➡ Curtis Stone visited a friend’s property to discuss its potential as a self-sustaining homestead. They discussed the importance of security, the concept of a centropic food forest, and the quality of the soil. They also talked about the need for sustainable firewood supply, heating options, and the use of heavy machinery for maintenance and construction. Lastly, they touched on the idea of off-grid solar power, emphasizing the need for self-reliance and independence.
➡ The article discusses the benefits of setting up an off-grid solar system, especially for those preparing for emergencies. It suggests using diesel generators as backup due to their long shelf-life and ease of storage. The article also advises against installing solar panels on the roof due to visibility and maintenance issues, recommending ground-mounted systems instead. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of having multiple water sources and the usefulness of shipping containers for storage and infrastructure during the transition to off-grid living.
➡ Start homesteading by finding the right property soon as time is running out. You can support this channel by buying top-notch survival gear at CanadianPreparedness.com using the discount code ‘prepping gear’ for a 10% discount. Remember, being prepared is key to thriving in survival situations. Stay safe.

All right guys, so back again with my buddy Curtis Stone who came all the way from British Columbia to tell me how strategic or unstrategic my off-grade retreat is. So what is your first impressions of the property as we stand in what will someday hopefully be an abundant cornucopia of a food forest? Well, it’s nice. You’ve got a bunch of mixed land in that you’ve got trees, pastures, you have some topography on the property. We’ve got lots of shelter from the road. The fact that you have a lot of trees here is really good and then the fact that you’re planning to put more in is even better.

But you know the nice thing about it is you’ve got a blank slate. You can just kind of go anywhere. So how big of a factor is security for you when designing your homestead? Well it’s huge. I mean I picked my location based on that mostly as being a YouTuber like yourself and always having people show up at my property. I got sick of that so I wanted to be out of the way. I wanted to be extraordinarily difficult to even just show up at my property. So it was kind of one of my top values actually but the fencing was a big part of it.

I spent about $40,000 on my first fence. Yeah, I mean for myself personally you know I try to be very security-minded. We have some satellite cameras. Cameras that will work even in a power outage and just trying to play with the natural shaping of the boundaries. I’m trying to think about ways to use big boulders and various trenches and things like that come into play that will look natural and that’s leveraging the trees. It’s one of the first things I did when I got here was start putting trees in the ground because I knew that would be the longest and they’re bulletproof.

You have choke points on your property. One, really. You have to go through. That’s your mountaineering up the side. That’s right. Yeah, on my property there’s only one way in. Choke points are crucial. For me it was I wanted to have the high ground, the high vantage point, multiple vantage points, and have only one way people are going to come in. But I’ve got multiple ways that I can go out on the bush roads and things like that. All right, so what is a centropic food forest? Well, it’s a food forest meaning that you’ve got all kinds of trees that produce something, but you have a system where about 75% of the trees in that system actually aren’t edible.

They’re entirely grown for the purpose of supporting the system for a period of time. So they provide shelter, they fix nitrogen, and they provide foliage that you’re going to cut and throw on the ground and mulch to build your soil. But that’s what a centropic food forest is. It’s all about expediting the building of soil to make a system that really flourishes over time. So what do you think of the soil here? It’s really good. This is called sandy loam. So when you rub your fingers in it, you can feel the grit.

That’s the sand. But what makes good soil is this clumpiness. So but you’ve also got a good amount of organics in it. That’s the black, the decomposition of many years on the prairie, ruminant animals, you know, chewing and pooping on it. And so yeah, no, this is really ideal soil. It’s really good. So in my system I just put in, it’s about the same size as this in square footage, 75% of the trees are beneficial and they’ll be gone in 10 years. In 10 years, all that will be left is the fruiting species of the trees and the shrubs.

You’re planting stuff that isn’t getting you food, but it’s getting you nutrients. Well, that’s it. And that’s actually kind of a neat where the prepping community and the permaculture community can really coalesce is that if you’re thinking long-term is what does it look like in 10 to 20 years of attrition where you can’t get stuff, you want to front load your systems right now to eventually be completely dependent independent without any inputs. Yeah. Right. And so that’s where the regenerative agriculture piece comes in, which, you know, people need to really think about.

And that’s the idea with the centropic food for us is that by the time it’s relatively mature in 10 years, you don’t need any inputs. The system just self-replicates. The only thing you have to deal with is the birds. That’s right. There’s certain inevitabilities that you’re always going to battle as a farmer, but they always say the best fertilizer is the farmer’s shadow. How much firewood does a person need to keep themselves warm for a Canadian winter? And how much land would you need to sustainably harvest wood indefinitely? So they say seven acres of standing timber is enough to sustain a Canadian family of four indefinitely.

Of course, that varies on the type of trees. If you think about managing your forest and taking out the deadfall, taking out the crop and burning it, why not? Right. And it’s going to help your forest in the long run too. So I actually think you have enough on this land to have a sustainable firewood supply for the rest of your life, because seven acres is all you need. And you got way more than seven acres of timber here. One of the issues is it’s not the ideal wood burning wood. Well, yeah, Poplar and Aspen, and you got a lot of black cottonwood.

Those aren’t ideal, but you know what? In a shit hits the fan scenario, I think you take what you can get. It’s a mixed bag, you know? I think if you’ve got a lot, use what you can. Is there anything that you can use Poplar or Aspen for that you know asides? Like, is it good mulch? Is it good? Yeah. Great mulch. Yep. And maybe that’s something you might want to actually consider as an implement for that Kubota, is get a good mulcher on there, a good chipper. Yeah. Mulching paths. It’s nice.

It’s good in the garden, in the walkways, and you can use it to make compost. And there’s a lot of good things you can use it for. Keeping warm in the wintertime. We got geothermal, but we also have a fireplace. We don’t have a dedicated wood stove. Is there any recommendations you would have on how to heat home with wood? I’ve got these stoves called Blaze King. That’s a Canadian company, and they’re unbelievable. I mean, my stove, I can run on one burn 10 hours, so I can go to bed in order to get up in the morning or in the middle of the night to load it.

So I like that. And the other thing I really like right now, there’s a company out of Quebec called J.A. Roby, and I don’t have any affiliation with them or anything, but I just like their product. They make a wood cook stove, like the old school ones that have in the Amish kitchens and whatnot. They have catalytic conversion. If I wanted to go Uber, minimal resources deployed, I could run that one cook stove and heat my entire home and cook on it and heat my water. So I like that idea of having everything reduced down without any electricity or any other inputs.

Okay, so heavy equipment. This is a whole new area for me. Yeah. What would you recommend for a person who is on a sizable homestead? Is this something they need? Is this overkill? Well, this isn’t overkill. I mean, if you’re going to have one machine, this is probably the machine to have. I love Kubota as I’m all Kubota myself. I’ve got a Kubota skid steer, an SSV 65, and I’ve got an excavator, four and a half ton excavator. And I love them. I had to build my house. You got a house here.

So I think for you in this context, this machine is going to do pretty much everything you want. If you want to get into doing more earthworks, I would recommend getting an excavator or just renting one. But for you, you know, unloading fence posts, moving skids of material around, moving snow in the winter, this machine is indispensable. Any size of acreage is going to need some kind of machine like this. And these are very versatile. I’ve heard that a skid steer is good for primarily if you’re trying to build something.

It’s for construction. Not good for maintenance. You’re right. And that’s actually why I didn’t go with this because I had more construction to do. So I will probably at some point get this machine and maybe sell my excavator. I don’t know. I love both the machines so much, but this is far better for maintenance. Not as good for construction. So in construction, I think a skid steer and an excavator are a perfect combination. But for maintenance, this machine will do pretty much everything you need. All right. So electricity, everybody needs it or do we? I don’t know.

But either way, everybody’s got to get the off-grid solar set up. Yeah. What are your thoughts on just tying your solar to the grid? If you’re a prepper, what’s the point? I actually like systems where you basically have an AB where you’re on the grid because you have grid power here. You set up your solar and maybe that solar powers some other stuff for now, but in a grid down scenario, you can basically just pull a breaker and then reconnect the solar to everything else. Being grid tied, the power companies kind of just cheat it.

For a guy like you, prepper, you might as well orientate your system around being fully off-grid. So you want to have the batteries and definitely you want to look at some kind of backup. Every system needs a generator, not only for the times when you’re not getting a lot of solar, but during the times that there’s a complication with the system, you need power. And that’s what I was telling you in our podcast. You’re talking about a gas powered area? Gas, diesel, propane. I like diesel. You can store diesel for many years and you’re using it as well for your equipment.

So why not just have diesel? That’s what I’ve got. I’ve got a 13 kilowatt Yanmar diesel generator. It’s a big debatable contentious subject in the off-grid space of is it diesel or is it propane? I think it just comes down to your context. The thing I like about diesel is it’s a natural lubricant. Propane doesn’t lubricate, so that means you got to maintain the engine in a slightly different way. And you can make diesel if you had to. So in terms of putting panels on the roof, I was against it for the simple reason that it’s like a dinner bell almost.

It’s a bit too much, calls too much attention. I’m presuming that yours is more of a ground based setup. I’m all ground based. I don’t recommend putting solar on the roof, at least in an off-grid situation. Ground mounted is far better. Plus with ground mounted systems, they’re better in the winter because you can change the angle. But if you get a big snowfall and your panels are up there, how are you going to clean them off? It’s a real pain. So having a ground mount system is just far more practical. If you’re going to be off grid at the very least seven kilowatts of solar and then maybe double that size for batteries and kilowatt hours.

Say you want to start small, you can build optionality into the system so that you can scale it. And then that just might be having that conversation with your electrician to be like, can we add an inverter and a charge controller and scale up the system? So that’s what I did. You need to think about what those loads are and then design your system around that. Okay, so I’m building a greenhouse, a three season greenhouse, not a passive solar. That is ultimately the goal. We’re going to do something with ICF or whatever.

What are some considerations people should keep in mind when laying anchor on a greenhouse? Yeah, so orientation is less important for a seasonal greenhouse, like you said. You can go east or west, you can go north or south. It doesn’t really matter as much. But you want to think about proximity to where you are, which you’ve got. You might want to think about if it rains a ton, does the water go away from us, which is important. I think it’s as good a location as any. We talked about that chore path in the podcast.

When you come out of your house, what are you going to do? And so if the greenhouse is too far away, you’re less likely to go there all the time. And then you end up wasting a lot of time walking around. Do you recommend concrete over? I like concrete. Yeah, especially in windy climates like this. I prefer just doing a stem wall. And when you say stem wall, you’re talking about the external wall around in the ground. The wall that the main infrastructure, the greenhouse is connected to. And I’m not talking about doing a pad.

I’m just talking about doing the footings on the edge. Like, did you scrape away the soil before you put down this gravel? Yeah, good. And then is this greenhouse going to be a nursery or are you going to have crops in the ground? No, it’ll be all like raised garden beds. Okay, raised beds. I would say for whatever you put on soil on top of here, do two feet of soil. Because this, you know, this isn’t soil. And so if you only have like this much, it’s all going to sink down over time.

You’re going to run out of soil really quickly. Yeah, you got lots of dirt. You could pull it from somewhere, no problem. And you got the machinery to do it. So I notice you got this shipping container here. Yeah. And these things are super, super handy when you’re setting up off grid because you’re going to have a long phase of working on infrastructure. And you don’t have a lot here. You got a house and just a bunch of land. Yeah, you don’t have a shop, you don’t have a barn. And so having containers is really good in that transitionary phase.

Containers are so useful in many different ways, whether it’s the store stuff, but you can also build infrastructure off containers, which is super handy. I’ve seen people build greenhouses off them. You could put a lean two on one side or another so that you’ve got an area to process and wash vegetables or whatever it is. Yeah, people do arches over top of two. Yeah, there’s all kinds of, yeah, get trusses between two. And they’re super, super handy. I think I’ve got three containers on my property and always very, very useful.

And they’re very weather sealed too, right? So sometimes you just need a place to put things that’s out of the weather until you finish your shop or whatever it is. And yeah, they’re a great way to store stuff. And they’re quite secure too. You know, they’re more secure than a house. Totally. This one is given to us by the container guy. I’m not giving, I had to buy it, but it gave me a good deal. Friends of the channel type thing. Yeah. No, this is sweet because you’ve got super easy access. You could use this kind of thing to build up.

You could build onto this. There’s a lot of things you could do with this. It’d be good holding cell for post apocalypse. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, trap the zombies in there and keep the, make sure the fresh meat doesn’t spoil type thing. Yeah, exactly. There’s no water on here because we’ve been in a drought for 10 years. There’s a lot of ground water and you don’t have to dig too deep to hit water. Yeah, you can tell. Is there any general thing that a person should know about water? Obviously, it’s your number one. Well, it’s yeah, it is me without water.

You can’t, you can’t get on the property. You can’t live on land without water. If you’re going to go really hardcore with, with an off-grid homestead to have two sources of water, you’ve got a well here that goes a couple hundred feet down or something like that. That’s good. But what I would also consider is perhaps some rainwater catchment off the house and then potentially another type of well, maybe a pit well in a low area, perhaps part in the riparian zones over there. What’s riparian? Riparian is, is a green area that grows around some type of body of water.

That’s what these trees areas are, is they’re essentially riparian. It’s like, you see this in nature, wherever there’s a depression, that’s where the green stuff starts first, right? Because it accumulates and holds water better. And so you might be able to have three sources of water here. I would be more inclined to drink from the deep well water because it’s cleaner. It’s not going to be potentially contaminated from anything on the soil or the sky. And same for the rainwater. My goal is to drill a few manual wells and just see how it goes just as a backup.

Absolutely. Yeah. There’s no downside to it. And you’ll learn quite a bit about your land when you do it. All right, guys. Well, the weather has changed and for the better, because we need the rain. Unfortunately, that means that we can’t run our cameras anymore. So we’re going to have to call it quits. But I want to thank you for coming out and thanks for all the great advice that you’ve given us today. And I want to encourage people to go and check out Off Grid with Curtis Stone YouTube channel, a wealth of information if you’re planning on going off grid and you do consulting, correct? Yes, freedomfarmers.com is the best place to kind of get everything that I offer with our courses and what we’re looking at on the property.

I’ve got a course called Finding the Perfect Homestead Property, and that really kind of teaches you how to use the analytical tools and understand the principles so that you can do this yourself. You can find the right property for yourself to start homesteading. Do it now, guys, because time is running out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk, and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive.

Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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