The General Plan

I have been researching and planning for about 18 months. Unfortunately the economy has hit, and my income has suffered tremendously in recent months. So my plan for starting at the end of this year with a land purchase may have to wait a bit longer. I am trying not to look at this as a setback, but as an opportunity to refine the overall plan/design and get some of my details worked out. So as I refine each item i will post my progress.

Overview
Build my own off-grid place on a 5-40 acre parcel of land in the pacific northwest with minimal impact on the land, and create a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle using the best of modern and traditional methods. I dont want to lock myself away in a fortified bunk or remove myself from society.

The Land
I have a wish list setup for the land i want. There are a few items that are must haves, and some that i would like.

• 5-40 acres
• vehicle access
• partially or fully wooded with at least 1/4 acre with southern exposure for building and gardening
• If i do not want the cost of a well, the land will need to be in an area that receives at least 50 inches of rain a year for collection.
• Privacy
• Unincorporated land (dealing with city planning departments is a pain)
  

Now for the wants...

• Creek or stream with a few feet of head for micro hydro power generation
• 100 inches of rainfall annually.
• Phone line nearby or cell service
• Bordering BLM or National Park land.

Yeah i know tall order, especially when i am not looking to spend a lot of money on it. So that is why i am planning. I have time for the right piece of property to show up, i just hope i am ready to pounce on it when it appears.

So there are the 3 basic items i need to homestead: Shelter, Water, Food. Lets start with food, since i believe it will be the easiest, then water then shelter since it has so many little things.

Food

Gardening and livestock has to be the easiest method of food procurement. Our ancestors were able to form civilization based almost wholly upon agriculture and the domestication of animals. The procurement of food through gardening isn't really a problem, its the storage of the food from harvest to harvest allowing us to eat healthy all year long and not starve in the winter. A refrigerator or freezer may not be viable in my power plans so i have been looking into canning and root cellars. I remember spending days at my grandparents house in the late summer and early fall harvesting their garden. We would can and pickle everything (to this day when i drive past a brewery the smell takes me back to my grandmothers kitchen when she would be canning beans). Their garden was about 1/4 acre i am guessing and were never short of vegetables and fruits throughout the year.

Also in the plan is to have a few goats and rabbits. Personally i hate roosters and chickens and am allergic to eggs, so i am gonna stick with goats and rabbits. Goats will eat just about anything in a pinch, will produce good milk and good meat from their offspring.

Goat breeds information
Good article on everything about goats

Rabbits, well they have good lean meat, and well....they breed like rabbits.

Lots of good info on raising rabbits

Emergency food stores are also high on my list. I plan on going out with a minimum of 2 years food stores, which should roughly cost $3000 to begin with. This will give me a good comfort margin should something go wrong.

Well kept list of 1 year emergency food and updated pricing

Water

Ya gotta have it. You can go weeks without food in a crisis, but without water you will quickly die. If i can find land with good annual rainfall, then rainwater collection i think will be the way to go. The collection system is pretty simple, roof/tarp/whatever to collect water and channel to a drain. This then goes through a roof washer system which funnels the first few minutes of rain away from the cistern, or into a secondary gray water cistern for irrigation. Once the washer is full it channels the water into your cistern for storage from there i will be using an inline UV purifier as the water is used. This then would be split to a water heater (on demand or possible solar) and the cold water and distributed.

Rainwater Collection Calculator
Annual Rainfall for Cities in the USA

Shelter

Gah! I have spent so much time thinking about what type of structure and method to use. Standard wood framed structures do nothing for me. I started my thought process with cargo containers then moved to earthship construction, then back to containers now i am thinking cob. Each method has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, the biggest of which seems to be cost versus labor. This is a subject better left for another post in which i will include a few of my design ideas with some of my ideas for the subsystems of the shelter.