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 ...