Sustainable living

Category

Homestead chicken coop plans

We eat lots of eggs and our soil is depleted, so in 2023 we started raising chickens. They will play a key role in our regenerative homestead. First step – designing a place for our new flock to call home. We decided to build our own coop. We considered buying a pre-made coop, but the ones we found online were too small for the number of chickens we wanted to have. Plus, my husband was keen to try building a...

Can we grow ginger in Canada?

We can definitely grow ginger in Canada – The real question is… how? We eat a lot of ginger in our house. It’s so good for calming tummy troubles, which we’ve had plenty of, and we just love the taste. What we don’t love is that when we buy it from the grocery store it comes from very far away. Most recently, ginger from Peru is what has been available at our local grocery store. So that ginger traveled thousands...

Water wise home – grey water

What if we could use a drop of water twice? Once to wash our hands or take a shower, and then again to water some fruit or nut trees. Here’s how we designed our grey water system to do just that.  We live on an island that has limited fresh water supply, so when we were building our house last year we prioritized designing and building water systems for our homestead that are as regenerative as we could afford. We...

More joy, less stress in our house build

Our vision of a regenerative homestead  includes that its human inhabitants (that’s us!) are nourished and find joy in the process of building it. Finding joy in building a house? Really? I know, it sounds nuts. And it sounds nuts because when we hear stories of people building houses we hear negative things – it was exhausting, stressful, financially overwhelming, or worse. What we’re curious to know is…does it have to be that way? Are there ways we can approach...

Our Modern Homestead Vision

We’ve started a challenging journey into waters that are unfamiliar to us. What stars will guide us? We’re building a house on Salt Spring Island, in the Salish Sea. We are on the unceded, ancestral lands of the SENĆOŦEN and Hul’q’umi’num speaking peoples. We are conscious of our place as settlers here and are listening to the long time caretakers of this land. Before we embarked on this journey, we discussed how we would navigate, when the seas inevitably get...