How I Built a Sustainable Suburban Homestead in 3 Years

By the end of this video, you're going to know everything you ever wanted to know and more about building a productive suburban homestead. This isn't going to be your everyday homesteading video. I'm going to go into excruciating detail in this one on every single thing I've done to set up this suburban homestead from how to find the space in the first place, setting up your first outdoor garden, indoor gardens, designing and building a productive orchard, the energy systems, how to put solar on your roof and start generating some sustainable energy. Capturing rainwater, recycling water with gray water laundry and shower systems, starting to keep chickens, using those chickens to help develop better composting systems, building composting systems, and so much more. All of that info is also in my latest book out right now, Epic Homesteading with step-by-step guides, visuals, graphics, designs, diagrams, charts, everything you could desire. It's out wherever books are sold, but if you get it from us, we'll ship you a free pack of seeds too. When it comes to site selection, where to actually build your homestead out, I've always been of the mindset of starting where you are, whether you own or rent, do as much as you can in the space that you have. In my particular case, I was able to secure a house here in San Diego, very small house, but the lot happens to be a double lot. And I could do what I wanted on it. And that's, what's really important is can you do what you want in the space that you have? So when you take a look at the front yard of this property, what you see is again, about a thousand square foot house over there. It's very, very small, located on the corner of the lot. And what that means is I have all this space to do whatever I want with, but then you need to talk about, can I do what I want with it? Which means HOAs and zoning laws. This is one of those things that it's boring, but you have to pay attention to it when you're setting up a homestead, because if you don't, you might find out that you can't keep chickens, for example. So look up your zoning laws in your particular area. See if there's a limit on the chickens you can keep, or if there's a height to the trees that you're allowed to grow. Do all that first because that will change your plans dramatically. Once you've found a spot, the next thing to do is start the planning journey, which is both exceptionally exciting and also quite intimidating because this is a place that is hopefully going to be very productive for you for many, many years to come. And if you make a design mistake, like placing a shed in the wrong place, you could be kind of upset. And so take the shed, for example, the way that I've approached designing this space, which is about 13,000 square feet, is going with the things that I know I needed earlier on in the process. So one of the first things I put in here was this shed. And the reason why is because I just simply had a lot of gear that I needed to store in this shed and I wanted to put it really close to the house. And that is probably the most important design lesson that I've learned over the last three years is the things that you access a lot, something like a shed, an herb garden, a front yard raised bed garden, you want to put as close to where you always are, let's say in your home, as possible. I don't want to be walking all the way over there to go get a trowel or go get some basil. I want that to be as close as possible. And then another rule that I followed, and it seems like it worked out, is designing from the outside in. When I first moved in here, there was a shed and it was right there. And it was about this big and just plopped right in the middle of the lot. It doesn't make a lot of sense. It's kind of far from the house. It's blocking anything I might want to design here in the future. So I took that shed out, moved this right up next to the property line, made sure that I was following my zoning laws. And there you go. So if you design from the outside in, based on proximity, you know that this kind of has to be here. That's what I look for in a design. What kind of has to be where it is. And then you can get creative with the rest of the space. So let's say you have a couple of design elements in, maybe you started to put those in. You need to get something growing because in almost any area, especially a suburban lot like this one or one that you might have, the soil may or may not be good. So I'd always recommend getting a soil test, but regardless, there's a lot you can do to make it better. The very first garden I ever put in at this property was right here and it was an in-ground garden, not a raised bed garden and not a container garden. It was with the soil that was already on the property, but I had to do some things to make that soil better. It's a little bit sacrilegious in some communities, but what I did is I decided to till my garden. So I took a device and that moved the soil around, broke up some of this harder clay soil that I have. And I worked in a healthy amount of compost. Compost that I got from a local provider. You can also get it in bags from a big box store or a local nursery. Any of those options is okay. Whatever gets you started. And worked this soil so it was loose with a little bit more fertilizer or organic matter in it. And then I started to just plant stuff. And year one on a homestead is really not as productive as you might dream, but you need to start getting that soil working, right? You need the soil life to come back alive and start throwing out some incredible produce. So this garden right here might not look like much right now, but that's because it's spring. You've seen on this channel many different iterations of this garden that have been absolutely thriving and productive. And if you look, this is my backyard in-ground garden. Again, very close to my house. This is the produce I'm going to be coming out and harvesting most often. If you look back here later in the season, you'll start to see the things that don't require as much maintenance going in the back. Maybe some peppers, some eggplants, some tomatoes. Some of the stuff that harvests really quickly might be up front here with some herbs or some leafy greens. So if you're starting an in-ground garden, which is probably the most cost-effective way to start, all you really need is soil, some compost and some time. Now if you don't have as much space or you just prefer an aesthetic look or you just want to make gardening a little bit easier, certainly is a lot easier to work and rip off this cabbage if I want to, you can start a raised bed garden. And all that means is you have a container that allows you to put soil in it and then you can grow directly in that container. So this could be as big or as small as you want. Again, it's right next to the front of my house, which beautifies the space because I personally don't really want to have a lawn here. I want to have productive broccoli and garlic and chard and cilantro coming out of my front yard. So I'll show you exactly how I set this up. When you're designing a raised bed garden, there's not too much to keep in mind, but there are some things that will make your job a lot easier. One would be spacing. So you want to have enough space to walk down a row. So in this case I can just kind of jet down here and I have about 30 inches between these rows. That means I can get a wheelbarrow through, I can get my big self through. And you also want to design the bed dimensions themselves to be easy to work in. We're not trying to make life super hard. We're trying to make life super productive and harvest some beautiful vegetables. So if you take a look at a raised bed like this one, this is a three by six foot raised bed. This is a four by eight foot raised bed. And what you'll notice is none of the beds that I have on this property are wider than four feet. Why is that? Because take a look, this is four feet. I can reach in here really easy on this side. I'm about two feet in. If I want to come around this side, I can also reach two feet in on this side. So I have no problems getting in to any part of this garden. Now when you talk about the overall placement and design of the raised bed garden itself, you want to make sure that it has exposure to light, has exposure to sun. So if you take a look at my garden, north is this way, south is this way, east is this way, west is this way. The sun rises in the east, it sets in the west and nothing is blocking this southern exposure here except for that jacaranda tree, which honestly it's not that big a deal. And in the winter it's actually not even a leafed out tree. So a lot of light will still come through. So there's a couple rules on spacing, but as long as you don't violate those, you're going to be in a really good spot. But now we have to figure out how to fill these beds up with productive soil. So this is a relatively tall raised bed. This one's 29 inches. These are actually our raised beds. They're called Bernie's Raised Beds. We sell them on our store. We absolutely love them and we stand by them. We have one that's about 15 inches tall as well. That's a more standard size. I'm personally preferential to the larger ones. The question still remains, how do you fill this with soil? Well, there are two ways to do it. In a tall raised bed like this, I really love putting filler material down in the bottom. It could be logs, twigs, sticks, branches, food scraps, extra compost, anything like that. Or you could put soil in, but that ends up getting somewhat expensive. If you're talking about a smaller raised bed, I'm really a fan of just getting the highest quality soil you can get, whether that be in bags from a local nursery or sometimes from a bulk delivery. If you have one in your area, you can give them a call. They'll come and dump a bunch of soil on your doorstep and you've got a little bit of a shoveling job to do, but it is way more cost-effective. And often the quality of that soil is also a lot better. So this is probably the most labor intensive part of setting up a raised bed garden is building and designing the system, then getting the soil in. But once you do that, it comes to the fun part, which is planting it out. Growing out your own vegetables is a topic I could do hundreds of videos on. And in fact, I have. That's what this whole channel is about. But a quick primer for you beginners out there is the most important thing. Know where you live and know when you have to start and stop your gardening. Here in San Diego, I'm very fortunate that we don't actually have temperatures cold enough to kill most plants, which means in January, I can grow something like this mustard right here cause it loves colder temperatures. For you, if you're in a colder climate, this might be a fantastic spring or fall crop. But really the easiest way to think about it is whenever the snow starts to melt off, the ground starts to get a little bit easier to work in, that's really the start of your season. And whenever that trend reverses and the ground starts to get colder again, that's really sort of the general end of your season. And you can grow a lot of different plants in that window. And the question then becomes, well, what plants should I grow? And I always say, grow what you like to eat because we're trying to develop a self-sufficient productive homestead, which means you actually want to use all of this produce. I enjoy eating mustard. I enjoy eating bok choy. I have a carrot right here. Let's see how that looks. Not that great, but we'll try next season to make that one a little bit better. Nevertheless, you grow what you like to eat. And then there's so many different guides available for how to grow a beet, how to grow a carrot, how to grow a tomato that you can dive into because all plants want the same things. Light, nutrients, water, soil, good soil. But they all are a little bit different. And that's kind of the fun and the joy and the beauty of the gardening and homesteading journey is the deeper you go, the more fascination you start to have. So dive in and set up a garden and have some fun with it. But this is an annual vegetable garden. It'll change over roughly every single season. But if you want to set up a productive orchard, that'll pay you off for many more years to come. One of the first things I did when I came to this homestead was start planting an orchard as soon as humanly possible. This is one of my favorite oranges of all time. This is a Satsuma orange. Sometimes you'll see these at the store. They're called California Cuties. And I used to eat them by the bag in college. Now I grow them by the bag. But an orchard is easily the lowest maintenance, highest yield thing you can put in a homestead, provided you set it up correctly. And that really was my personal intimidation point when I first started out on this land here. So down this line, you have about 15 different varieties of citrus. Down this line, you have what looks to be a dead orchard, but it's actually just all of the deciduous fruit trees, the ones that actually lose their leaves in the winter. So I have two pomegranates, an apple, a peach, a nectarine, and another nectarine. And even behind us, we have a beautiful papaya in the backyard. I have bananas, grapes, berries, all sorts of different things. I did not start this way. I started with what was easy. And in my climate, citrus is easy. In your climate, it might be stone fruit, your peaches, your plums. It might be pears and apples. You kind of have to figure out what works in your area. But the most important thing for a suburban homestead style orchard, I think, is planting closer together, pruning more actively and making sure that you're getting what you want out of the orchard. So for me, what's important? It's not important that this caracara orange produces 700. I'd actually prefer variety. That's why I have 15 different citrus and I've planted them an insanely close four feet apart. No one would ever do that if you're growing them up in Northern California for production. But I'm not. All I want is about 40, 50 amazing caracaras, limes, satsumas, peaches, pomegranates. And so I can cram these way closer together and just pay the price by pruning them more actively. This is a method that I learned from a guy named Tom Spellman. It's called backyard orchard culture. And what I'll do in this case is keep the trees to about six or seven feet. These ones haven't even reached that yet and prune it. So they kind of form a nice hedge style structure. And then I just don't have to worry about over-managing an orchard where they things are getting totally out of control and I feel overwhelmed, fruits dropping to the ground and being wasted. And it's different for every single tree. So in the case of citrus, that is a family of trees that really likes a nice tight canopy, as it's called. It wants to be grown in sort of this bushy structure. It does not want a lot of light coming in and hitting that main trunk. But as we come over here and take a look at the pomegranate, but more specifically something like an apple or a peach, you can see the structure of this peach really well right now cause there are no leaves on it. And if you take a look, you'll notice it has this sort of bell or like vase style structure where I'm pruning out a lot in the middle. It's nice and open. And then as it grows, it's going to put a lot of leaves out on this side and produce a ton of fruit. In fact, so much fruit that Jacques on our team and I could not even eat it all. We had to give some of it away, which, you know, always good to give to family and friends. So if you know you want fruit trees in your budding suburban homestead, I'd say get on it ASAP. Notice I designed from the outside in. I wanted a nice citrus hedge. Maybe it blocks this view a little bit, makes me feel like I'm in a citrus jungle. That's kind of the vibe I was going for. But I put these in about four or five months after I moved in. And now, years later, I'm getting an abundant amount of produce. The other question you're going to run into is where do I get these trees? Local nursery is always a great place to go. And I always recommend that first. You can call around and find a local nursery that has this particular variety that you might be obsessed with. But then you're going to be faced with one of two choices. Do you buy a live tree like this that's in a pot and you can plant it right in the ground? Or do you buy what's called a bare root tree, which is exactly like it sounds. It looks like a stick, doesn't look alive. There'll be a little burlap bag at the bottom and really the roots are just kind of hanging out in a bit of bark or something like that. The idea here is that those are way cheaper. It is way less expensive to buy a bare root tree. You can pop it in the ground in January, February, March, and you'll be in a really good spot, get an orchard started for a very low cost. If you have a little bit more budget and you want to buy yourself some time, I highly recommend going with a one to three year old tree. The bigger the better sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes that transplant shock can kill a tree and you get really sad, but the bigger the better. Why? Because you can take what might be a three year wait to get some of these beautiful satsumas and shrink that down to a one year, one and a half year wait, which is a big difference when we're talking about years to get some produce. In my case, I bought about a one year old plant for all of these citrus and I just have so much produce coming out. There's so much more to orchard care that you can go into. And it's a wide world, absolutely fascinating to dive into. But this is a very good primer. The only other thing I'll touch on is water. But to do that, I have to show you the weird watering systems I'm using here at my homestead. When you're in the city trying to homestead, of course you're connected to the city systems. I'm connected to my power grid and I'm using city water from my local municipality. But why not use it as effectively as you can? So I'm standing here in my artichoke patch, one of my favorite places. I don't know, the light looks beautiful. It's a beautiful plant that comes back every single year and it doesn't get watered, at least by me. There's a little white pipe over there. And if you were to go under my house and follow it all the way back, you would see it's connected to my laundry machine in a system known as gray water. So the general principle with gray water is using water a second time after it's gone through one system in your house. In my case, laundry and shower are the two places that I recycle that water into the landscape. The laundry water comes here into the artichoke patch and the shower water goes out into that productive citrus orchard that I just showed you. And neither of those areas is getting that much water directly from the city. It's all stuff I've already used. So if you do pick up a copy of Epic Homesteading, I have screenshots of exactly how I installed my gray water laundry system, but it's honestly not that hard. You could do it yourself. You could hire a professional and you can oftentimes get a rebate for doing it. All it involves is installing what's called a three-way valve on your laundry machine. That when you turn it one way, it sends the water to the sewer system to be processed the normal way. You turn it another way and it'll send it out to a patch like this. The only thing you really have to do in the case of laundry and shower is change up your soap. I use one called Oasis for my laundry detergent. It just biodegrades in a very safe way. And for my shower, I use Dr. Bronner's. Those are great ways to use water, don't get me wrong, but there's water that comes from the sky that I've figured out really great ways to capture, especially here in my climate. Maybe you're in a climate where it's raining all the time and this is less important than maybe putting in some solar panels. But for me, I want to capture every inch of rain that I can. And so this is one way to do it. You can set up a simple rain barrel style system. So if you take a look up there, there's a little terracotta tile roof, and that's what's being captured into this system here. The way it works is you've got a gutter. That gutter is going to spit the water and any debris right here. This little header has what's called a leaf filter. That's going to take all the large debris off. If I put my hand up here, you can see some of this stuff would have just gone right into the water, which I don't really want. But there's even smaller particulate matter, like little bits of dirt or bird poop or something like that. And what will happen is the water will filter through and fall right down here. And this is kind of a road to nowhere. It's called a first flush filter. And it's exactly what it sounds like. The first bit of water that's coming off of this roof system, which is probably filled with some dirt and some grime gets captured in this vertical tube. As this tube fills up, eventually it hits here. At that point we're making the assumption, Hey, this water is pretty clean by now. And it's going to dump over here into the rain barrel, which can be used right down here. So I could come down and attach a hose to this if I want and use that in any way that I choose. I could water my artichokes more. I could water my flower patch. I could water my raised beds. And if this was ever to overflow, that's okay because it's going to overflow, come out of this system here, and that dumps where? Into my artichoke patch. This type of system is a fantastic way to get started from 50 gallons, a hundred gallons, 200 gallons. But if you have the space and the budget to take it to the next level, I will show you what I did in the backyard. Underneath this massive passion fruit vine is actually a 5,000 gallon cistern that captures all the rain off of my main roof. It's the exact same system I just showed you, except for there's a pipe that travels underground and drops it right into this cistern. And the thing I'll say about this is this is more of an advanced technique. The budget is a little bit higher for something like this, but the security it provides. 5,000 gallons, it's connected to a pressure sensitive pump that puts enough water pressure out to make it feel like I'm just watering with a normal city hose here. But in fact, I'm pulling from a big tank right here. And I like to use this for my pond area or for the backyard garden over there. So it's a little bit more extreme. You can still get some rebates from the city. It takes a bit of a professional crew to install something like this. But if you're really making a go of homesteading, whether it's in the city or certainly in a more rural area, I think a big water cistern is insurance that you can't afford not to have. Rainwater is one of the crucial ways we're taking resources that are naturally falling on the property and then redirecting them for our best use in a homestead. But my favorite one is one you can't even see. Welcome back to the roof, my friends. I will confess I come up here and just enjoy a sunset, take a look at the garden and yes, maybe even clean off my solar panels. That is what we're talking about. Solar energy at the homestead. Obviously one of the resources we rely on the most from our city, from our energy company is the energy to power the home. And so what better way to offset it than putting some solar panels on your roof? Now I can hear people already saying, that won't work for me. It's too expensive for me. It won't work in my area. There's a lot of complexity to getting solar panels. There's a lot of ways that you can pay for solar panels or finance them. There's a lot of different types of solar panels. There's a lot of different ways that your energy company will reimburse you for the energy that you do or do not generate. So I'm speaking in generalities here and there's a lot more analysis in the Epic Homesteading book about how to calculate what's called your payback period for solar. But in a nutshell, what are solar panels doing? They cost a certain amount to put on your roof and then they generate a certain amount of energy per year. That energy would have cost you if you were to buy it from your electric company, but instead you're generating it. So it's offsetting your electric bill and you're basically taking that number and dividing it into how much it costs to install the solar panels. And then you'll get another number and that number is how many years it takes to pay back that initial investment. I can speak for myself. I have 24 panels up here. In my case, in California, you got a rebate at a certain period of time. It was about 22% or so. So I got to write off that much of the purchase price, which is certainly a nice bonus. And then it ended up being about five to seven years where I would be effectively generating energy for free. That's not exactly accurate. You still pay a connection fee to the grid and there's some ancillary fees, but basically I don't have an energy bill anymore for all intents and purposes. The only thing I'll say here is it really does depend on where you live. If you live way up in Vancouver in Canada, maybe this isn't the best choice for you because you're just simply not generating enough from the lack of sunny days that you have to pay this back in a reasonable amount of time. But that's kind of why the Epic Homesteading Book is like a grab bag of options. In your climate, this might not be the best choice, but maybe you have an abundance of rain. So capturing a ton of that might make a lot of sense. So there's a lot of different ways to approach this. But for me, this is one of the key parts of my homestead. I'm offsetting almost all of my electricity every single year, even right now. I pay $120 a year to be connected to my grid. And that's pretty much it. So we have our veggies on lock now. We have our water on lock and we have our energy on lock. But where's our protein coming from? Believe it or not, it's actually hard to grow protein. I tried it. About four years ago, I tried to live off my garden. I ended up living off of potatoes and weird little fish that I fished out of a sewer ditch. So I didn't really succeed in growing protein until I got these little guys. These are my Epic hens. I have nine of them now. I lost one of them, raised them all from baby chicks. And not only do they provide you eggs, quite a few eggs, more eggs than I can actually eat, but they're an integral part of the overall waste recycling system here at my homestead. Chicken keeping is a deep world. You could spend a whole year just doing that and that would be not only completely fine, but totally fun. And there'd still be a lot to learn. So I'll give you everything that you really, really need to know as quickly as I can here. Raise them from baby chicks. Take it from me. It is one of the most rewarding experiences you will ever have. If you raise them from eggs, if you hatch them, well then you might get a rooster. And going back to that zoning requirement, sometimes you can't have a rooster. In my area, I can't have a rooster. And so I'd have to figure out a way to deal with the fact that I just birthed a male. So I like to raise them from day olds or week old chicks that have already been sexed and they are female hens. Then you get into breed selection. In my case, this is sort of a choose your own adventure. If you want different colored eggs, you can select the breed based on that. If you want based on temperament, like Butter right here is a very friendly motherly hen. If that's what you'd like, maybe you can go with what's called a buff Orpington. If you want a weird looking one like this guy right here, this is Rufio. That's a cream leg bar. Just got her cause she looked cool. It's kind of up to you. If you're really into egg production and you want to max out your eggs, then you can actually just look up the hens that produce the most eggs. They might not be the flashiest hens, but they might be sort of a great workhorse type of hen that just gives you the protein that you need. Let's talk coops. You can go complete DIY like my friend Jacques who built his entire coop for about a hundred dollars. It just took a bit of time, but it's a beautiful, amazing coop or you could ball out and get a little bit fancy like I did here with this Carolina coop, or you could do something in the middle. What a coop needs is an enclosed area called a run. That run is a place for those hens to basically hang out, chill, vibe, enjoy, drink, eat, rest, roost. All of that happens in this indoor run. Where we're at right now is called my outdoor run. This is something I built to extend the coop. I wanted to give the hens access to more sunlight, access to more forage. We'll throw our vegetable scraps in here and they'll eat them. Then the other thing a coop needs is a place for them to go at night. That would be the hen house in my case. It's right over there and they can roost up on these little roosting bars. There's some bedding below and there's a little egg hutch where they'll go to lay their eggs every single day. You can expect, depends on the breed again, but you can expect somewhere between five to six eggs a week. Hens will typically lay every 24 to 26 hours. My friend Loaf over there, however, lays maybe once every three days. So she's a bit of a freeloader and you'll find that in a flock. There's personalities, there's temperaments, there's vibes, and it's just a really fun experience. But eggs aren't really, sometimes even the primary reason you might have hens. Certainly for me, they're a huge benefit. But what I really like is a way to recycle the systems we've already talked about. My outdoor vegetable garden, my productive orchard, any of the scraps from that, whether it be from after I cook in the kitchen or before I get them in the kitchen, just the processing scraps, will go right here. And then the chickens will scratch through that, excrete waste, either there or in the hen house. And then I can clean that waste up and recycle it through my composting system where it will then make it back into the garden. To me, no homestead is complete, city or otherwise, if it does not have a way to recycle all the materials that you produced, but you don't need. And that is where composting comes into play. I'll talk about this system in a second, but composting is accessible no matter what size homestead, garden, et cetera, that you have. You can start with something very small, a little bucket, just like this. Throw some worms in this bucket, put another bucket on top, throw some scraps in that. Cycle that back and forth and voila, you have a very simple, probably less than $20 system to recycle your food scraps. You can get even fancier than that. There's a method called Bokashi composting, which again, uses a bucket, but it uses an inoculated bran, which is sort of just like an inoculated grain. And you'll sprinkle that on top of your food scraps and then you don't even need worms. It'll sort of pre-digest and ferment that food. And then you can bury the food scraps directly in the garden. So you don't even have to mess around with a larger system like this. But if you do have the space, this is a hot composting system. And I have a five bay system where I'll build a pile and then I'll move it down the line. And as it gets moved down the line, the material is broken down further and further. Because if you think about what you're trying to do with compost, think about decomposing. Think about a forest, right? The leaves are falling down, the branches, the trunks, et cetera. They're all sort of getting decomposed by all of the bacteria, fungi, insects that are in that environment. And once they're small enough, really, once that organic matter gets so fine that it's at that elemental level almost, it will then be able to be used as nutrition by the next crop of plants that are growing in that forest. And so what you're doing in a composting system is the exact same thing, but you're doing it in a human way where it is repeatable and replicable and controllable. And so a hot composting system, you stack layers of different materials, all covered in the book, all covered on our channel as well. And then that material heats up. It's the bacteria, it's the fungi, it's the insects, heating that pile up by reproducing and consuming and breaking down that matter. And then once it is small enough, you can recycle that back into the garden by putting it on top of your garden beds and creating a beautiful, healthy, rich soil. Really important for a suburban homestead because like I said, you're not working oftentimes with the best quality soil. It might just be the fill dirt from the construction when they actually built the house. So I'll do this. I'll take my chicken scraps and chicken manure, shovel them out into here. That'll heat that pile up really nice. And then I actually use the chicken scraps to kind of kickstart the pile, break it down faster and put that back out. So composting to me is the other side of the equation. You've got capturing resources that are available but often wasted. Rain, energy, gray water. And then you've got recycling resources that are often wasted. My straw, this weird onion right here, a strawberry that died. All that kind of stuff that I can't use in the kitchen. So let's say you have your systems in place. You're growing, you're succeeding. You've got some harvests out of the garden. What the heck do you do with all of that produce? And to me, that's where almost an entirely different, equally fulfilling, if not more journey begins. That of the kitchen, preserving, cooking these meals and really making the most of what you harvest. And to me, that gets into the many different ways that you can preserve your food. At its most simple, preserving is a time honored and ancient technique, of course, because back in the day we didn't have refrigerators to store our food in. So you can do something like hang drying all of your herbs to make different herbal mixes and spices. You can hang dry tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, hang dry your peppers, get nice dried peppers that you can rehydrate and use at any point in time. You could get an actual dehydrator, relatively affordable, and start dehydrating all sorts of different things. Slicing up an onion, making your own onion powder, slicing up some homegrown ginger, making your own ginger powder. You get where I'm going with that. A million different ways and a million different recipes that you can produce just by combining some of the preserved goods that you have at the homestead. For me, one of my favorites, not only canning, which is putting up in a very regimented and food safe way, produce for the longterm in a pantry, but quick pickling. Something that it's a lot more beginner friendly and you can create some absolutely delicious things. I always have pickled red onions homegrown from the garden hanging out in my fridge. I have pickled carrots, pickled vegetable mixtures. They're really nice to add to a salad or to add onto some freshly baked sourdough that's coming from, guess what? Your garden. So there's so many different ways to preserve. You can get fancy and I've covered it in the book. Freeze drying, we've done that a lot. Freeze dried strawberries are great, but it's a little bit crazier, a little more space age tech. And unfortunately those devices are still quite expensive. But if you do have the budget, it is fun to play with. If there's one thing I want you to understand, it is that the word homestead often evokes this image of going off into the woods or buying 10 acres and building a cabin with your bare hands and then wearing linen that you sewed yourself and slaughtering a cow or something like that. Honestly, kind of sounds like a vibe, but almost all of us do not have the time, the resources, the know-how to get started on that type of journey. So this book is my exploration of how I did it in a normal American home. A thousand square foot home. It is not big in a suburban area of a major city. There is something for you in this book, no matter where you live, no matter what your gardening experience is like and no matter how intimidated you might feel by that word right there. I think we need to broaden it. Don't gatekeep it as much. So in this book, there is something for you. It's out right now at everywhere you might buy books. But if you buy it from us, I will toss in a free pack of seeds from our seed company, Botanical Interest to get your homestead started. I hope you enjoy it guys. It's been such a rewarding experience for me to take this patch of truly bare land, just completely scraped clean and build what you've seen over the course of this video. I think you're going to enjoy the book. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.