I put these in about
four or five months after I moved in and now years later I'm getting an abundant amount of produce. The other question
you're gonna run into is where do I get these trees? Local nursery is always
a great place to go and I always recommend that
first you can call around and find a local nursery that
has this particular variety that you might be obsessed with, but then you're gonna be
faced with one of two choices. Do you buy a live tree
like this that's in a pot and you can plant it right in the ground? Or do you buy what's
called a bare root tree? Which is exactly like it sounds. It looks like a stick, doesn't look alive. There'll be a little
burlap bag at the bottom and really the roots are
just kind of hanging out in a bit of bark or something like that. The idea here is that
those are way cheaper. It is way less expensive
to buy a bare root tree. You can pop it in the ground
in January, February, March, and you'll be in a really good spot, get an orchard started
for a very low cost. If you have a little bit more budget and you wanna buy yourself some time, I highly recommend going with
a one to 3-year-old tree. The bigger the better
sometimes, not all the time. Sometimes that transplant
shock can kill a tree and you get really sad, but
the bigger the better, why? Because you can take what
might be a three year wait to get some of these beautiful satsumas and shrink that down to a one year, one and a half year wait, which is a big difference
when we're talking about years to get some produce. In my case, I bought
about a 1-year-old plant for all these citrus and I just have so much
produce coming out. There's so much more to orchard
care that you can go into and it's a wide world, absolutely
fascinating to dive into. But this is a very good primer. The only other thing
I'll touch on is water, but to do that I have to show
you the weird watering systems I'm using here at my homestead. When you're in the city,
trying to homestead, of course you're connected
to the city systems. I'm connected to my power grid and I'm using city water
from my local municipality, but why not use it as
effectively as you can? So I'm standing here
in my artichoke patch, one of my favorite places. I don't know, the light looks beautiful. It's a beautiful plant that
comes back every single year and it doesn't get watered at least by me. There's a little white pipe over there. And if you were to go under my house and follow it all the way back,
you would see it's connected to my laundry machine in a
system known as grey water. So the general principle
with grey water is using water a second time after it's gone through
one system in your house. In my case, laundry and
shower are the two places that I recycle that
water into the landscape. The laundry water comes here
into the artichoke patch and the shower water goes out into that productive citrus orchard
that I just showed you. And neither of those areas is getting that much water directly from the city. It's all stuff I've already used. So if you do pick up a copy
of "Epic Homesteading," I have screenshots of exactly how I installed my grey
water laundry system, but it's honestly not that hard. You could do it yourself. You could hire a professional and you can oftentimes
get a rebate for doing it. All it involves is installing
what's called a three-way valve on your laundry machine
that when you turn it one way, it sends the water to the sewer system to be processed the normal way. You turn it another way and it'll send it out
to a patch like this. The only thing you really have
to do in the case of laundry and shower is change up your soap. I use one called Oasis
for my laundry detergent. It just biodegrades in a very safe way. And for my shower, I use Dr. Bronner's. Those are great ways to use
water, don't get me wrong. But there's water that comes from the sky that I've figured out really
great ways to capture, especially here in my climate. Maybe you're in a climate where
it's raining all the time, and this is less important
than maybe putting in some solar panels, but for me, I want to capture every
inch of rain that I can. And so this is one way to do it. You can set up a simple
rain barrel style system. So if you take a look up there, there's a little terracotta tile roof and that's what's being
captured into this system here. The way it works is you've got a gutter, that gutter's going to spit the water and any debris right here, this little header has
what's called a leaf filter that's gonna take all
the large debris off. If I put my hand up here, you
can see some of this stuff would've just gone right into the water, which I don't really want, but there's even smaller
particulate matter, like little bits of dirt or bird poop or something like that. And what'll happen is the
water will filter through and fall right down here. And this is kind of a road to nowhere. It's called a first flush filter, and it's exactly what it sounds like. The first bit of water that's coming off of this roof system, which is
probably filled with some dirt and some grime gets captured
in this vertical tube. As this tube fills up,
eventually it hits here. At that point, we're
making the assumption, Hey, this water's pretty clean by now and it's gonna dump over
here into the rain barrel, which can be used right down here. So I could come down and attach
a hose to this if I want, and use that in any way that I choose. I could water my artichokes more, I could water my flower patch,
I could water my raised beds, and if this was ever to
overflow, that's okay because it's gonna overflow
come out this system here and that dumps where,
into my artichoke patch. This type of system is a fantastic way to get started from 50
gallons, a 100 gallons, 200 gallons, but if you
have the space in the budget to take it to the next level, I will show you what
I did in the backyard. Underneath this massive passion fruit vine is actually a 5,000 gallon cistern that captures all the
rain off of my main roof. It's the exact same
system I just showed you except for there's a pipe
that travels underground and drops it right into this cistern. And the thing I'll say about this is this is more of an advanced technique. The budget is a little bit
higher for something like this, but the security it
provides, 5,000 gallons. It's connected to a
pressure sensitive pump that puts enough water pressure out to make it feel like I'm just watering with a normal city hose here. But in fact, I'm pulling
from a big tank right here and I like to use this for my pond area or for the backyard garden over there. So it's a little bit more extreme. You can still get some
rebates from the city. It takes a bit of a professional crew to install something like this. But if you're really making
a go of homesteading, whether it's in the city or
certainly in a more rural area, I think a big water cistern is insurance that you can't afford not to have. Rainwater's one of the crucial
ways we're taking resources that are naturally falling on the property and then redirecting them for
our best use in a homestead. But my favorite one is
one you can't even see. Welcome back to the roof my friends. I will confess I come up
here and just enjoy a sunset, take a look at the garden and yes, maybe even clean off my solar panels. That is what we're talking about, solar energy at the homestead. Obviously one of the
resources we rely on the most from our city, from our energy company is the energy to power the home. And so what better way to offset it than putting some solar
panels on your roof? Now I can hear people already saying, that won't work for me. It's too expensive for me,
it won't work in my area. There's a lot of complexity
to getting solar panels. There's a lot of ways that
you can pay for solar panels or finance them. There's a lot of different
types of solar panels. There's a lot of different
ways that your energy company will reimburse you for
the energy that you do or do not generate. So I'm speaking in generalities here and there's a lot more analysis
in the "Epic Homesteading" book about how to calculate what's called your payback period for solar. But in a nutshell, what
are solar panels doing? They cost a certain
amount to put on your roof and then they generate a certain
amount of energy per year. That energy would've cost you if you were to buy it from
your electric company, but instead you're generating it. So it's offsetting your electric bill and you're basically taking that number and dividing it into how much it costs to install the solar panels. And then you'll get another number. And that number is how many years it takes to pay back that initial investment. I can speak for myself,
I have 24 panels up here. In my case in California you got a rebate at a certain period of time. It's about 22% or so. So I got to write off that
much of the purchase price, which is certainly a nice bonus. And then it ended up being
about five to seven years where I would be effectively
generating energy for free. That's not exactly accurate. You still pay a connection fee to the grid and there's some ancillary fees, but basically I don't have
an energy bill anymore for all intents and purposes. The only thing I'll say here is it really does depend on where you live. If you live way up in
Vancouver, in Canada, maybe this isn't the best choice for you because you're just simply
not generating enough from the lack of sunny days that you have to pay this back in a
reasonable amount of time. But that's kind of why the
"Epic Homesteading" book is like a grab bag of options. In your climate, this might
not be the best choice, but maybe you have an abundance of rain. So capturing a ton of that
might make a lot of sense. So there's a lot of different
ways to approach this, but for me, this is one of
the key parts of my homestead. I'm offsetting almost
all of my electricity every single year. Even right now I pay $120 a
year to be connected to my grid, and that's pretty much it. So we have our veggies on lock now, we have our water on lock and
we have our energy on lock, but where's our protein coming from? Believe it or not, it's
actually hard to grow protein. I tried it. About four years ago, I
tried to live off my garden. I ended up living off of potatoes and weird little fish that I
fished out of a sewer ditch. So I didn't really
succeed in growing protein until I got these little guys. These are my epic hens. I have nine of them now. I lost one of them. Raised them all from baby chicks. And not only do they provide
you eggs, quite a few eggs, more eggs than I can actually eat, but they're an integral part of the overall waste recycling
system here at my homestead. Chicken keeping is a deep world. You could spend a whole
year just doing that. And that would be not
only completely fine, but totally fun and there'd
still be a lot to learn. So I'll give you
everything that you really, really need to know as
quickly as I can here. Raise them from baby
chicks, take it from me. It is one of the most
rewarding experiences you will ever have. If you raise them from
eggs, if you hatch them, well, then you might get a rooster. And going back to that zoning requirement, sometimes you can't have a rooster. In my area, I can't have a rooster, and so I'd have to
figure out a way to deal with the fact that I just birthed a male. So I like to raise them from day olds or week old chicks that
have already been sexed and they are female hens. Then you get into breed selection. In my case, this is sort of
a choose your own adventure. If you want different colored eggs, you can select the breed based on that, if you want based on temperament, like Butter right here is a
very friendly motherly hen, if that's what you'd like, maybe you can go with what's
called a buff orpington. If you want a weird looking
one, like this guy right here, this is Rufio, that's a cream legbar. Just got her 'cause she looked cool. It's kind of up to you. If you're really into egg production and you want to max out your eggs, then you can actually
just look up the hens that produce the most eggs. They might not be the flashiest hens, but they might be sort of a
great workhorse type of hen that just gives you the
protein that you need. Let's talk coops. You can go complete DIY,
like my friend Jacques, who built his entire
coop for about a $100. It just took a bit of time, but it's a beautiful, amazing coop. Or you could ball out and
get a little bit fancy like I did here with this Carolina coop. Or you could do something in the middle. What a coop needs is an
enclosed area called a run. That run is a place for those
hens to basically hang out, chill, vibe, enjoy,
drink, eat, rest, roost. All of that happens in this indoor run. Where we're at right now
is called my outdoor run. This is something I
built to extend the coop. I wanted to give the hens
access to more sunlight, access to more forage. We'll throw our vegetable scraps in here and they'll eat them. Then the other thing a coop
needs is a place for them to go at night. That would be the henhouse in my case. It's right over there
and they can roost up on these little roosting bars. There's some bedding below and there's a little egg
hutch where they'll go to lay their eggs every single day. You can expect, depends
on the breed again, but you can expect somewhere between five to six eggs a week. Hens will typically lay
every 24 to 26 hours. My friend Loaf over there, however, lays maybe once every three days. So she's a bit of a freeloader, and you'll find that in a flock. There's personalities, there's
temperaments, there's vibes, and it's just a really fun experience. But eggs aren't really sometimes
even the primary reason you might have hens, certainly for me, they're a huge benefit. But what I really like is a
way to recycle the systems we've already talked about. My outdoor vegetable garden,
my productive orchard. Any of the scraps from that, whether it be from after
I cook in the kitchen or before I get them in the kitchen, just the processing
scraps will go right here. And then the chickens
will scratch through that, excrete waste either
there or in the hen house. And then I can clean that waste up and recycle it through
my composting system where it will then make
it back into the garden. To me, no homestead is complete, city or otherwise, if it does
not have a way to recycle all the materials that you
produced but you don't need. And that is where
composting comes into play. I'll talk about this system in a second, but composting is accessible
no matter what size, homestead, garden, et
cetera that you have. You can start with something very small, a little bucket just like this. Throw some worms in this bucket,
put another bucket on top, throw some scraps in that,
cycle that back and forth. And voila, you have a very simple, probably less than $20 system
to recycle your food scraps. You can get even fancier than that. There's a method called
bokashi composting, which again uses a bucket, but it uses an inoculated brand, which is sort of just
like an inoculated grain. And you'll sprinkle that
on top of your food scraps and then you don't even need worms. It'll sort of predigest
and ferment that food. And then you can bury the food scraps directly in the garden. So you don't even have to mess around with a larger system like this. But if you do have the space, this is a hot composting system, and I have a five bay system
where I'll build a pile and then I'll move it down the line. And as it gets moved down the line, the material's broken
down further and further. Because if you think about
what you're trying to do with compost, think about decomposing, think about a forest, right? The leaves are falling down, the branches, the trunks, et cetera. They're all sort of getting decomposed by all of the bacteria, fungi, insects that are in that environment. And once they're small enough, really once that organic
matter gets so fine that it's at that elemental level almost, it will then be able
to be used as nutrition by the next crop of plants that
are growing in that forest. And so what you're doing
in a composting system is the exact same thing, but
you're doing it in a human way where it is repeatable and
replicable and controllable. And so a hot composting
system, you stack layers of different materials,
all covered in the book, all covered on our channel as well. And then that material heats up. It's the bacteria, it's the
fungi, it's the insects, heating that pile up by
reproducing and consuming and breaking down that matter. And then once it is small enough, you can recycle that back into the garden by putting it on top of your garden beds and creating a beautiful,
healthy, rich soil. Really important for a suburban homestead, because like I said, you're
not working oftentimes with the best quality soil. It might just be the fill
dirt from the construction when they actually built the house. So I'll do this, I'll
take my chicken scraps and chicken manure,
shovel them out into here, that'll heat that pile up really nice. And then I actually use the chicken scraps to kind of kickstart the
pile, break it down faster and put that back out. So composting to me is the
other side of the equation. You've got capturing
resources that are available but often wasted, rain,
energy, grey water. And then you've got recycling resources that are often wasted. My straw, this weird onion right here, a strawberry that died,
all that kind of stuff that I can't use in the kitchen. So let's say you have your
systems in place, you're growing, you're succeeding, you've got some harvest out of the garden. What the heck you do
with all of that produce? And to me, that's where
almost an entirely different, equally fulfilling, if
not more journey begins that of the kitchen,
preserving, cooking these meals and really making the
most of what you harvest. And to me, that gets into
the many different ways that you can preserve your food. At its most simple,
preserving is a time honored and ancient technique of course, because back in the day we
didn't have refrigerators to store our food in. So you can do something like
hang drying all of your herbs to make different herbal mixes and spices. You can hang dry tomatoes,
sun dried tomatoes, hang dry your peppers,
get nice dried peppers that you can rehydrate and
use at any point in time. You could get an actual
dehydrator relatively affordable and start dehydrating all
sorts of different things. Slicing up an onion, making
your own onion powder, slicing up some homegrown ginger, making your own ginger powder. You get where I'm going with that. A million different ways and
a million different recipes that you can produce just by combining some of the preserved goods
that you have at the homestead. For me, one of my
favorites, not only canning, which is putting up in a very regimented and food safe way, produce
for the long term in a pantry, but quick pickling, something that it's a lot
more beginner friendly and you can create some
absolutely delicious things. I always have pickled red onions,
homegrown from the garden, hanging out in my fridge. I have pickled carrots,
pickled vegetable mixtures. They're really nice to add to a salad or to add onto some
freshly baked sourdough that's coming from guess what? Your garden. So there's so many
different ways to preserve. You can get fancy, and I've covered it in
the book, freeze drying. We've done that a lot. Freeze dried strawberries are great, but it's a little bit crazier, a little more space aged tech. And unfortunately those devices
are still quite expensive. But if you do have the budget,
it is fun to play with. If there's one thing I
want you to understand, it is that the word homestead
often evokes this image of going off into the
woods or buying 10 acres and building a cabin with your bare hands and then wearing linen
that you sewed yourself and slaughtering a cow
or something like that. Honestly kind of sounds like a vibe, but almost all of us do not
have the time, the resources, the know-how to get started
on that type of journey. So this book is my
exploration of how I did it in a normal American home,
a 1000 square foot home. It is not big, in a suburban
area of a major city. There is something for you in this book, no matter where you live, no matter what your
gardening experience is like. And no matter how
intimidated you might feel by that word right there, I
think we need to broaden it. Don't gatekeep it as much. So in this book, there
is something for you. It's out right now at
everywhere you might buy books, but if you buy it from us, I will toss in a free pack of seeds from our seed company Botanical Interests to get your homestead started. I hope you enjoy it, guys. It's been such a rewarding
experience for me to take this patch of truly bare land, just completely scraped clean, and build what you've seen
over the course of this video. I think you're gonna enjoy the book. Good luck in your garden
and keep on growing.
