TIMELAPSE: How We Built A 3 Acre Farm in 1 Year from Scratch

good morning you guys and welcome to lola's farm this land right behind me is the piece of land that my boyfriend and i purchased exactly one year ago january 1st of 2020. this is a two and a half acre piece of land in the mountains of boquete panama so today i'm going to be sharing with you guys a little farm tour and how we turn this raw piece of land into a functioning homestead within the last year so the first thing that i'm going to share with you guys is our little mini school bus that we've actually been living in for the last three and a half years before we planted our feet here in boquete we traveled all through the united states up to alaska down through mexico all through central america and then found our our home here in boquete panama so it's actually kind of a miracle that this thing made it all the way up to the top of this mountain because the road to get up here is pretty freaking treacherous so when we got it up here we decided to plant jenny which is the name of our bus forever or as long as she lives so we actually made footers out of concrete blocks and then we shimmed it up level with steel plates and this was the first time that we had ever done anything like that so not only was it our first project up on this land but it was also a really big learning experience so just a quick little disclaimer from here and on for the rest of the video for the rest of this tour everything that was built was built during lockdown because right when we moved up here just shortly after about a month after that's when covet hit so because of that everything that we did build was really mostly out of functionality and doing the best that we could with what we had [Music] something else that you should know is that when we bought this land we knew that it had absolutely no water and absolutely no electricity so when we moved up here it was extremely important for us to find a good reliable water source the good news is we knew that in bogota panama we get over 120 inches of rain a year so we knew that all of our water was going to come from the rain so the first thing that we did was install this one half horse power water pump in this 600 gallon water tank that way we could start collecting rain water immediately and then distribute it into our bus and then also throughout the land if we wanted to plant any crops so if you take a look up you'll see that we have this pvc pipe that's connected all the way throughout our solar panels so our solar panels collect the rain it comes through the pipe and then to this little mesh screen that filters out any debris before it comes down this black pipe all the way underground up the black pipe and over into our 600 gallon water tank so on the top of the bus you guys will see i just showed you we have six 150 watt solar panels which gives us a total of 900 watts and that's what we've been relying on for last three and a half years and to be honest it was something that we struggled with during the rainy season because where the bus is located in these huge pine trees the sun actually doesn't hit the roof of our bus until about 10 30 in the morning so one of the next big projects that we worked on shortly after we got the bus all set was we expanded our living space so it's very important to have a nice outdoor space for us so we decided to build this deck off of our bus and it was such it was such an awesome learning experience as well and the best thing about it in my opinion my favorite part and the favorite thing that i that i have learned i think in the last year is how to show sugiban the wood which basically just means you burn the wood to treat it and prevent it from molds and like parasites and and different things from eating at it so welcome to our little jenny love in all her glory so as you can see this this girl right here she's she's pretty beat she's she's gone through some of the worst roads in the world oh my god oh boy this is gnarly and she's been lived in like truly lived in in the last three and a half years we've had probably hundreds of people step foot in this bus um so she's she deserves a facelift so one of the next projects that we're going to be working on within the next couple months is actually ripping this entire bus apart and redoing it from the bottom up so this is probably one of our favorite parts of the bus which is our sticker wall this is kind of a whole collage of a lot of the places that we have been to um so you can see we've we've traveled all the way from south dakota down to san cristobal mexico we even shipped our bus over to the island of cozumel off of mexico um so it's been through a lot so we do have electricity and this i'm gonna i'm gonna be honest right here this is gonna be a little tongue twister for me because i don't know any of this stuff all right my boyfriend behind the lens here is telling me what to say i'm going to be completely honest so we have a 200 amp we have 200 amp hour lithium batteries we have a 50 amp victron charge controller and 1000 watt victron inverter crusted we also have running water and then we just have a very simple basic two burner stove which we did all of our cooking on so i'll be honest if you told me three and a half years ago that this was gonna be the size of my fridge for the next three and a half years i probably would not have stepped foot into this bus at all if you also told me that i would have had to store all my clothes for three and a half years in this one small little drawer that probably would not have happened and and enough to top it all off that i would have to poop in a bucket underneath this bench with just dirt we do have a toilet seat but with just dirt that that also probably would not have happened but i'm not going to show you that so something that was really really important for us was that we were still able to produce these videos and post them on youtube for you guys so we were really excited to find out that we could get high-speed internet up here on this little mountainside so you can see behind me we have a little antenna behind us that shoots all the way over to the volcano over there for our connection we have a little router in the bus and then we actually have a fiber optic fiber optic line that goes all the way down to the workshop there so we can have high speed internet all the way down in our workshop and if you're curious about how fast our internet is up here on the side of a mountain we actually have 25 megabytes of upload and 25 megabyte bytes of download and you're probably wondering what are you talking about you don't have electricity when you have these electrical lines right behind you these are actually privately owned so we can't tap into them so that's just the way it is so before we head over to the heart of our little homestead the first thing that you'll notice when you walk onto our land is this crazy looking thing which is our antenna to um get in touch with alien life that has kind of been our our new no i'm just kidding it's our wind turbine so this thing oh my goodness what a freaking process to install this thing but if you guys don't know bogete especially where we're located on this mountainside we get some insane winds so one of the big things that jor and i wanted to take advantage of with all of the elements and use it to our benefit so that's why we installed this wind turbine so this specific one here is a 1 500 watt turbine and the difference between having wind compared to solar energy is this actually produces three-phase ac so for us that was a really really big learning process and it's kind of taken us a little while to understand how that plays into installing all of our all of our electrical so our newest and probably favorite addition to lolis farm is four goats so we got goats mostly for the purpose of cutting our grass but also in the future milk production and cheese production just for ourselves and for the other people that are going to be a part of our homestead so we wanted something small we just got four so we have two boys this is the big boy he's about six months old this is george this is the baby boy this is vasilios and then over here we got our girls so these will be our little milk and cheese production babies this is alberta and this is camilla so you'll notice in our greenhouse that we don't have a door and the reason being is this isn't for temperature control it's mostly just for rain and wind control because we're from boston massachusetts so we're used to having to plant in the seasons whereas here we're just fighting with the rain and with the wind so everything that we've been doing with growing food has been very experimental so we've been kind of doing everything on a very small scale so we're kind of getting to the end life of this harvest season in the greenhouse here so we just have some tomato plants and brussels sprouts waiting for them to harvest a little bit more and then you can see we have a bunch of compost here that we're kind of preparing and getting ready to just spread all over and just completely start fresh in here so like i said before something that we now know is geodesic dome shaped greenhouses work very very well something else that we know works very very well is the a-frame shape which takes us over to our chicken coop so we built this chicken tractor about nine months ago and it has worked beautifully for us and the reason being is because um this is very movable so the idea is that we keep the chickens in there for about half the time during the day and then we let them free range the rest of the day so they till up the guard and they fertilize the garden you can see we actually have the chicken coop right here and we just moved it a couple weeks ago so you can see kind of the deconstruction but also reconstruction of the soil so when we one day plant some crops here so we usually let the chickens about about 11 a.m which is currently the time right now we let them in there in the morning and then they free range all the way until about 8 o'clock at night so it's been pretty amazing because they have been producing each one one egg a day so we have three chickens we get three eggs a day like no matter what this was also a little experiment that we did with doing an outdoor garden so we wanted to see what things did work well in the elements with the wind and the rain and so far we have some kale we have some cabbage and we have some broccoli and they've all done relatively well so now we're moving on to the place where we have spent the vast majority of our time which is our workshop slash temporary home [Music] when we started the construction of this building the initial intention was it to just be a workshop but we kind of over time decided that we needed a little upgrade from the bus so we're turning it into a workshop slash temporary tiny home for ourselves while we're building our house house so the dimensions of the house are 16 feet by 16 feet so it's about 380 square feet with it including the loft and the back porch so before we head on inside i just want to take you guys around back and show you where we keep all of our water stuff so we have four 600 gallon water tanks which is a total of 2 400 gallons of water and we have a rain water collection system off of the roof of this workshop so the rain hits the roof it goes all the way down to the bottom goes into the gutter down this pvc pipe and into our tanks where they're all connected and it's been amazing because we had this set up during the heart of the rainy season and these were all four were almost completely empty they were about here and within two weeks they all filled up all the way to the top to the point where they were overflowing so the water pump that we use down here is actually the same exact one as the one up at the bus so it's one half horsepower and then it pumps into this westinghouse um hot water heater which let me tell you guys we just installed this and we have not had a consistent way to have a hot shower in three and a half years we actually have a system the pvc comes all the way over here up into these little nozzles and then boom we got hot water baby so this brings us over to our solar panel so this is how we power the workshop and we put it a little bit further away because this spot specifically on our land the sun hits it at six am so we wanted to utilize as much sun and get as much power as we could especially from whoa baby especially when we're gonna be running a lot of power tools and all that good stuff so we have three 300 watt 24 volt solar panels so this equals to 900 watts in total which is the exact same amount as we have up at the bus we will be upgrading to five more panels to a total of eight because during the rainy season we were lacking a little bit so we just want to make sure we are golden for when the rainy season hits so you guys are probably wondering why our solar panels are very horizontal and the reason being is the location that we are in the world we're very close to the equator so in that case you want to have your solar panels more horizontal but we are just slightly above it so we do have the solar panels very slightly um facing the south so even though this thing's gonna be a workshop it's also gonna be our temporary home so the name of the game is to keep it as clean as possible aka switching off my little farm boots to my slippers so let's take a look in so the space in here is about 90 done so we're really really closing in on pretty much everything so we're now getting to the parts of really making the place feel like a home we're getting into the lighting and the appliances and soon we're going to be installing a couch and all that good stuff so that when we move in it feels cozy so one of our favorite things about this piece of land is the view that we have of the volcano so we decided instead of having a wall or a door or anything here windows we decided to just install a huge garage door that we can open at any time and just hang out in here and enjoy the beautiful view [Music] so unfortunately the clouds just rolled in so we don't have a view right now so when you first walk into the workshop this whole space here is going to be our living space so you can see we have this new refrigerator we have this new stove and then over here we're going to have all counter and storage space as well as a little sink that we're going to install in the corner and then over on this side we're going to have kind of a little living hangout area so this corner we're thinking of adding in a couch maybe a little table and then eventually have a projector that comes down right here so that we can hang out on the couch and watch some movies you guys have no idea how excited we are to start with the aesthetics of the space because when we started the construction here in june it was really all about functionality and the necessity so the necessity of getting electricity the necessity of getting water and then having a dry space to work so one of the first pieces of aesthetic that we've installed has been these beautiful little lights which bring such a nice ambiance to the place especially at night because these two lights they don't really give you that cozy feel if you know what i'm talking about one of the goals that jordan i have especially when we start the construction of our house is to build as much of the furniture in our house as we can so this table and this bench were actually two of the projects um that that i took on and i don't know if you guys can tell but i do i am kind of a girly girl at heart but i do love building i love welding i love working with wood so these two things were such a good project for me to take on pretty simple working with wood is very very easy compared to working with metal and we still have these to this day we built both of these things probably about 10 months ago and we use them all the time as you can see we got our little cat roger over here just soaking soaking up the day right now so jordan and i really really wanted to go for the industrial eclectic look so that's why we kept all of the conduit exposed so not only does it give it that look but it also keeps things very easily accessible if there's ever any problems with the electrical our latest project that we literally just finished a couple days ago was this addition onto the back so right beyond the garage door we wanted to have a little hangout spot so we made this deck and the cool thing about it is all of this wood we actually milled ourselves from a tree that fell down down the road so these two additions here and over here we wanted to add on because we wanted to have a bathroom which we haven't even started the construction of of yet it's just an empty room but that'll be one of our next things that we'll work on and then that brings us over to the other side which is our electrical closet aka what we like to call the powerhouse so we have 600 amp hours of lithium batteries that's connected to a 60 amp charge controller and then below us we have a 3 000 watt inverter that's used to power all of our 120 stuff this is the controller for our wind turbine and then this is the charge controller for it but we actually have it all disconnected now because we're going to be upgrading to a much better one really soon we've seen the temperature range from as low as 58 degrees all the way up to 75 degrees and that's 365 days out of the year so we got this little tiny very very tiny wood stove to heat up the space in here just a little little bit so even if it just raised it like 5 to 10 degrees that's all that we wanted so we don't have it hooked up because we're currently waiting for a flue pipe to come in the mail which is taking a little bit of time but once we have this hooked up i'm so excited because at night time and especially during the windy season it gets very very very chilly in here and now i'm actually going to be taking you guys to where our next really big project is going to be which is building rodrigo our very good friends a-frame house [Music] so our three to five year goal plan is to have this whole piece of land being a functioning homestead community so we want to have at least four to five houses built um we have all the people lined up that are going to be a part of this community and to be completely honest you guys one of the biggest things that made jordan i nervous about settling down and starting a homestead was being tied down when you have animals when you have a garden a farm all that good stuff so the community aspect allows us to keep traveling and not be tied down to this specific place as well as allow everybody else that's part of the community to do the same thing so our very special amigo the one that we're going to be building his a-frame right in this exact spot he actually just started clearing up the land because we're going to be starting construction within the next couple weeks so rodrigo's temporary little project that he's been working on and something that he's actually going to be living in temporarily while we're building his a-frame is his little a-frame tree house so those of you don't know this is our very special friend rodrigo he actually has his own channel so if you want to go check him out he's duh d a jungle boy on youtube and he's going to be sharing his whole journey of building his a-frame house so this is where we're gonna wrap up our one year homestead tour for you guys and it's really ironic because this is actually our hundredth video of our whole homestead playlist on youtube so thank you guys so much for following along for following this journey and if you guys want to stick around for the next 100 or so videos and watching us build this thing up even more and really start the whole community aspect then click the little subscribe button and keep following along thank you guys so much and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: The Nomadic Movement

Views: 1,122,644

Rating: 4.9258113 out of 5

Keywords: the nomadic movement, nomadic movement, tiny house movement, tiny house build, tiny house, tiny home, diy, panama, living in panama, diy build, life uncontained, building our own house, relocating to panama, move to panama, diy deck, wood milling, lumber milling, chainsaw milling, farm tour, timelapse, farm timelapse, diy timelapse, wild wonderful off grid

Id: ZPOWWqPaf9k

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021