Howdy! I have 5 acres in Utah, USA, and I'm currently working to add a manual pump to my electric pump, set up a composting toilet, and build my food forest--I hope to become largely self-sufficient and off-grid within a couple of years
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Living off the grid - homesteading and self-sufficiency
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For anyone interested or already living off the grid, anywhere in the world.
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Hey, nice to meet ya! We also use a composting toilet, we're in a place with almost no natural water so we don't want to flush it away :P Have you got water on your land?
I do have a well, yes. It provides quite a bit of output when I turn it all the way on, but my city limits the total quantity of water that I use. I don't have any irrigation set up, so my focus right now is soil building, doing a lot of sheet mulching, and digging swales so that I can keep more rainwater on and into the land. It's really nice to have a well for the house and other normal water needs, or if I want/need to do some spot irrigation, but I'm hoping to keep irrigation pretty limited and get to the point where the land is mostly self-maintaining with it's water.
Jealous :) A well would cost more than we paid for the entire land but it'd be so worth it!
What do you do for water? Is it mostly rainwater collection? I spent a couple of years looking at land and the first requirement was always water availability
Yeah, the only part of Europe we could afford was dry af so we only have rainwater, and in the past couple of years it's hardly rained at all. We do collect from every single roof we have, we can store just over 11.000 litres (~3000 gallons) but if it doesn't rain there's nothing to store. after 5 years we're just about ready to dig a well or move but we can't afford either :) we're doing okay though, we have water in the house and all our animals have enough to drink - the one thing we're missing is irrigation for a veggie garden. so mostly we grow vegetables in winter.
We just bougbt around 1500m^2 in Belgium between 2 cities where me and my girlfriend work.
A street next to a forest which is nice, so it is a small community. The back part of the property is forest with around 15 trees. Big renovation project though!
I wish I could go off grid, but in Belgium we don't have the money for the space or a heat pumps ystem for the winter. Just 1 hectare is around 300k€ without a house at all and a 20% house building tax (unless you get agricultural ground which is much cheaper at around 53k per hectare, bit you can't build any structures on it.
But we have trees, a workshop, a decent sized house, what feels like isolation because of the forest on one side and our own mini forest behind the house.
Not enough for animals besides some chickens amd ducks, but plenty for a big garden 😁
Hey, that's so cool! Here in Spain I have a LOT of Belgian neighbours, believe it or not, haha (and Dutch!) As you say land is quite expensive over there so I guess that's why they come here :) So is your place off grid or just hidden? I totally understand the struggle, I have an orchard and a forest around us but heating is still very complicated. We have a wood stove but there's not enough prunings from the orchard and we're not allowed to fell trees, besides pine is not great for burning. So every year we have to work something out ;) Having a workshop is also super important, I think a lot of people underestimate how many tools and other bits and bobs you're going to need when you want to homestead! But most of all - congratulations, must be super exciting!
This is day 1,766 offgrid in a campervan in the American southwest. 95% of my power comes from solar, with ~5% from the alternator when I relocate between boondocking sites. The 750w array on the van roof makes about 2kWh/day, depending on what I'm doing. Today is 1.81kWh so far, so in the ballpark.
Water management is a key part of boondocking; I have a 35gal tank and carry another 14g in 7g jugs. Easy peasy to make two weeis, less easy to go 3 weeks.
When I lived in a house on rural land I had chickens and built an incubator for hatching fertilized eggs from eBay or whereever. The only things I miss from that previous life are those chooks, the tractor, and motorcycles. :-\
I linked to this community from the sidebar over on our community for folks that live in vans, cars, and RVs. We're offgrid in a different way. :-)
We have a previously abandoned *caserío *(farmstead? hamlet?) and 10 hectares almost off-grid (still grid tied electric system until I can up the capacity) in Asturias, Spain. We've been on the farm now for about 16 months and are finally getting most of the basic stuff (permaculture zones 1 and 2) started and growing. We were very careful in buying to make sure we had the necessary things to get off-grid - but it took a long time! We spent almost 4 years searching for the right property. But here we are, with space for gardens, orchards, field crops, some pasture, and a community forest for coppicing and firewood.
We heat entirely with wood I harvest sustainably from the surrounding common land, and do approximately 80% of our cooking with that wood also, year round. We produce food surpluses on the property and sell a little bit locally. We are working towards market gardening and selling through the 5 closest weekly markets to us. Currently there are four of us and as we rehabilitate some of the other abandoned houses in the village, we will look into inviting others to come and share in our work. We hope to have a small cottage available for WorkStay / WorkAway by this winter (just in time for fence building and roof repairing season).
Hi,
Late to the party per usual. I've put together a couple little frugal, off-grid homesteads/forest farms over the last 15 years. Presently on some wooded acreage in Appalachian Kentucky. Enjoy building things, growing things, privacy to do our own things. Have also done the same in the boonies of east Hawaii - a far nicer climate there. Here we have chickens, grow a bit of our food. Plant lots of fruit/nut/etc trees. Remote spots are a trade-off.