Self-Reliant Family Living Off-Grid on a Thriving Homestead for 13 Years

foreign [Music] and we live in a yurt we've been living off grid for 13 years we've been homesteading for seven of those 13 years and we'll continue growing and continue home sitting till the end of our days [Applause] [Music] a lot of people move so many times during their lifespan but we found the spot and we're both into it 100 percent it was really just wanting to live off the land wanting to live quietly wanting to have a peaceful life living outside and knowing that we were going to have a family wanting to connect our children with that and raise our children and that was the biggest driving force we do really have to watch the weather but I think that's one of the most beautiful things about living off grid especially when you require the Sun for your power and rain for your water so you're constantly living with the seasons and when you don't have control over it you don't take it for granted thank you [Music] this is a homestead we are doing this for food security we are providing for ourselves our goal is to get to as much sustainability as we can providing for ourselves so I'm in charge of the gardens to grow as much vegetables as we can so we do I do a lot of preserving and canning we're still eating tomatoes from last year as the tomatoes from this year are coming in I the garden for me in the spring summer and fall is my full-time job and I really enjoyed that piece of it next project will be a greenhouse putting a greenhouse up and trying to get extended seasons in our growing so that we can eat more from home year round it certainly saves a whole lot of money to grow your own food which is has been the biggest difference in for me since leaving my job too is the amount of money we save by doing our own things at home so from the garden we've got canning and sauces and everything for the year I make soups that I can and then on a regular basis we still make our own bread our own butter our own yogurt with as many ingredients from home as we can but we do still have to Outsource Staples you know it's hard to grow a field of wheat when you don't have tractors and big equipment to harm serviced it we've tried and failed we grew the reap very well but it stayed out there because it's hard to harvest wheat by hand I think really our goal was to live off the land but we did it really naively and didn't really know what that meant and so I didn't picture animals right away and it took us many years to get animals but in order to be self-sustainable here we needed animals to work the land so we have eggs from the chickens and those chickens end up in the in the freezer we grow the chickens as dual purpose and then we grow the pigs for the pork we started selling a little bit here and there and the next year we had to get more pigs because everybody wanted our Pig again for the next fall and we also have the goats and the sheep from the sheep's milk we ended up making cheese this year for the first time I mastered the photo I feel and from a cow that we're going to have then we'll be able to have more cow's milk to be able to make more butter and cream all the nice Staples that come with that so we grow rabbits too and we also are starting to grow more of the animals for the dog foods which would be hopefully one day not have to buy kibble anymore so we do keep bees their biggest job really here on the farm is pollination and help in the garden and then we skim a little bit of extra honey off the top so we typically do have enough for us for the year but we don't sell it and but we use it for baking and we we eat a lot of honey here our kids have been raised in this and so it's it's part of their everyday tasks on the farm for them have grown with their age and their abilities and what we're doing but we they are involved in every part of farming they're involved in chores every day they're involved in making food they're involved in helping grow the food for me it's just so important [Music] Becca wanted a yurt and I'm like oh my goodness it's a little crazy then I was thinking what's going to happen with my water we're gonna have to be here 24 7 or else something's gonna freeze and then we went to the township and the township said you need 900 square feet 900 yeah 900 900 square feet of living for a permit the yurt was 700 then we attacked strawbell and I like the idea so I said why don't we build the straw Bill kitchen and garage and utility room bathroom everything that has water so it won't freeze in here then we wanted an easy connection between the two and we had pre-ordered the year with French doors so that we could put an Alleyway hooked up to the kitchen he was able to build all of this himself he built the forms for the floor he laid the flooring inside he built the straw Bell we parched it by hand like it really was from the ground up with Blood Sweat and Tears putting this place together if I would go back I would have did all strawberry on the first shot but we had already ordered the year the yurt was a 10-year plan their plan is to take the year down keep the floor keep the actual footprint everything's in floor heating and then I want to put up two-story straw bale so that we have rooms for upstairs and it's getting to a point where the kids are getting older and we need some more space so we will have a round straw Bill house in place of the Earth hopefully next year so we are completely off grid no grid tie whatsoever with solar panels bringing the grid to us would have been incredibly expensive they have to pay per Hydro pull that goes up the closest hydropoles more than a kilometer away via the road we started with four solar panels an inverter and a bunch of batteries and as the years grew our consumption got a little bit more our need for freezers for all the meat that we do is so we went for nine panels at 325 watts each we started with the lead acid batteries to now finally being on lithium which has a nice warranty for 15 years and are absolutely Carefree so those panels power the whole house we're powering one fridge three freezers washing machine the circulating pumps for the floor uh lights but um pretty much that's it we did a lot of research into what takes power and what uses how much power so that we could build a system that fit for us so we don't have anything that plugs into heat because that's going to drain our system really quickly we use fire for heating the house we use propane for all of our cooking needs and for our on-demand hot water too so there's no coffee maker we don't iron nobody toasts toast and toaster here we still eat toast silly toast toasted in the oven so we're very conservative with our appliances we don't have a TV because we don't want to run a TV so we really have been choosy about what it is that we're powering in the winter time I move the panels up to catch the most Sun possible but the winter you don't get all day sunny days so we have a backup generator that will start up automatically to top off the batteries and shuts off the system itself and maintaining a system can be quite pricey and we are always going to need some kind of backup it'd be nice to not rely on fossil fuels but we live in a temperate climate and so we do our best to try and offset that with wood but you know we'll always need that extra especially in Canada so we Harvest rainwater as our sole water source for the house we were only on rainwater on our entire Farm until last year we decided to put a dug well in for the livestock on the farm that's where most of our water ends up going but for the house itself we have rain water so it gets collected off of our steel roof and it goes through a fine filter into some big bulk tanks in the garage where it's kept nice and insulated doesn't freeze in the winter we do filter it for drinking on top of that so we have a tabletop Berkey filter that we love so we can drink it without being concerned the problem is is that you know we live in Canada so for months on end we don't get rain so we're very mindful of the water that we use and yeah we we make do there's melt in the winter time also you know the sun melts some of that snow down onto the roof and if we are ever in Dire Straits we can pump it from the well into the house and we've done that before it's kept in tanks from dairy farms so big stainless steel tanks and we can save 1400 gallons between the two tanks we've got a little flush toilet we only have one bathroom in the house all of our plans for the original House was built around a composting toilet but it was going to take an extra amount of time for permitting we had already waited so long for permitting because it's really hard to permit a yurt to live in and so we dug a regular septic system and with a larger family too with five I think a septic system is probably easier to manage we have an indoor boiler that we set up in the garage it's a Wood-Fired indoor boiler which heats the floors within floor heating supplemented by a wood stove in the yurt which burns a decent amount of wood to keep the earth warm so we do cut a lot of wood throughout the year sometimes at -20 and sometimes at plus 30 but it still needs to get done and it Heats our water the boiler that's in the garage in the winter time when it's running also has a home hot water so otherwise we have an on-demand propane hot water heater that we use mostly in the summer to have insurance they want two sources of heat but the on-demand yeah hot water past dust as an alternative source of heat but with the passive solar you could leave for the weekend and the yurt will get cold as long as your doors are closed the kitchen won't to freeze welcome we're coming into the garage of the strawbell so this is a nice big cool space mostly for storage for heating this is what we heat with our wood boiler for the floors and our water storage tank uh tanks are in the other Corners so lots of water storage here so we come in from the garage into the kitchen which looks out over the South uh so we get lots of beautiful sunshine this is one of our communal spaces in the house so we spend a lot of time in here and the brightness is just my favorite up here we've got the bathroom hopefully nobody's in it and every strawville house needs to have its truth window so our truth window in the corner convinces everyone that we do live in a strawbell house so it's a 16 inch wide straw bale that has about an inch of parging all the way around it to seal it in the nice thing about that is the purging is porous so it lets kind of humidity in and out it doesn't trap it when you seal it it becomes inflammable right so it's a it's a very sturdy house the R value is excellent and we've been really lucky to stay nice and warm it's a good thermal mask to have so we can run a washer and dryer off grid so our dryer is propane for heat and gets used maybe twice a year if we need to and then the washing machine at the time we bought it was the most efficient that you could get um when it's ready for an upgrade we'll get a more efficient one but it has its own inverter so when it spins it makes its own power a little bit um so this is the utility room this is the brains of the operation in here and so in here we have our entire HVAC and heating system so we have in-floor Heating and then this is the off-grid system here so we've got our inverter that inverts the power we have our batteries so we just upgraded to these really Sleek lithium ion batteries that take up a quarter of the space it's where we raise worms for our chickens and it's uh this is our grow center also for the for the spring when we grow when we start our seedlings it's nice and warm in here and we have our grow lights in here so that we can start all of our garden so the only part of the construction of the house that's normal or what we would consider normal construction is the hallway so it's just simple two by four connection from the straw bale to the yurt to be able to come through to the main living space so it's pretty easy to quarter it up we have our dining room where we sit to eat we have our living room we have a guest room in the middle on the futon when we have guests and then on this side we've got all of our sleeping areas so John I sleep downstairs in our master bedroom the girls have a loft in their upper bedroom and then Mo has his bedroom at the end we have plenty of space so we spend most of our day in this area we are mostly around the wood stove the winter time you know we read on the couch we stay warm in here it's nice and cozy it's also really dark in the winter when you get the the sun going down sooner and all of the walls are closed and it just feels really cozy like you're hibernating so we started looking for land early knowing it would take us time we knew we wanted to stay in the area because we were both working in the area and when we walked onto this land I think it was very clear that we knew we had found home there was nothing here there were big Open Fields there were big forests so we ended up buying 68 acres of land most of the land is provincially recognized Watershed and so we can't really touch it without permission but for us the goal of having that piece of the land is to preserve it and to leave it for wildlife and for biodiversity once we're done working through the fields and fencing and doing what we need to do we should be able to farm about 20 acres so yeah we were really fortunate to buy our land in a good price here for Realty but it was also really difficult because we were a young couple you know we didn't have kids at the time newly married we were both working we had no equity and we didn't have the money to put down on the land so we borrowed from family which worked out really really well for us and so when the land was paid off ah what Joy when you own the piece of land you you sit on uh but then there's everything all of the infrastructure it costs a lot of money uh we were fortunate we were working both of us full time so we were able to put money aside and we don't spend a lot of money but um the biggest piece was uh then trying to mortgage or be able to build a house because building a house requires a lot of upfront money so we did have to borrow again we were lucky my parents could pull out a credit line for us on their assets which was great and then we were able to flip that over into a mortgage after but there are a lot of costs involved even working the land you know we picked up a 60 year old tractor to work the land that thankfully you all can fix and I think that when it comes down to finances and being able to do it financially we can only do it because General has all of the skills to do it himself so we don't have to call a plumber we don't have to call an electrician we don't you know we can do most of the thing on our land that's a really big benefit so there's that skill set that leads us to an incredible amount of savings just because he's handy because he can build I mean he built this whole thing right but the setup is really daunting for a lot of people who are out there looking for land and wanting to start a life like this it's incredibly daunting and to build from the ground up requires yeah some Financial finagling that we were really fortunate to be able to do so we weren't able to work uh only on the farm and for the longest time so we both worked full-time jobs off the farm and then started growing the homestead over time and that became a little bit challenging there wasn't enough time in the day so I was able to retire from my job I think the goal in the long run is to have the farm pay for itself so you know we don't have big business plans but it would be nice to have to be able to work off of the land and have both of us at home to work often because we really enjoy working together we do get to Michelle's got a great job right now that allows us a lot of time together on the farm so hopefully we'll get there one day there's so much joy and passion in what we do but there are never enough hours in the day our days are long and it's hard work so it's more often a 10 to 14 hour day but those days aren't busy non-stop with all of the tasks and some down time in between you know when you're milking especially there's got to be 12 hours in between so you fill up the space in between anyway the firewood for the yurt in the wintertime is a lot we burn a lot of wood to keep this here at warm but with the straw Bill hopefully we won't need the fire stove much often just as on the on the coldest days so as much as I really enjoy being tied to this farm and being tied to the land and living from the land there are times when I need to get away and have a break and have a holiday and we love traveling so that's a challenge for me is not being able to just pick up and go for the weekend the other thing I would say about homesteading in general is that it can be really lonely finding like-minded people finding Community can be hard when you're homesteading for sure we have a lot of new neighbors that want to try to grow enough vegetables for each other so we've found more people that we can share this with which is awesome there are four families now involved and so if you can have four if he's working together and you can reach that sustainability so much sooner and all locally right so it's something we're really looking into I hope that we can make it work foreign Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it also to find out more about bear Bush Homestead you can visit the link in the description of the video thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 216,345

Keywords: off grid, off the grid, homestead, homesteading, farm, farming, hobby, home, house, yurt, straw, bale, natural, ecological, organic, solar, power, panels, rainwater, collection, tank, harvesting, stainless, steel, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, cow, milk, eggs, dairy, garden, gardens, canning, vegetable, chickens, family, five, Canada, winter, wood, boiler, heat, permit, finances, cost, budget, work, documentary, story, interview, Exploring, Alternatives, BareBush Homestead, livestock, bees, North, sustainable, self, reliant, 2023, new, living, kids, best

Id: mYSGD05n6iI

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023