Off-Grid Gardening: Raised Beds & Chicken Coop Move!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we explore thriving garden beds on our Arizona desert homestead, enriched with rabbit compost and protected by fly traps, creosote-wrapped railroad ties, and a relocated carport frame for a future chicken coop. Donna’s raised beds, shaded for summer and planted with healthy transplants, promise fresh produce, while we cover the pool for winter after siphoning dirty water. Ernie bakes homemade bread in a sun oven at 350°F, showcases a road horn for tractor grading, and relocates workshop supplies from the old dome site to the shipping container for efficiency. We plan trommel builds with salvaged parts, aquaponics revival, and celebrate the greening desert through water retention!

Transcript:

All right. We’re going to go into Donna’s garden here, see what’s up. Now, she spent a lot of time putting, you know, a lot of compost and logs and kind of a big giant eagle mound. And, she says it’s working great. You know, we’re already starting to get, that’s the ball’s coming up, and, she has this area shaded.

You know, we’re experimenting with that. You have to have shade here in the summer because. Damn. And these fly bags, because we had that rabbit manure. We had to put these in so you could freaking walk out here. Those things really attract the flies and kill them, you know? Which is, you know, not for just killing things, but, man, I’m not a fly fan.

Well, they, creosote, saturated railroad ties here. You know, we just wrapped them in plastic, so we didn’t, you know, have it leaching into the soil out of precaution. Not that it would do anything up here, but, you know, some of the viewers said, you know, and those are kind of toxic. But after 30 years a row, I think they leached out most of.

But Donna wrapped them anyway. And then we took and, screwed the platform, the frame of this into the, creosote. So this thing is not blowing away. It’s not going anywhere. We put all kinds of shade and stuff on it. So this is get this started. Now, what we did, we did this because, you know, you grow anything out here.

Here come the animals, you know. So out a caution. Now we had one of these frames and, wrapping this with the wire that came with it, you know, really worked out well. And it wasn’t that difficult. So we go, okay, we’ll go ahead. And we used wire rebar ties to do it as opposed to just counting on the, zip ties because they will get destroyed in one summer here.

I don’t care if they’re UV protected or not. It may last one more season. Big deal. So we’re going to go ahead and cover this and then probably shade it and so on. Donna wants to put chickens here. So this would be the chicken area. Now the home site build is right there. You can probably make it out across the wash there.

So we’ll have the big domes and the home bill will be there. And she don’t want to be too far away, you know, from doing this. Now we have a road where the truck in the trailer is there now, she brought in, two totes of water. And because she has an electric pump here that works well for watering the garden, and it’s isolated, and she just fills it up with water and just uses that.

But to transfer all that water from there to here, you need a bigger pump. So that takes, you know, more electricity. And I’ve been using all the batteries for, you know, stuff I’ve been doing. So she just ran extension cord from the bus. You know, we had to talk about gauge and loss and distance of whatever. But, you know, she needed to power.

So she got it out here, and she’s been using the bigger pump to fill this tank, and this will last, you know, for ever. But, she’s using that, for her garden. Now, we have, I don’t know, probably eight of these. So that’s what our plan is, is decentralization of the power and the water and have several different units that can back up each other.

That’s why I was looking forward to having more power stations. Now. We have three now, and I was looking to do more. But, you know, because of the way the 48 volt thing. Yeah, it will take up all those batteries to get up to 48 volt for that inverter. Then that’s going to be the power station. You know, for a lot of the work that we do back here.

So probably be running lines. Or maybe I’ll go ahead and use some of the other inverters and, you know, get different batteries. But this road over here comes from our, other check dam that you saw, you know, back up there by that tree because, that is to retain. I was an experiment of doing the earth bags as a check dam and then coating it with stucco.

Now, this road, we’re trying not to have a road from this one going to the garden area because Donna wants to make this kind of a, you know, watch the sunset, footpath. You know, kind of a growing area and not have so much dust and everything around it. So we’re going to try and not, you know, make a road there.

Now, this wash here, is a continuation of this one. And this goes up to the corner of the property. Now, that’s a wash on the north side of the building pad. And then there’s a wash on the south side over there. And I have to keep bringing the sand pond soil up here and raise this up now, in the middle, I got it up like, about a foot, and I need to go at least, you know, 2 or 3ft.

Keep it out of the floodplain. Now, what I’m doing here is this is going to be the continuation of the check down that you see up by that tree. It’s hard with the glare for me to make sure I got it. Or you can see the check down there. Well, this is a continuation. I have a the road on the left side of the berm, and then on the right side I will build this up and keep building this up here to where it gets up the height.

And then this berm is where we’ll probably plant a lot of trees because when the water comes up against it, it’ll soak it up just like it does on the side of a wash. And then we have, you know, all the holes and everything. So this will flood so that we can do trees and so on. So that is the plan.

You know we’re working on it. There’s a lot of building stuff that needs to be done too. But there’s so many other things that we got on the property. Now you can see over there Donna see if I can. Yeah. It’s hard for me to see the screen, but you see that pile over there? That is a bunch of the remove creosote and the, low dead branches that were starting to trim off and everything.

And we take all this, the dead stuff and accumulate it and put it over there, and we run it through the chipper and, the shredder chipper is for doing, you know, a lot of this slow load dead stuff here that we have. You know, you just want to get rid of that and make it look nicer, because if you trim these back and you manage them, they’ll turn into, like, a hedge.

They get really green, you know, and they you know, they’re nice.

So it’s really green out here. And there’s a lot of animals. It hadn’t rain for a month, but you can see if you back up the the water it’s freaking grass. So that’s what the cows eat out here when you give them a chance. So we went ahead and it’s always daily work on a lot of different parallel things.

But, we need to get on having the workshop done so that we could do the stamp press with the struts that, integrate the dome into the build that’s over there. So we’ll be doing a lot of that this week to

So we went ahead and covered the pool. Today we were going to take the water out and and take the pool down and put it away, but we decided to just keep the water and we cleaned it out as much as we could, siphoned some of the dirty stuff out, covered it with this tarp, that is. It’s also kind of like a solar top tarp.

It might, warm some of the water up a little bit, which I don’t really care about right now, but we siphoned some of the water out there and I will just keep everything else going on it. But yeah, so it’s packed away for the winter time. The temperatures are daytime temperatures are in the 80s, nighttime temperatures in the 50 and the water temperatures about 62.

So not going to be using it anymore this season.

So today we’re moving this carport frame that had the tarp cover blown off of it and disintegrated here in the sun anyway. It’s about a 12 by 20. And we’re going to move it over by the garden area to make a chicken coop out of it. We’ll put hardware cloth around it, maybe shade it at least for the summer.

We might shade it in the wintertime, I don’t know. But yeah. So we’re going to move it all the way. Just take take the poles off and put it on the back of the pickup truck and take it over there by where the gardener’s.

There is going to be the chicken coop that we just moved over from, where the utility dome is going to be, and we put it here close to the garden. So the garden has been fully planted. Finally, we got here with a friend of mine. Brian came and helped. He does a lot of gardening things so he was able to help me and everything looks really good.

This rabbit, compost does a really good job. It brings in a lot of flies, but everything transplanted really well. Everything’s healthy.

Buzzing along, starting to grow already. So we’ll keep you updated on this as needed.

So I’ve got to heat the sun oven up to 350 degrees. It’s been out here for about ten minutes because making homemade bread, homemade bread the old fashioned way and kneading it, letting it rise and everything. So this is about ten minutes in the pan. I need about another half an hour for it to rise.

Okay. The bread is risen and the temperature in the oven is probably a little bit warmer than we needed almost 375 or so. But when we open this, the temperature is going to drop just a bit.

And lock it up and yeah it’s still kind of warm but. Well I can just set it in the different angle of the sun. So that’ll lower the temperature. Anyway, we’ll come back in about 30 minutes. See how that’s cooked.

Looks like the bread is done. It’s been 35 minutes, and the sun oven was able to maintain 350 degrees. So take it out.

Now, for this particular.

I will take it in the cool.

So the birds out of the sun oven and I’m going to put some butter on it. It’ll soften the crust when it cools.

So a little bit of karat gold butter there and let it soak in a little bit. And then once it cools for about ten minutes, we’ll take it out of the pan and let it cool the rest of the way. But that’s how you make bread in a off grid, not using electricity or anything just by hand and

Now this is a road horn that Jay Noone built for me. It came out. Did this just for you? Don’t have to backtrack. With the, back plate on the tractor all the time. You just pull this around and it levels out and kind of levels all of the, washboard in and so on on the road.

And that’s easy to use, like that. Now, these are, poly barrels that we’ve had for a long time, and we had them at a friend’s while we were on the Love Bus Liberty tour, and, we we. Yeah. Got them back over here so we can start working on them. Now, these are the barrels. And I’m going to be using for the trommel and then the poly ones I’m going to take.

Now this is the aquaponics setup that we had. And we kept this because it has, you know a sand filter and back washing thing. And it has, it has, it has. And you know this, you could even have, fishing, you know, and you could all kinds of stuff, but aquaponics, I’m not, it works great, you know, because it uses a lot less water.

But if you get the chemistry wrong for even a couple of days or something, you know, you kill your plants and fish and everything. It’s a thing. It needs way too much babysitting. So we’re going to go ahead and do the raised gardening. Now, these are, it was given to me, you know, for, presentation I gave in Palm Springs and they had, you know, to encourage me to come out.

And they gave me all these well casings to. And what am I to use that for? I don’t know, but I want it. So we, brought two trailers and we got all this, so I have so much of this aluminum tubing, I’m going to try and build just about everything out of it. You know, the post for everything.

And, manufacturing the frame for the trommel. I’m going to be using a lot of this. And this stuff is really light. I mean, it is amazing. You know, it is weighs almost nothing, but it’s strong and that works really well. Now, this is another 30ft dome. Now, I’m not sure what we’ll use this one for.

We’ll probably do it in one of the builds, but we had two of them. We put one up on the, round slab up there. Now, this is the motor for an old motor that was in a car wash. Yeah. Derek Sloopy friend got three of these, and we built the trommel using one of them with a control box to control the speed, and it’s reversible and all that kind of stuff.

And, he gave me one, and I left the trommel there. This is a, stamp press. I mean, not a stamp. It’s a, log splitter, a five ton log splitter. And what I liked about it is that it is, electric, and it has a hydraulic, and we, press blocks out of it, and, we haven’t really got to using that.

I really made it for a friend. And, we’ll get that going just to show that we can, because there was some little projects. Now we, I’ll show you, you know, some of the stuff that we had to redo because we had a fire, and it just really charred everything, and I had to clean all the stuff that it did.

Anything plastic or aluminum, you know, it was a windy day and, lithium, charge controller was overtax and start a fire and man, it it took care of business. But, we recuperated from that, and it didn’t really slow us down because it didn’t get any of the stuff that we were constructing, but we had to redo a bunch of things.

Now, I got the, this whole conveyor thing was from a place, a concrete place that we get a lot of our supplies, and it was just laying there, and I could use that channel, you know, some of that steel for making the trommel. And I said, take it up. Just take the whole thing. And jurors and I go, okay, so what we’re going to do is a lot of this stuff’s going to go in the trash landfill.

But, I did get some of this channel, this, unit strut stuff here. And this is heavy duty. It’s a double, but this is what I use for, putting down, the solar panels and start that up over there.

Today. What I’m doing is moving a lot of the stuff that we initially had up here, where we first built our workshop dome, and we’re going to be moving all of these things from supplies and shelving, some tools and all kinds of different things, going to be moving it from here all the way over to where the shipping container is, so that we can just have one area that has all of our tools and supplies in it.

So that’s what I’ll be doing today.

Off-Grid Gardening: Raised Beds & Chicken Coop Move!https://t.co/CTWKoGmCfq

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) November 14, 2025