Building & Growing: Electrical Setup & Garden Beds!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we make strides on our Arizona desert dome build by installing cleats and conduit for outdoor electrical outlets, preparing for patio power and hot tub possibilities. With cooler weather, we resume hyper Adobe earthbag layers, planning windowsills and dome integration. Meanwhile, Donna enriches garden beds with lightweight rabbit manure compost from neighbors and plants heirloom, non-GMO starters sourced from town. We organize the workshop for efficiency, eye a concrete pad expansion, and celebrate the greening desert after rains, balancing construction with food production in our off-grid homestead!

Transcript:

All right. Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. Now, what we’re doing today, we’re going to be doing finally the next layer to get where all the. Well, not all, but most of the electrical outlets go. But we have to make these cleats that go between the bags and what happens. These are the outside ones, the inside ones we’ve got taken care of, but the outside ones, we got to have this conduit that will go between the layers in the wall and the wiring will come from the inside on a separate breaker to the outside boxes.

Now this is what’s going to go on it, you know, and it has, you know, the outside and so on. And it’s, protected from the weather. So we got these and, we’ve been waiting on, you know, combination of all the other stuff we have to do getting the tractor back, doing some the rain. We’re carving the roads and doing.

There’s so much stuff. But doing with the earth bags, the hyper Adobe bags and the way we’re doing it with just Adobe concrete and steel, you can just leave it there for weeks, months, years and come right back and get to where we’re going. Well, now, we have nice weather, so we’re going to be out here a lot and, start really getting the walls up.

We got to put in the windowsills. We got to put the dome integrated into the door frames. We got, you know, the roofing, getting the dome on top of the pony. Well, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to go pretty fast. Now, what these boxes are they thread in. So you get these goes in and you can come in from either side or the back like we need to with this one.

Now we’re going to go ahead and put this down. But we got to prop it up to where it stays up here. And then we put another, piece of wood back here. And I had that wood here somewhere. Now I got it. Anyway, I’ll point it. So we’ll go ahead and get this down. And then I had to drill.

I had to drill some holes in here to fasten this so that it’s firm on there. And then we place it. Now let’s come over here and I’ll show you what we’re doing.

We have three places, two on the outside over there where our patio is going to be, and so on, maybe a hot tub and whatever. We need power out there. Now. This is what we’re going to do. And I’ll pound this end because this Adobe is not, you know, concrete. So we can pound these in there. Already did one over there.

And this will be on the outside when we dress this up with the, coatings out here, the stucco and so on. And finally the finished coating will have this will stick out. So an out door outlet now, what we’re doing now is when I get this one, I have one over there already. And the final third one there that we have on the outside outlets.

Then we’ll start putting bags on. And Donna’s got the kind of gravel to kind of interface. We got a wet this down and have it soften a little bit and and then we’ll start putting on the next layer once we get this done, we got another couple layers to do before we start getting in the windowsills.

Now we may have some vertical windows that, I want to experiment. This is an experimental, build here. It’s going to be nice. It’s going to be finished. It’s going to be very functional and useful as, I guess dome and, we can live in while we’re doing the main house. But then it’s for, you know, friends and family and visitors to come.

And it’s really nice finding an Airbnb in or something, you know, that come out here. It’s just awesome out here. I know we love it. So tomorrow, though, we’re going to our youngest daughter’s birthday party. We get to hang out with family and so on and plan a time for the holidays for everybody to come out here with their RVs and everything and just enjoy the weather.

Everybody bring your dirt bikes and you know, RC cars there and grandkids make use of the desert, so we’ll have some fun. But this is the last day I got one more of these to do and then it’s tractor time and starting filling hyper Adobe bags. So we’ll get that.

Now we got enough water for us to be able to do another layer of the bag. So we’re going to go ahead and get ready for that. I’m going to head down to the workshop and I’m going to show you what’s up there.

Now this is where I’m thinking of putting a concrete pad right here that would make, using the workshop, you know, to its full potential. And we’re almost done with this.

All right, we got to start unpacking a lot of the equipment and assembled the toolbox and get all of the, wrenches and everything where I know they’re at. So I’m not spending so much time looking for stuff. Oh my goodness. Now, we started putting a lot of the stuff on the shelf just get it out of the way for us to do the organization.

And I got, you know, just a bunch of my stuff on pegboard and, work table that I can use a little bit, but we just have so much stuff. Now we’re getting ready for employing in the build, but we needed to get this taken care of because I need to have, you know, I got a new vise in, you know, some equipment that, I lost in a fire.

So we’re going to go ahead and, start putting this all out so we can get back to mass production on the build. But, we had to get a lot of the supplies. We needed more equipment. And I’m putting that together now when I get done with this. I’ll go ahead and let you guys, you know, know what’s up.

Now, what we did is we took out the window shaker. We don’t need the air conditioning anymore in the bus. And that was kind of the frame that we had for putting it in the window. But now I need to get this all organized because I need to get the plasma and the welder all out and go, because we’re going to start working on the trommel, too, which is why I need to have this concrete area out here.

Now, the stamp press that we have, I have in the bag right here is the, the die for stamping out the struts for the dome. And we’re going to need to do custom segments for integrating in with the door frame and the windows. Now this table, I’m going to put a chop saw on here, cut off for the length of the struts.

And then the stamp press fashions the end for us to incorporate it and the bolting it together and doing a lot of stuff. But I really need to get I have batteries that will be here probably tomorrow, and then we’ll go ahead and power this. I got everything else and we’re just going to start building the electrical to power this.

And I got to put up solar panels and I gotta, gotta gotta gotta. But we need to regularly make sure that we’re putting in, working on the dome and get that going up, because you just got time and pressure. Time and pressure. Now for the building. We got this, platform that can be lifted up with the forklift, and that will make it a lot easier as we’re starting to get too high to be able to comfortably, fill the bags.

And then we got, you know, Portland underneath there for when we need to do some concrete. And we had a bunch more supplies and equipment and so on that we’re doing. Now, what I want to do is, probably sooner or later this is going to be a concrete area where we can do a lot of work, and I’ll put up shading that will come across and out over here, in the winter time.

Yeah. It’s nice to have the sun beat on you, but, sometimes you just like to work in the shade. Maybe get out if there’s ever any rain. But, I need a workspace here, so we’re going to go ahead and start fashioning a concrete pad for this. That’s an eventually eventuality. So, and then we kind of organize, some of the supplies and stuff that we have over here.

Now, that red building, that’s a building, you know, that we could put up, but we just haven’t done it because it’s so it’s so committed of the work that we have to do. And that’s, what does that say? 30 by what is that? 40, 30 by 40 and 22ft high. So the bus can fit in there.

So that’s been, you know, on our list of maybe can we might even sell that. I’m not sure. I think I’m going to get another shipping container and put it over on the side over here. And a roof in between them and have a concrete slab. That’ll take a while. But that is for us to be able to put all our equipment on and not be exposed to the elements.

And that’s and we have our equipment kind of lay down yard up there. And we have a place for everything. But, you know, I’d really like to get this stuff out of the sun, certainly before we get to this next spring. And it starts getting long, hot days again. Now, we haven’t really been, inclined to put the fence up yet, but we got all the stuff for it and the tractor nine inch auger creates a perfect hole.

Just a drop these in, square them up, get them plumb and boom, start running. Barbed wire. And we got a fence. But it hasn’t been a problem. The cows pretty much leave us alone. And the biggest reason we would get the fence up is because I think we’re going to get a dog sooner or later, and it’ll be sooner rather than later.

You want to get them right in the summer. It probably wouldn’t like that. And, we’ll see. You know, it’s a it’s a big commitment, but this is the longest we’ve been without a dog. And I like having dogs, you know, especially when you’re out remote out here, the kind of, radar warning of, you know, what’s coming when.

And, so that’s on the list. But we’ve gotten all the roads pretty much done. And the flood control, we have a really good bead on it. It’s just time and pressure, putting up the berms where we want to. It just. Everything takes a full day. A full day for this. A full day for that. A full day, a full day, a full day.

And developing 18 acres is a lot for, you know, husband and wife and a tractor. But we’re getting it done. It just takes time. So that’s what we’re working on. The big thing right now is Donna wants to get her food production going, so that’s what she’s going to be working on. And then you’ll see some video for that.

I’m going to try and get some, drone footage to show you just how green everything is. And on our little 18 acres, you can see it’s greener than most. Like just after a couple of reins of control on the water. This is working out, but, it just takes time. Time and prayer time and pressure.

And it’s really nice out here. Peace.

So here’s the rabbit compost that we’re going to put on top of the garden. We’ve just put it in these bags. It’s a lot easier to shovel it in here. It’s very light because all the water all the urine has evaporated out of it. And so it’s not heavy at all to put them in those bags and just dump them over here.

And as soon as we get everything on here smoothed out and water, we’re going to start planting our garden plants.

Today is working in the garden day, and since me and Ernie were in town for the last couple of days, I had planned to go ahead and get a bunch of garden plants and I had to go all the way almost back to Glenda where we used to live, which was quite a ways away from here. And, I did get some heirlooms and non-GMO plants, which is really what I was looking for.

Most of the other things just had trees and and desert foliage. That’s not really what I needed. So I do you need to go to our neighbors and get some more rabbit poop to top this off. But this, you know, the rabbit poop and bunny poop is really good. Manure or compost to use. You don’t really have to let it compost at all.

You can just take it right from the rabbits and and put it in your compost garden. Here’s the plants that I got because it it breaks down really fast. And it’s sort of like a time release thing in your garden. The pellets, the poop pellets just kind of break down as needed. So it’s really good. I’m really happy to have this, resource for this kind of thing, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

Building & Growing: Electrical Setup & Garden Beds!https://t.co/w74fNCdBDI

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) November 1, 2025