Just thinking...Tiny House Homesteading?

I hear there are a LOT of "bitter greens" in Girdwood. LMAO!!!!

Land prices are extremely high and require alot of money just for excavation and utilities in Girdwood.

PF - Stay away from a guy named Art down there ......... JK

I like your sense of humor

PF--I freelance in design, and our fam business/bread and butter is basically manual labor. I find that doing manual labor helps my mind run better creatively, if I were in a creative job or a job that required more thinking and planning, my head would be stretched in too many directions and would just get worn out and creative quality suffers. Just something to think about.

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THE BEGINNING IS NEAR
5-star double-rated astronavagatrix earth girl

I think the mobile version of the "homesteading" lifestyle would have more to do with scrounging than with growing. More to do with networking than with "hunkering down". More to do with careful selection of posessions than with dragging home every free thing you can get your hands on and stockpiling it against the day you'll need a piece of angle iron, plywood, mesh fence, roofing felt or lag bolts. Probably your main angle of approach will be the creative acquisition and storage of food and/or bartering for a parking space and utilities for your RV.

Unless you have land or will be spending time in one place, you will not be able to make use of many of the skills and techniques that more sessile people take for granted.

A person won't be staying in AK in a trailer over the winter, that's for sure. Not unless the trailer is parked inside an insulated or heatable building, or has an outer structure built around it. But I think that going south was mentioned, so...

The scrounging, networking and careful selection of posessions might include things like:

Acquiring a selection of adaptors and knowledge to make use of any type of water spigot or electrical tap you get permission to use. You might want some kind of small solar panel or a little inverter to run 110 items off your car's 12v system while in transit. A dual-fuel lantern that you can run off gasoline. A dual-fuel stove. Maybe a propane ring and a small tank. Get a canner and learn to can things in jars. Get or make a dehydrator that can disassemble and become more compact for storage.

When you get to a new place, go to the grocery stores and find out what the protocol is for acquiring their discarded produce and bakery goods. Some of them will brush you off. Might be helpful if you tell them that it is for chicken or pigs, as they don't want to be held liable if a human gets sick off their castoffs. Lost of good edible food is thrown away from produce stands and grocery stores every day.

Dumpster dive. Locate and frequent all thrift stores in your area. Go to farmers and people with large gardens or orchards and ask for permission to glean. Dehydrate and can the best quality foods you can get your hands on. Maybe see if there are any existing gleaners groups in the area. Find out what foods are native and readily acquired in your area. In some areas of Alaska, f you have a phone that can be answered at all hours of the day and night, you can get on the roadkill list and get moose meat (if you don't mind going out at 2 in the morning to collect your meat). Dipnetting is the best way to fill your larder with salmon. Rosehips, blueberries, high and lowbush cranberries in season. Razor clams offer a great deal of meat. If you aren't any good at fishing or don't have the gear, maybe go down to the docks and ask folks if they have any fish they don't want to keep. Some people catch a whole halibut but only keep the cheeks. There's a lot of meat on the rest of that carcass. Some people enjoy catching salmon off the banks but don't want to clean them. Maybe offer a trade - you clean three fish and get to keep one.

Alaska has a lot of wild foods to offer. I'm sure where-ever you go next will have its own native bounty. Just have to figure out what it is.

I'm hoping to move to a remote village (access by barge or by air) in the next few years, and will probably take several 20' shipping containers for housing for us and the livestock. So I've been working on plans for that -- it looks like a custom-designed place that size can be made to work. I think the problem with travel trailers is that they were never meant for long-term living. Of course, they are more mobile, but if you are just going from one 'permanent' location to another, the shipping containers can be moved. Might not cost any more in the long run, either, as the travel trailers require a fairly good-sized vehicle just to tow them, where if you are hiring the shipping containers moved, you could get by with a smaller vehicle for your every-day transportation.

Kathleen

Jennigrey, you can live in a travel trailer in the winter in Alaska -- one of my brothers lived in an 18-footer in Tok for a couple of years. He skirted it, and stuff froze in the winter, but he had a good sleeping bag and plenty of blankets and he did just fine (and it got down to minus seventy one of the winters he was living in that thing). It's not ideal, certainly, but it can be done.

Kathleen

Did he at least put a roof over the trailer? I guess it technically *can* be done, but it takes huge amounts of work, and things tend to break. Even harder to live in an RV in the winter than in a wood structure or a primitive tent.

When I was a kid, my family was in the RV repair business for years, in Alaska and Texas both. Saw and repaired lots of damage from people trying to living in an RV in Alaska over the winter.

There's so many barriers to living in an RV in Alaska during the winter, I feel it's almost the same thing as saying, "It can't be done." Maybe I should have said, "No RATIONAL person would stay in Alaska in an RV during the winter." 'Course, no rational person would live in Alaska in the first place, so I guess I should have just skipped that part.

Assuming you keep up with snow removal on the roof so it doesn't crush anything, there's still the fact that any heat you create in the RV will make melt water on the roof. With ice dams around the perimeter of the roof, the melt water won't escape off a flat roof and tends to work its way inside or at least into crevices. When it re-freezes, it pops open joints and seams, lifts vent covers from their putty, rips rivets from sheet metal, etc. Rodents (shrews all the way up to porcupines) invade and chew on wires, insulation, plastic pipes. Heating with electricity is fine till the power goes out. Keeping jars of food from freezing and cracking can be tough if you don't have enough heat. If you had a big tank you could stockpile propane and use that when the power goes out, but you need to make sure your vents are unobstructed or you could easily smother.

There are several people living in tents in Anchorage all winter. An RV would be a huge upgrade. Condensation and mold can be a problem. Ice damming can be avoided by using a tarp or visqueen. Water has to get in to freeze and do damage. My 2002 cabover camper has no damage and I don't even cover it all the way. RVs have improved a bit over the years too.

Rational people miss out on great ice fishing, snowmachining, northern lights and the joy of hibernation. It is kind of pretty and pristine after a good snow too!

LT

yes, yes YES!!!!

FP, are you sure that trailer is roadworthy? is all the wiring good for the lights, do the brakes work, the grounds work? we have a 20 year old trailer and it is a real chore to keep the wiring working (brakes have been rewired). We just went thru a major troubleshooting with the wiring and pigtail etc, one of the things messing up was the grounds were attached to rusted metal, so not grounding properly(shorting I think), so hub ground off the rust to bare metal, much better now.

How about the tires, have they been sitting in the sun? does it have a spare?

Also anything plastic on our trailer is practically disintegrating, and we can't get replacement parts so have to make new ones work. An old trailer is so much "fun".

BTW we replaced part of the rotted floor with that plastic decking lumber stuff.

And then there's the copper pipes...my hub wants to replace them with some sort of flex tubing stuff.

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THE BEGINNING IS NEAR
5-star double-rated astronavagatrix earth girl

Spoken like a true irrational, LT! The garage sales in AK are much better than their counterparts in the lower 48, I'll give you that. I always assumed it was the P.F. checks that people splurged with, but now I think it's just one more aspect of the overal irrationality of AK residents. Y'know, you can get good ice fishing, snowmachining, nothern lights and all the hibernation your little heart desires *without* paying three times a much for shipping and vegetables, down here in the continental U.S.

Are you talking about MY trailer? Heck no, to ALL of the above! It's not going anywhere. I'm covering it up and parking it, going to pay a friend to knock the snow off every once in a while this winter and that's that. No bathroom on the thing, no pipes or tanks in use. It would be lovely to have something similar down South, but as I've said before, this little Blue Bell wouldn't make it down the highway to the fishing hole, much less down the AlCan!

It was better than living in a tent this summer, though.

As for those certain greens...I hear they grow well here, too. I should look into that if I'm looking for an agricultural venture in Girdwood, eh? I think that's about the only kind you could successfully undertake, here!

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Rachel Haiku Heritage City Farm

jennigrey, but you don't get the peace, solitude, and away from it all feeling anywhere but in Alaska!

I love the state, truly. If I didn't have such ties to Ohio as I do now I would pack it all up and haul it a million miles up to Alaska. I haven't been to Washington but of all the states I have visited, Alaska is still my favorite.

Ask me if it's my favorite after I've spent a winter in Whittier. LOL

I was born and raised in Alaska and lived there for many years. I love it dearly and miss it tremendously... I just found it too hard to keep stock there. Particularly the layers upon layers of thawing manure in the paddock. So now I live in maritime Washington and visit my family in Alaska when I get the opportunity. I agree about the freedom. There's truly no place like Alaska. I call its residents irrational with only the greatest fondness and kinship. When you are raised up there, you take a lot for granted. I was in disbelief when I moved down here and had to PAY to cut down a Christmas tree and not have any powerline trails to ride down. Also, the salmon here are WAY too picky about what they bite. Hunting tiny deer instead of moose. No "stupid chicken". *sigh*

I spent a summer in Whittier.

It's my favorite state too, but, uh...Whittier? You're kidding, right?! We often joke about sending a camera crew into Begich Towers with a bottle of whiskey and a pack of smokes in the middle of one of the regular snow storms, because that would be far more entertaining than any of these other reality "survival" shows!

They even got cut off this spring, for over a month, because of a rock slide. For ONCE the tunnel had nothing to do with it.

I'm afraid I'm going to miss it terribly here. When i come back, I'm thinking about spending more time up in Palmer or Chugiak or Sutton area. A little more agriculturally friendly. Or maybe down somewhere between Homer and Kenai....Too bad Homer's so expensive now.

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Rachel Haiku Heritage City Farm

When I was growing up, our area was very rural and farming/homesteading was still going strong. At that time, it was not unusal at all for the houses to be much smaller than the barns and outbuildings...and there were many outbuildings. We had a large barn, corn crib, chicken house, smoke house, wood shed, tractor/mechanical shed, and a shop. We didn't have a root cellar, but that would have been a nice thing.

So, yes, you can live in a small space (actually many advantages to it when you think about it) and homestead/farm, but you do need shelter for your animals and harvest, somewhere, some how.

Best wishes.

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"Luck is the residue of design" - Branch Rickey

Yes I was kidding about Whittier. That's why I said to ask me if I still like Alaska after I've spent a winter in Whittier.

Seward isn't bad, it's a pretty area and Resurection Bay is spectacular in the early morning. Plus they have the Nat'l Park service branch and the Sealife Center. We didn't get to tour the Sealife Center though. I bet it's really neat. I saw a lot of greenhouses and gardens in the yards of homes around Seward.