The Tiny Life with Ryan Mitchell

Today I'm talking with Ryan at The Tiny Life. Ryan's newest book - Living Off Grid: 50 Steps to Unplug, Become Self-Sufficient, and Build the Homestead of Your Dreams

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00:00
listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.

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At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. A tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Ryan Mitchell at the Tiny Life in the Carolinas. Good afternoon, Ryan. How are you?  Good. Thanks for having me.  Oh, you're welcome. I'm  so thrilled to get a chance to talk to you because I had

00:58
Sent an email to you, I think a year and a half ago, and I didn't hear anything back. And then your person, because you have people, I don't have people. Yeah, there's a few of us. Your person emailed me and reached out and I was like, yes, finally I get to talk to you. Yeah. All right. So how is the weather where you are? It's good. Yeah. So I'm located in the, I say the Carolinas. So we are, my tiny house is in

01:27
North Carolina and we moved on to a homestead about a little less than a year ago. ah And then I live with my girlfriend in South Carolina. And so we're kind of gearing up the homestead to make the transition over to that. So that's why I kind of say, you know, I have one foot in both places right now as we make that transition. How far is it from where your girlfriend is to the tiny home?  About 30 minutes.

01:55
Oh, so close. You're real. Yeah. Yeah. And I was living, you know, obviously full time  in the tiny house when I met her. And then, you know, when we decided that uh we were going to, you know, continue the relationship and it kind of went to the next level and everything  that I was probably moving in with her because she had  her  two dogs, a Liz, two lizards, a spider and a

02:22
a snake, that was not going to fit into the tiny house at all. has a full house of critters.  It sure does. Well, I'm in Minnesota and I'm going to tell you right now, it's hotter than I would like it to be for April 22nd. Yes, yes. It is, I think it's 77 outside right now. And thank God there's a breeze because if there wasn't, it would be disgusting already because  Minnesota is really weird. You would think that 77 would just feel good.

02:52
It doesn't, it feels hot in April.

02:57
So, but at least it's not snowing. Yeah. Cause it could be doing that too. And I'd rather have this than snow cause I'm over it. It was a very,  it was a very moderate winter, but it seemed like a very long winter.  I'm  good on snow for the season.  Um, so I have a quick question about  where your, um, your tiny house is located. Is, is stuff has, has stuff been greened up for you?

03:26
for weeks now because you're so far south.

03:30
Sorry, ask that question one more time. Has stuff been green up? how are the trees leaving out? Yeah, like in the last two weeks, things have really kind of taken off. You know, we've had some warmer days, some really nice days, like low humidity, which is  not typical for us.  So yeah, things are starting to green up.  We just had our last frost date a couple days ago. So, you know, we're busy in the garden and things like that. m Get ready for spring and summer.

04:00
We have another month before our last frost date. But that doesn't stop the greenhouse from getting planted. That's true. Yeah, we have  that benefit of  long growing seasons. if you're really on  the spot, can sometimes cram two  rounds of crops.  And if  you're choosing shorter varieties that

04:28
you know, take a little bit less time to come to maturity. then, you know, during the winter, you have quite a few options if you have a greenhouse or you're going to do, you know, low tunnels or something like that. Mm hmm. Yep. We're starting a brand new to us variety of watermelon this year. We've never done it before. It's called a mini me and personal size watermelon. It's got a 60 day maturity.

04:58
Wow. Time frame. And my husband planted them,  I want to say two weekends ago.  And we have sprouts already and I'm so excited to see how these do because growing the big watermelons in Minnesota does not work very well because our growing season is so short. Yeah. Yeah. So hoping to have watermelons in  end of June, first part of July.

05:26
Excited so excited because I love love love watermelon and if they do well I want to grow a bunch of them again next year so we can sell them at the first farmers market in June. We'll plan.  I've never had much luck with any melons because the squirrels always get at them before they're ready and it always seems like I'm like, okay, I'm gonna pick it  one more day and we one more day on the vine and then I'll pick it and then that night something gets every time.

05:53
Huh, we,  it's weird, we don't have a lot of squirrels on our property. I don't know why, I think I've seen two in five years. Oh wow. So they just,  don't think they have a food source that is a natural food source for them, so they just don't live here. And we're surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields and alfalfa fields, and I don't think that squirrels are very happy with that,  so.

06:22
All right, so tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do, Ryan. Sure.  So my name is Ryan Mitchell.  I run the tiny life dot com and we focus on a simple living in kind of three different lenses.  The first one is tiny houses.  So, you know, small homes. uh Typically for one person, you're looking at two to three hundred square feet.

06:47
You know for a family, a small family, you might be looking at thousand, fifteen hundred, just depending on your needs, things like that. Then minimalism, which is basically, you know, thinking intentionally about the way that you live and your interaction with consumerism, what you buy, and just, you know, making sure that the things you own don't start to own you and just being, you know, kind of crafting that intentional life around what's important to you.

07:16
And the last one is home setting home setting, obviously, you know, very familiar to you. Uh, and that's a, a newer  kind of park tour or website we've been doing for about two years now.  Uh, but it's not new to me. I've been, you know, growing food, chickens, quails, bees, you, you name it,  um,  for  at  least a decade, um, if not more. Uh, so.

07:42
Yeah, we kind of focus on those three topics at the website. um, you know, why I'm speaking to you today is because we have a new book coming out. It's called living off the grid, 50 steps to unplug, become self-sufficient and build the home set of your dreams. And that basically was the book that I wish I had when I was kind of, uh, you know, going through my own journey, uh, with a lot of like practical steps, uh, of how to think about how to develop a plan.

08:12
how to make a homestead that's right for you,  and not just kind of adopting someone else's pre-packaged plan of or definition of what it means to be a homesteader. So yeah, that's kind of a little bit about me and our background.  Awesome. So I have to ask you, how do you define homesteading? And I will tell you how I define it first, and then you can tell me if you think it's accurate.  I think that homesteading is a  lifestyle choice

08:41
It is not owning 100 cows and 100 acres of land. How do you define homesteading? Yeah,  I think for me,  I do this also with a tiny house. I don't get too dogmatic about the number of square feet. You some people get very firm about like, it has to be under a certain square footage.  And I think with homesteading, um what's important is  coming up with your own definition.

09:08
definition and you know kind of defining that path for yourself.  So for me,  what my kind of personal definition is, is just thinking about ways that you  rely on external systems that could be the grid, that could be food systems,  that could be the store,  you know, different things like that, entertainment, all that kind of stuff.  And,  you know, thinking about those kind of points of weakness  or

09:37
Kind critical areas that  you maybe rely a little too heavily on and then trying to shore those up trying to replace some of those or bring those a little bit closer to you and that could be as much as like bringing, you know, getting off the grid,  bring solar to your home set and doing all that kind of stuff. It could be  growing your own food. It could be, you know, having a cow or two. It could be a whole, you know, herd of cattle or it could just be working with uh

10:05
the rancher down the street to buy,  you know, half a cow  and put that away in your freezer. So,  um,  yeah, in the book, I kind of walked through some thought exercises about like how people can think about this. And, and the thing that I've just seen over the years,  time and time again, is that people tend to say like, okay, in my head, home setting is this,  and it's usually someone else's definition.  And they adopt it  as almost like,

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The rule and there there is no rules right like you can make this lifestyle whatever you want it to be and then they they tend to back themselves into a corner and figure out that oh don't really want this they'll get you know 10 20 30 50 100 cattle and then realize like oh I can never leave this house because I always have to be watching the cattle or milking the cows or.

11:02
or whatever the daily chores are constantly and I can never go on a vacation.  So yeah, that's why I've always kind of said like, it's important to sit down and define your own definition. Yep,  absolutely. I just, it's so funny because I was just interviewed by Cody Hanner at the Homestead Education Podcast  and I just heard it today. I was interviewed by her three weeks ago, I think it was, and  she was asking,

11:32
me about how we got started. And I was like, the honest answer is I just needed quiet. I just needed to not live in town anymore.  Yeah. And we started at 50 and my husband and I are 56 now. We bought our homestead when we were 50.  And she said, I love that the first thing you answered with is that you started, you bought your homestead when you were 50  because you,

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doesn't matter how old you are, if you are sound of body and mind,  you can make it go. And I was like, yes, you can. I said, just realize that  sound of body may be a little less  definitive than it used to be. And she laughed. So yeah. And as for the tiny house thing, I used to refer to the old house as a tiny house.  was a three bedroom, one bathroom home on a 10th of an acre in town.  And the realtor

12:27
listing said that it was 850 square feet. And I believe it because I raised four kids in that house with my husband. That's tiny house for a family of six. Yes, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And my husband was very taken with the idea of actual tiny houses. When we got old and our kids were out of our small house and I was just like, no freaking way. Yeah. No.

12:55
You value your quiet, I value my quiet and us being literally in the same space all the time will have us divorced in a year.  So instead of doing that, we bought a three acre place with a 1400 square foot house on it. big.  So it's all how you look at it. It's all what you need to be happy.  Agreed.

13:23
So having said all that, I have a question about your tiny house. house. How big is it? So my tiny house is 149 square feet and then a sleeping loft. Okay. And is it on an acre? Is it on a couple of acres? So it's on a friend's property and that's 20 acres.

13:51
Okay.  It's gorgeous woods  and I got extremely lucky because it's in a this, this acreage is in the middle  of the city. like I would, you know, be, you know, doing just life and work and all that kind of stuff in the city. And then I would come home ah to my tiny house  and it was just on this acreage  that has this pond on it that

14:19
like is a spitting image of Walden Pond. And so it was like this little oasis in the city. And it was wonderful to live in. does it feel like camping when you're there? Or does it feel like home? I mean, I think initially it did kind of feel like camping. And also it was a long journey for me to get there. You know, I started back in 2009.

14:48
Uh, in the, when kind of the downturn happened and I  had made a decision like, I tell me that you change because I was just starting my career back then  and  the company that I was  working for closed and I was only six months into my career and I was already getting laid off with the whole, you everyone else in the company. was like, um,  maybe this wasn't the bill of goods that I was sold  when I was signed up for  college and all that kind of stuff. So.

15:18
I did some thinking about it and I worked a long time and in 2012 I moved into it. And so yeah, I did feel a little bit like camping in beginning. But then I kind of settled in and what I realized was it was probably one of the more comfortable homes that I've ever lived in because it was designed for me. Traditional homes are designed to maximize for resale value, not for

15:46
people or not for families. They're  a asset. They're not a home, which is a really sad state of affairs. But I also understand why, you know, like these homes are expensive. They're usually people's largest asset that they own.  So they have to be able to cash out at some point in the future  for, you know, their needs, their retirement, things like that. uh But  yeah, once I kind of settled in  and got comfortable in it,

16:15
It definitely  felt like a regular house. uh I was also younger  and  was out and active and doing things.  At that time I owned a business, so I was going to that physical location  most days of the week  while building up that business. uh It was just a nice little respite away from the big city.

16:43
Yeah, that's how I felt  when we moved because I had just had it with all the noise and the church bells and the train that went through town daily. All the noise was driving me insane. And when we moved here, we live on a pretty busy road because it goes from one town to another and the semis go by a lot because, you know, spring season they're hauling tractors and in the fall season they're hauling corn.

17:12
But you get used to that. That's part of it. But I'm not,  I'm not hearing the Catholic Church's bells toll three, four times a day. I'm not hearing cars go speeding up my road. I'm not hearing  all the things that drove me crazy.  it,  we basically bought the place that we wanted, that we really, really wanted.  And

17:39
It feels like we don't ever want to go on vacation because living here feels like vacation, even though we have chickens and cats and a dog and a big garden. So whatever makes you happy is what you need to do. And as I've said quite a few times on my podcast, not everybody is cut out to live in the middle of the cornfields and alfalfa fields and soybean fields.

18:08
There are a lot of people who really love living in the city. And if that's what floats your boat,  do that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You  know, we are our South Carolina home is right next to the  the big city that we live nearby.  And  we love both places. We have family here.  So, you know, this is a convenient place close to all of our family. And then we also really love the mountain.

18:38
um And  that's this nice little quiet  place that  is away from everything. um And so that...

18:50
that dichotomy or that juxtaposition, I guess you could say  of the big city, kind of the city house and the mountain house has been really nice.  um,  and you can do  home setting and  all those kinds of things going off grid, even in, you know, more urban locations or suburban, because, uh, getting back to  the earlier point of like make, define a home setting for the way that you want it to be. If

19:20
If you do want to be very social and  have things nearby, like lots of restaurants and concerts or whatever your thing is,  you can  have your cake and eat it too. You can live in  a place that's a little bit closer to town. You may have some smaller acreage. You may uh be just working on a patio out of like container gardening.

19:47
But you may be to do other things. So everything's a give and take and you kind of think about it that way. Yep, absolutely. When we lived in town, we had four chickens in a garden shed. We made it into a chicken coop.  And we had, I don't know,  I would say 50 by 20 square feet of garden in the backyard. That was it. Yeah. And we had more than most people in our neighborhood. So that was great. And we grew lots and lots of really good produce.

20:16
and shared it with the neighbors. And it was wonderful, but I just didn't want to be in town anymore. we decided to jump in 2020 and we're not sorry that we did it. So you said you're getting into homesteading. So what are you doing? What have you started doing for homesteading? Yeah. So I'm kind of bringing it more as like we're getting back to homesteading.

20:45
Um, when I  lived before the  tiny house,  you say I had a big garden. had like a third of an acre garden in ground  and  bees and chickens and quail,  um,  and  doing a few other things like that, canning, all that kind of stuff. And at that time, uh, I was at least part of it. I was in an apartment, so I was able to do all that at a community garden.

21:15
And, uh you know,  so I didn't even have to have the land and the cost was like 150 bucks a year to me  to just kind of get access to that. And then you had community alongside of it and, you know, fun activities to do and people to talk to and whatever. uh But then  now  we're kind of thinking about,  OK, you know, what are the things that  we want to do right now  while we are?

21:42
kind of in two places, you know, there's certain practicalities like we're likely not going to be able to have livestock if we have to be away for a couple weeks at a time, let's just say. um But we could, you know, have a garden, especially raised beds where we kind of do heavy mulching and things like that.  We could have bees, we can do solar, you know, there's certain things that  are practical there. um So

22:11
I think right now we kind of have developed a loose plan. We've gone on the land,  we've got the  house kind set up. One of the first things I did was build out a workshop to kind of be the jumping off point to  do all the other things. you know, having a place to build stuff, the materials on hand, the tools on hand.  in the book I talk about kind of orders of operation  when it comes to home setting and

22:40
Workshop is kind of a key step after you've got your basic necessities nailed down like your shelter your water your sewage things electricity things like that So now that we have the workshop now, we're kind of We've been taking a little bit of time to kind of learn the land through the different seasons and That's been nice to one just enjoy the land. But then to we've learned a lot about okay, you know, it's

23:09
When it rains heavy, it pulls here.  When it gets a little cold, you have these cold wells and these little spots.  The animals um that are around kind of come from this direction. So maybe we're not going to clear that way so we can leave their habitat. Things like that. The sun  angles and the shadows and all that kind of stuff that you learn throughout the year.

23:35
So we're kind of coming to an end of just like learning the land a little bit. And now we're setting plans for the next things, mainly as the garden. We had to do some infrastructure work and we're still working on that. Just getting water where we want it to, power where we want it to be on the house. We took down an old barn just a couple of weeks ago so that we could put our kind of large garden.

24:05
Uh, area we're going to do all raised beds  and  put our, our trees and our,  uh, beehives in it and then kind of fence the whole thing. with some,  uh, electric fence, because we have  several bears on property.  you know,  they love to munch on those,  uh, you know, you have to watch out for bears knocking over your hives to get the honey and things like that. So yeah, that's been kind of  the workflow so far is getting on the land.

24:35
getting a few key things established, learning it, and then setting plans for what's next. That is so exciting. I'm listening to you and you have just got to be chomping at the bit to see how this goes.  Yeah, yeah. There's a long list. Well, I sat down  like a year ago and just like made a list of like, okay, these are all the things that I want to get done. And they were kind of the smaller steps in between.

25:03
And then I ordered them and then I assigned dollar values because, you know, certain things cost, you know, for materials or whatever. And  I was like, oh, okay, I'm definitely not going to be doing this and all in the next year.  So how do I want to go about this? And so just kind of thinking through all the steps um was really exciting. And  also, you know, it allowed me to kind of prioritize things um and kind of paint that vision too.

25:33
Yeah, I've said a lot of times on the podcast, start small, dream big.  And I stand by it because unless you are a millionaire, you can't do all the things all at once.  It's not affordable. Well, and even if you are a millionaire, like it takes time. It's all going to take time. Like there's a lot of work. There's a lot of moving pieces.  you know, ah

25:59
I'm not going say having money is a bad thing, but like it also isn't the panacea for um kind of standing up a homestead that it could be. There's still a lot of work, time, effort and planning.  And I think frankly, you know, being a little bit more budget conscious, thinking about your dollars and things like that,  it slows you down just enough to make sure that you don't make any critical mistakes and you really think through your decisions.  I think that's an important part um that

26:29
kind in the book I laid out some of the  kind of the common mistakes I see people make in their journeys. And  so yeah, I think it's just important to kind of take your time with it for sure. Start small, 100%. When I that the community garden for many years, I ran myself.  I was kind of like the head person once  I got kind of involved with it. And  every year I would have  probably like

26:57
20 to 30 new gardeners come in and they always had big aspirations.  And I would always kind of coach them. like, okay, let's start small. Let's give you a hundred square feet. Let's start there.  And,  and you know, sometimes they would push back us like trust, know, just trust the process here. When it's August and it's miserable out and you have a bunch of weeds coming in, like you want it to be approachable and practical so that you're not just hating life as you're, you know, trying to weed.

27:26
way more garden than you're used to. And every time it's worked out for them and they agreed in the end. And those who didn't heed the advice always ended up with a garden full of weeds that they couldn't keep up with. yeah, small, starting that way is definitely the way to go, even if you're experienced. Yes, exactly. And I'm going to use chickens as an example.

27:55
If my husband had his way, we would have 200 chickens. He learned after we got up to about 36 chickens that having about 14 to 15 is a good number because there's enough eggs for us and there's enough eggs to sell to the neighbors in the farm stand. Yeah. Because 150 to 200 chickens, that's a lot of chicken coop cleaning out to do every week. Yeah.

28:25
Yeah.  And you need to have an outlet for those eggs, right? Like you're not going to,  if you never,  if you haven't had a business, even a small side kind of thing, uh, selling eggs, like you're not going to go from zero to a hundred as much as you want. Um, and unless, I don't know, unless you just have a particularly good location or you're really tapping in heavily into  farmers markets, but there's probably already people there selling kind of the same goods that you have.  yeah.  Um,

28:55
I think the most I ever had was about 15 chickens and  that was about right  for us at the time. Yeah.  And  honestly,  we did have, I think it was two, I  think it was last spring. I think we had 26 chickens  and now we're down to 14.  That's because chickens get um eaten by raccoons. Yeah.

29:24
Or they just get sick without any notice, keel over and die. So old, you know, all those things. Absolutely. Yep. So if I was going to give anybody advice and I shouldn't, cause I don't know anything, I know enough to be dangerous, but if I was going to give people advice about chickens, I would say start with like five and see how it goes. And if you actually like taking care of them and then you can always add more.

29:54
Yeah. So, so I try to keep these to half an hour, but I do have one last question.  How long did it take you to write your book and get it published? Let's  see. So this book, I had already had a publisher lined up and basically we worked with  Prince and Press  to kind of come up with a book concept. They wanted to be in this space.

30:23
They liked my writing because they saw it through the website, the timeline.com. uh, so I've always been fortunate to always have a publisher and not have to like shop a book around. So I've never actually done that before, but, uh, so I had that on my side and then I focused on it for, uh, about six months. It was basically every single weekend, uh, because I work, you know, like, um, you know,

30:51
Part of my own stuff consulting and then like a day job too. So I was doing a weekend and nights and things like that. So yeah, about six months of nights and weekends. Okay. So not, not forever, but it definitely took some time. Yeah. I mean, uh, this is probably one of my, I don't know. This is I think 60,000 words. So it was about middle of the road for my books and um,

31:19
He's this is my ninth book  and yeah, it's a lot of words and then you have to edit it too. So we spent, you know, three months editing as well  on top of that. then, you know, kind of going to press and all that kind of stuff.  yeah, I mean, I always enjoyed the process. It's something that I  found that I really enjoy through the years,  the tiny life and through all the other books I've written as well.  And I was really excited to work on this one because it was

31:49
Like said, the book that I wish I had handed to me when I first started. I'm sure people are going to appreciate everything in it because if it was the book you wanted, it's the book they probably want now. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Ryan, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you? Yeah. So I appreciate the time and the conversation. For those who are interested, we're at thetinylife.com.

32:17
And  in the store, you can find a link to the book as well.  But the book is available at your local bookstores,  all major retailers online,  and a bunch of indie kind of mom and pop bookstores in  stores as well. The title is called Living Off the Grid by Ryan Mitchell.  And I appreciate the time. Thank you so much, Mary. Are you on social media anywhere? Oh, we have presence there.

32:46
We don't do a ton of social media anymore. We mainly focus on the website and our email So if people want to kind of like really stay in touch with us  I would encourage them to you know Just go to the website sign up with our newsletter and we'll kind of keep you in the loop on stuff  All right fabulous  as always people can find me at a tiny homestead podcast calm  Ryan. This was really fun. Thanks so much. Thank you. Have a great day