I often find it difficult to describe our way of life to folks. We are too modern to be a real homestead, too small to be a farm, too unorganized to be considered “preppers”. We aren’t green, organic, or truly self-sufficient. So what are we? To put it simply, we are a small family, endeavoring to live life sustainably, economically, and unconventionally.

Our small clan experiences life on 200+ acres of beautiful Alaskan earth that provides an abundance of resources from which we find both sustenance and shelter. Dependence upon weather, the seasons, and the land affects a major portion of daily life and often times determines the health and well-being of our livestock and garden. We live completely off-grid and rely on solar and wind energy to provide power for our homes. Everyday chores such as laundry, vacuuming, and grinding grain are left exclusively for sunny and windy days, and use of common household items such as blenders, food processors, and mixers are considered a rare luxury. We harvest trees from our land to provide building materials for flooring, furniture, cabins, animal housing, and wood sheds. All firewood for heating our homes and water is also harvested from around the property as well.

As a family, we cultivate and maintain an organic garden, and use collected rain to water it throughout the growing season. Produce such as beans, potatoes, corn, beets, turnips, cabbage, carrots, and herbs are put up in the autumn for use during winter and spring. We also work to gather wild herbs and edibles for cooking, and collect native medicinal plants to make tinctures, salves, poultices, and infusions. During the summer, we keep bees and collect honey for baking, and harvest honeycomb wax to use in some of our wild-harvested bath and body products.

In efforts to simplify and enrich our life and diets, we have found keeping livestock to be extremely beneficial. Our family cares for a small milking goat herd, and we use their milk to make a variety of cheeses, yogurt, kefir and goat milk soap for our family’s business. Residual whey from cheese making is given to our chickens and pig, or used in home baking, as it is an excellent source of protein. Fresh eggs from our free-range chickens also supply a significant portion of our diet. This is our first year raising a pig, and we intend to butcher it in the fall to accommodate our year’s supply of pork and lard. We also rely heavily on wild fish and game to provide healthy, organic meat. In the late summer we fish for salmon, and smoke and can most of it for the year. Our annual fall moose is also a main source of protein throughout the year.

Sometimes, I will tell folks that we practice “simple living,” but this is far from the truth. In reality, this is an extremely demanding and taxing way of life. The garden, the livestock, the wood stoves, and the roads all demand our presence and constant attention. We are not able to leave on a whim, and trips to town take a lot of planning and preparation. Some days we will wonder to ourselves, “What the heck are we doing here?” We could very easily hook up to the grid, purchase our lumber, switch to oil for heating, and buy our organic produce, milk, and meat at the store. What keeps us pressing on is the beauty and abundance of our earth, and the incredible blessings that come from challenges we face as a family. We are very fortunate to live in such a place at such a time, and for that, we are humbled. This part of our journey will one day pass, but until then, we will continue to enjoy the process of growing and learning, taking small steps daily to live more consciously and responsibly.