Off Grid Homesteading in Wales Takes Simple Living all the Way

[Music] hi i'm hoppy and i'm tao and this is our home called melinda we live at the la mass eco village in pembrokeshire wales if you enjoy beautiful handmade sustainable things then you will love today's sponsor true wood true wood creates unique 100 real wood watches and accessories with a modern sustainable style truewood offers free worldwide shipping and plants 10 trees with every order and for a limited time only use our exclusive discount code floorp for 10 off any of their wood watches and sustainable accessories click the link in the description to activate your discount the lowest eca village is a collective of off-grid small holding it took us four years to buy the land and to get planning permission from the government that happened in 2009 so we've now been here 10 years on the ground i've lived in alternative communities across west wales all my adult life i had a thriving therapy business then when we got together we lived in a chalet community in swansea and then just one day out of the blue around my 40th birthday i just suddenly felt this it was like a like like a bell just going it's time to move to pembrokeshire we were taking over grazed blank fields previously grazed for 25 years by sheep and we were transforming them into this kind of mosaic of ecosystems in the beginning you know we didn't have wi-fi we didn't have we didn't even have toilets we didn't even have water like it was a fair field you know a bare bunch of fields we had three little touring caravans and we just built this this building within a year you are just about to enter the place of the sweet angel otherwise known as melangash at the lammus eco village come with me so i want to show you first of all this little building it was built for our firewood store and it's just made with douglas fir and it's a solar dryer which has a gap underneath and an airflow that gets drawn up and then dries all the timber so this one is probably one of our most recent additions it started with a kit cabin so we bought this cabin for cheap and then we realized why it was for cheap when we built it because it started leaking but what that led to was to wrap it around three sides so we put on this conservatory and we use recycled windows all the way around if you have a look at the floor we've got all these beautiful beautiful ocean-worn slates which were collected from a local beach we've sculpted all the pieces of wood and this is all from timber from our woodland and then everything the plates the cups everything is recycled you know we've picked them up from charity shops and stuff and then this is the original cabin here and then we've got a bedroom in here for people for guests when they come to stay there was a an original door here where we've got the portal and we realized that if we were going to make this into a space for people to stay we needed to take that door out because we wanted to have a bathroom access for people so we moved the door so we re-cut the door re-hung the door we put the same mandala pattern in the step as the porthole and then we made a really beautiful bathroom and so this is the bathroom in here it's got a beautiful moroccan sink that i got off ebay and this shower is heated by the sun so we can only have a shower in there when it's really loads and loads of sunshine and i'll show you the panels of how we do that this is our passive solar heating system this is what heats our water in our shower so that's this building so now i want to show you our compost toilet we had a flat area here in between the house and this space here and i really wanted to have a decent toilet for people to come into when they were coming to stay we have two chambers when this chamber is full it'll sit for about two years while we fill that chamber up so it's got two years to be converted into good usable soil so this is our animal barn we have our freezer we have our storage for vegetables and then the top part is where we store all our hay for our goats right now we've got goats as our big animals this is where the goats live so we collect goat's milk we always leave enough for the babies the babies come out after we've taken what we need for the day and then they help themselves to mama's milk and then we've got a little shower room there which was our original milking parlour for the cows which is now turned into our volunteer showering space so you can shower with the goats this was going to be our original forever home but as things have evolved at this point in time we're developing it as the lamas earth center a center for transformation and healing so this is just the first part of quite a big project so we've got a wraparound hall that's yet to be built and we've got a sound healing temple and ceremonial space which will be above so this is our home this is where we live it's made with douglas fir it's raised off the ground we've got 15 of these little pillars we cast those pillars out of the center of a tractor wheel we dug 15 holes into bedrock and then we cast cement into that so if this building were taken away all that would be left is 15 pads little circles of cement that's it so it really is in terms of its footprint on the land it's really low impact all the windows for this building are recycled glass we also designed the building to have really wide eaves to keep the water run off away from the building we have a channel at the back of the building here which is actually fed the whole of the water flow through our plot hey welcome to our house coming in so first we've got our lobby room over here we've got our battery reserve this takes the power from the solar panels and store it i've got 24 volt system there's my reading there batteries are quite happy healthy at the moment this is our our main living space in here so we've got our kitchen very much a working kitchen so we've got things like this is our blueberry jam various ointments herbs potions we've got our range which we light in the winter we cook on in the winter we're blessed in our spring water comes from a spring which we share a spring with lots of nearby farms we've got our wood burner which is our main source of heat in the winter upstairs we've got our bedroom which is kind of like a loft bedroom in terms of construction this is basically a stud frame very simple bar now when we arrived here on the land we were living in three small caravans we needed to get our family into accommodation very quickly so this space was designed to be quick to build in essence we put in 15 pad foundations i built a deck and in each of the four walls was built flat raised into place and then a rafter system on the roof with ties round with ties above me here to tie the walls in together and then the floor of our bedroom over there acting as ties very straightforward in terms of the materials it's basically made of six for two there's a six for two structure breather membrane on the outside sheep's wool insulation 150 ml throughout and then we've got latham plaster on the inside a lime plaster here on the walls and a gypsum plaster on the roof because gypsum plaster is sticks better and works better on a roof this is hoppy's sound healing room so this is where she does her sound therapy and then we have a pantry in here where we process milk we have a fridge and then we kind of store food and equipment there as well in terms of composting we split the food we have raw food which goes into the compost heaps the compost heaps are at the center of our small holding much of my life revolves around building compost building soil so that's all important kind of minerals and nutrients that goes into that process the cooked food is trickier to deal with we actually feed that to the pig we've got pig on site why because of rats basically cooked food in compost is a recipe for a rat infestation so so i separate them out and that's how i deal with the compost i grew up in the mainstream i grew up in suburbia and my dad was an accountant my mum was a housewife and i had a very ordinary upbringing but i never really felt rooted and it wasn't until i started living on the land that i discovered roots you know i don't think i've ever felt more empowered my supermarket is a garden and my pharmacy is my herb garden i love that i love that and that's how it probably always was life before the industrial revolution but the beauty is that using technologies that we have now like hydropower solar power we can live a modern day life but totally integrated with nature if you're rooted enough into the landscape where you by know know that the land will support you with clean water with good food with good solid shelter with a bit of livelihood if you've got that kind of base you then have an incredible freedom and space about your life you're not constrained by heavy mortgages or nine to five jobs or anything like that you've just got a lot of space to explore being rooted in the land gives an incredible sense of resilience an incredible sense of empowerment

Channel: FLORB

Views: 560,068

Rating: 4.8770199 out of 5

Keywords: Travel, van dwelling, simple living, tiny house tour, florb, dylan magaster, off grid, off the grid, homestead, home stead, homesteading, green house, off grid cabin, off grid living, living off grid, off the grid living, off grid solar, diy, off grid homestead, homesteading for beginners, uk, wales, lammas, eco, village, homesteading off the grid, off grid house, living off the grid, off the grid homes, homesteaders, off-grid, off grid life, off grid couple, hay bale, hay bale house

Id: H3LLSLLen3E

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021