Desert Homestead 2026: Garden Growth & Family Holiday Recap

In this New Year’s update from Occupy the Land, we reflect on a wonderful holiday season with family and grandkids enjoying the desert—shooting, riding e-bikes and ATVs, and experiencing off-grid life. Donna shares her thriving garden: heirloom plants (lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, broccoli, peppers, etc.) are sprouting beautifully thanks to rabbit compost, natural pest control, and ideal cool-season weather (80s days, 50s nights). We plan to finish the predator-proof chicken coop (with grandson help) for fresh eggs soon. With the homestead cleaned up post-party, we look ahead to 2026 projects—more dome layers, workshop power upgrades, water retention, and food production—while savoring peaceful desert mornings and the greening landscape after rains. Happy New Year from our Arizona oasis! Peace.

Transcript:

It’s New Year’s Eve, and, I took yesterday, you know, kind of cleaning up after the family and party and all that kind of stuff. And Donna, you know, went, on a trip up north. They wanted to go see, Canyon de Shea area up there. And it’s really beautiful with Sedona. And they stayed overnight and all that, so left me to, you know, get a bunch of stuff done.

And one of it was finishing powering the workshop. Now we have the solar cable comes over. I haven’t put all the panels on or anything. I just got to where it’s getting power. And, there’s the battery system, the inverter, and that’s the wire that goes into the breaker box. I’ll show you that. But I’m going to go ahead and turn it on and for the first time, use it.

You know, I tested it, worked yesterday, closed the breaker from the batteries.

There we go. I want to see if it’s even though it’s really cloudy.

I want to see if we can get any photovoltaic coming in. It’ll reset here and say something.

It takes a while for it to do that. All right. Here. It’s.

Putting something in. Okay.

Well, let’s give me some wattage. All right. So it’s charging. That’s cool. All right, so now we’ll go in. The batteries are charged enough. So it’s 48 volt system. But that inverter does 220. So I had to get a transformer to break that 220 down into two legs. So I could have 220 for some of my equipment.

Oh, it turned on the light. All right. Cool. Yeah. So what I just transformer takes this right here is 220 splits it into two legs of 110. Then it goes in. This switch used to be on the side of my studio. I pull this down and it would just be, solar. And I can use that for generator so I can have that come in a generator or it goes into the line utility, which is the inverter and battery system goes into here, the breaker panel.

I got all these breakers connected to these wires and stuff that I took apart from before, but I just needed to power this. I just wanted to go ahead and see if it worked and, you know, checked all the voltages and everything. So we’re good. So I can start assembling this stuff and putting it back. But I don’t have to bring the battery out anymore.

I just plug in the lights and I got power charging batteries, doing whatever I want to do. Now, what we’re going to do is this wire here that’s left over. I got 100ft and it runs like 40ft, you know, listen. Yeah, about 40ft to get to here from the inverter. So that leaves me enough wire for me to send 220 across here to that shipping container.

So I’m going to go ahead and move the stamp press welders and plasma cutters and everything over there and work outside of that door or out the end here, put a concrete pad there. So that’s what the plan is. And I got the generator in case it’s cloudy like this for weeks. But, we’re going to go ahead and, you know, put all this back together, you know, check some stuff, maybe put some little more equipment in there and cut off switches and so on.

But I got most of that in the battery room. So and this is the line that was, you know, run from the back of the container there. So I have power in the workshop. I got about ten 15kW at 220 and 110. So I’m stylin. And this is a board that I had experimenting the first time I was playing with grid, off grid solar and all that got ten, 15 years ago.

And when we moved, I took this with us because I knew I was going to be using it and I did, but a 220 inverter, I had to break it down into two legs, you know, 120 and 120, and I get 240, whatever. So that’s what I accomplished yesterday. So now we can run on the plasma cutter and the, welder and so on.

I can go to 20, which makes it more efficient. I got power back here and I can just leave it on very, very cool. And advancement.

Well, we had a great holiday. All our family came out, you know, all the grandkids, the kids, Donna’s brother and of course, they got to go shooting. So I got a bunch of brass all over the place, and I want to try and get it out. I don’t want to make them pick it up. You know, we got nine millimeter and seven, six, two and two, two, three and stuff everywhere.

So what I’m going to do and we were shooting down there. I’m going to go ahead and put up my separator here, put a smaller grate on it and got it hooked down there so it doesn’t come down. And we used just a separate soil. But I’m going to go ahead and take the tractor and scoop it up and put it in there and get all the brass out of here, because I don’t want brass everywhere.

So I’ll show you how that works and we’ll see how it goes. That took me about a minute to back drag it all into a pile. Now I’m going to, just scoop it up on that and we’ll see how it separates. Well, I took the pile from here. Don’t put up there. This is all the fine stuff.

And it’ll be a lot easier picking them out from here. But I had to shovel it because the bucket is much wider than this is. So I got most of it done, kind of down to a pile. And then I just start shoveling it up on there and, you know, it’s from the sides and left over and.

Yep, gets it. So very cool. That’s why we need the trommel. There would be a lot easier to separate stuff with the trommel. We’ll be getting on that.

It’s Monday, January 5th and Donna doing work on the site and so on. This is what I wake up to every morning. It’s very nice. It’ll be low 60s today.

And the holidays are finally over. Kind of.

We had family out here. We had, bunch of people out riding, electric bikes and ATVs and enjoying the greening of the desert. I mean, it’s amazing how green it gets when it gets a little bit of water. Now, over there, you’ll see that’s called Saddle Mountain. That cloud that’s coming up, that’s Palo Verde nuclear power plant, and that’s, you know, that’s coming up.

Over the power plant. Now, what we’ve been doing is we’ve been doing a lot of, upgrades on the electrical. And Donna built this, gazebo that, was a nice center for us to relax and so on and entertain. But it has been almost too comfortable. We’ve been kind of taken off. But there’s always every day there’s something to do.

And I need to finish the, final electrical on the workshop. What we’re doing is getting the workshop powered and so on, which I’ve done. And now you’ll see, on the other side of that red container is a green one. Now we’re running electrical power over to that. So I make a workshop out of that as well. And it’s just gorgeous out here.

It’s amazing.

So now we need to integrate the dome. We have about three more layers to put on the stem walls. They’re the hyper Adobe Earth bags. And then we’re going to start putting on the dome part and start finishing the guest house. And it’s kind of an experiment. And we’re going to be oh, and there’s the moon, Lou.

So we got to get right back at it. We’re going to be doing a lot of, infrastructure detailing, getting you know, the drainage is pretty good. We have over here working on the sand pond. We have an upper terrace where we’re going to be putting fruit trees, and then the water storage down at the lower part of the property, which is ten feet lower than the highest part, which is way up there.

So it all drains down this way. And then we have, so water we’re working on for animal husbandry and agriculture. And so on. So that’s the long term plan. And then we need the workshop to be able to, stamp, press out the struts for customizing the dome integration into the walls and then the solar panels up there, just some free panels that we got that they were throwing away.

And we, my son got them. And that’s what’s power in the workshop. So it’s just enjoyable out here all day, every day. Being able to craft the land to what we wanted to do. And it’s just gorgeous every single day. It’s just different variations of this. It’s awesome. Now what you see out there, that is I-10. That’s the artery between, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

So we get to see life going by, but doesn’t bother us. We’re going to go ahead and start detailing a lot of the next wave of the build here, and you’ll see what’s going on. But we just got done enjoying the holidays with the family. It has been awesome for them to finally a lot of our kids and grandkids, half of them haven’t seen it and they all came out at one time the weekend after Christmas and just enjoyed what we do now.

They see, you know, they didn’t understand your mom and dad living out in the desert, you know, what the heck are they doing? Well, they’ve been very supportive, but now they see and feel the emotional security you have of isolation and being able to be self-sustaining. And we’ve encouraged our kids to get out of paper. My sisters extended family, you know, just hold.

So it’s a silver thing. Well, that’s taken off. And hopefully now they’ll be secure in their future. We have been, silver stackers forever, and we don’t have gazillions, but we have enough to make sure that we’re secure in the building here.

And allowed us to occupy the land.

So now we’re into 2026. I hope everybody had a great holiday and some downtime and family time. We certainly did. We didn’t get a chance to relax very much, but we certainly, had a good time seeing everybody. Our, we have two sons and two daughters. Our daughters had been out to our land before. Our sons have not.

But everybody came out. My brother came out from New York and his family, and they all had a really good time out here. They didn’t really know what to expect, but it was, I think they were all very pleasantly surprised. We had a good time. Kids are running around like kids are supposed to do. And the my kids don’t sit still.

They’re always out doing things and and running around and doing quads and the e-bikes and stuff. But what I’m going to show you this morning is my garden. And I planted this a couple of months ago, and it’s doing really well. Part of this was covered this, the end of it over there had a cover on it.

So I took that off because it didn’t seem like the things were getting enough sunlight. Because you can see here everything. It’s in full de sun for the most part. Everything is doing really well. Been taking some things out of it so far and and enjoying that. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a garden. And since I took the cover off here, the things are really sprouting up.

Now. I did have some issues with some of these. I don’t know if they’re hookworms or whatever. They were getting into certain things like my cabbage and and the broccoli plants. But, we’re taking care of that naturally with some vinegar and peppermint spray. And hopefully that will deter them from doing it. But anyways, they look like they’re, it’s growing up pretty good.

And then I also, I really need a bigger garden. But I went ahead and I planted some, carrots and radishes and this little bean here with the bunny people used before. And we’ll see how that goes just in these little containers here. And those are the carrots. But we have a lot of projects on on the list to do this year.

I mean, one of them is this chicken coop I have to finish. My grandson’s going to come out and help me with that. He wanted to get an e-bike for himself. So his dad’s like, well, you need to earn the money. So he’s going to come out, help me put this together. We’ll wrap this. Hardware cloth around the perimeter.

We’ll have to create a door of some sort and, cover the top with chicken wire and get that going. And then hopefully after we get back from an Poco will be able to get the chickens and start that whole process. But yeah, this is what it’s like out here in the morning. It’s very beautiful, very peaceful. So we’re looking forward to what this year is going to bring.

Lots of projects.

Desert Homestead 2026: Garden Growth & Family Holiday Recap https://t.co/ePIl8at8dL pic.twitter.com/IwmDj5XuPN

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) January 23, 2026