Couple lost suburban home, then built a better life on Ozarks homestead

There's an off-grid homestead going on. You have all the fruit trees, the garden, animals. We're getting greeted by the pigs. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, Philip. Good to see you. Hi. And the pigs' names? We have Princess Pig Pinky, Jude, and the Weezer Sisters. And they're what kind of pigs? Kunikunis. Good for pasture raising. Hi, Princess. Hi. Yeah. You want a belly rub? You do? Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're really, really docile. They're so fun. And they're just, they're not for meat? Yeah, actually they are. But this is about max of what they get to. And they take a long time to actually grow out. She's just three, and they're a little over a year old. And then if we decide to process one for food, it's manageable. They're small enough for us to manage ourselves. That must be hard if they grow that long with you. Yeah, so it's really something that you, if you want to, you're going to want to invest a lot of time. And I think that's part of why we kind of got into what we're doing now, is we really wanted to be part of our food and really closely connected with it. And so, I mean, they all have names. They all have a role to play here on the farm. They eat the grass, so they help us maintain the pasture. And then they give us fertilizer for the garden. They clean up our gardens in the fall. So they are part of the farm. It's another reason this breed is so good for homesteads. Are you moving the fence then? Yes. So it's rotational. Yeah, so we can really rotate them really well. But then we also have dairy goats, and we rotate them also. Yeah, we'll rotate the goats through here and the pigs through here. And then the chickens come along at some point, and they clean stuff up too. And it'll start to regenerate, and all this will grow. Yeah. So we really concentrate on being part of the cycle. Okay. Yeah. Ready for goats? Let's milk them. Hi, ladies. Laverne, are you ready? So did you move from a more conventional home? Yeah. We were both raised in the suburbs, and we met in college. Let me get her boy. Hi, buddy. Come here. When we met in college, we would, you know, lay under the stars at night and dream about this lifestyle. This is what we wanted to do 30 years ago. We're going to let Fern do it. Just let Fern go? All right. We'll do it backwards, Laverne. Then life kind of got a hold of us, and we lived a more conventional lifestyle for a long time. Did you have any experience with this? No. No, like I said, I was raised in the suburbs. I was actually vegetarian for a long time, and it's because of the CAFOs and the way that the industry handles food. And so, for me, it was important that we figure out how to do that in a way that I felt good. That's what we'll get for today. About 10 years ago, we had a couple of acres up around Kansas City, and we thought that we could build a straw bale home. But we learned that where we were living, you can't do that. There's building laws and codes. We actually ended up losing our home. There was a drought that year, and so the foundation of our house dropped. And so in order to save the house, we had to get a third mortgage, and we just really struggled keeping up with those payments, so we ended up having to lose our house. But it was such a blessing in disguise because then it opened up the world. So we have a straw bale house. This is actually where we make the plaster that covers all the straw bales. This is the red clay dirt that we actually dig from the land. It came from the land out farther on the end of the property. We're at the end of our property. We've got a real nice vein of red clay. I'm scooping it. I'll sift it, shake it back and forth. And underneath, it makes some nice textured clay. A little wetter over here. So I'm going to scoop it from this side, sift it up, and we'll see if we can get it mixed up and put on the wall tonight. So you can kind of see the color that it ends up being, that finished coat. So when you were working on that, where were you living? We were in tents right down there. We moved to the land five years ago in June. We didn't want to be in the winter in tents. So we had to have the building as done as possible by October-ish. I wanted a round house, but then we learned that that was going to take a little longer. There's one pancake. I don't have a lot of construction knowledge, but straight lines were a lot easier. So the straighter you can keep things is just a little bit easier. And so because we had this short window of time to get the structure up, we decided to do hexagon, because that was just the fastest and easiest way to get the house done. So in four months, we had the main structure all built. The foundation dug, the posts up, the roof on, and then we were putting bales in. So we were three-quarters of the way done with bales at the first freeze. Yeah, so we just had tarps hanging on the outside to keep water and rain away from it. And it's amazing how much air actually passes through a straw bale. When you're cold, you really find out quick. So the first winter was cold. We didn't realize. We knew that the straw bales were going to be insulation, but they're not insulative until you get the clay on both sides. And we just started with just the house and got in as quick as we could and then dealt with exposed straw bales for a while. And then we just started adding plaster and continually figuring out what mixture we want. You can kind of see a finished plaster at the bottom, but then you can see the not finished plaster at the top. And you can see larger cracks and things. So air would still kind of pass through it. And so each year we've gotten more and more plaster on and filled things in. And we can tell when it's the plaster that's finished like this, there's just no air passing through it. It's like a rock. The goal is to get three layers on, and it's just taking time. Because we're living in the space at the same time, it just makes it hard to sometimes like, oh, let's stop and open this area up and plaster it. And it's just us. The boys helped for the first couple of years, and then they kind of grew up and went their ways. But now it's just us, so it takes a long time. Yeah, so welcome to our hexagon home. Okay. And we started with just an open floor plan. We had drawn all kinds of ideas out, figuring out what we wanted, but... That first winter when we just had like the bales most of the way done, but they were still not plastered, we actually brought our tent in here to try to keep some warmth. And it was just the outer walls. The walls behind you and around the bathroom and the loft, it wasn't there yet. What did it cost to build this? It's about $37,000 total. That included our well and the solar and the house. So you didn't have to take out any loans? No. We had a loan on the land for three years, and we paid that off. So it's all paid off now. Yeah. It was really important for us to be debt-free and to know that nobody could come and take it away. So living here is difficult, living in a construction site, but the good thing about it is that it allowed us to figure out where we really wanted things. So by the time we were here really living in the space, we realized, oh, we thought we wanted our rocket mass heater over here against this wall, and we realized, no, it's going to work better in the middle of the house. The bathroom and the bedroom and the loft, everything kind of shifted once we were in the space. Putting the loft actually was the first thing, so we had more space. We had our own space down here, and the boys could sleep upstairs. It's a little close here, but as soon as you walk away from it... So you're not worried about having a ladder like this? Well, oh, because you don't sleep up here. No. Although my mom visits very often, and she sleeps up there. How old is she? 74. Wow. Yeah, she's still doing good. So just watch your head. Right here is still a little low, but this middle part is pretty wide open. So you fit two beds. Both boys were up here? Yeah, both boys. Yeah. You did the beams and then put some plywood down? Yep. Yeah, it's basically a subfloor, but it's functional, and that was the important part. So was that just super simple? It was, yeah. And cost-effective. There's a subfloor below it, and then this was a higher-grade plywood. The one with the least amount of glues, the least amount of chemical off-gas and formaldehydes and things, yeah, and then sealed that. We've upgraded different things throughout the years, and one of the things is we put in a turbine to let more heat escape during the summer. As the heat rises, it just makes that thing spin, and so then it pulls out even more heat all by itself. In the winter, we just put this back in. I usually cover it from the outside and then put a big towel in there and then put this in there. And then eventually I'll have a door on it and stuff, but it's not necessary right now. The prettiest parts aren't as necessary as functionality sometimes. Still a work in progress. There's time constraints too because right now we're done interior plaster because it'll add too much humidity for the summer if we keep going. So now we're done doing interior plaster until the fall. And then the opposite in the winter. We can't plaster outdoors during the winter because it'll freeze. So we're either plastering inside or plastering outside at any given time of the year. So you'll just keep going when you have time. And the railings here. It's just copper water pipe. So how large is the house? 480 square feet. On the main floor. So then another half of that up here. Not very big, but it has a big feel to it. Yeah, I think the height really helps a lot. Well, the boys were so tall. They were in high school when we moved in here. They were 6 foot tall. I wanted them to have some place to stand up upstairs. So that's why we decided to go 15 feet high. But I'm really glad we did because it does feel very spacious. Does it feel like enough space? Oh yeah, it's enough. Especially now it's just the two of us. All kinds of space now. And was it harder to go high? Because that's pretty high for building. Was that tricky, the two of you? He fell off once. Only once. I fell off on the top when I was on the roof on the metal because it was kind of slick. I started sliding off. There's nothing to grab really. So I'm just sliding going, whoa, whoa, whoa. And Logan's off in the distance. Hey, just catch yourself. Catch yourself, Dad. So you can see, we finished the first layer of clay. But he's still finishing the roof. Yeah, it's just like building a barn. So the structure being post and beam, at each of the six corners of the hexagon, there's a post that goes up and then there's beams going all the way around. And in the very center, there's this one large post that goes all the way from the ground all the way to the top. The beams are inside the wall. So there's a post behind this corner inside and it's about as big as that post. So there's one of those in each one of these corners and then there's a large beam that goes from post to post all the way around. On that is what you lay all the rafters from that top point down to the beam on the outside. And you're going to need your own contractor and your own... Yeah. And no stamping for engineering. Right. So you knew the engineering of the second story and... Right, yeah. Using ledgers and things like that, we had construction friends that helped us make sure that we had the right amount of lumber to make these spans. But you can also look it up. So we just Googled things. What's the span for, you know, this size of a house? You can see on the loft that there's the space between this post and then the other post that's way over there. And so we can say how long it is and then they'll tell you you need two 2x8s to span that. And so that's why here the structure is two 2x8s put together. That's going to make it structurally sound. And then the types of wood, too, make a difference. So we started with a lot of pine, but then we really wanted to start using more local stuff. So like all the beams and the posts, that was all local milled lumber. And those are oak beams that you can go a little bit smaller and it's stronger than the pine. We knew what we wanted things to look like and then we're not afraid to get dirty. It also feels like you figured out that a lot of architecture is like one big... You know, the work's already been done. You can figure out that there are certain rules that apply to any home. Yeah, I used to play with Legos growing up and this reminds me of that when I was a kid. Legos and Lincoln Logs. I mean, somebody has done all the engineering, figuring out, and it's all out there for people to get a hold of. And I'm not afraid to try things, but then I know it all rests on my shoulders that if this all falls down and kills us, it's my fault. The first rainstorm, he was like... I'm just staring at the ceiling. The roof got all weak and it didn't leak. Storms are coming in and I'm supposed to get some really big ones. Storm season in the Ozarks. We are in our crawl space below the house. We're just chilling, waiting for the storm to pass. So we've got some food. If we get stuck down here a long time, you can see how we've built. We've got two inch thick pink foam board and that's cinder block foundation. I filled the gaps in with spray foam. This is all rough sawn oak for all the floor joists, the rim joists, sill plate. This is our subfloor that you can see here. Actually, this is actually the final floor because this is the trap door. It looks pretty calm. I think it's probably already done, but we'll wait just in case and hopefully we'll see you later. It would take a lot to knock this house down. There's been some people who have done studies on it. Once the clay is on the straw bales, you can't knock it down. Super strong. And of course it's fireproof too. It's so funny because you know the story of the three little pigs. This house is made out of straw, but it's actually way structurally sound. It's actually made out of all three, straw, sticks, and bricks because the plaster is the brick, you know, and the sticks are the lumber. So the pigs just worked together. They could have all been in one big house. Beautiful day in the Ozarks. Nice and toasty inside. It's four degrees last night. It's a balmy 11 right now and it was the coldest week of the year and it's currently 69 inside so we're gonna start heating it up a little bit. I actually have coals still going. These bricks, the sides over here, I can feel the heat all the way down to here and then this whole bench, really hot up on the top. This heats the whole house. So it's a rocket mass heater. We build our fire in here. The fire burns and pulls through and there's a chimney inside of this barrel and the gases continue to burn in this barrel emitting a lot of heat right away and then it goes into the bench. There's a duct that goes through the bench and turns and goes through the bench again and then up and out. So you're capturing all that extra heat and energy that you're burning that wood. You're capturing it in this bench as opposed to just letting it go out the smokestack. This will get up to 500 degrees and we're absorbing as much heat in there. That way by the time it goes out, instead of being 400 out the top, it's only like 120. So we're capturing all that energy. So our chimney right now, it's 186. At the top, it's 130. And then the barrel, that's 429. Right here where the chimney comes out, you can see that it's way hotter. Sometimes it'll glow a little red. That definitely is time to clamp it down. And if you choke off all the air, it'll just continue to burn but it won't increase the heat. We use the top of the barrel for warming up water for the animals. This is the frozen time of the year so we've got to go out, reheat their water every couple hours because we have limited amount of rainwater to access right now. So it's already 75 degrees in the house and this has only been running for about 20 minutes tops. So up to this point, we've been running it once in the morning really and once at night. But also I can cook on top of this, use a Dutch oven, make biscuits. And you have to cut the wood really small. Yes. It's not very long, it's not very big. And once it starts, and it just burns, and gravity, the sticks continue to fall in as it burns. Yeah, it pulls it through the whole system. You have to use the right dimensions of duct and the right size and shape of this where the wood goes in, that's called a J-tube. And we learned how from a book. So we actually bought the book on rocket mass heaters so we had all the dimensions correct. This was the book that helped us the most. Somebody's figured it out. It's like, oh, yeah, it works. These rocket mass heaters are so much more efficient. All winter we used just a half a cord where somebody else would probably use... A friend of mine just said he used two and a half cords last year. And he had supplementary heat on top of it. And that's all your heat? That's all that we're using for heat. I see there's something going on here. Yeah, so this is the copper piping that actually we spliced into the water system. It comes from the cistern outside and then our water pump pushes it through the whole house. But before it goes into our instant propane water heater, in the winter it goes around this and preheats it. The barrel is 327 degrees right there and these copper pipes... Oh, those are getting hot. The top one is 270 degrees. So at each turn there's a clean out. There's one there for this turn so we can clean out this stretch. And then there's one on that side to clean out that stretch. And then if you sit on it, it's hot? Oh yeah, sometimes it gets really hot. It's the warmest spot. The first year we had this, it was still getting cold in our buildings because we were still working on it. And we have a great picture of me and both the boys and the dog and the cat all on here because it was the warmest spot. We had our hats on. And in a way it becomes like the centerpiece of the room in a really pretty way. Yeah, it is. And it adds extra seating because we have a tiny little house. Every space that you can sit on is a good spot to be able to sit. Looking here, you have seating and then you have your bed. That's the whole place. You go any farther, you're back outside. We do have curtains that we can close for privacy. And this, because it's just the two of you now, would you do this much? I do. I close these up at night because it just makes me feel safe and protected and you know, like that womb space. I like that feeling. So I do. I close it off at night and then the light from the rest of the windows in the morning, I sleep in. Simple, but kind of all you need for a bedroom. Oh yeah. And as you can see, we kind of created a closet out of thin air. Yeah, and then also just keeping it kind of simple. Well, we had one closet over there and then quickly learned that it just wasn't big enough for both of us. So I had this idea. He had already built me a little bit of a headboard here. I said, if you can make the headboard a lot taller and we can move the bed away from the wall, I can build a closet back here. So we created another closet out of thin air. And then I just ran the electric to do the light. So I can create a little space in my closet. Which is a full-length closet. Yeah, it's got shelves back here and then all of my clothes. We did have that conventional lifestyle where we had two cars and we had a big house and all this other stuff. So we really simplified and wanted to do things how we had originally dreamed it. You know, we were like, oh, we just want a cabin in the middle of the woods. Losing our home, you know, we thought, well, we can do anything. So you may never have really explored this dream you had when you were younger if it hadn't been for losing the house. You were probably comfortable. Yeah, we tried applying it to where we were living. It was just too complicated to try to build a straw bill and I wouldn't be able to be allowed to do it on my own. And it's like, why not? You know, I've got an art background so I knew how to draw things, you know, and she's really smart so she knew what she wanted so we knew what we wanted things to look like and then we're not afraid to get dirty. So that's just going to be extremely fine and the finer all of the material is that goes into making the plaster, the smoother texture you can put on a finished plaster. So we'll even put the sandal go through the screen also so you can see that's all left. That's really fine. And this all came out of internet research? Yeah, and books. But a lot of YouTube. We're just going to sift some sand in here too. There's a lot of people on YouTube in the Southwest who are doing these things so we're watching and learning from those but the different climate isn't necessarily the same. And then water and cattail clothes. Does this house work in the Ozarks the same way it would work in Arizona? Yeah, in fact the straw bales work here better probably than there. There you wouldn't necessarily need the straw bales. You would just have to have a cob, which is more of a solid clay with a lot of straw in it. But our straw bales, because it gets so much colder here for a longer period of time keeps us more insulated. You can see it's already getting to be like a plaster. Do you ever work with plasters or paint? No. This is all new to me but I love it. I love getting my hands, oh I do. Oh yeah, it's crafting your own home with your hands. We've actually even put all of our hair in the house in the clay plaster. Because it's like, well when we were in the Southwest we were really looking at ancient houses, like ancient ways that people were living. Like the Pueblos and the cave dwellings and things like that. And you can see people's fingerprints in the clay. And they said that they often can find hair and things, animal hair and human hair in the structures. And so I love the idea that this is, you know, someday somebody maybe will be digging through our old ancient home, you know, a thousand years from now and maybe find our hair in it. We know, I mean, that house inside and out, literally. I mean, from the inside of the walls to every part of the outside of the walls. And just knowing the energy that we put into it, you know. The blood, sweat and tears but also the love and the joy. Just being able to have our hands in it and on it and through it is really awesome. It's really being intimate with our building, being intimate with our food, you know, just really trying to really be super connected to it. The chores are just all day long? It's just twice a day. I get up in the morning, feed everybody, let everybody out. We feed chickens a little bit in the morning, a little bit at night. But we let them free range so much that they go and they pick through everything that the pigs leave behind, the goats do. When I was growing up, I grew up outside of St. Louis in a small country town. My dad was a manager of a poultry industry farm and we had 8 houses of 50,000 chickens each. I just swore them off when I graduated high school. I was like, I'm never going to have a chicken. But now I love them because each one has an individual personality. The white one over there is Sweet Cheeks and she's got 6. Tiny is this black one here and she's got 6 that are a little bit older. We let our hens, they raise their own clutches, which is a lot easier for us. Conventional farming and stuff, it's a lot of incubating all of them and then putting them into a big brooder together and you're always showing them where the food is and showing them where the water is. And it's another reason why we let the moms raise the babies is because they actually pass on that wisdom that they've gathered. So when you separate them from that way of natural living, then they might not have the smarts to know which predator is what. But the mom does pass on that knowledge. When we started, we knew we wanted to grow our own food just to be self-sufficient and reliable on our land. And so we've tried wheat, we've tried rye, we've tried oats, we've tried sorghum. And there's difficulties, a lot of difficulties with each one of those. Some of them are in the ways that it needs to be harvested before it molds or the way it's going to be stored or the way you have to thresh it and winnow it to get the grain out. There was so much difficulty. This is the three sisters' garden. It's not much to see right now because we just are planting. So here we're planting corn and rose. And then we stopped at Hopi Land and got a tour of this ancient, ancient village. They revere corn. And at that time, I always thought corn, I just was thinking of GMO and Monsanto and like corn syrup. You know, we kind of demonized this wonderful indigenous American plant, native to here. So these are rows of corn here and you can see that they're starting to sprout. Planted them last weekend. And we learned that corn is so much easier because it's native to here. So it grows easier here. It doesn't have the mold issue. There's not the threshing and winnowing that you have to do with other grains. So it's really kind of like America's grain. I learned about three sisters' gardening, corn beads and squash. So we plant the corn first along this side so that the beans can climb up the corn and then the squash on this side are going to kind of go on the south end so they have enough sunlight. The squash becomes like a ground cover so it keeps the moisture content in and things like that. And then the beans actually fix nitrogen in the soil so they're actually feeding the corn. And the corn provides a structure for the beans to climb on. And we're trying this year, in addition to growing it in rows like we have in the past, we're trying the traditional method of growing them in mounds. So each one of these little circles will have the corn, the beans and the squash in it. And why in circles? That's the way they did it. I think, so corn is wind pollinated, but mostly the pollination drops. And so having them kind of in a cluster, they're going to get more pollinated than having it in a long row. The wisdom was brought up from the Mayan culture and so they carried it with them as they populated the North American continent as well. Corn is this wonderful indigenous American plant, native to here. And then we learned, they revered her so much and then we learned how much food that they made from real corn, not sweet corn. This is flour corn that we grow. So it's very different. This is our corn. So this is white flour corn. We make tortillas out of this. We make hominy, grits, stew. Do you grind your own corn? Yeah. So if you just grind it like this, it's cornmeal. And that's what you can buy on our shelves. But there's not as much nutrition and flavor in it. We learned how to nixtamalize. It's an ancient technique that unlocks the nutrition from the corn. This process where you cook it in wood ash. So it's kind of plumped up and it loses its shell with the outer hard covering and it becomes softer. Yeah, that's good. You have to learn how to eat and cook with it. It's a learning curve. We're really getting to really enjoy the culinary part of it too. I had a career in food. So getting a chance to start to play with things again. Were you a chef? Probably not cooking a lot of corn. No. If it ever was, it was sweet corn. Because we kind of went to the whole food is fuel, we wanted good fuel. But now we're actually getting to kind of play around with it some more. There's only eight varieties of heirloom flour corn left in the Americas. Were there probably dozens? Hundreds. So we're losing a lot of that diversity. It's funny, we think of wheat as such a staple, or it's essential or something we have to grow here. But actually corn is the original. Have you changed how you eat? Yes. We definitely have over time. More and more so. And so we do corn, squash and beans is like the majority of what we eat. Because you're planting that way. So this is goat meat from last year. And you do it like that because you don't have freezer space. Right, we don't have enough solar for a big freezer. This is spaghetti sauce. That's pig lard. We can pig, we can fish, we can goat. And you can get the specifications on this too. There's a book and it tells you how long you have to cook it and what the rules are to keep it safe. There's some of our squash and some of our corn. So this has already been nixtamalized. So it's basically hominy at that point. So that's hominy that we can freeze. That, if we thawed it out, we could even grind it and make tortillas. But you could also add it to soups just like it is. And the refrigerator is a certain kind of... No, it's just a standard fridge. It's just small. So it doesn't use very many amps because it's so small. You know, if we had a big conventional fridge, we might not be able to run it. But this is a little apartment fridge, so it works just fine. I love your counter. Copper. Copper sheeting, yeah. You know, we could have taken the sheet of copper to a factory and they could have bent it for us. It would have perfect 90 degree angles. But that would have been more expensive. And so Phillip just came in here with a hammer and hammered it into place. Copper is actually anti... naturally antimicrobial. It was important to me... So I actually got sick two years ago. I had long-haul COVID. I'm just now recovering from it. During that process, we had to keep everything very clean and make sure there was nothing growing, no mold, anything like that. I became very sensitive. So it was really important that we had a clean, solid surface here. And when we were researching all these different options in copper, you could actually put like copper in something and it will clean it. You know, it will disinfect it. So it's naturally antimicrobial and it was actually the cheapest option. And we think it's beautiful. It's not perfect, but we didn't mind that. Hi. It's beautiful. Hey. Bathroom. Composting toilet. It looks fairly conventional. It looks plumbed. It's not plumbed. This is an exhaust pipe for a small fan that runs non-stop. We worked on different things over the years and this was just so slick. It does all the work. Number two goes in the back. Number one automatically goes in the front and it separates it and stays clean. There is a bucket in here for the number two, but the urine goes through a pipe out into the gray water. So you do have like a gray water pipe. Yeah. Slightly plumbed. Yeah, there's just no water coming into it. And then you have to empty? Yeah, so it just opens. You just have to take it somewhere? No, it's plumbed. I don't ever have to do anything. Number two, I have to take out the bucket. It's got a lid carried out to the human or compost can. And then you have a shower. Yep, shower. Beside the outdoor shower. So that was nice upgrade. And then there's just a standard washer and dryer. On solar? On solar. The washer doesn't use as much, so it's easier to use that when it's not sunny. But if it's sunny out, we run the dryer if we need to. Or we can hang it up outside too. We've upgraded the sink itself. This is what it'll be, but it's not a finished counter yet. It'll eventually be like our window sills. A live edge slab. But we needed to get one in here, so we got it to this point first and then working on the next part. And a lot for canning? Yep, canning, pressure cooking, water bath canning, dehydrator. These two are meat grinders, and then that one's the corn grinder. And then you've got a press for cheese and fruits and things like that. And then this is our cream separator for dairy. We're learning. We could make butter, but we're still working on that. Water is just well water? Yep. Right now it's well, pipe from the well, transitioning to rain catchment. So we do capture rain off of our roof. And these are just, right now we use them for garden and animals. So goats can't have well water. Goats have to have rain water because the mineral content of the well water is too much for goats. And so right now we scoop it out with buckets. So on the back side of the house we have some bigger rain tanks. Yeah, there's a big tank there also so it catches it off of whatever roof. About every roof has a rain catchment. That's our south side, so we have solar, passive solar in the winter. So we can't have a big overhang. So we have just enough overhangs that in the summer the sun doesn't come in, but in the winter it does. We're adding green material in the summer too to shade the walls. So you can see we've got trellises up. There's beans planted at the bottom of those. Yeah, right here they'll grow up. The beans will help shade the wall if we need any extra shade. And then we'll continue on the other side. This is a fig tree. It's brand new. The figs can also be kind of temperamental. We're on the edge of the zone where they like to grow. So we're planting things near the house because the house is kind of like a clay oven. Like it's going to absorb a lot of that solar heat and then it radiates that off. So this zone right here we can actually it extends our season. We can grow things right by the house that may not work a ways from the house because it warms it up. And then there's potatoes and then we have beans along the back trellis that'll grow up and shade the walls. And we're going to continue this across this side because this southwest side is what gets that setting sun and that gets really hot. So you'll come back here and it's like a stone oven to extend your seasons and things like that. This is like our kitchen garden. So it's stuff we need access to but also the potatoes I planted there because we were getting a late freeze this year in the spring and I wanted to get my potatoes in but I knew that freeze was coming so we put it in the front because the heat of the house actually keeps it warmer right there. Because the house is like a heat sink during the day and it really does make a difference. Yeah. We don't get any frost right up here but the rest of this will all be frosted. So you built the roof. Yeah. You can tell when it's off cut. Everything that we could cut corners on expense we did. You can see that they're different colors. But it was only $1.50 a foot instead of $3.50 a foot. These two are the first apple trees we planted so they're almost five years old. You are growing fruits all over the place? Yeah. Both of these are food forests. They're permaculture food forests. So there's nuts and fruit. So this is one of our oldest food forests but of course we've only been here five years so it's still kind of a baby. But you can see it's got a lot of comfrey around the edge and so the comfrey we chop and drop and put at the base that feeds the trees. So you have hazelnuts a big heartnut tree and then there's apple trees spotted around the outside. And then the understory is like honey berries and currants. So there's a system. I mean you figured out what grows best together? Well the idea behind the permaculture food forest is that there's these different layers of the garden. And so you're trying to populate each layer. So we have a ground cover layer which is a lot of herbs and then you have a bush layer so that's usually berries and fruits. And then we've got like an understory layer which is the hazelnut and some of the apple trees. And then this heartnut tree is going to grow up and be our canopy. And then this food forest was actually already here. We're just managing it. We thinned it out. But it's sassafras, honey locust, the black walnut, hawthorn trees, black cap raspberries and gooseberries. So all of that was already growing there when we moved in. Growing because there were people here before? Nope. So wild. There's that much food that grows wild. Wild native food. In permaculture they're trying to mimic that with a food forest. So we're mimicking what's already happening in nature. And then adding things to it also. So we're manipulating what's coming naturally. We thinned out some of the ones that we didn't really necessarily need. So you're seeing like maybe two-thirds we took out about a third of the trees that were here. So we opened up the understory so that there'll be more productive fruits. So the gooseberries, we should get gooseberries off of this year. And the black raspberries, we've already been getting lots of fruit off of them. And protecting it from deer? This is from our chickens. So we have free range chickens. Most people, a lot of people, coop up their chickens and keep them in a fenced yard. But we really like to honor the natural instincts of our animals and let them live happy lives. So we let them roam and we fence in our gardens. And plus they really help keep, you know, they eat a lot of the ticks and all that other stuff. So they really keep things cleaned up. So this is a sassafras tree. It's very common in the Ozarks. Traditionally, the root bark was used to make root beer. So the leaves are the flavoring in gumbo. This is filet. So you've heard of filet gumbo. And then these are edible too. You could just eat them in a salad. They're very tasty. Isn't that good? It's almost like a can. It smells like juicy fruit gum. Fruit loops is what it reminds me of. Fruit loops cereal when I was a kid. Do you want to see our hot tub? This is our homesteader's hot tub. So it's an old cast iron tub that someone was just throwing away. Philip built it up on cinder blocks so that he can put wood underneath and we light a fire so it keeps up the water. But I did plumb hot and cold water out here too so we can take an outdoor shower if we want. You can see more of our rain barrels. We're catching a lot of the roof water in those rain tanks right there. And then this is the great water. So it's all of our kitchen sink, our bathroom sink, our shower, our wash, and the urine from our composting toilet. It comes all underground and I piped it to where one pipe can go underneath the old garden and then the other one that we use most of the time just splits off and comes this direction. We've got willows planted in it and calamus. So there's water loving plants that they use up a lot of that nitrogen that's naturally occurring in that gray water and they clean it before it just goes out into the wild. Pretty abundant. I mean it's really growing. Oh yeah. Anything we put in there. So we could actually start plants in there and then kind of take them and put them other places because they will thrive. It's just urine so you don't have to worry about a pathogen. But I mean there's the system of the layers of the filtration and the mulch and the dirt and the plants all actually are a cleaning system for the water. Yeah so then it comes out and there's like a barrel that's buried in the ground and so it'll fill up and then slowly leach out into the mulched area. And then it's terraced down so it just continues to use gravity to pull that water through the subsoil. But wood uses nitrogen to break down. So we've got the logs and all basically a hole that we filled with wood mulch so that it'll use up a lot of that nitrogen. And then heavy feeding ones like the willow is really going to clean it. And then long term wise there's a bald cypress that we planted on the end and eventually that's going to really be even more of a filter. It's a swamp plant. Swamp plant, yeah. So this was our, where we were telling you where we lived in tents the first year we were here. We had our outdoor kitchen here and our tents and we can't live somewhere without planting food so we ended up planting food right outside of where our kitchen was. It was our first garden space but little did we know at the time it wasn't the greatest space to put one. It was like lots of rock. A frost bubble. So the frost, we didn't we learned this since we lived here but the frost is going to come down and settle in here because the trees block it from going anywhere else. So this little place right here happens to catch all the frost. It's where we put our first garden. The only place that, it's a bubble. We'll get frost here and it won't be anywhere else. So it was not the best place for a garden. But we can plant things like popcorn because we'll harvest it before the frost. And then there's herbs that just grow naturally you know like I'm growing mother ward and hypericum herbs. Sweet potatoes will grow really well in here. And then our garlic harvest. And then in the back we're letting it go to like sunchokes. The native things that don't require any input. They just grow on their own. And they spread really well. They're drought tolerant. They're from this area so they're designed to work in it for a long time. Is there a master plan like have several food for it? I mean. Yeah we definitely want to have several food for it. This is another naturally occurring one that was already here and it's black cherry and black walnut and mulberry. And so we're identifying the ones that are already growing. And so we're leaving those there and then just seeing another spot that might be good to replicate what's already growing in nature. So we took cuttings from this mother mulberry tree and then we've got several other mulberries growing over here. All of those are hazelnuts. It's a native here so it's going to grow really easy here. The other thing we've noticed though is that the hazelnuts aren't doing as well over here as they are in the food forests. So here it's not really a food forest. They're just kind of planted on their own. And so we kind of stopped. Like those are the first ones we planted but they're still really tiny. And the ones we planted in the food forest because they have the companion plants and they have the mulch layer and the ground cover, they're thriving. And that's why naturally you get these food forests because that's how they thrive. They work together well. They protect each other and they feed each other and if you think about it food grows in the forest. Like we can literally go into the forest and get food but nobody's tending it. Nobody's feeding it or watering it or taking care of it. They're doing all those functions on their own. So that's the idea of a food forest. Now the indigenous people of the land here, they did manage the land quite a bit with burns and forests. We've done one managed fire here on our land. Prescribed burn. Because you wanted that nutrient. Yeah, it helped the pasture kind of reset. It rejuvenates the land and then it's a good time to bring in more native seeds because everything's really kind of, not a blank slate but it's more open. What was on the land before? This was cattle. This was all a cattle ranch. And most ranchers have brought in fescue and orchard grass and some non-native cool season grasses but what I'm doing is bringing more warm season grasses so there's more green throughout the year and you can harvest hay at different times of the year and things like that too. Look at all that milk rolled up there. Oh this is our humanure compost right here. So you just carry the little bucket. It's smaller than a five gallon bucket. Yeah, once a week. So it's all charged off the sun which is kind of cool. And then we just keep filling it up. Grass clippings, straw, chopped leaves. But yeah, you can feel the heat, yeah. This is full. I've made it this full three times this year already and so then it drops and then you put more in and it drops. Or like if we process a whole animal I'll put like all the bones and things that we don't use. What little is left that we don't use goes in there and then just cover it with more straw and grass clippings. The heat breaks it down, the microbes and the one that we emptied and just used on our food forest, there were just a few bones left in it. And I've put all kinds of stuff in there. This hazelnut was actually planted before the one we saw over there in the food forest. So it just shows you how growing in the companion planting food forest way really does help the plants thrive. They're not really working together much yet. So this was all ranch land? Yeah. So yeah, we'll rotate the goats through here and the pigs through here and then the chickens come along at some point and they clean stuff up too. And it'll start to regenerate. Yeah. We call it our piece of earth. Like peace, you know. Like peaceful. Because it is. It's very peaceful here.