We bought a tractor, when we first bought the land. Yes a whole team, 3 people and Me, myself and I We use the B ack to Eden method. This year we just built a greenhouse to extend our season. We have an organic garden with raised beds. We built a log cabin in 90 days from scratch. You can also find Doug and Stacy on YouTube or Facebook.We have a youtube channel called OFF GRID with DOUG and STACY I’m Doug and I’m Stacy!īasically we post daily videos about our daily life. Want to learn more about off-grid living? Check out the other articles in Doug and Stacy’s Living Off Grid 101 series: Just like having a mentor to help us learn on our off grid journey, it is nice to have a store like Lehman’s to provide us products for our simple life. #OFF GRID WITH DOUG AND STACY HOW TO#We also feel a great deal of satisfaction knowing how to grow and preserve our own foods. It’s amazing what you can learn when you put your mind to it. This year we have even added a root cellar to store our foods. We started fermenting foods using fermenting tops with mason jars, canning with water bath and pressure canners, and salting and smoking our meats. How are we going to preserve it? Remember, we live off grid with no electric or solar power. If it is not functional, heavy duty and used on a day to day basis, it is not in the kitchen. The butter churner is amazing and is definitely a discussion piece when people come to visit. We also had an abundance of cream on the farm. The stainless gallon tea kettle is used daily and looks great on the Pioneer Princess wood cookstove. We were also grinding our own wheat berries for flour and adore the hand-cranked grain mill. One of our favorites are the 4, 6, 8, and 12 quart stainless steel bowls. Knowing we were growing lots of produce, we needed heavy duty products. We really needed to be intentional with our kitchen utensils and food processing tools because we were now the producers and consumers of all our food. We could not believe all the gadgets we had accumulated and never used. One of the first things we did before moving was to audit the kitchen area. We decided to embrace permaculture methods of a no till garden area and added many three foot raised bed gardens as well as a greenhouse. After a few years gardening with a team and plow, we figured this was not sustainable for us. We needed an easier way to grow our food that would be sustainable for us as we age. And the summer in the Midwest is very hot and humid. In the second year, we had too much rain. In our first year of gardening, we had a severe drought. However, our first couple of years had many challenges. So we decided to do it the old way…we used a team of Belgian horses! This was definitely a challenge and something pretty cool to learn. With our naivete, our first garden was going to be over 10,000 square feet. Most Amish have large gardens and large families to help do the work. Since the Amish lived very close to us, they became our mentors. We decided we needed to find a mentor to help us get started. We were coming from a background of no gardening experience (except the local community garden by our local library). One of the first decisions regarding food production we made was how to garden. We now grow our own food and preserve it from canning to fermenting. In this day and age of toxic food sources, we wanted actions to speak louder than words. We wanted to be in charge of where their food came from, how it was treated, and what went in it. On our 11 acres in the Midwest, we have begun the journey. We decided that we wanted to slow down and be more intentional with our time and our health. Now when we say “quest”, we mean that we sold everything, left the city life and built a log cabin from scratch. “Get closer to your food.” For eight years, we have been on the quest to do just that. #OFF GRID WITH DOUG AND STACY SERIES#Today they conclude their four-part series of living off grid with one very important topic – food. Doug and Stacy from YouTube Channel, OFF GRID with DOUG & STACYĮditor’s Note: Welcome back our special guest bloggers, Doug and Stacy.
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