Homesteads

Former Army tech Larry Johnson has spent his career improving computer and telephone systems so when he saw inefficiencies in how we grow our food, he decided to create a new system for farming your yard. His EZGro garden uses aquaponics, stacked towers, and custom pots to create a high-density vertical garden (HDVG) on as little land as a deck, rooftop, or parking space.

Johnson says the system will grow 700 plants, using 15 towers, in a space of just 2 by 18 feet. Today, he sells kits ranging from single tower patio gardens to 10-tower deck gardens to commercial-sized set-ups like those being used by a Miami football stadium for concession meals, by a Whole Foods Market in New Jersey, and by rooftop farmers in Lagos, Nigeria.

It all began in 1995 when Johnson began tinkering with his quad pot design, crafting a custom container strong enough to hold tomato plants with over 100 pounds of fruit. He then developed an irrigation system that feeds nutrient-rich water from the top of the towers, drips through the pots, and filters out through tubing below to be reused. This closed-loop system uses less than 10% of the water of a traditional garden.

To create a system robust enough for even off-grid farmers, Johnson has spent the last 2 decades developing his trihelix solar windmill. Solar panels are mounted on top of three turbines, known as the "Tri-Helix", which are twisted like DNA strands to catch even inconsistent wind (turbines start turning in winds of just 2mph).

https://ezgrogarden.com/

In the early 90s, Mark and Jen Shepard bought a degraded corn farm in Viola, Wisconsin and began to slowly convert it from row-crops back to a native oak savanna that would become one of the most productive perennial farms in the country.

After 8 years homesteading in Alaska (arriving just as the Homestead Act was expiring) where they had been forced by low-paying jobs to discover “which trees, shrubs, bushes and vines we could get food from”, they arrived in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin ready to apply their knowledge of permaculture (“permanent agriculture”).

Over the past nearly three decades, Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees on the 106-acre farm. The main agroforestry crops are chestnuts, hazelnuts and apples, followed by walnut, hickory, cherry and pine (for the nuts). For short-term income, the couple planted annual crops, like grains and asparagus, in alleys between the fruit-and-nut-bearing trees. Cattle, pigs, lambs, turkeys and chickens act as pest control and free composters as they roam the savannas of the farm.

Not content to rely on commercially-produced seeds, Mark does his own breeding to find the best-adapted trees to his region using the method he’s dubbed STUN (Sheer Total Utter Neglect). He plants trees at a higher density than recommended and with as much diversity as possible (at one point they were farming 219 varieties of apples) and then lets pests and disease run their course. He fells diseased trees or those that don’t bear enough, or early enough, fruit. The result are orchards hardy enough to survive even Chestnut Blight.

As more and more of the alley crops have been replaced with trees and pocket ponds help manage water on the farm, the land here has returned to the native savannas where the mastodon once grazed 12,000 years ago (in 1898 bones were discovered 5 miles down the road). New Forest Farm has inspired many other perennial farms, especially chestnut farmers in the region, and Mark hopes that every school child will plant their own apple seeds (and perhaps subject them to STUN) and that every family can plant a backyard food forest

Marlena and Eugene built their homestead in Blanco, Texas using salvaged windows, doors, wood flooring, tile, a bathtub, a lot of plywood, and some lumber. After over a decade of building, they now have a completely off-grid home, workshop, garden, and rental cabin.

While they did spend for the new 23 solar panels that run the three buildings, they bought all six of their 500- to 700-gallon rainwater barrels for a few hundred dollars each instead of the 1,000 they cost new.

When Eugene first arrived on the property, as a caretaker for the main landowner, he pitched a tent as his home, but he still spent nights in Austin (often at his mom's home). Slowly he began to build. First, he erected a porch for his tent. Later he added a one-room shelter with an open-air kitchen.

When his now-wife Marlena joined him in 2016, they began building a more permanent setup. They added shutters to the kitchen so it could be closed off in winter, but open in summer (they rely mostly on DC fans for AC). Their bathroom includes a recycled bathtub and a stone-floor shower.

To accommodate overnight guests for their wedding, they built an off-grid cabin (with gas fridge) in just two months with mostly recycled materials for just $12,000. It now provides income as an overnight rental.

To avoid trips to town, they grow their own food in raised beds and raise chickens in a recycled coop (they plan to add goats and bees). They are now able to go two weeks without leaving the homestead for provisions.

Their latest addition is a modern barn that serves as both a workshop for Eugene’s tools and for Marlena’s jewelry business. It was built to convert into an event space to rent for added income.

The traditional Basque housebarns - “baserri” (“caserío”, in Spanish) - were once economic centers that sustained the multiple generations of family that lived in them. Beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries until the 1970s baserri allowed rural Basques to live off their own land with little need for commerce beyond a few basics (sugar, oil) that they didn’t produce themselves.

Five years ago Julen Iturain Mujika quit his job leaving behind the distractions of city and corporate life by moving into the baserri of his ancestors. With the help of his father, a builder, he created an apartment on one floor of the old home (the space is now divided between cousins). Relying on recycled wood, secondhand appliances, and salvaged boxes for cabinets, they spent about 50 euros on their kitchen and about the same for a bedroom with a sawhorse table and box closet.

Despite the remote location, Julen and his partner Ibon don’t have to travel often: they work from home on their online startup (www.burulogy.com). They’ve also relaunched an extensive garden for vegetables and take advantage of the fruit and nut trees that bear staggered produce throughout the year.

Bryce and Misty have spent the last 12 years building a cob home, homesteading, living off the grid, and homeschooling their two daughters. They live without a car, so for transportation, they use taxis and bicycles, and they eventually hope to have a cart that their two horses can pull.

For food production, they have a permaculture food forest for fruits and vegetables, chinampa-inspired wetland gardens, a cow and a bull for milk, ducks and chickens for eggs, bees for honey, and they also forage and cultivate feral crops.

These two have put in an impressive amount of work setting up their homestead. The house is built with clay that they collected from the wetland area of their property, their well was dug by hand, and everything from the fences to the staircase was made with wood from within a 20km radius of their home.

The cost to build the house was approximately $1,000 CAD. Most of the building materials (the sand, clay, straw, and wood) came from the land, and things like roofing, lumber, and windows they sourced from secondhand and reclaimed sources. Interestingly, they used several different natural building techniques in the home with each new addition. They usually start with a timber frame, and they have used cob, straw bales and wattle and daub, to fill in the spaces between the beams. And they've also explored using green roofs and earth floors.

Since moving to the land, they had two lovely daughters that they homeschool using unschooling and life immersion methods. They learn about food production, natural building, nature, math, reading, and more!

To earn an income, they do a variety of odd jobs including catering, seasonal farm work, a roadside plant stand, and they also receive the childcare benefit that all families in their province receive. Their primary focus is not how to earn more money but rather how to spend less and have more time. They try to produce as much of what they need on the farm.

For electricity, they have solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine (currently non-operational), for water they have a hand-dug well and rainwater collection barrels, for heat they have wood stoves, they have two composting toilets, and a rocket stove to heat water for their bathtub.

Ariel has been homesteading and living off-grid in a 24'x8' tiny house for 6 years! She grows, forages and preserves as much of her own food as possible, she cuts her own fire wood, carries her own water, generates electricity with solar, and cooks with propane. She is a passionate backpacker and wildlife photographer who works part-time on a ranch in exchange for a place to park her small home, and she also works a variety of jobs to earn money, although her expenses are very low since she isn't paying rent, and since she managed to pay off the tiny house several years ago.

We are super inspired by Ariel's simple, disciplined, and sustainable lifestyle and are so happy to have collaborated with her on this video! Ariel provided all of the footage and photos for this video so that we could put it together.

This inspiring off-grid homesteading family lives in a renovated stone earthship.

They grow their own food, collect rainwater, use solar power, have composting toilets, and they have a pond that filters their grey water. On top of living an eco friendly lifestyle, they dedicate their work to important projects like urban gardening and promoting industrial hemp as "Hempbassadors."

During the winter, they typically take 2-4 months off to travel, which is financially possible for them because they don't have a mortgage (the house only cost $15,000 when they bought it).

Their daughter, Emma, is in the first grade, but they take her out of school while they travel and homeschool her on the road.

Francis & Marie have dreamt of being self-sufficient for a long time. For 8 years they renovated their earthship home, planted their permaculture gardens, and prepared for the day they'd be able to live their dream full-time.

For over 2 years now they've been living on their dream homestead. They grow apples, berries, and other fruits which they preserve for winter. They also grow vegetables, and collect eggs from their chickens. In the summer, their grocery bill can be as low as $30/week because they produce so much of their own food.

Much of their harvest is kept cool in their root cellar although they would like to have a fridge.

The home is a passive solar home with a greenhouse in the front. It can stay above zero degrees on it's own, but they have a wood stove – an Amish Pioneer Princess – to heat the house, to cook, and to heat their hot water.

For rainwater, they have 3 collection systems. One is a tank in front of the house that collects water from the greenhouse, and they use a solar powered pump to transfer it into an underground cistern.

Another tank collects rainwater from the roof, and a third collects rainwater from their shed. In total they can have 10,000 litres of fresh water when all of the tanks are full.

They don't have a well yet so they get their drinking water from a cabin they have access to down the road.

They have a small solar power system for their lights, the water pump, and for the internet. They'd eventually like to invest in a bigger system but for now it works well.

Our 10-Acre Survival Homestead (2020 PROOF)

2020, rumors of a virus in China. Soon, lockdowns were spreading across the globe and trouble was coming to America. Our homestead was about to be tested. Watch how we thrived. Now, Do this Yourself here (free): http://bit.ly/HomesteadCrashCourse

Homesteading Couple Hasn’t Bought Groceries in a Year of Self-Sufficient Living
Jul 3, 2021

Chris and Stef jumped into self-sufficiency last year when they decided not to buy groceries for an entire year, including staples like salt, sugar, coffee, and flour! Instead, they've been growing, catching, raising, and harvesting 100% of their food supply on a small 1/2 acre homestead. They're only a few weeks away from completing their year-long challenge and they attribute their success to hard work and to the fact that they live in the Southern Gulf Islands where they have a great growing climate and access to the ocean.

The couple's four main sources of food have been:

CATCH - they catch fish, prawns, and other seafood from the ocean
GROW - they grow loads of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and spices on their land
HARVEST - they forage for things like mushrooms, berries, nuts, and seaweed
RAISE - they raise laying hens, chickens, and turkeys for eggs and meat

Eating only what they produce has drastically reduced the amount of money that Chris and Stef spend on groceries (they still buy hygiene products and other items that are not food and beverages) but a lot of the savings went directly towards building infrastructures like fencing and the chicken coop.

Another advantage of living off the land and sea like this is that they have noticed a huge reduction in the amount of household waste they're throwing out. Food from the garden doesn't come in a package!

It was inspiring to meet these two and see all the work they've put into learning and working towards their goal of becoming more self-sufficient with their food production. They taught us a ton and we're looking forward to following along with them. Be sure to check out their YouTube channel which is called Lovin Off The Land.

Professor gives it all up to start a Hippy Commune in the Rainforest.

For Harry, life as a professor in the city of Toronto had it's downsides, and after buying underdeveloped land on the other side of the country he found the pleasures of a more simple life. One where he could help people by offering low/no rent solutions in an area that was quickly becoming unaffordable, and one of freedom where he could build unique dwellings, have relationships with interesting people, and overcome alcoholism. Join me on this short documentary as Harry tours me around his property discussing the many challenges he has and continues to face like backlash against local building bylaws, and shows me the many ventures and stories of the people living on his land.

Meet Clara & Edwin, a young tough couple who live off-grid in the woods in a gorgeous self-built tiny home. They spent 3 yrs helping family friends rebuild their timber frame cabin home after being devasted by wildfires. During that time, Clara & Edwin learned how to mill trees & about timber frame construction. This also led them to acquire heavenly tiny house parking on 20 acres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. With much sweat equity & love for nature, they're building an off-grid homestead AND learning a lot about how to do it right.

In 2007, Ole and Maitri Ersson bought the rundown Cabana apartment complex in central Portland and immediately began to de-pave parking spaces to make space for food production. Today, the Kailash Ecovillage has 55 residents who all help farm where there was once pavement, grass, a swimming pool and an overgrown weed patch.

The community is well-prepared for systems collapse; they have extensive rainwater collection and storage, plenty of produce and they process their own sewage. Their permitted sanitation project complies with international building codes for compost toilet and urine diversion systems and turns their pee and poop into nitrogen and compost.

Here, nearly everything is shared. There are two community electric cars - donated by the Erssons who no longer have a private car-, shared bicycles (and bike trailers), an extensive fruit orchard, berry and grape patches and considerable community garden space. Photovoltaics provide about two-thirds of the energy consumed by the complex.

Neil Robinson is the community’s full-time farmer who has sold thousands of dollars of Kailash produce at farmers markets. He moved in as a way to prepare for systemic collapse. “I wanted to learn to grow food and then have a system that could step in. We have water, we have food.” Ole explains, “We're in this zone where it's not a question of if, but when, we're going to get a Richter 9 earthquake… that's going to break all kinds of grids, the power grid is likely going to go down, the sewer grid almost undoubtedly and it's probably going to take months, if not years, to get the sewer system going again.” Their sanitation project can absorb 60 adults for months.

Rents here are lower than the Portland average because the Erssons want Kailash to be accessible to all income levels. There’s a 300-person wait list, but Ole hopes others will follow their example. "If you look at it from a economic perspective no business would want a complex landscape like this because it's way too much maintenance, but what you have to do is turn the maintenance over to the residents and then they do it: they get joy; it's an antidepressant; it's a way of creating food; it's a way of creating community; so you have to do it in a certain way, but it's definitely a lot more work than the typical grass and shrub landscape for sure."

https://www.kailashecovillage.org

Young priest turns forsaken farm into paradise homestead

Five years ago Catholic priest Johannes Schwarz left his parish to "withdraw for a few years" in the Italian Alps (in the shadow of his beloved Monte Viso). He bought an old "rustico" - stone farm building - for 20,000 euros and transformed it into his mountaintop hermitage.

Inspired by the early Christian desert hermits from the "200s and 300s when some people went into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine searching for a more rigorous life", Schwarz found something remote: he has only one full-time neighbor on the entire mountainside and in winter, he often has to snowshoe for a couple hours just to buy food and supplies.

To be as self-sufficient as possible, he makes his own bread and stores plenty of potatoes which he grows using Ruth Stout's "No-Work" gardening method. To grow much of his own fruit and produce, he terraced the steep hillside (using stones from the area) to create micro-climates. "You try to build walls that have southern exposure because they heat up during the day and they give off the warmth and can make a difference of several degrees." (Studies show differences of 27°F/15°C in the ultra-deep Incan terraces). He grows plenty of tomatoes inside his self-built recycled greenhouse.

For heating and cooking, he built a combination rocket stove and masonry heater by creating his own casts and loam coating. His refrigerator, which he transported up the hill on top of his bicycle, is kept in the unheated room, along with his food stores. He uses a tiny 30-year-old 3-kilogram washing machine and built his bathroom out of salvaged materials. To transport the lumber up the hill for his remodel, he got some help from a local farmer.

He divided the old barn into four small rooms on two floors; the living room/kitchen and pantry on the ground floor and a chapel and bedroom upstairs. His bedroom also serves as an editing studio where he creates videos on philosophy and religion.

He created a wooden-arched indoor chapel where he “celebrates the traditional Latin mass” alongside a wall he painted with Byzantine, romanesque and gothic styles in appreciation of "the symbolism of the ancient art."

In 1978 Cheri and Evan Howard signed "The Shakertown Pledge", a commitment to living at or below the federal poverty level. In the pricey San Francisco Bay Area, their family of four lived on $18,000 per year by avoiding expenditures like restaurants and concerts, and by growing vegetables and raising chickens. When they bought 35 acres in the high desert of Colorado, they moved the four of them into a double-wide trailer on the property and began raising goats for milk, as well as continuing with the chickens and large garden.

After 17 years in the mobile home, they began to build a larger home themselves, cutting local trees for beams and collecting stones for the walls. It took them seven years to construct the home which is one big "great room" connected to the old trailer by a small door. For cooking and heating, they use a wood-fired stove, as well as the Rumford fireplace they built from plans found at the library.

Many of their appliances are human-powered which they see as “appropriate technology”. "One thing you'll notice around here", explains Evan, "Is that if you're going to do things by hand, you're got cranking: almost everything cranks". They hand crank: their grain mill for flour, their ice cream churner, their apple cider press, and even their washing machine which Cheri has dubbed her "Pleasure Washer". Evan has used his extensive collection of primitive hand tools to make everything from cabinet drawers to chair legs.

The couple don’t feel they are making a sacrifice (except perhaps when dumping the compost toilet in mid-winter), but instead view the extra labor as “play” and something that keeps them healthy in mind and body.

They compare their lives to those of monks and believe the geography of space is important. When Evan found a spot on the property with perfectly-aligned rocks for a dugout, he knew this would be his monastic “sanctuary” or “cell”. He spent six years using a pickaxe to dig the underground hut.

In 1994 a group of seven friends began living and farming together on 80 acres of land 70 miles north of San Francisco. One of the first actions taken in the founding of the Sowing Circle community was an agreement made by all partners that each owner’s “share” in the company that owns the land would not be linked to the land’s market value.

The group worked with the previous landowner to create the first Organic Agricultural Easement in the country which protects in perpetuity the organic gardens and orchards from any development or any use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Today their Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC) is one of California’s oldest organic farms and their Sowing Circle one of its most-enduring intentional communities. At the start, they wanted to put to practice their ideas of permaculture, water management, and wildlife restoration.

The idea was to live like the land-based communities that predated them- like the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok-, much like an old-growth forest. “Until recently, the majority of human settlement has functioned much like an old-growth forest,” writes OAEC kitchen manager Olivia Rathbone. “Humans... have long had the skills and knowledge to actually increase the biological carrying capacity of the land rather than deplete it, to render the concept of 'waste' obsolete.”

Today, their kitchen waste is composted, either directly or via their chickens. Their human waste is sent through one of three commercial-grade composting toilet systems - one of which involves mycelium - and which are being monitored by the county and state as testing grounds for more widespread use. Tree clippings (for fire management) become mulch. Their greywater is recycled in the gardens and even their seeds are saved in a very extensive heirloom seed library.

There’s a long history of land-based communities here, after the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok cane Italian and Portuguese homesteaders in the late 1800’s and finally, from 1974 through 1990 the Farallones Institute established their Rural Center here (a counterpoint to their Integral Urban House in Berkeley) where scientists, designers, and horticulturists lived together and experimented around appropriate technology and sustainable design. Their cluster of 5 300-square-foot passive solar cabins (financed through the state’s Office of Appropriate Technology in the seventies) called “Solar Suburbia” is still the main residential cluster, though they have been enlarged to 700 to 900 square feet.

Brock Dolman moved here in 1994 as one of the seven founding friends of the Sowing Circle. His advice to those hoping to start their own intentional community or permaculture practice: listen to your predecessors rather than trying to follow trends or recipes for design. “It’s really taking our cues from what is the genius of nature that has been in that place for eons and eons and eons.

It has adapted to the conditions: temperature, moisture, soil, availability, slopes, aspects, the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous people's interacting with that landscape over time. Why we would disregard those clues and impose an idea that we happen to make up because we think we have a better idea. I think our sense is that that's just human hubris and folly."

Dee Williams used to live in a 2,000-square-foot, 3-bedroom home. Then she traveled to Guatelama (to help build a schoolhouse) and when she came home her house felt too big so built herself a home that fit. That turned out to be an 84-square-foot foot home on wheels that cost her $10,000: $5000 for the materials (mostly salvaged) and the other half for the solar panels and low-E (low thermals emissivity) windows.

She spent 3 months building her new home in Portland, Oregon, and then hitched it to her truck and parked it in the backyard of her good friends Hugh and Annie in Olympia, Washington. For the first 7 years, she moved in and out (removing the back fence), but for the past two years, her wheels haven't moved.

Annie describes their setup, half-jokingly as a "compound", which also includes a sauna (built by Dee) and until a few months ago, included Hugh's Aunt Rita who lived in "the big house" and Dee helped care for (incidentally, Dee's home is permitted as a caregiver's cottage, though Aunt Rita died this spring so now she's only allowed to "recreate" in her tiny house).

When she moved into her 7x12 foot home back in 2004, Dee got rid of not just a $1000/month mortgage, but most of her stuff. She admits it's not easy to keep things to a minimum- "creep happens"-, but it's a constant process. "I was engaged to be married and I kept the wedding announcement for decades and finally I was like I know that happened I think I can let it go in writing. After a while it's okay to let some of that stuff go and to trust that there are things that you hold inside you that are actually a lot more meaningful.. than the photo or piece of paper."

Today, Dee helps design and build tiny homes for her company PAD (Portland Alternative Dwellings) where they "encourage people to design things that fit their bodies": instead of obsessing over square footage (their designs run from 70 to 136 square feet), "all of a sudden you can let your body be the tape measure".

With Madrid rents too high for young architects Ignacio and Pilar, they decided to turn their studio into a stealthy home. They buried the kitchen essentials - refrigerator, pantry - inside the walls of their workspace and added a second room to serve as their bedroom. To avoid drawing attention to the residential addition, they clad it in a reflective surface (methacrylate with a mirror finish) so it would take blend with the garden.

The couple dubbed their home “The Burrow” both because of its stealth mode and because it is partially underground; they also call it “a lair, a hideout, a shelter”. Besides a small sliver window in the back, the bedroom’s only opening to the outside world is through a round, galvanized steel window, “the oculus”, “which reflects and blurs the incoming light”.

There were originally two skylights on the structure, but 2021's Storm Filomena - Spain’s largest snowstorm in 50 years - knocked a tree onto the home and broke the glass. The home itself withstood the incredible snow loads, though the couple were snowed in for a week.

The space is a mix of natural materials like the cork-clad ceiling (as insulation) and the thatch roof. Ignacio and Pilar say they worried at first that clients might not see their homestudio as professional enough, but instead, they find that while clients may not want to build their own burrow, they fall in love with the coziness of the space.

20 years building local from raw earth & ash (flex-crete)

On the valley floor beneath the dramatic sandstone cliffs of Bluff, Utah, emerging builders have spent over two decades erecting experimental homes with new materials like FlexCrete blocks: a Navajo Nation product created from the coal ash leftovers from power plants. They’ve built dozens of homes testing earthen plasters, recycled plastics, shipping containers and pallets. Located at the edge of the Navajo Nation, they have also merged their investigations with traditional craft to build with owners on tribal land.

“Sweet Caroline” (2006) is round like a traditional hogan with an eastern entrance, but instead of earthen plasters they used Flex-crete, a fly-ash (coal burning power plant by-product) material produced on the Navajo Nation. “Benally” (2007) was constructed with “rejected road base material that matched perfectly the sand/clay/aggregate ratio necessary to make non-stabilized (no added concrete) compressed earth blocks”. Making the central hearth the focal point (as in a traditional Navajo home) the passive solar compressed earth block walls were built to point directly from the hearth toward the four sacred mountains (fundamental to the land). The roof shading acts as a traditional “shade house”.

“Rosie Joe” (2004) incorporated “a rammed-earth trombe wall for temperature regulation; a south-facing wall glazed with salvaged and gang-mulled windows; weathered wood; the ceiling and roof structure made entirely from recycled pallets; exterior walls of straw sandwiched by clear acrylic; interior walls clad with discarded road signs.”

Resembling a ‘terra dome‘ structure, “Little Water” (2012) continued to perfect the passive cooling and heating techniques, with 5 natural systems for “Bluff’s scorching summers and frigid winters”. These include an insulated thermal berm wall, a straw bale wall, a solar oculus for natural ventilation and cooling, a ventilated second roof and a rocket stove.

We toured the Bluff campus with lead architects/builders Atsushi and Hiroki Yamamoto, spent a night in the “Shipshape” container home, and visited with “sweat equity” owner/builders who talked about the desire to live under the protection of the four mountains surrounding Navajo land, but wanting to fuse modern with traditional in a home.

Dwight Streamfellow was a college junior when he bought a piece of cheap river-front land to start a homestead. He was a city boy (partly in Washington DC where his father was a Republican senator) so he planned to learn-by-doing on how raw land in the rugged mountains of Northern California’s Six Rivers National Forest.

The property cost him only $11,000 back in 1976, but soon he had built his own home (much of it with hand tools) and was growing his own food, pumping water from the river to irrigate his garden & orchard, and powering his homestead with photovoltaic and firewood (for heat and his hot tub/bathtub).

In a state that is drying up, Streamfellow considers his large chunk of riverfront his true wealth: he’s on the South Fork of the Trinity River, the longest undammed river left in California. Forty-five years ago he tried harvesting the water by carrying 5 gallon buckets up the 150 feet from the river to his home. He then tried a pedal-powered pump, but the calories burned weren’t replaced by the calories created in the garden. He finally perfected a system - an electric pump that is powered by a photovoltaic array - which provides all the water he, and his tenants, need for large gardens, orchards and the five homes on this property.

Starting before the Internet, Streamfellow felt he was without an instruction manual for most of his nearly 5 decades working the land, doing everything from building roads (chipping away at granite), creating garden terraces along his steep property and building up hugelkultur beds to garden on bedrock.

Now 68 years old, Streamfellow isn’t wealthy, but he has no debt (he believes in the pay-as-you-go model) and he considers himself wealthy from what his land provides; he has four tenants (who often work the property in lieu of rent), a garden that supplies sufficient annual fruit, vegetables and potatoes, and chickens, pigs and deer for meat. "It was always my goal to be as self-sufficient as possible,” explains Streamfellow. Forty-five years after settling here he says he always has a year’s worth of food and three year’s worth of firewood: "to me that's what represents wealth– that food and the capability to heat my home".

Cristina Manene and Fernando Orte wanted a home to escape the city, but that would still provide reminders of village life. Outside Madrid they found raw land embraced by the Tagus River where they built a home to resemble a Spanish village complete with plazas and all local stone.

The home is created from small boxes in either glass or stone placed to avoid trees resulting in the nonlinear shape of a small town. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls on alternating spaces are nearly always left open to create a continuity between inside and outside. The completely open dining room connects one courtyard with an infinity pool that is finished to mimic the blue of the adjacent river.

The stone boxes provide an alternating pattern of shadow with the very light glass volumes. They are more sheltered from the elements, but their rooftops are flowering with local plants. Initially the couple had planted lavender and thyme, but the local seeds took over and now they realize they prefer their roof to resemble the adjacent mountainside.

The materials of the home are raw and further blur the line between indoor and outdoor: exposed concrete ceilings, interior walls of rough plaster and stone and gravel flooring that continues from the patio to the interior.

The home is powered by solar and provides some food: the couple have 5 hens and a seasonal garden. The lack of television and the omnipresence of nature ensures that “time moves differently here”. Christina explains they wanted a place that provided an unavoidable connection to nature for themselves and their three children.

In 1940, the Laboroi family moved into a housebarn in Italy’s Graian Alps that was big enough for the five family members, as well as their goats, cows and chickens and hay. Being able to fit everything under one roof was a luxury that meant no one needed to go outside to work with the animals during cold, snowy winters.

Eighty years later, the Laboroi’s still live in the mountains - unlike many other farmers from the area who moved to the city in the ‘60s and ‘70s -, but they wanted to restore the original stone housebarn which had been covered in cement plaster by the previous generation. Andrea Laboroi and architect Davide Querio decided to turn the abandoned stables into bedrooms and open up a huge picture window in the former hayloft to provide the living room with a view of the alps, valley, Gran Paradiso National Park, and even a waterfall.