6 Years Off-Grid: Their Epic Journey from City Life to Sustainable Oasis

In today's episode, Luke and Sara are gonna show us their beautiful big garden and their self-built tiny house right behind me and share the story how they decided to sell everything, their business, their house, move to Portugal, buy this beautiful land and build this off-grid lifestyle. Benvindo! Welcome, this is our home. This is your garden. This is our garden. We are a bit behind but we'll get there. So over here we've got our raspberry bushes and the garden over there needs a bit of attention. It's growing beans right now in there but it needs to be weeded. Our lettuce bed over there to the right. Oh yeah and this is the box we catch our pigs with. I made it out of scrap. DIY catch. Yeah because we needed to catch the three males and once you catch one, the problem is how you're gonna get the second one in without the first one coming out. So it has like a double door. So you get one here then you open and then and this is what I hit Sara with. It's just the black eye. Smacking right in the face with this. When we first came here we had our well so we needed to empty it out to clean it so we lined it with plastic, pumped the water out and cleaned the well and this one day will be for crayfish. Crayfish farm but yeah many projects. It's the one thing that's on hold for now, this project. We've just planted these but we have some tomatoes growing. Cucumbers, beetroot, zucchini you planted here. Oh yeah and zucchini. And these are medronio, they're called the strawberry tree and they're very good border tree shrub. So we just started them so we have it alongside the road. All this was just the weed. This was all bushes, all bushes. The broom, the one with the yellow flowers and the cistus ladefa which is a rock rose and they're not good for fire safety. They go up like crazy but we've cleared all this. So anywhere you're walking right now, once six years ago was only bushes. So whatever we needed to do we needed to pull out bushes to do it in. This is our garlic bed, growing very slow. We should be harvesting it right now. Jalapeno peppers, comfrey. It's a really good plant for making your own homemade fertilizer. That's a kiwi that we put in the first year but we need another one and we don't know if it's a male or female. So we have to wait for summer now, now that we know and see if it's a male or female and buy the other. But it's doing okay, huh? Because normally they struggle with the frost. Strawberry and spinach is going to be this bed. And you made a water system too. I've had many, many different ones. We used to have a petrol pump for the well but now we've gone all electric. So we've really cut down on the fuel usage, which is nice. But you're completely off grid. So the power is solar power? All solar, all solar. And the water is... From the well. So we have to be very careful with water. Obviously when it's summertime we really be careful with the water source because it's the only one that we use right now. We have other water sources around the land but right now that's the only one that's the closest and easy access. And in summer when the water table is lower it only produces about 2,000 litres a day. So it's enough for a small compact garden. We use 2,000 a day between the watering, the shower, the kitchen and the animals. And it stays at the same level. Slowly, slowly it goes down, eh? But never empty. No, never. But then in winter and autumn and spring it's always full. We have no problems. What else is there? Cabbage. Some more peppers. There's some rainbow chards around. That garden needs a lot of attention. It's just weeds for now. And these are our rosemary bushes. And they were this tiny when we got them six years ago. And now they've given us... I've been taking cuttings and planting rosemary around the garden so they've been very, very good. And if you come with me, this is our pride and joy right now. The asparagus. Take this off. Our beans. We've got some strawberry plants in here and our beans are coming along really nicely. These look ready to me. We love fava beans. We love them so much we never get to cook with them because we just eat them raw. There's a really good Maltese dish actually that you make with them. But yeah, we eat too many of them. And then we have our asparagus bed. This is the first year that we've been actually been able to harvest a decent amount because it takes four years. You can take a little bit on the third year but I'd rather not because it's better. The fourth year is the best year that you can start picking. And then they are around for 25 years. So it's really good if you start a garden to start those straight away because it takes four years to start seeing a good haul. You want a bean? Thank you. This is our main house. Gypsy caravan. Yeah. Gypsy style caravan. It's been not a I build this, I finish it. And it's done. It's been, I start building it. We move in because we have nowhere else to live. Build the cupboards this week, piece by piece. It's not finished yet. And by the time I finish it, I'll need to start again on the outside probably. But it adds character, you know, this character. And I built it on the chassis of our old caravan. So I ripped off the caravan and built it on the chassis and then added an extra piece. So actually it can be moved. Theoretically. Yes. Theoretically. It can be moved. Hassle, but it can be moved. I needed a porch to look over the land. And this is Molly's favorite spot. She just sits here in the evening, keeping an eye on everything, you know. Molly is a dog. Molly is our dog, yes. Go up on your perch. You want a treat? Up. Now you want to go inside. Let's go inside. And Molly grew up here, right? Yes. We got, yes, we got her straight, as soon as we knew we were going to get this piece of land, we went to pick her up. And at two days old, she was thrown in a dustbin. So some people threw her in a bin with another three boys. And the guy who, when we were looking for a puppy, he's like, I just have, I just got four puppies. If you'll wait two months, I will give you, I will give you one of them. And then after two weeks, he said, I can't take care of these puppies. Come for her now. So we had her when she was just two weeks old. Very small, drinking milk out of the bottle. She's a dustbin baby. That's why she thinks she's human. You want to go in? Go in. We've lived in vans in the past and everything. I'm a big guy and I didn't want to feel claustrophobic, you know what I mean? How tall are you? I'm 6'3". What's that, nearly two meters, just under two meters, I think. In saying that, the first thing he built was this side on the chassis of an old... This was an afterthought. Yeah. It's still not finished. I recently just built some cupboards. So at least we don't have everything in boxes, which is nice. A luxury. But slowly, slowly. But also I've been building an outdoor kitchen outside over there. And we're going to eventually move this kitchen. So we'll just have the outdoor kitchen. Less pots to clean, less plates to clean, you know. It's a very nice farm thing. I like to say, yeah, Boston. Yeah, yeah. But this will go eventually and we'll just have a little coffee station for people to visit. We have a fridge. So everything is... Yeah, everything is off solar. We've got a fridge. We have a popcorn maker. We have a coffee machine. Very posh. It's awesome. It's bigger than it needs to be, which is nice in winter. Because we just do one burn and it's warm in here, you know. It's like eight kilowatts. Something like that. Yeah. And here, how many square meters? Twenty. Twenty five, max. We have a vermicomposting toilet in here. Just a normal flush toilet. And then when it flushes, it goes into a big IBC full of leaves and organic material and composting worms. And then from there, anything that comes out, every time you flush, some water comes out. And it's already 98% clear of anything dangerous. And then it goes into a leach field and seeps into the ground. I think this is the only other legal system, apart from a closed septic tank, that you can have in Portugal. I think it was invented in Portugal. OK. There's a website. It's really good. How to build it, how to make it, and all the science behind it, which is awesome. Yeah. Shower. Got a nice pump. At least we have some nice pressure, which is nice. We have an electric water heater. We're still on gas. I do want to build a biodigester eventually, but that's the one resource that we still buy. What did you use for insulation? We have 40 mil. Yeah, four centimeters only of polystyrene. Oh, OK. It could have been more, you know. But it gets hot in summer. So I only built the insect screens last year. So the first couple of years, with all the windows closed, it used to get really hot. We couldn't stay in here at 3 o'clock. Now I did all the insect screens, and we open, and it's OK with a fan in summer, if you're in front of the fan. But this year, we're going to close all the windows again and get an AC, because we have enough power to supply a small AC. It's not big in here, so we should be OK. And we don't spend a lot of time in here, but when we're in here, we'd like not to share it with a thousand flies. So that's the whole point of keeping everywhere closed. This is our double bed, and we have a single under there. But however, Sarah's mother is visiting, and she's 77 or something. So I had to build another bed last week for her, because she wasn't going to climb up there or go under there. So I'll show you. I made a cub bed. So this is a cupboard, and then we bring it down, and it's a bed. I did want to have, you know, the Murphy beds, but we needed the bed to be so high for her mother as well. So there was just no room. So I decided to do this. Yeah, I literally just did this, haven't varnished or cleaned up anything. That's a couple day work. And that actually was the first tiny house. This was it. Yes, this was the size. And then we're like, hang on. Before I built the table and everything, I was like, OK, where's everything going to fit? Let's make it a bit bigger. And we also wanted an attached bathroom for when our elderly parents visit. They have a normal flush toilet because they don't want to use a compost toilet, you know. It's very hard to explain to them, you know, how to use the dry toilet, which is one of my favorite things. This is our kind of homemade grease trap that goes from the kitchen sink into the garden and it just goes through a fine sieve so we catch any food particles at the source instead of having to clean up pipes in the future every three months. And yeah, it separates and the oil, it's like a skimmer, skims off the oil from the top. And you use like biodegradable stuff? Yeah, just fairy. We use it in the garden against pests, so it's fine. We just have to be careful when we empty like pasta water when it's boiling, because then it might hurt certain roots of plants if it gets there too quick. If you're pouring a lot of water down, you know, I think that's what killed my orange tree, basically. I'm still upset. There's our solar. So the back panels, there's what we started with. That's about, I think, two kilowatts, right? Because they're 325 each. Yeah, 975 times two. And then we have an inverter. I forgot how big it is. Maybe four, I think. And four sealed AGM batteries. So this is before, yeah, we couldn't afford lithium. And then now we've got a lot of, we also have a portable system in there. So now, in winter, we used to have to top up our sealed batteries with the generator when it's cloudy. But now we just use this unit and we haven't used the generator in a whole year now. So that is 3000 watts, three kilowatts. And we have two more of them in there as well. So we have another six. And obviously, lithium, you can bring them down, not like sealed AGM batteries. Old fencing all around was all freehand chainsaw milled from pine trees. My friend and neighbor cut them down. And I got them here in my car, most of them, which was crazy. And I freehand chainsaw milled them. And then I also decided to make a little boat for the lake. But now it's broken. I did, I did. And it took my weight. It took me three times. I had to make adjustments. But I also did it. This is broken now, obviously. But I wanted it to fit inside my car. So this was removable. Yeah, there's a big crack as well because it is pine. So it was a learning experience. I used to go fishing on the lake. Everywhere you look, there's if a friend is cutting down a tree for some reason, I try and get it. Or if I have someone cutting down trees, I try and get it. So yeah, these are like olive tree roots. One, two and this one. But this one was cut in half and I'll show you the bench I made out of it. This would be the outdoor kitchen. So it's going to be with a green roof. So a live roof. With soil. This was our first home on the land. And we got ripped off. We got cheated. There were leaks everywhere. There were mice living in the insulation. So I ripped it out, left the chassis for the gypsy caravan and then we turned it into a chicken coop. This is the last project I've been working on this week. Still a bit sticky. I need to give it a second coat of varnish. So don't sit in it. My mushroom chair. So this was the olive tree? This is one olive tree. This is the root, which I cut from those roots over there. And this is one olive tree, except for this piece. This is from another olive tree. It's the fourth bench I've made. I did two others for some friends. So this is number four. And then I'll show you number one over there, which is a simple pine one. But on the way, I can show you my cycle-powered washing machine. To be honest, we haven't used it for about a year and a half. If you go around the corner though, there's the cockerel on the peg. Before I move it. Who's sleeping here? There's a baby fell asleep on the nipple. That's the daddy, the mummy and the six kids. So our rooster never fit in with the chickens. And then he decided to make friends with Peppa, our pig. And since then, they've been inseparable. He pooed on her. You don't treat your wife like that. Rupert Humperpig. I used this washing machine for a while. We did for the first three years, I think. I haven't used it in about a year and a half because we did buy a normal one since we have enough power now. So that's back in a small tent back there. Secondhand bicycle and a bit of improvisation. It was actually our neighbor of ours, this machine didn't work anymore for her. So she gave us the machine and then you found the bike. And it saved us at least 20 or 30 euros a month on washing clothes. This was the first home of our pigs when they were babies. But they outgrew it pretty quick. How did you decide to purchase land in Portugal? You're originally from Malta. We didn't want to live in Malta anymore. We did spend a lot of time traveling before. And then we went to Malta for a couple of years to try it out and spend some time with family after 10 years traveling. And we couldn't do it. It's just too overpopulated, too many cars. It's still beautiful. But for us, it's just too many people. It was a coincidence, actually. We were traveling, we were in Mexico at the time. And we decided we're spending way too much money traveling. We'd like to set some roots. And we had a few places in mind. We thought of New Zealand. But that's too far away from family and friends. Then Luke was looking up Scotland because it's beautiful like New Zealand. Too cold. And then he was just looking. I think this was like four o'clock in the morning in Mexico. And he was like, oh my goodness, this property is really affordable in Portugal. And the more you look, the more he found. And we had never been to Portugal. So we just drove back to San Francisco, sold the van, came to Portugal and just started traveling around the country looking for property. And we fell in love with the country and the people immediately. And yeah, we love it here. Best decision ever. And the second we saw this place, we're like, oh my goodness, this has to be ours. We didn't want a huge place like this. Not even a tent we were looking for. We were looking for up to five acres, eh? You know, like just enough to be, try to be self-sufficient. But then, yeah, we must have seen over 50 properties all over Portugal. And when we saw this, we just fell in love with it straight away. We saw the river that borders our land and we saw where the ruin is. It's a beautiful plateau. And yeah, we knew this was ours. We had to get it. And we knew it was a lot of work and more money than we actually had to put into it. But if you don't take a risk, you never get what you want, you know? So we just went for it and figure it out. And before traveling, you sold everything in Baltimore. We originally sold our house and we had a food truck business. Sold that. And we went to the States. We did the, well, we did part of it, of the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail. But we had to get off after three months because of the freak weather. We couldn't pass through the mountains. And yeah, then we went down to Mexico and then said, before we spend all our money, let's at least buy a piece of property somewhere. That's a smart thing to do, right? When you're 40. 40? But you had just turned 40, right? Oh, yeah. Six years ago. Yeah. Well, because we love traveling. But then at a certain point, you don't want to spend all your money. You have to just invest a little bit. This is the first bench Luke made. Big rocking chair. Big chair for a big man. It overlooks all the places that our animals live in. And you lived sometime in Europe as well. Yes, we did have a tent. But in the middle of the night, down the middle in a storm. And we had all our furniture. We had some furniture, all our stuff from Malta. So we sped to Barcelona, bought a second-hand yurt. And now it's pretty much just storage. It's jam-packed with all our stuff from Malta. It's pretty sad seeing it. Because we haven't enjoyed it as much as we should have enjoyed. Because a yurt is beautiful. But when we actually do it up, we'll have to... Before we get to live in it properly, we have to do it up again. Because once I finish the outdoor kitchen, a lot of the furniture will go in there. So then we can do the yurt properly. A friend of ours was visiting us and we had nowhere to put them. And we're lucky enough to find this for quite a reasonable price. And also, Ben Fogel slept in there. This was our goat house. Right now, Peppa uses it sometimes to come and have an afternoon nap. Our pig, with her piglets. But other than that, it's not being used for anything. But we are going to change it into a chicken coop pretty soon. We had goats for about two years and they were amazing. I loved having goats. But we weren't set up properly. The only fencing we had at the time was just here to keep them in. But there wasn't enough food for them. So I would have to take them out for sometimes four hours a day, five hours a day. And along with milking them, cleaning up for them and taking them out for walks, they were... I was spending about eight hours a day with them. And not getting enough time to do anything else. So the quiet life that we sought and that we came for, even though the walks were amazing, it wasn't so quiet because I was just running around trying to keep up with all the work. So after a lot of chats, me and Luke, deciding, OK, what shall we do? We came to the conclusion it's better if for now we give the goats away. And then in the future, when we're more set up, we'll get goats again because I love having them. They're lovely jumping up and down on the boulders. But yeah, it wasn't the right time. This is the pond. So there's a spring just under here. You'll see it soon, where the running water is coming from. But when it stops, it dries out. So it's not sealed. So the theory is the pigs with their poop and they're stumping around and wallowing in the mud, it will naturally seal it. So that is what we're trying out. That's why we have pigs. So I did steel fencing all around and built them some really cute earthbag pig houses. And we'll see what they do. I mean, it's already different. And Maggie has only been in here for two months, but she's been sick for two weeks. But it's already changed. Yeah, she's opened it up. It's opened it up. This was different. So we'll see how that works. And then eventually we'll move them on to another hole and another pond, hopefully. And apparently, once we take the pigs out, once they seal it, it takes about one to two years. Then we can bring ducks in instead and they keep it sealed, apparently. So it's all an experiment. We'll see how it goes. Since being here, we never had jobs. So we were using our money, our savings, going down very fast. And we decided to start a YouTube channel and document all that we do here. And it's been going really well. So if you want to check out our channel, it's called Luke and Sara's Off Good Life. You can see what we're doing now, the projects that we're working on, the mistakes we make. Everything is there on our channel. All right. Thanks for watching. Links to the YouTube channel of Luke and Sara we'll leave in the description below. And see you in the next one. Cheers.