V0019 Slab City Rabbit Side

okay yeah while they were playing we were filming it for a video oh okay yeah yeah so you just rolling the slab city are you checking it out yeah i'm just here i'm just checking it out for right now nice so are you from around like california i guess i was born and raised in orange county oh cool and uh for the last six years though i've been living out in uh i've been living out in denver oh yeah yeah that's that's a different uh yeah a different environment it certainly is a lot different yes we have mountains here but not really and and right right beneath the canal uh water line so you can't even see the mountains yeah oh i guess we can see those ones down there but yeah yeah yeah i actually got lost finding this place and that guy over there literally walked me down to the to the bottom of the hill and pointed me in the right direction yeah very nice guy i'm over there bothering him in his yard and stuff [Music] yeah it's supposed to rain tomorrow uh apparently i don't know nemo's walking off it's supposed to rain uh what is it tomorrow and wednesday i believe yeah we're trying to cut up a pulley and this and that and pulled it across and we'll screw it all down so it's a lot darker in here than it usually is okay but it's kind of ominous i'm very i'm very dog friendly they they tend to love me so what do you guys got going on here um i mean it's our house uh but also um uh there's three of us that are here and jessie is our like art curator okay so she uh is like the art director and uh handles the aesthetic look of things ryan's kind of the the architect and the design for a lot of the stuff and it's kind of the muscle guy okay and we raise uh chickens and ducks and we have a bunch of plants in our garden tortoises we got a pond some fish and uh yeah just living our lives okay trying to live comfortably yeah botanical art palace so we're just like living in an environment that makes us happy which is plants and and water and art and this this is kind of the combination of the three of our creative input okay usually it's a lot more brighter like this right but like you can see the tarp is just really covering it which is which is good that's what we're going for but there's fish in here it's a 300 gallon tank plus two more in the back and they're all connected so it's a 900 gallon pond what do you have koi in here uh those are goldfish and minnows rosy red minnows let's tell you about a pet store okay and they'll grow to be a couple inches long they've bred in there so we have a few generations now fish there's a frog that hangs out there's a crayfish clams snails those all came from these canals okay not the fish but the clams and the snails and the crayfish did okay and that duckweed that also came from these canals so it's kind of neat we found a lot of stuff locally that works and just throw it in the pond and it helps clean the water and keep it all nice and processed and then that plums up through the rafters and goes out towards the garden and then there's a uh a hose there just we can water the gardens with that okay so the vines have lost some leaves because of the summertime so they're at times have been obscuring this entire thing but right now they're a little bit uh sparse i like i like the horse yeah right yeah he's got another yeah there's other ones around one out in the garden and other spots uh the tortoises i don't know if they're awake i saw them earlier [Music] that's the smaller one the female's underneath there uh she's digging in the burrow okay yeah they're about 20 and 30 years old they've had babies oh yeah we got little baby ones when they hang out in here most of the time they just hibernate and then this that door opens up into our our dog yard tortoise yard and they walk around out there and pick up grass and whatever else they do okay yeah yeah it's uh we like them they're really cool they're a lot more intelligent and and faster this is your yard over here yeah i had dogs and we keep our animals and the loose dogs separate oh what is this the best of our ability a random piece of artwork uh this one i think somebody gave to us but we got a lot of stuff from thrift stores okay well i actually have a painting i am going to donate to you guys next time i'm around oh yeah right on she'll be in january awesome it's uh one that i painted myself oh perfect in art class uh so it's nothing special not worth anything we love original work yeah yeah but uh i don't want to toss it away right yeah yeah we have a lot of corners and areas to put artwork a little bird beater compost you guys do your own compost yeah we've been nurturing that baby for like a child for two years okay so now we know oh yeah that's true we were at another camp and then moved to this spot because there was a lot of space because we plan to grow and expand like this so uh we brought the compost materials with us and then put it in the new one and even now it's full so we've been we broke out the bottom bolt uh board we've been taking from it so the thing next to it is a sifter you take shovel fulls put it in that and the small pieces will fall through in the buckets and the big ones roll back into the top for another round the next addition to that will be an electric lawnmower motor with the blade so it's like a food processor so when the big chunks go back in and kind of grinds them up yeah so they'll decompose faster and we'll eventually these are all uh small strips of shade cloth that were too small to expand over anything like we'll use the big pieces and do a big wall section like that right when they're small strips if you just tie them up like this and do them in a long line they shade just as well if not better because now they're thicker right and the wind can pass through them so they don't really oh that's like a sail that's ingenious i like that it was kind of accidental genius you know like well how could we use these put them up and then they've just they've really worked and the cat runs across them so they're strong enough to hold a cat okay yeah we're going to replace what's inside of them oh you know because it's like a snowman and stuff right like it's just jars of water so we'll put way cooler stuff inside and fill them back up again well i definitely like the flowers yeah the flowers are neat it's just you know we could do better than flowers uh this is gonna be for the rain when the rain comes i flap this down so it's very temporary but we're building a workshop area here you know all the drawers that put stuff in storage behind that but the cool thing is this winnebago it's going to be an art studio because we make art as well as collect other art so we just built in these tables and we're about to put in flooring here we've gutted this whole side and this is the original stuff so it has this really cool old in the orange yeah built these tables stained them through them and painted the shelves so it's like a u-shaped work station so we can all have that going shelves will continue around we'll cool it in here because you can feel right now it's warm yeah uh our roof is gonna go over top and it'll be a solid roof on this so that it doesn't rain in here it doesn't leak in here and we can stand on top of it so now that's a rooftop patio or right right whatever whatever we can do we'll do some tai chi on the roof maybe so yeah it's right now art storage but uh right here we're gonna build you know an eight foot by eight foot cubby shelf kind of system this window comes out fills in a different hole that'll be cool i'm excited about it this thing's going to be awesome it'll just be a nice space to retire to and do some art and a nice creative zone separate from everything else these are some of the chickens that's one rooster there we raised him from a um he just came out of the egg reached down pulled him and the egg up and brought him back we didn't know if it'd be a boy or a girl we were hoping for a girl but that didn't happen we have three roosters now so every time there's another rooster we have to build another another part another pen yeah yeah because free-ranging here is a death sentence for chickens well in most places it's great but in slab city uh there's at times of the year more dogs than people and then 90 of the dogs aren't on a leash and then a smaller percentage of those dogs are mean you know so dogs get into fights with each other but chickens aren't very good at flying away these smaller ones are they're pretty flighty they can get up high um but there are people out here that have had chickens and they free-range them because they want the the birds to be free and that makes sense but their food yeah for the dogs yeah all these chickens are rescues from other camps in slab city or uh surrounding towns some of them weren't in any necessary danger that just the people couldn't take care of them but some of these chickens there's a black one in here came to us basically zero feathers and a huge gash on her back getting attacked by a dog and that was one of two chickens that survived the guy had 18. wow so the summer heat kills them and the dogs kills them so dogs kills them dogs kill them yeah so they're being really noisy right now so we purposefully you know we these are these birds are fully enclosed they do not escape these pens and we give them as much space as we can give per bird i think they have eight or ten square feet per bird that's ten times the industry standard so i think we're good yeah but any opportunity we get that we can expand these things once we have enough material we do like this one's been doubled recently back there and then uh yeah they lay their eggs usually there's one leg shot there you go yeah right so they they never lay them in that one you always choose this one oh that is interesting there's one over there yeah yeah this is their favorite one i just gave them hay so they picked it all out kick it everywhere yeah and then the door doesn't like to close sorry if i'm dusting you no you're good got to do a housekeeping yeah breathe this stuff in so much yeah so the eggs we uh stick on the fridge the fridge isn't on most of the time only in the summer or the middle of the day you got to keep them under 99 degrees but the small chickens one of them lays these little blue eggs and then we have game hens in there which are medium-sized birds so they're they'll do some of these uh and then there's the ham eggs and then there's the duck eggs okay they're monsters yeah and they're they're they're heavy you know they got strong shells i've dropped them from this height accidentally and they didn't break we sell the eggs we eat the eggs we make bread and other treats with them and sell those we have a bicycle so we'll do a little route around okay these are the yucky ducks we fill this thing up we just got water so we'll probably do that later today i splash around and turn it to muck and we fill it again so they'll have separate drinking water for that this is about to expand and i'm building two ponds that are kind of linked together okay and they'll be filtration and all that and so they'll have a constant filtered pond situations they can splash around their hearts content okay yeah every duck loves water some of them need it they just float around all day these ones are more land ducks that enjoy the occasional dips so it's uh why is that one over there separate from these ones he actually also has a female in there with them okay these are two girls the the the one with the clean looking bill is the male right here the bigger one but those two there with the green speckles or females and it used to be him and three females then we rescued this other male back here the one that looks like a mallard yeah and uh ducks aren't very vicious with each other chickens will kill each other they have a very rigid social hierarchy the ducks are pretty chill and so they just like quack at each other and kind of just rub faces um which wasn't endangering them but they were very stressed out like two o'clock in the morning you could hear them just running around in circles because the boys were fighting over the females and stuff so expanded this that direction put in the baby gate and then um he has one female over there there's two here no fighting piece has been restored i hear you aside from little squabbles like this they're very talkative but they can't fly their wings are tiny you can see the size of his body compared to the wings so this is already twice as high as it needs to be it's more for dogs so they don't get the idea to jump over it and he can't even get over that gate he just stares through and wonders yeah they're they're cool they're all like i said they're all rescues they all have names they're all gonna die of old age you know it's we're not eating any of these ones so eat the eggs yeah that's their rent but otherwise they're i like that that's their rent yeah right the one duck looks at me when i take the egg she's very aware that i that i take them i don't know if she likes it or hates it or cares at all but yeah when i do she looks me right in the eye and then looks at the egg and looks at me and i go thank you daphne and i want that and sometimes when i take it she'll run over to where the nest was to see like yeah no he took it wow and the next day to lay another one and then i take it c took it again i'd like to show off this wall that we just did yeah this is this wall over here okay and uh it's kind of dark in here of course this is the thing but we just put up this uh xylophone wall we went to a thrift store and uh collected as many babies isla phones as we could uh because jesse had the idea of dogs are getting mad putting xylophones over the wall making like a really colorful thing that is also like musical we thought it looked really cool yeah it does i like it yeah yeah and then it's is set up in kind of like our living room hangout area oh okay um so yeah when we have guests or friends ever kind of just come over here and hang out take a seat yeah yeah not bad i like your little d d dice over here yeah yeah yeah you play i used to when i was younger uh i haven't in a long time i still have my books i still have them i won't throw them away because i got that dream that maybe one day i'll find people to play with right yeah but uh but no i don't i don't play i haven't played in years about 20 years something like that but uh when i did play back in high school i was playing a lot okay yeah i i used to actually dm games i got oh did you yeah i ended up dming for several groups actually you were popular then i'm sure i was yeah that's always the difficult part about playing the game is finding somebody that's going to dm or dm well yeah yeah exactly someone will offer to do it but it might not be the best i do what i've noticed is most most places people kind of just stick to their own camp yeah is that is that the norm a lot of people mingle and wander around some people don't have built up camps they're just here for the season so they just spend time at other camps okay yeah and then oh it's bedtime you crawl back to your tent wherever that is sleep in it and then go back to you know the internet cafe in the morning cruise on over to the oasis blah blah blah you know there's there's community spots that people will often spend their time at okay so are you guys trying to turn this into a community spot hell no no no this is our home this is our we're a family this is our house um it's just also a gallery of sorts that we've made for ourselves but we also enjoy showing other people okay so we allow you know tourism and people come and we have friends that hang out and we have um guests stay like international guests and stuff we have a cabin that we're building for all of that so we enjoy people being here but not to stay here or live here just hang out all day we don't yeah we don't have like there are other places that will do like uh one dollar a plate for breakfast and anybody that shows up and pays a dollar they can do breakfast or they'll do like karaoke night on thursdays at their place or something like that and that's awesome to have those sorts of things in the community but that's not what we're doing here this is where we live this is not for other people to come and like you know kind of cruise in and hang out all day you know like we'll have our friends over but like it's not just kind of like yeah yeah come on by anybody yeah so let me let me pose this question to you because you guys definitely have like an art thing going on for sure for sure i don't think so you don't think so so what what do you guys think if you start getting more more art uh in here and this starts becoming like a regular tourist stop for like the art gallery of the of the slabs that's right right it's basically already that's that'd be fine um the art's curated though you know what i mean like it's not like any piece of art that gets into our hands we just find a spot and put it up there's a there is more bad than good and not even bad just there's a certain uh motif happening here so things outside of that just don't work so we don't you know but we'll accept gifts of art and if it doesn't really fit the vibe we have other areas so we have kind of like backup art in other spots right may not necessarily work with the current vision but that's the thing with our we just find a spot for it and we have plenty of areas to fill in this place so there's always somewhere that something can work right um but you're asking though like what if we were on like an art tour or something like that yeah yeah yeah that'd be fun i suppose um you know for like a specific season like for this part we kind of yeah people that are coming by want to come by and see the place we like to show off what we have because we put a lot of work into it it's mostly like for our enjoyment if other people think it's cold and that's good too yeah yeah exactly yeah well i i definitely think it's cool i actually was gonna ask if i could check out your garden back here yeah like i said i really liked i really liked the idea you guys did with the uh with that horse yeah i clipped off the old stuff and it'll it'll grow more a lot of these things there's stuff in pots that we're stashing for now but we're going to plant once the area is ready for them we have trees that we'll survive two summers out here now and agaves those are easy now we're doing oleander but it's kept away from any of that where the animals are because it's poisonous is it yeah and it's grown all over california i didn't know that in huge amounts on on the sides of public streets and public parks like the the everyday californian is exposed to this stuff and like if i were to just strip these leaves off and throw them in a bowl of water and let them be in there for a little bit tomorrow the dog goes and drinks that water and they can die wow it's like it's i can't remember the poison and i might be wrong about that but that's what i've heard i've heard that's pretty accurate so you know google it but um i believe the poison is right like ricin i think that's where it comes from okay i'm not familiar with poison don't eat it but yeah it's there it grows out here that's why they they have it everywhere in california because it grows fast big bushy nice beautiful green and big big flowers on it um so and it doesn't require much water to do that but if you give it a lot of water it'll just become this massive bush so they're great for hedges and everything excuse me date palm a lime tree or a baby lime tree yeah a very baby it was bigger in the summer fried it and then it grew all that again so that's good mesquite is what we're going to um build our main tree canopy with okay if this were to become like a forest that we're ultimately going to grow starting from right here it keeps emanating outward this is a new garden that just happened so we just keep doing that and build towards that thing in between here and there should be forested okay if we're given enough time to do so right right um but this one here is like a year old tree that one over there is over two years and then we've taken a branch from it and air layered it and so that you can make a genetic copy of that tree and now this our newest one is a branch from that tree and we air layered it and since then it's done all this growth okay since it came out so like that's that's successful in my books so now there's another four or five branches on that tree that i'm going to air layer to get more and these things end up with a good canopy so now we got one two three four five of them so maybe something over here you know so you don't have to put that many another 10 trees and we've effectively covered this area yeah and then when you look at the difference between the size of that tree which is basically how big it was when we got it so this tree which is multiple times thicker and then it's it's actually you know nine feet tall or seven eight nine feet tall so they grow give them enough water and they'll they'll do it and they have a lot of benefits they reach really far down underground with their tap root pull up water and then redistribute it higher up with the roots okay and then other plants benefit from that they are a legume so they uh not all of them do it but some are better than others at it they pull nitrogen out of the air gobble it up the extra stuff they throw down to the roots bacteria takes that and transfers it fungus in the dirt takes that eats it up sends it over to somebody else and they distribute and share nutrients that's good so these trees once their root network is in here everything else is going to benefit from it like they're plugged in like it's a the it department you know yeah so that's that's our angle with these gardens like all this dirt aside from some potting soil that's been added because we'll have potted plants and then when you don't use it anymore you just dump the dirt in here but this stuff in here was made from this sand started out like you know brown desert sand and it's now soil yeah like actual dirt and there's beans sprouting in here and worms and mushrooms pop up and then like the sticks and leaves and things like that are from past tomato plants that we've grown boom now it's in there and it's just organic material it just becomes organic material before beans these are pinto beans beans and lentils pour them in and then they sprout into this you take that piece off give it to the chickens let the roots rot and then they um and then it just becomes part of the soil so this is whatever less than two years for this patch here and then i started doing the other ones so that garden there isn't as black as this one so yeah it's like these areas are our research and development for her yeah for gardening out here random seeds uh turns out these two are okra it's just starting to flower now got a little okay um they lasted all summer did great oh sorry this is one plant isn't it yeah this is the other one jalapenos sugar cane uh one tobacco plant we'll give them some seeds tamarind a bunch of stuff pomegranate right behind you yeah we just harvested a pomegranate off of that big big guy and yeah it's grown all this since we got it so i'm gonna train it along the chicken coop here and trellis it all around so we'll just be pomegranates hanging and it's dragon fruit cactus got a good 10 15 cuttings of that that we've started so i'm hoping that it takes about three years before we get fruit from them but that's okay so who's into botany well all of us but now because of this place i started with a slight interest in plants uh from keeping reptiles okay and so i didn't know much i just knew enough to get get our hands dirty and the rest has just been trial and error here you know and then so jesse started helping watering the plants inside and i'd water the plants outside and then by spending time with them she just learned a lot about it and then we would research stuff at night find out what kinds we had and we had a list of all the species at one point there was a 150 species of plants before our first summer that we had here um we're probably close to that now still although they're different plants those ones uh we found out the hard way that walmart and lowe's and all those places home depot their garden center will sell you anything it doesn't matter what area you're in so they'll sell you some plant and you're like oh sweet 6.99 you bring it home and it just dies because it's like a zone five and this place is zone 10 b or 11 or whatever yeah i think we're timbie yeah you'll bring on plants that say i love sun and you're like no not this sun i don't love the sun but yeah trial and error is the key to what you said there i mean there was a lot of error a lot of stuff died turns out in the desert uh you can grow cactus that's yeah that does well this works yeah yeah yeah but then there's other stuff and then as the uh the soil gets remediated as more roots fill up the ground then the ground can hold more moisture for longer and then we kind of expand how much we can grow yeah year by year now we're working on little by little another tamarind tamarind bunch of stuff it's coming along we haven't really grown any like huge crops of anything we're not into like monoculture farming of like okay do a million of this or a million of that it's all about diversity and having a mixed environment that it doesn't matter what we throw into it like you just walk through there and you're like potatoes oh okay and a tomato i know this and that it's very random something i like that will happen is like you will kind of just toss seeds all over the place and some stuff will work some stuff will won't and then you'll need soil for another project you pick up the soil and put some over here and then you plant something else and then some seeds that you forgot about start popping up in the new spot because of like palm trees in there the the parameters have changed and whatever now that you'd be like oh i like it over here i'm not popping oh i forgot i planted the house yeah i didn't want carrots here yeah yeah there's like 25 little uh date palm seedlings now over there it'll take them 30 years to be any type of tree at all and they're not even going to produce good dates so like they're not the most valuable of tree when you're trying to grow a forest in less time than it takes naturally right palm trees aren't really the way to go we have a few because they're available but uh they're gonna be dwarfed by these mesquite very fast and then eventually the palm trees will be able to punch through but for the first little while when they're like this tall their leaves are quite nice and they're a nice bushy thing right but once they become tall and spindly they're just this thing on a stick way up there it doesn't do anything for shade yeah and that's why we want trees for the shade yeah for the shade yeah there's fruit trees and stuff you know food's good but shades that we're after there's plenty ways to grow food but not too many ways to just the sun well yeah we're um like i said in the middle of pulling this tarp up here so we'll probably have to get back to that then we got to go and help other friends tarp their place okay well i will let you guys go since you guys are busy i appreciate you guys letting me in and showing me around i really i really like what you guys got going on here i can see why i was recommended to come here yeah for sure all right guys again thank you for the tour appreciate it i appreciate i appreciate you guys opening up your home to me i wish you the best yeah thanks absolutely man thank you sir very much thank you so that was rabbit side a beautiful place beautiful people uh beautiful artwork wow uh i look forward to being able to donate my piece and hopefully making this place just that much better awesome people to come visit again it is their home be respectful you know mind your manners but yeah i definitely recommend stopping by and saying hello also check out their their website uh which i got right here what is it facebook and instagram so uh i definitely i'll put links in the bottom in the bottom so you guys can check that out and i hope you guys enjoyed this tour

Channel: Vagabond Travels

Views: 49,601

Keywords: Van Life, SUV Life, Car Dwelling, Off Grid, Tiny Home, Slab City, Slab City Library, Rabbit Side, Attractions, California Attrations, American Attractions, Desert Living, Vagabond Travels, Travel, California, Nomad, Squatters, Squatting, Boondocking, Art, Art Gallery, Hostels, Slab City Hostel, Slab City Museum, Museum

Id: QIBj1HaV_kQ

Length: 32min 16sec (1936 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020