Our Homesteading Journal: Our first year off grid homesteading in Northern Canada

Our Homesteading Journal Day Zero

There are so many of you that I have missed and am excited to find still here and still going strong.

I’m back after an entire spring, summer, and fall season away. We now find ourselves back in the deep chill of winter and it’s time to start sharing again. Before I took a hiatus from blogging, I was counting down to our family’s big move off grid here in Northern Alberta. We had a winter that just wouldn’t go away...and we were trying to get ready as best we could to move a farm, our family, and our businesses off grid. I say “our” as back then there were two adults running this show. However, much of the first year ended up being a solo journey (filled with amazing friends and community).

I have documented much of this past year in video and pictures, which I will share along with the incredible, heartbreaking, and joy filled stories that came with each season.

I’ve been debating whether to take a chronological approach to this journal or to jump around based on what strikes me as important to share. I can’t decide so I’ll do both :)

Some of what’s in store includes;

The day my house tipped over.
The day I had to chase a Jersey bull through the forest with a gun...his day had come.
Stuck in the mud...for weeks.
Our first year’s harvest on new soil.
Teaching over 100 people to Brain Tan Hides.
Learning to cook on a wood stove.
Canning a year’s worth of food without a kitchen.
Finishing the hempcrete haywagon house.
Building a hempcrete rocket mass heater.
Tearing out a hempcrete rocket mass heater (when it threatened to burn the house down).
A full year of foraging and wildcrafting.
Learning to install wood stoves.
The heavy duty of taking a life; harvesting our own meat on the homestead.
Taming a wild cow...meeting Violet our new family milk cow
Oh...and...jumping down from the tailgate and destroying my ankle...mid move.

Soooooo much more...sooooo many lessons.

I hope sharing these stories will help others see what it’s like to take full responsibility for your family’s food, shelter, and lifestyle, and what it’s life to start a homestead from scratch on bare land in a forest with little by the way of financial reserves.

I will be using the tag #HomesteadingJournal with these posts and they will be interspersed with other musings, things we are up to these days, and as always...homesteading tutorials.

Follow along and share this journey with us!

Until then, and from my home fire to yours, hai hai.