I love seeing how other people live off-grid, each of us has our own ways, some are hard core, no electricity of any sort, some have all the modern conveniences… it just all depends on what you are looking to do and the finances you have to spend… of course the more modern conveniences you wish to have, the more $$$s it’s going to cost. We went somewhere in the middle, leaning towards slightly primitive……
How to get off-grid with not a lot of money… that is the holy grail, right? I see many people posting messages here and on other websites, all saying very much the same thing, they want to be independent, to have a piece of land, to have a small place to live, to be off-grid, but they don’t have the money to do it, they often want to join other people in hopes of pooling resources, or just jumping on someone else’s bandwagon.
I am here to tell you it is possible to do this without resorting to illegal means and without having to join with other people or a group to get off-grid.…
This is one method of dispatching and butchering a chicken, I noticed he said “sorry” to the chicken before starting the procedure… it’s what I would do too.
He uses a killing cone, a plucker, I will say that I think he needs to sharpen his knives, he does a good job but I noticed a couple of times he had to saw more than I thought he should have to cut through… this is part one of two…
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It’s hot, hot hot, those of us with gardens are in full swing… now it’s time to start your fall gardens. Things like greens, spinach, lettuces, garlic… honestly in the past, I haven’t given much thought to fall gardens, I have gardened so hard all summer that I’m pretty worn out for thinking about planing more things. But this is not the mindset of a good homesteader or off-gridder, especially if you are relying on that garden to supplement your food.
So let’s keep that excitement we had during the late winter and spring and get that fall garden started!…
Living more frugally can mean growing your own food, that can include more than just plants, it can mean meat. Many people who live in more rural areas grow chickens for eggs and meat, it’s just as easy to grow rabbits, this is something that has appealed to me ever since I moved off-grid, I would have no problems eating them, but it would be difficult, at least in the beginning, to dispatch one, I’m sure after it’s dead I would be able to skin it, gut it and prepare it… I did see a video of a man who invented a method of humanly dispatching the rabbit, here is the video…
From regular contributor Corey Naughton
I have a quick kitchen/prep related product review for you.
The “Hot Water Rocket”
There’s many ways to heat water when living off-grid. At the Bleu Cheese Ranch we use a batch solar hot water heater for the bulk of our needs. Others opt for pump driven systems. Still more bite the bullet and burn propane in hot water on demand systems. While these methods are great for heating large volumes of water we tend to overlook the needs for smaller quantities. In doing so we end up wasting energy, time, as well as convenience. During the winter months I can heat water for tea on the wood stove in a matter of minutes but the rest of the year leaves me wanting.
But then I found the Hot Water Rocket …
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CNN devoted an hour to one of the hero’s of off-grid living, Graham Hill. The TV Channel visited his place on the Hawaiian island of Maui’s north shore. (Our thanks to Claudia Rothschild for making the edited transcript)
“My vision is to try to create a fully off-grid, luxurious, sustainable way of living that doesn’t cost too much, and then try to get friends and maybe even make it a bed and breakfast and have people come through and understand how incredible it could be to live off-grid,” said Hill.
“Off-Grid means you have a water catchment, there is enough rain that you can get all your water from the sky. Solar and wind are really good on Maui, so basically, make it entirely energy independent.
Because I design my life virtually, I am able to work from anywhere. So when it is freezing cold in New York, I am able to come here for two or three months and work from here. So it is a fantastic setup.…
Rather than standing out from the landscape, Three Glens is almost invisible from across the valley. Its massive stone walls link to a dry stone wall that seems to flow right through the building; on another flank the oak cladding merges with a small stand of fir and birch beside it.
The owners, Neil and Mary Gourlay, wanted a farmhouse that “belonged” to the land it stands in. Stones for the walls have been collected from the fields, the oak is from wind-felled trees on the farm and the wool insulation is from the Gourlays’ own flock of blackface sheep. Three Glens is one of a new breed of “eco-farmhouse”, costing its occupants nothing to run, an important consideration when upland farming has become such a marginal occupation.…
In homebuilding, innovation in materials technology and energy efficiency is everywhere, but construction methods seem always to lag behind as many contractors stick to the familiar and sometimes the cheap. The Guardian reports that choosing a home has become “as simple as picking furniture from the Ikea catalogue” for residents of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where a neighbourhood of affordable architect-designed kit houses has just been launched. If you can’t afford pricey designs that does not mean settling for generic or uninspired aesthetics, inefficiency and mid-grade craftsmanship.
Author Sheri Koones champions this alternative path – prefabricated housing – that she has been promoting for years in a series of books about this option. The latest is “Pre-fabulous and Almost Off the Grid,” which features more than 30 homes built using some sort of prefabricated components.…
How many of you would like (love?) to to have your own place and live for just what you’d pay in taxes? Assuming you already have a piece of land (hint, look for so called “junk” land and you can often have it for a song)… Well that’s precisely what Anna Hess and her husband Mark did.…
Last Sunday afternoon, I went to a gardening roundtable discussion in my community. I live on a mountain side in the high desert of far west Texas (yes, Texas does have mountains, the Davis Mountains to be exact). It was quite interesting talking to the various gardeners out here. Some were just starting out, some were experienced gardeners but not in this location, and some had gardened out here for many years.
I have been really itching to get out and garden this year, I haven’t gardened much for the last 2 years because of water issues, we didn’t have much of a rainy season those two years. Our rainy season usually starts in July(ish) and ends in September(ish), during those few months we get most of our yearly amount of rainfall. It’s hard to wait for the rainy season to start, typically I would start in spring and hand water.…
How much land do you need to survive? This is not a theoretical question if, like Carol Deppe, you bellieve the zombie apocalypse is just around the corner.
The author of The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times,Deppe says you need an acre. But others say a quarter acre is enough.
Deppe’s book might help you build a veggie-garden with climate change in mind, but she lives in temperate Corvalis, Oregon, population 54,462. In other parts of the country such as New Mexico, Texas or Nevada, she might have other concerns. As it is, the book is mainly about surviving when the world infrastructure collapses and she has nothing to rely on but herself. …
