My Self Reliance

I'm busier than I've ever been!

The small food plot I planted with fruit trees and herbaceous forage this spring alongside a mineral block has attracted and nourished several moose, deer and bear. While I'm standing in the food forest giving an update, a whitetailed deer fawn runs up to me. Thanks for Watching!

Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!

Click here https://drinkag1.com/shawnjames to get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring today's video! It's the end of the line for our truck camper! We've sold it so that we can buckle down on the homesteads and focus on self reliance without distraction, at least for the foreseeable future. Thanks for Watching!

Using permaculture methods, I'm helping my sister regenerate an old, neglected homestead, starting with restoring the pasture and building old fashioned fences to contain livestock - cows, goats, pigs and chickens. Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!

The soil conditions are so poor on this old pasture that cover crops are not helping as they can't get enough nutrients and moisture to grow. To solve this problem, my wife and I spread hay to add carbon and organic material to the soil and to act as a mulch to aid in germination of rye and buckwheat. We'll follow this up with the addition of several head of livestock to manure the ground and spread nutrients. It's going to be at least a three year intensive process followed by many more years of regenerative practices to help my sister bring this farm back to it's former productive glory. Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!

I spend a storming day at the cabin sawing lumber to build a firewood storage shed to heat my cabin, workshop and maple sugar shack next winter. Log Cabin Building, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Cooking, Canadian Wilderness, Off Grid Living, Homesteading Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myselfreliance Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/MySelfReliance

Now (early August) that the vegetable and grain crops are mature and less susceptible to damage, I'm giving the laying hens free range access to half of the raised bed garden to forage all of their own food. They are quickly consuming all of the pests, chasing the chipmunks away from the grains and eating many of the weeds that I've allowed to grow in the garden specifically to feed to the chickens. Their favourite plants are by far the clover. They're eating the plants down the ground which will kill part of the roots, releasing nitrogen into the soil. That, along with the manure they're adding as they forage and a fall cover crop I'll plant soon, will make these beds extremely fertile for next year's growing season. Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!

After decades of decline, this old homestead is in need of restoration and regeneration so that it can once again provide sustenance to a family and a community. Step 1 includes building up organic material in sections of the pasture and converting the remainder from sedges, blackberries and ferns to a biodiverse blend of grasses and forbes that are nutritious for cattle, goats and fowl. Welcome to our self reliant homesteads! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture and regenerative farming as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that! #homestead #sustainability #farming #offgrid #selfreliance

It's been a perfect year for wild and cultivated blueberries and it looks like we're going to harvest and store enough to eat berries almost every day for the next year. In this video, I'm sitting in an Ontario Parks field that was burned last year, which restarted the successional growth pattern by setting back the forest species and encouraging pioneer and somewhat shade intolerant species like blueberries. Bears have gathered here from miles around to pack on the pounds in preparation for winter hibernation. From now until November, bears will feed up to 20 hours per day and eat as much as 30,000 calories in a day! We don't harvest storage berries from here but rather from other crown land spots and on our family's three homesteads where we grow lowbush and highbush blueberries along with countless other fruits and vegetables. Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and Dervla, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that!

An update on the crops I'm growing in raised beds to feed our chickens, and while I'm walking through the garden, I notice that it's time to harvest and cure the 160 garlic bulbs that I planted last November. Welcome to our self reliant homestead! Join us, Shawn and D, as we create a resilient, abundant and sustainable ecosystem that feeds our families from the land in Ontario Canada. Using permaculture as our guide, we strive to become independent in water, food, energy and shelter, focused on beauty in form and efficiency in function. Our Self Reliance is a life of compromise between my two daughters and my wife's preference for culture, comfort and formality, and I, with my love of chaotic and beautiful but challenging and often uncomfortable wilderness living. The resulting homesteads are an eclectic blend of modern with traditional, whimsical with practical, formal with informal, civilized with rustic. Over the last five years, my wife and I designed and built our dream homesteads from scratch with very little outside help; from undeveloped, declining forest to a comfortable home and cabin with a prolific edible landscape for people and wildlife equally. For many years, we have strived to lessen our burden on others by taking full responsibility for the health and welfare of our immediate family while building a strong community around us, both online and offline. Now that the infrastructure is in place here, we will be spending more time working cooperatively with community members, including extended family, to collectively become more resilient while living a deeply satisfying and meaningful life. Thank you for being part of that! #homestead #sustainability #farming #offgrid #selfreliance

What am I building on the homestead now?

It took 2 months to build alone, but my hand-split stone chicken coop is just about finished and the chickens are enjoying a dry roost safe from the many predators that live in the surrounding forest - bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, martens, fishers, raccoons, weasels and birds of prey. To watch the long version of this video: • Hand-Built Stone Chicken Coop: Ultima... I am moving on to my next homestead building projects and will return to the coop to clean the stone of mortar and grout the joints later this summer. Upcoming projects include another firewood storage shed, a small building to store lumber from my sawmill, a workshop expansion, a walk-in cooler and processing set up for wild game and domestic livestock, a maple sugar shack, a log sauna and a bedroom addition on my log cabin. Between building projects, I'm growing 1/2 an acre of food for my family, including an orchard, and another 5+ acres for wildlife and livestock. Most of our protein comes from fish and game that I harvest from the wilderness of Ontario Canada, and we're preparing to raise livestock again, including beef, goats and pigs in addition to poultry.

Food is so expensive now that it actually makes sense to build the infrastructure we need to raise animals for protein in addition to the wild game I harvest. The cost of building raised beds, chicken coops, barns and pasture fencing will pay off in my lifetime and future generations will continue to benefit from my efforts. Thanks for Watching!

Go to https://drinkag1.com/myselfreliance to get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring today's video! At the beginning of 2020, I started a vegetable and fruit garden practically for free using materials found in the forest - soil, compost, mulch, carbon, fertilizer and wood. I cleared 1/4 of an acre of deciduous forest and built hugelkultur mounds and raised beds to grow an abundance of vegetables in the 1st year. In the following 3 years, I started spending money to build up the infrastructure for a productive food forest system that my family can benefit from for generations. Today, we’re harvesting our first fruit from the trees and harvesting an abundance of berries, vegetables and eggs as well as wild game from the surrounding forest.

Go to https://drinkag1.com/shawnjames to get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring today's video! To become self sufficient in healthy food, I'm growing grains and greens for my laying hens, including lettuce, beets, sunchokes, buckwheat, peas, amaranth, sorghum, corn, millet, upland rice and teff. My mission on this channel is to help YOU and your family live your dream life so you can become more self reliant, happy, fulfilled and prepared for challenging times.

It took 2 months to build alone, but my hand-split stone chicken coop is just about finished and the chickens are enjoying a dry roost safe from the many predators that live in the surrounding forest - bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, martens, fishers, raccoons, weasels and birds of prey. I am moving on to my next homestead building projects and will return to the coop to clean the stone of mortar and grout the joints later this summer. Upcoming projects include another firewood storage shed, a small building to store lumber from my sawmill, a workshop expansion, a walk-in cooler and processing set up for wild game and domestic livestock, a maple sugar shack, a log sauna and a bedroom addition on my log cabin. Between building projects, I'm growing 1/2 an acre of food for my family, including an orchard, and another 5+ acres for wildlife and livestock. Most of our protein comes from fish and game that I harvest from the wilderness of Ontario Canada, and we're preparing to raise livestock again, including beef, goats and pigs in addition to poultry. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myselfreliance

It's been a typically busy spring and the weather has been ideal for growing food in the forest so far this year. Log Cabin Building, Bushcraft, Surviv

Hand splitting river stone with chisels and a maul for stone veneer to install on my chicken coop, off grid log cabin and workshop. Making biochar to add carbon to my vegetable gardens, orchards and food forest.

Why do I keep calling my gardens a "food forest"?

Four years ago I cleared a 1/4 acre of forest to grow food for my family of four, and after many modifications and changes in philosophy, my food forest is starting to produce an abundance of food. The secret to its success is biodiversity, above and below ground, and includes not only the plants that feed us, but also many support plants like comfrey, yarrow, lupine, sea buckthorn, fungi and more. Thanks for Watching! My mission on this channel is to help YOU and your family live your dream life so you can become more self reliant, happy, fulfilled and prepared for challenging times.

While I'm on the homestead building a stone chicken coop, a wild turkey gobbles in the distance in my food forest and provides an opportunity to harvest a turkey and cook it in the wood cookstove in my outdoor kitchen at my off grid log cabin.

Cali and I travel to Algonquin Park to trout fish, canoe and camp with Jiom and Ted Baird. The first day is hot and sunny but that changes over night and the second day brings hail and rain. The fishing is as good as usual for brook trout on both days. Back at the homestead, I plant more fruit trees and watch as the trees flower and the perennials emerge from the warming soil. A barred owl feeds its chicks in a nearby hollow tree while other wildlife search for food and build their own nests. Log Cabin Building, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Cooking, Canadian Wilderness, Off Grid Living, Homesteading Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/40OgrDO Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7pym84TIpDlbOagIrjDoWU?si=87a26de90e0e41b5 Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2261599/episodes Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myselfreliance Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/MySelfReliance