➡ Over the past six months, the author has transformed a property into a self-sustaining, off-grid homestead. The property now runs on well water, geothermal heating, and solar power. They’ve built greenhouses, food forests, roads, and more, and have plans for future improvements. They’ve also adopted a dog and six cats to help manage pests on the property.
➡ The text describes the various improvements made to a large property, including the addition of a gravel road, an above-ground pool for emergency water supply, and the acquisition of a six-wheeler and tractor for heavy-duty work. The owner also built an archery range, plans to build a gun range, and intends to introduce animals like cows and chickens. Other developments include the planting of trees, the construction of fences, and the implementation of security measures. The owner also cleared a camping spot and plans to continue developing the property in the future.
➡ We’re creating a cozy camping spot in the forest with different tents and a wood stove for warmth during winter. Despite clearing some trees, the area still offers good wind protection. It’s a fun, secluded spot for outdoor activities and relaxation. Remember, you can support our channel by buying top-quality survival gear from CanadianPreparedness.com using the discount code ‘preppinggear’ for a 10% discount. Stay safe and remember, the prepared thrive.

I’ve spent the last 10 years acquiring the knowledge and the resources that I would need to move my family completely off the grid. Now, throughout my quest to strategically relocate to a place to ride out whatever societal collapse might befall mankind, I must have looked at dozens of properties along the way. But as the catastrophic events of the last few years started to culminate, I felt a sense of urgency. So I finally pulled the trigger on a property in the spring of 2024, and in the last 6 months, I was able to turn what was essentially a blank canvas into a completely off-grid, self-sustaining homestead.

It took a lot of work, and quite frankly, it probably nearly killed me. Nonetheless, we now have a property that runs on well water, geothermal heating, and solar power. Today I’m going to walk you through the progress that we made, from building greenhouses and food forests, wood harvesting, road building, fencing, fortification, security, irrigation, solar power, gun and archery ranges, tree planting, and even setting the groundwork for future animal husbandry. We got a lot to talk about, so let’s get to it. Oh, our first acquisition on the homestead was this guy.

Within a few days of us living here, this mutt came to the homestead. We called him Shadow because he came like a shadow in the night. So this is the 6-month update on the homestead, what we’ve been able to accomplish in 6 months. Honestly, I could have accomplished a lot more, but I’ve been so busy talking about the Russians and the North Koreans and the Israelis that we got a little sidetracked. This was something I’ve been planning for several years, so I’ve been accumulating the resources so that when I did acquire the property, I could rather quickly build things out.

So we’ve actually installed a 20-kilowatt solar system. We have these monocrystalline panels, they’re bifacials. We’re going to do an in-depth breakdown of this entire process. What you’re seeing behind me is one or four, I’m not sure what they’re showing on the camera, of about 36 panels. Because all of the utilities in the house are running off-grid from the geothermal, to the forced air, to the well pump, and of course all the electrical needs. All of this stuff requires electricity. This is just the power box that switches over from solar to on-grid.

And we have a system that will use the grid to supplement whatever sort of deficiencies there are in the solar system. If we have three days worth of overcast, the batteries aren’t filling, the grid will actually fill up the batteries. If we wanted to, we could go completely off-grid, but I don’t think I have the battery storage that I would like just yet. We do plan on expanding out the battery pack next year, because we right now only have 40-kilowatt hours of storage. I would like to double, if not triple that.

So one of the first things we did is we built this massive greenhouse. This is a 50 by 25-foot greenhouse, so it’s a steel frame, and it’s going to last a long time. You know, I could have did some kind of hoop house thing, but because of the winds that we get out here, I decided to err on the side of caution and build something that’s actually going to last. And next year is going to be where we build out the actual garden beds. We haven’t done any of that yet this year.

We’re going to try to grow vegetables that are rich in nutrients, but also rich in calories to supplement our potatoes. So we have our staple potatoes. We can basically grow those anywhere on the property. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a problem growing potatoes. We have lots of good fats and oils from that. But if we want to grow things like peppers, add some zest to our palate post-apocalypse, right? And we’re going to be able to grow a shitload of food in here. So let’s go check out what we’re going to do in here.

My goal in here is to try to maximize the space. I don’t want to be overly restricting in terms of our walking, so I want to make it easy to cultivate at the same time. I might even try to have some hanging stuff from the support beams. And it’s going to be awesome, man. I don’t know if you guys really are getting the sense of how big it is in here, but it’s a giant greenhouse and it’s facing north to south. So we get the sun coming over. Every plant is going to get its nice thicks of sunlight throughout the day.

So it’s awesome. So as some of you know, we built an orchard from scratch. We built a centropic food forest. It’s about 100 meters by 70 meters. It’s full of fruit trees. Many of these fruit trees were six or seven years old. We planted them, but we ran into the problem of wind. So we decided to build this wind fence. We built these with standard three inch posts. We have our five foot tall wire fencing, and then we have this wind fence that we put around it. This has helped out a lot in terms of diminishing the crop damage from wind, and I hope to enhance this a bit more next year.

Now we have a very big gopher problem here. Gophers, mice, voles, all those annoying critters. So we decided to conscript an army of cats to help us out. So we now have six cats on this 160 acre farm. As you can see, they’re policing right now the cornfield, which is of course dead because summer is finished. We had so much squash and pumpkins in this centropic food forest this year that about half of them got left on the ground. It’s going to be fertilizer for next year. We got about a thousand pounds that we harvested, and that’s really all we had to be able to store.

But now we know that the soil here is great for growing this sort of thing. Not going to be a problem next year. I’m about to take the flamethrower to most of this stuff. It’s going to be nice. So this is the irrigation system that I put in, and there’s eight pipes that run through the orchard underneath the ground so I can go over with machinery. And this conserves water, and all of these pipes are offset about two or three feet from where the trees or the rows are. It encourages the roots to extend outwards away from where they’re planted.

It saves a lot of work from having to water so we don’t have to rely on rain. We have an abundant high flow well on the property, and that’s where all of this is being fed from. So it comes from the ground and it goes right back into the ground. Very little is wasted. We’re going to keep adding mulch to the soil, and hopefully in a few years we’re going to have just rows of different types of fruit trees. And I’m glad the cats are loving the orchard because this is where I want them, because I want to keep the gophers out of here.

The house runs on geothermal heat with the in-floor tubes. We also have a fireplace as a secondary mode of heating, and for that I buck three cords of birch wood. Now we don’t have birch around here, so I had to get the birch, but I was the one who bucked it, chopped it, and all that stuff. We have about 70 acres of forest, but the trees don’t get that big. This is about as big as the trees are going to get, maybe a little bit bigger in some spots. It’s about a foot in diameter, so we’ll never run out of firewood.

It’s just not the best firewood. There’s enough standing dead timber on the property that we could easily ride out a few seasons just on the standing dead stuff. Because we have a lot of forest where it’s just a lot of toothpick trees, I want to go and thin that out, and that way those smaller trees will get bigger over time. For now, we’re probably going to preserve this stuff for when we actually need it, and we’re going to keep getting our wood brought in from other sources. So we have 169 acres here.

I’ve probably covered a few acres in gravel. The purpose of this is multifold. Obviously, we want to make the space more accessible. It’s just more convenient to walk on gravel. It’s going to keep the bugs down. It’s going to manage the mud and just all that kind of stuff. And so we laid down this heavier gauge fabric, and it’s doing very well. It’s great at grass and weed control, so we’re going to put this gravel over top of it. Nice graded gravel surface is just a lot easier to work with, but it’s taken a lot of work.

It’s taken a lot of diesel, and it’s taken a hell of a lot of gravel, probably into a thousand cubic yards of gravel. So another thing I’ve been working on is roads, and it’s still a work in progress. What I’m going to do is I basically scrape most of the organic layer off the top, and then on top of that, we’re putting a layer of gravel. Fortunately, you can pretty much drive on anything out here because it’s just flat prairie. But if you want to have that nice, smooth, accessible roadway, you know, that’s when gravel comes in handy.

Because we have no above ground water here, we decided this year to put an above ground pool. This is an emergency supply of water, just in case the well pump stops working for some reason, and there was a long-term grid down situation, we would have 10,000 gallons of water at our disposal at any given time. Obviously, we now have to drain the pool for winter. If we do need an emergency source of water in the winter, there’s always snow. Now, next year, I want to start excavating to create a pond, but I figured this was a nice temporary solution, and it adds a nice recreational activity for us out here.

All right. Now, since I came to this acreage, I’ve gained 20 pounds. I’m getting fat and lazy, and it’s because I’m using more machines, so I’m doing less things by hand than I used to do when I was the off-grid rough-and-tumble survivalist. So I decided to get the six-wheeler. For practical purposes, I wanted something that’s a workhorse, and it’s not much more, believe it or not, for the six-wheeler than the four-wheeler, and it adds a bit more payload capacity, and you can also carry more people. So I would not have been able to do a lot of the work that I’ve done on this Homestead without this tractor.

It’s an MX5400. It is a 71-horsepower tractor. I have a few implements. We have the bucket. We have the auger. We have the grader. We have a brush hog, which is very important for out here. We have a rototiller and, of course, a forklift. It’s been indispensable. You really do need some kind of big tool like this on the Homestead. So when I acquired the property, they also threw in this skid steer. It’s got a lot of miles on it. In fact, I don’t know how many hours are on it, because the odometer or whatever you call it doesn’t work anymore.

It still runs, and honestly, the things that workhorse that I tell you, man, these tools are absolutely indispensable out here. Couldn’t have did it without them. So another thing that I built on the property this year is this archery range. I want to enhance this in years to come, so I actually have lines indicating the yardage. Right now, each one of these critters is at five-yard increments. If I choose to, I could easily just go back. You can’t see behind the camera, but it goes back like 100 yards. It’s fun, and we hope to use this as a testing ground for a lot of the different types of bows and crossbows that we’re going to show on the channel in the future.

Next year, I ordered 100 of the Hesco barriers that we showed you guys in a previous video, and we’re going to be building a gun range out of those Hesco barriers. So we’re going to have an archery range and a gun range. Those Hesco barriers are going to provide some nice sound protection and some nice weather protection, and I think 100 is going to be enough that we’re going to be able to create a range that’s at least 50 yards or so for next year. I’m glad winter is here because I don’t have to worry about these things for six months, but I have a lot of stuff to do next year.

All right, so we do plan on getting animals on the property. We got about 90 acres of grassland, which is more than enough to feed a number of herbivores. Probably going to get some cows and chickens to start. My buddy Gene over at Arcopia, he has these smaller cows that they’re more easier to work with, so we’re probably going to go with something like that. I don’t know if we’re going to get into cows next year, but we’re certainly going to get into chickens because that’s easy, and I think one season with chickens, just while we’re still building off the property, of course, before we get cows, we have to properly fence everything in, and I still have a lot of fencing to do.

We might even get some sheep because sheep are great not only as a source of food, but also as a source of wool. We’re going to be doing some hunting on the property. Obviously, it’s the perfect hunting property. We have elk, we have moose, we have deer. I’ve even seen a bear out here. There’s also lots of little critters, but primarily we’ll be hunting deer. I didn’t get a moose tag this year, but we have all kinds of moose out here. I can guarantee you within a kilometer radius of us right now, there’s at least 12 deer, and I know where they hide.

I know where they chill, so if we ever need meat, there’s a lot of meat on the property. So my buddy Channing over at The Container Guy gave me a deal on this container, and the great thing about this one is that it has four doors, very accessible, built like a tank, okay, far more secure than any kind of barn or a pool shed or anything like that. They’re not cheap. You’re going to be paying 30% more if you want these doors, but The Container Guy, they modify shipping containers, so go check them out.

So at the beginning of the year, we built out the cedar raised garden beds, so I built six of them, and we got a lot of food just out of these six 4×8 garden beds. There’s a screen mesh on the bottom to prevent gophers. The soil that we have out here is actually really good, so what we did was we mixed the soil with some potting soil mixtures. I think we probably could have done fine just using the top soil. We decided to go with cedar for longevity. It comes at extra cost over something like pine, but it’s going to be worth it in the long run because these things will be here for many years to come.

All right, so we don’t have a lot of conifer trees around here, so I decided to plant around 500 trees. We got about 10 of these ones that were burlapped. They’re seven or eight years old, and they’re going to be difficult to plant. You absolutely need machinery in order to do it. Most of our trees are not this big. In fact, I would say about 400 of them are about this size right here. A lot of the trees did not survive, and this is pretty common. If you’re going to be planting, going on a tree planting blitz, expect about half to die, maybe even more depending on how dry it is that year.

The reason why we’re planting trees is number one, we want to diversify the landscape. We want there to be more green in the wintertime, but we also need a shelter belt. I’d say they’ve probably grown about eight inches or so since we planted them, so they’re actually doing pretty decent. This is what Baxter does for a living. He digs bunkers. Baxter’s a bunker digger, Ron, over at Atlas Survival. If you need an employee, let’s go work for you. All right, so I’ve got my work cut out for me in terms of building fences.

I have to fence around three, maybe four miles. We’re going to be using this type of fence. It’s taller. It’s going to keep things out, keep things in, especially when we get animals on the property. We’re going to be doing a couple different layers of fencing, very similar to my friend Dean’s setup, where he has an interior fence, and then there’s an exterior fence, and there’s a fence along the roadway leading into the property. These are a three-inch fence post for the interior sections. We probably don’t have to go this overkill for the exterior sections, so we have to bring in the post pounder to do that.

We’re also going to be installing a couple of your standard style farm gates, five foot tall. These are heavy duty gates, 200 pounds. We’ve also, of course, put in a lot of security measures. We’ve posted a lot of signs around the property, so I have some Vosker cameras on the property that don’t require a Wi-Fi connection. They run on cellular. We also, of course, installed a couple Dakota alert underground early warning notification systems to tell us if people have come on the property. We’re going to be putting some motion activated solar powered lights on the property as well.

So a lot of the forest on the property looks like this. There’s a lot of brush. It’s very gnarly. It’s overgrown. It’s tangled. It’s just a mess. What a mess! It’s a naughty mess that a human has hasn’t stepped foot in for a long time, so I wanted to clear out a nice little camping spot on the property, so that’s what we did, and we’ll show you what we did. So I cleared out a few hundred square feet of this forest so that we could have a nice place to play. So we’re going to put, you know, a few different tents.

I might even put some kind of bunkie in here. It’s really nice in here. We got a lot of elm and cottonwood and a variety of different types of plants, maples, and things like that. That’s the wood pile. That’s part of it. That’s about half of what I took out of this region. That really doesn’t do it justice, though. It’s going to be a nice place just to, you know, kick back and feel like you’re in the bush. We got the Russian Bear Panda Tent. This is an inflatable tent. It’s a four-season tent, so we’re going to put a wood stove in there.

There’s actually a canopy that goes over top of it, and this is basically how it’s going to look now all through winter. So, unfortunately, we don’t have that nice evergreen cover, but we still do have some good wind protection in here because of the density of the forest. We’ve got a nice fire pit here, and it’s going to be fun, you know, just to be out here camping. It’s far enough away that you feel like you’re away, if you know what I mean. We’re going to have a place maybe for some other, like, recreational stuff to do out here.

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