Three Birch Homestead

Today I'm talking with Andrea at Three Birch Homestead.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Andrea at Three Birch Homestead in Canada. Good morning, Andrea. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. How's the weather in Canada this morning? um It's a little bit cold. We had like a really warm spell and now it's kind of freezing again.

00:30
Yeah, I'm in Minnesota and we've had a couple of really beautiful days  and they're saying we're going to get snow tomorrow, a little bit of snow Thursday, and then they're kind of hyping up a bigger storm over the weekend. And I'm like,  it's March. Could we please put it to bed now? Please.  Yeah,  I'm ready for spring. There was actually a really like  heavy windstorm here the last couple of days and the power's been out, I guess, like all over the place.

01:00
um But because we're off grid, we like don't even notice. We just hear about it from other people.  Uh-huh. It's one of the benefits of living off grid. You've got that covered.  All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself, please. um We live in northern BC, Canada,  off grid um on a property, like a rural property.  We're about 45 minutes from the closest town.

01:30
an hour and a half from like a bigger center. So it's a bit of a drive. There is like a small community about  half an hour from here. um But there's just like a general store and a post office. It's not, there's not a whole lot going on there. Yeah.  So  and  we raise animals for  meat  and we um have kids and

01:59
homeschool and yeah, just sort of try to do as much as we can on our own and provide as much food as we can for ourselves.

02:11
Okay, I have a question. You have kids. How many kids do you have? um I have five kids. Two of them are adults, so they don't live with me anymore. And then I have  a  14 year old son and then a two year old and an eight month old.

02:29
Okay, having raised four kids without a whole lot of family around, because my family lives in Maine, uh how has it been for you? Do you have family at all in the area that can help out or is it just you? um When my other kids were little, I lived in a different area and I did have family around, so that was very helpful.  Here, we didn't have much family around, but my husband's parents recently moved to the area.

02:59
They live uh here half the time and then in Ontario half the time because they wanted to be closer to their grandkids.  So, um because the  two boys are their only grandchildren, so they wanted to be close. And so that's been really helpful.

03:16
good because when I hear moms having more than a couple of kids and I don't hear anything about extended family being able to kind of help out here and there, I worry because I did a lot of the raising of my four kids myself and it is a lot of stress and a lot of energy and I loved every minute of it but it would have been helpful to have extended family to step in. Yeah, it's definitely nice to have somebody. So I thought I

03:48
Yeah, I thought I would ask because  I don't recommend anyone do  homesteading or off-grid living or anything else like that if you don't have some form of community to  call on if you do need help. It's definitely nice. Yeah. you you disagree? Yeah,  I agree. It can be really isolating. When I first moved out here,

04:12
Like where I had lived before, I did live out of town, but I only lived a couple minutes out of town and I had lots of friends around. And so when I moved out here to live with my husband, like my now husband, I didn't really have that anymore. it definitely, I didn't realize how much it was going to affect me until I got out here. And then I was like, wow, like I don't have anybody. And so I was pretty lonely. And then my son joined Taekwondo.

04:42
which helped us to meet people. And so now I do have some friends around, but they're definitely not as close. they're, you know, a good 45 minute to an hour drive away. So I don't get to see people as often as I used to, but I've kind of learned to adapt. It's given me a lot more time to do stuff at home, which is nice. I spend less time socializing and more time making bread and doing other things that I wanted to do before too, but didn't have time for because I would be out and about.

05:17
Absolutely. I am an extreme introvert and I spend most of my weekdays from about 730 in the morning until about 430.  Just me. And I love it because I get so much done and I can pursue the things that I'm interested in without anyone being like, why are you watching about chickens?  Why are you reading a book about cows? know? Yeah.

05:43
So, all right, so tell me, tell me your, your living situation. Are you in a home? Are you in a cabin? Are you in a trailer? How does that work?  Um, we're in like a cabin, I guess it's,  it's not huge. It's  maybe like, there's probably 700 square feet in the main space.  And then there's a bit of an upstairs with the bedroom. It's pretty small. Uh, like I came from a house that was like,

06:11
2500 square feet.  it's definitely like been a transition, especially once we added two more kids to the mix. My teenage son has his own little cabin, which is nice. um And so  but then he's got to like run his own fire as well. So we've got two wood stoves that we have to maintain. But yeah, so it's it's a nice little like, long cabin. But we need more space. We're definitely planning on adding

06:40
some more space in the future. This summer we actually want to, we have a deck  and it's a really nice deck.  It faces a mountain and it's  a lovely view but we're actually going to enclose it and turn it into part of the house  and forego having a deck because we need the space more than we need a deck.

06:59
Yep, yep, understand. And that's the joy of being off-grid. You can probably add whatever you would like to add as long as you have the fundage or the bartering skills to get it done. Yes, well, and like where we live, there's not like building codes. Like we don't have to get a permit or anything. We can just kind of do what we want. And Will's parents are really good about helping us with that stuff. So they're going to help us build.  They've helped us build like all of our additions. My bedroom is actually

07:28
like upstairs and it used to just be like a loft and then there was like a big open like high ceiling and we basically closed that in so  we don't have the nice expansive high ceiling anymore, but we have like a whole bedroom up here now, which  we really needed because there was only one bedroom in the whole house and so  Sweet awesome. That's fantastic uh

07:54
Okay, and so do  you just heat with the wood stoves or do you have another source? Just the wood stoves, yeah. Okay. And do you have a... I assume you do not have a well, so how do you get your water?  There's a creek on the property that runs through and it's  basically glacial-fed water, like it comes off of the mountain. So we drink from that. It must be amazing water.

08:23
It's pretty good. Yeah, it's definitely, yeah, pretty pristine.  It's very cold.  I love that. My parents, when they built their first house when I was like six, we had moved from a suburb and the water was terrible to taste to drink. And when we moved into that house, the new house, they had an artesian well dug for it. And I can

08:50
vividly remember getting the first glass of cold water from the faucet and it tasted like heaven. It was so  clean and so cold and so sweet. And I was like, this isn't water.  My mom said, yes, it is. And I was like, it tastes really good. I could drink this all day. She's like, please do. It definitely makes a difference. Water is very important.

09:16
Yeah, where we live now,  my favorite glass of water is when it's minus 20 degrees outside because the water from the faucet gets so cold because again, it's a well. And  I really love my water  almost ice when I'm drinking it.  I understand the whole  glacial water is really, really good compared to just regular water.

09:40
Okay, so you have animals, what do you have for animals? We have um two milk cows  and a bull and then we have a steer that we're raising for meat. We have chickens, turkeys, pigs.  We have goats, but we're actually getting out of goats. We're going to sell the goats off. We use them to  clear land, like clear brush, to  create more pasture land for cows.

10:08
and they've done the job well  and  we really love having them like that when they have their babies. It's just like such a wonderful time, but  it's just a lot of work to move them around the pasture. So we're just, yeah, we're going to sell them off  and  focus on the cows. We got goats originally because  we wanted, well for pasture clearing, but also  we wanted to start with a  smaller animal for milking.

10:34
And so we did that, but we don't really enjoy drinking the goat's milk. We like, like I made cheese with it and the cheese was really good.  But so we, got a milk cow and we definitely like prefer the milk cow.

10:50
Okay, so as I'm sitting here listening to you, I'm assuming that you use the animals to feed yourselves. And so when you make cheese, how do you store it? Because obviously cheese needs to be refrigerated. So do you have like solar energy or how do you power your appliances? Yeah, we have solar power. We also have a generator. And yeah, so

11:18
The cheese gets stored in a fridge.  I vacuum seal it and then store it in the fridge. So a lot of our fridge is taken up by cheese and milk.  We don't have a lot of room for other things.  So we have to be careful about what we put in our fridge and we have to use up our leftovers like fairly quickly. uh But I haven't had to buy cheese at the grocery store in like a few years now, which has been lovely.

11:47
I was going to say, isn't that a great feeling just knowing that you are set because you did it? Yeah, I don't have to like really spend any time in the dairy section of the grocery store.  Okay, so now I'm going to ask an uncomfortable question because it makes me uncomfortable to ask it. But do you have a job because even if you are off grid and living quote unquote self-sufficiently,

12:13
money still does buy things that you can't make. So do you guys have a job or are you doing this all without jobs?  Yeah, for sure. It's definitely like a big question that people ask is like, how do you pay for this? And it was something that I asked too before,  you know, living like this. mean, I've always been interested in homesteading and I've always done a little bit here and there. But yeah, so I work online.

12:42
And then my husband has a glass studio. So he does some glass work. He makes jewelry and stuff. So that  funds like quite a bit of what we do. And then, you know, we have, we don't have a mortgage.  We don't pay an electric bill. Like, so we don't,  costs are low,  but we do, yeah, still need money. You could never not need money. I think it's.

13:10
silly to think that you could live without money.  Yeah, the reason I said now for the uncomfortable question is because I always feel weird asking people stuff about their  income or their finances or how they fund things. But people need to know that  even if you're going to be a homesteader, you're probably still going to have to have some kind of jobby job to fund it.

13:36
Yes, for sure. need to bring in an income. I get real twitchy when I have to ask that question. And I always preface it so that you guys brace for it, you know? Yeah, I don't like asking people how they make money either. I'm sorry, say it again. Oh, I don't like asking people how they make money either. Like it's one of those questions that's sort of like, it's like not really any of your business. But then I also totally understand why people ask it, you know?

14:13
Yeah, it's kind of like asking a mom these days whether their newborn son was circumcised or not.  It's a really slippery slope for a conversation.

14:27
Okay, what else can I ask you? um You're in Canada, it gets really,  really cold in Canada in the winter. So  when you have to get up  at, I don't know, 5, 6 a.m. and go milk the cows or feed the animals, how  many layers are you putting on in the morning? Because I know it gets really cold. Yeah, we live in like...

14:57
sort of a coastal area so  it's not quite as cold here as some places in Canada but we do still get like cold snaps where it's quite cold  and I actually don't go outside and do the chores I'm inside with the kids and I make the food and  stuff like that and then my husband and my son my teenage son go out and so  usually they're wearing

15:22
you boots and snow pants  and a jacket. If it's really cold, they're putting on like Bella clavas and,  you know, heavier wool underneath their jackets and stuff like that. But yeah, this year we haven't had any like really cold weather. It's actually been like quite mild this year. So that's been nice. If I go out, like if I'm milking the cow that I was milking the cow before I had my ah my last baby.

15:51
And  yeah, I would wear, you know, a sweater over top of like, I've got a lot of like merino wool base layer stuff.  And so, you know, leggings and pants and snow pants and wool socks and boots and wool hats. And yeah, you're definitely covering up everywhere.  Yeah, it's  interesting because my  mom used to pack away the summer clothes in October.

16:20
and pull out the winter clothes from the attic. And then in the spring, she'd pack away the winter clothes and unpack summer clothes again.  And I'm like, I don't even understand this concept anymore because in Minnesota,  you can have a 60 degree day in December. And I don't want to be without a tank top if it's 60 degrees outside because I'm going be outside and it's going be warm. And so my mom mentioned this to me that she had packed away

16:49
the summer clothes this past fall. And I said, you know, you don't really have to do that. You can wear the clothes all year round. And she laughed and she said,  you do your outfits the way you want to. I'm gonna do mine the way I want to. And it's funny because we all have our systems and our habits and the way we do things. And she said, seriously, you don't pack away your winter clothes in springtime? I said, no, because  it can be

17:18
in June in Minnesota and I want my sweater. And she just giggled and she lives in Maine. It's not that different.

17:28
Yeah, I do usually put away the  big winter gear  because  it doesn't get cold enough in the summer for us to need  snow pants and heavy woolies and stuff like that. But I will keep out some of the warmer clothes because at night, in the evenings if we're out, it gets chilly. um

17:51
Yeah, and actually, like I do keep a lot of  summer stuff out now because our house gets so warm because it's so small and we have like a big wood stove like right in the center of it.  It'll be 30 degrees in here at 30 Celsius. I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but it's it's warm.

18:17
Yeah. Okay. So what led you to wanting to live off grid? Um, I mean, I've wanted to live off grid for a long time. I, I've always been interested in gardening and wanted to have like my own animals and a milk cow. A lot of it is for health benefits and just having control over my own food source. But like my ex husband,

18:46
was not, he was sort of into that stuff, but not really. And so we never really like, actually were able to pursue it. I would do some like, I would dabble, you know, I'd do some canning and I did some wild harvesting and we had chickens and I had a garden and stuff like that. And then I got divorced and so I, I was, you know, on the market again and sort of was looking for, you know, someone to spend my life with and

19:16
that was definitely like something that I was looking for was somebody who was into those things, know, into self-sufficient living and stuff like that. It wasn't like it had to be somebody off grid necessarily, but just somebody who was living, you know,  on the land and gardening and  growing food and  raising animals and such.  And so when I met my husband, he was into all those things. So we hit it off pretty...

19:42
pretty quickly and he lived off grid, which was lovely. It was like, oh, that's cool. know,  I mean, we had a long distance relationship for like three or four years before I actually moved out here because where I lived, like my kids were attending the high school and  you know, I wasn't really able to move. Plus when I met him, he lived in just like a tiny shack. was just, it was like a non-insulated building.  The cabin that we're in now wasn't here at the time.

20:11
So it wasn't really like practical for me to move out here. ah But  yeah, like I definitely was attracted to the off-grid lifestyle, mostly just for self-sufficiency because you're not connected to, you know, main power grid. You're not paying a big corporation for your power and,  you know, they can hike up the prices at any moment and  stuff like that.  So.

20:37
Yeah, exactly. um We keep talking about looking into solar panels again. We have a big pole barn and it would be great for solar panels.  And every time I even dip my toe in the water to research it, I see big, big numbers to get solar panels installed. And I'm like, yeah, we don't have it right now. I want to real bad, but it's going to have to wait. Yeah, it's.

21:03
not a cheap thing, but I guess supposedly the prices have gone down significantly from when they first came out.  So the technology is getting better and  that's what we were told by someone that we know who installs solar panels. He was saying that  the prices have gone down significantly from what they used to be. em Well, maybe this fall I'll revisit it.  Yeah.

21:31
They now have like these bifacial ones too that capture sunlight on both sides,  which then you can kind of have them standing up. Like they maybe wouldn't work as well like  on a roof, know, like  mounted to a roof. But if they're standing up, then  you can get the sun from both sides, makes them more efficient. Very nice. That would be very cool. ah So  are your

21:57
I guess your younger kids don't know any different than living off-grid, right?  Yeah.  I mean, they're still young, like, so they don't really know  even what off-grid is, but  yeah, they won't know any different. Like, we have a composting toilet and we kind of joke about how our son is going to be like,  know, weirded out by like regular toilets when we go to town.

22:26
Yeah, the noise will scare him. Yeah, and like there's no water in our toilet and  you don't flush it.  But I mean, he has seen toilets in town, so I don't know if he'll actually be like so weirded out by it. But I'm sure at some point he'll ask us a question like, why,  why is our toilet not like this? Uh  huh.  Yeah, it's stuff you don't think about like that,  that when it comes up, you're like, oh, wow, I hadn't even thought of that.

22:55
Yeah, the craziest thing to me about like living off grid versus like living on It's like here. We...  Oh,  sorry. Yeah, just the  biggest thing that I've noticed with living like off grid versus living on grid is like when I go visit my friends who live on grid.

23:13
Like they're running, know, they've got their coffee machine on, they've got their microwave going, they've got their vacuum going, they've got like all these things running at the same time. And I just like, I can't live like that anymore. Like we can't do that.  You know, if  we're running the vacuum, it's like, that's the only thing that we're running. You know, we're not, can't use the toaster at the same time as the water pump.  you have to be really like.

23:39
careful about like what you're using when and so that'll be something that my kids  will  be used to and so you know maybe when we go visit other people they might be like why are they doing all these things at once like that's so crazy

23:59
Yeah, I feel like homesteading and living off grid makes you far more intentional about what you do and when you do it. For sure.

24:17
I lose you? No. Oh, sorry. I was really quiet there for a was like, Oh, sorry. for sure. then I paused. Yeah. I need to ask a couple of questions because it's three birch homestead and you're off grid. So

24:37
Yeah, no, that's okay. So again, three words.

24:48
Sorry, think we have a delay going on here. So, okay. No, we just have a delay. I can, I can tell. There you go. Okay. So your three birch homestead and your off-grid. So have you learned how to make your own soaps or your own lotions or do you do sourdough bread or any of the things that people usually think of when they think of homestead and off-grid?

25:15
um I don't make soap or lotion.  I buy those at the store from one of my friends makes soap. But I do  make bread and I make cheese and  cook most of my food from scratch. ah I have made sourdough, but  I haven't in a while. I recently got  a mixer for my birthday and so I've been making more bread. So I want to get back into sourdough.

25:42
I found that like hand kneading stuff just, it took too much time. So I just didn't bother. em But now that I have a mixer,  I am on a  major baking spree.

25:57
Yeah, my husband is the yeast bread maker. I've said this before, I kill the yeast every time I try to get it to bloom. I don't know why, it just dies on me.  And when  he wants to relax and  zen out, he will hand knead the bread dough. But when he just wants to get it done, he uses the KitchenAid mixer. And I always know when he's really thinking about something, because he's like, I'm going to make bread. And he gets everything ready and he gets the dough together.

26:26
And he slaps it on the island top and starts to hand knead it. And I'm like,  are you considering an idea or are you upset? Because the only time you need dough is when that's going on. And it's always a hint to me that he's in a state of mind about something.  could see that being like a therapeutic thing for sure. Yeah.  And the thing that I love most about cooking from scratch is that the house always smells good. Always. Yes.

26:59
My favorite thing that he makes is cinnamon rolls from scratch. And he makes the cinnamon rolls and I make the frosting and I always try to have lemon juice on hand so I can make a lemon frosting because lemon frosting on cinnamon rolls is amazing. That sounds really good. I've been making cinnamon buns too, actually. I  do like a sticky topping. So I cook like  that, right? I make butter and sugar and then cook it in that. um But yeah, lemon frosting. That sounds really yummy.

27:30
It's a drizzle. shouldn't say frosting because people are probably thinking of the buttercream frosting and I try to make it a drizzle  because if you try to put buttercream frosting on a warm cinnamon roll, it just slides off.  doesn't do any good. That's true. em

27:46
So,  all right, well, I try to keep these to half an hour.  I appreciate your time so much. I know you guys are all busy and you take time out of your busy days to just  basically entertain me and by default, entertain anybody who listens to the conversation. So,  where can people find you, Andrea?  I'm on Instagram at 3birchhomestead.com.

28:12
pool,  I will make sure I put that in the show notes so people can go look at your pictures because I did and I was like, wow, that's awesome. I  want to come back in my next life as an off-grid homesteader because right now on-grid homesteading is good enough. um As always, people can find me at AtinyHomesteadPodcast.com. Thank you again for your time, Andrea. I hope you have a great day. You too. Thanks.