 Hey everyone, I'm Rob Greenfield and welcome to my little homestead in Orlando, Florida. I've been in Orlando for just about two years now, so my time here is coming to an end just as I planned. But before I go, I want to give you one last tour of my little homestead and share my life and why I've designed things this way. So welcome in and I'm going to show you around. Before I get started, I just want to say, this isn't just about this tiny house or this homestead. It's really about a way of life. It's about a way of thinking. For me, it's all about how can I live in a way that's beneficial to the earth, my community and myself? How can I live more simply so that I can live in the service of others? So when it comes to food, to water, to energy, to waste, to transportation, to money, to my social interactions and my relationships, all of that is wrapped up in this. And when I talk about my possessions or my garden or the design of this house, all of that is about lessons that we can learn so that we can work with the earth rather than against it. So to start, I'm going to talk a little bit about minimalism, about possessions. I have been working to simplify my life for about eight years now. And I went from having a large number of possessions, a three bedroom apartment, slowly transitioned and I actually ended up getting my life down to just 111 possessions, all of which fit on my back in a backpack and then on a bicycle biking across the country. But now, living here in Orlando, I accumulated more possessions because you tend to do that when you have a space. But also because I have embarked on this year of growing and foraging all my food, it's required a lot of possessions. So not as minimal as before, but still very minimalistic. I'm going to show you a few things. Here's my clothing shelf. So as you can see, very few clothes. The idea of this is really, do I need a lot of clothes? Do I really need to impress people through the clothes in my body? No. They serve a purpose. They serve a very simplistic purpose and often, as you probably know, I'm wearing as few clothes as possible because I just believe in the natural usage of the body. So that's all of my clothes right there, except for maybe one or two shirts or underwear that are ready for the laundry. Here is another part of my possessions. This is kind of the natural hygiene. I woke up to all of the things that I was putting on my body and in my body and realizing that they were not things that I needed to have on my body or foods that I should be putting in there or not actual foods, food-like substances. So I started to think about the shampoo, the conditioner, the body wash, the face wash, the deodorant and all of that, and I just realized that I didn't need most of that. The body functions without them. So you'll see there's not a lot here. I have a toothbrush and toothpaste. I use a natural toothpaste that's biodegradable. It's in a plastic container. I do minimize my plastic and I do live a pretty zero-waste lifestyle, but this is actually one of my luxuries. I love my toothpaste. I use, as far as washing my clothes, I have what are called soap nuts here. So this is our natural soap. It's a nut or a spary that grows on a tree and creates a soapy substance to wash clothes with. And when you're done with them, they're biodegradable, and I can literally take this and throw it right into the yard. So a pretty zero-waste way of washing clothes. I have my dental floss. This is actually made out of silk. So again, biodegradable, goes into the compost bin, no garbage is made. And then I have my essential oils. Lavender is one of my absolute most essential oils. It really is relaxing and calming. I like to use it every night before bed and multiple times throughout the day. I have a natural sunscreen, and this sunscreen is actually so nice that I want to put it on. Mostly use it for my nose, and I don't like the toxic sunscreens, and was avoiding them for a long time, but a friend of mine made this, and it's so nice that I actually enjoyed putting it on. So a few other things. I live in a very noisy city with minimal insulation, open windows all the time in the Florida heat. So earplugs are key. I live right next to two airports. There's leaf blowers and lawn mowers, busy roads. It's been a challenge living here in the city, to be honest, and I'm ready to leave. But the earplugs have been something that's been really helpful. We have a lot of light pollution here, and it's so light that I can actually read my books. I can read the name of all of my books on the bookshelf with all of the lights off at night. It's that bright coming in here. So I also have an eye mask, and then there is fingernail clippers, and then this is a manual hair cutter. So no electricity. I try to minimize my electricity usage, so it actually works just like that. I'm not going to do it right now, because I don't want to cut my hair at the moment, because I don't have to cut all my hair. Just as simple as that, I can do it on my arm. Just works just like that. And of course, this is also zero waste. I do not put myself in the landfill. I haven't really come up with the statistics, but if you think of all the hair that you put in the landfill, and all of the skin cells, and all of the times you blow your nose, and all of that, there's probably enough cells to make up multiple of you in the landfill. To me, that just doesn't make sense. My body goes back to the earth, where it came from. None of it goes to the landfill. So when I cut my hair, that hair is composted or just put into the yard. Pretty simple concept, but not one that is really practiced by mainstream society. I also burn sage and sweetgrass and cedar. So that's just a way to relax, to get myself centered. So very few material possessions. Under my bed here, I have some storage, and I have some possessions here as well. But overall, I have very few material possessions. And what I'm really excited about is I'm currently getting ready to leave Orlando. And I've seen that I haven't accumulated sentimental possessions or really material possessions over the last almost two years of being here. There's a lot of stuff in this house, but it's almost all jars, containers for food. It's mostly food. So there's not a whole lot here, and that's really great to see. So I've been getting rid of stuff already for the last week, and it's been really easy. I have not created an emotional attachment to things. And that's really the goal. It's just by not being attached to material possessions, it allows me to live a life that's just truly present wherever I am in the world. So this tiny house, it's just really simply a vessel that allows me to meet my basic needs. One of my basic needs is sleeping. So here's my bed. It's a futon that I bought used, and it works as a couch, and it works as a bed as well. This blanket I actually got off the side of the road. I've been using it for over the last year. The pillow from a garage sale. So really simple, really basic stuff. The house is built with 99% secondhand materials for under $1,500 all with friends. So pretty basic design and simplicity. So I use the word simple a lot, but it truly is simple. It's 10 by 10, so 100 square feet, and again, it's just really designed to meet my most basic needs. Over here I have some more possessions. A lot of food. Today is day 334 of growing and foraging, 100% of my food. That's been my immersive project. I'm not going to go too much into that in this video because there's other videos about that, but it's been a fantastic experience, and that was the centerpiece of me being in Orlando. And as I just have a month left, that's me transitioning out of here. I also have a bookshelf, and these are all books mostly about growing food, foraging, sustainable living, expanding the mind, and then basic cooking equipment. As I said, it's a lot of cooking stuff. So you might be wondering what's going to happen to this tiny house when I'm leaving. Well, I'm really excited that I'm actually going to be taking it apart with a few friends, a handful of friends, and we're moving it to a community called Sustainable Kashi, which is a little off-the-grid eco-village. And so this house will be used by dozens of volunteers for the years to come. So rather than it sitting in the backyard here where it might not get used a lot, it's going to be there, and it's going to be a part of a great purpose where people can immerse and learn about sustainable living and live in my old house. So actually, if that interests you, look up Sustainable Kashi, and maybe you can do their three-week volunteer program where you learn about organic farming, and maybe you'll get to actually live in this tiny house there. So I'm in Florida, and so I designed this house to be a Florida house. So people ask a lot about, what about doing this in cold climates? So if you're in a cold climate, there's a lot of ways to live sustainably. One could be a log cabin with a wood stove. There's straw bale houses. There is designing the house with passive solar for heating and cooling. So if you're in a colder climate, a temperate climate, you're going to do this in a different way. I can only be the example of where I am, and so that's what I've designed this for. I don't have insulation because it's not so necessary here. It would have been nice, but I designed this for Florida, and Florida has its challenges. Don't believe that it's just like paradise down here, the mosquitoes, the extreme heat. It is challenging, but just keep that in mind. Everything that I've designed here is to meet my basic needs here, and what we need to do as individuals is we need to adapt and adopt things to our climates. On that note, let's actually head outside, where I spend a lot of my time. So I've designed my life around living largely outside because you can do that here in Florida. You can do that for parts of the year in temperate climates. So you could certainly have an outdoor kitchen set up and an outdoor bathroom for those maybe six, seven months of the year. But this is my year-round kitchen and bathroom, which I'll be showing you. So the idea of this is that it's designed to really work with nature to utilize these resources and not let anything go to waste. So as far as water, my water is harvested from the rain. So behind the tiny house is a little barrel here, and rainwater harvesting is extremely simple. You move water falling down onto the roof and into containers to be harvested. There's a little spigot right here to fill things up as needed. And then here is my rainwater filter. So this water can be used for filtering any water, whether it's tap water, water from a lake, or from the rain. And this is a Berkey system. I think it's one of the most sustainable systems out there, so it's why I use it. I've been using them for about five years. And my water doesn't have chlorine, fluoride, anything like that in it. It's just pure water from the sky. And for me, it's water that I love. I also love spring water, but rainwater is definitely one of my favorites. So the sink is also powered by rainwater, so it sits in this barrel back here, comes out this faucet, very simple system, no electricity or anything of that sort. And then I have my sink, and then this water drains. I usually have that filled up, and then it just simply comes down. And this does not go to the sewer. Instead, all of my water stays on site. And this water just goes to the back. And then right now it's flowing out, and then food is grown back here. So this is called gray water. So rather than making it someone else's problem and sending it off to a wastewater treatment plant, it's used to keep the fertility and the water on site and not to put pollution out. So I have taro, turmeric, and there's some papaya trees going back there as well. So water is kept on site to grow food. As far as cooking, my main source of cooking has actually been a propane stove. This gas is likely from fracking, something that I really do not support. I have not been successful at living a life that's fully off the grid or fully sustainable. It's extremely hard to do that in the world that we live in today. What I do is I do a much better job than I used to do, and that's always my goal. I don't try to do anything perfectly, I just try to do a really good job. So it's a message of moderation. It's not 100% of anything necessarily. It's not extreme. Sure, acorn's on the roof. That might be one of my recommendations is don't build a metal roof under an oak tree because it can be pretty disturbing, especially early in the morning. So I may do sort of extreme things, but my message is just moderation. It's what we can do to live in a way where we use our resources wisely and don't just destroy the very home that we have. So the propane stove is not something that I like to use, but it's one of those things that I do, and it's hard to do a perfect job, but I accept that. I have my hypocrisies, I accept those hypocrisies, I embrace them, and I just strive to do better. I also have a solar oven, I cook over fire, and I did have a methane bio-digester to turn food waste into cooking gas, but I got rid of that as I'm transitioning away, and that was donated to sustainable kashi as well. Actually, that's where a lot of things will be going. My books will be used there as well, so when I leave here soon, I will leave here with almost no possessions, and most of it will be donated or used. Or some of the stuff that I bought used, I will sell used again. So just a cycle of continuing the usage of stuff and not creating garbage. So speaking of not creating garbage, this is the compost right here. So I create very little garbage. That's a term that's called zero waste, so this is my trash for the last five days or so. I create very little garbage. I use the can that's here that is the landowners, you could say, garbage, since it's very little, because most of what I do is I compost. So food waste goes into this bucket, which is then brought over to the compost bin. Things like my dental floss, which is made of silk. There's the cardboard and paper, the yard debris. All is composted and not sent to the landfill. Simply composting is something that we can all do that would make a massive change in the world. One little tip, a lot of people worry about the smell and fruit flies. Here in Florida, we deal with fruit flies big time. So what I've done, you can see, I actually fill it most of the way with water. And that way, anything that's below the water line, the flies can't get to. So you'll see, this is four or five days of compost and there's very few fruit flies here. So from here, the compost goes over to my compost bin. It's all about taking responsibility for my actions and not making my waste other people's problems. In permaculture, they say waste is just a resource out of place. So this is not food waste. This is a resource. So it goes into the compost pile and then all that water soaks in here and bananas love water and they love a lot of nutrients. So this food waste directly, not waste, this food scraps directly grows bananas, which I've been eating today that came from right here. And then it also makes a great soil that can go back to my garden. So you know, one of the big things that I kept coming back to in life, I kept seeing that today in 2019 and the 21st century, things are so easy and they're so convenient. And I had to keep asking myself, why are things so easy and convenient? And basically what I found is that the burden is being placed elsewhere. Other people are paying the true costs. People, other species are natural environment. So this is all about taking responsibility for my own actions, not doing the easy thing and throwing it in a garbage can, but actually dealing with my own waste. But the great thing about that is it's sure it's a task, but it actually adds fertility to my land, to my life and makes delicious bananas. So continuing on talking about waste, something that I'm really not into is buying toilet paper. It's actually been over five years since I bought toilet paper. And this right here, if you haven't figured it out yet, is my toilet paper. This plant is the genus and species is Plecranthus barbatus and it's in the mint family. And the reason that I use it is because it is just incredibly soft. I mean, so soft that you just want to do this all the time. Well, not all the time, but you get the picture, it's extremely soft. And because it's in the mint family, it actually smells great as well. So I don't waste my money on toilet paper. I don't have trees chopped down on my behalf just to wipe my butt. I simply decided a while back to stop wiping my butt with money, basically. So I pick my toilet paper fresh from my plants and then they come over to my compost toilet. So the toilet paper just goes right here next to my toilet. And what's really amazing about this plant is this toilet paper actually stays good for an extended period of time. I've had it sitting here for up to a week without it drying out and it stays soft and wonderful. Actually, there's really nothing at the store and minty. And what's amazing about it is if you pick it on a dewy morning, it holds that dew and actually serves as a wet wipe. So this is nature's toilet paper and nature's wet wipe if you're into that. I've never been into wet wipes, I just don't find it necessary. So this is my basically closed loop compost toilet system. So how it works is you sit down like you would on a flush toilet and then I have something here that is really important to me and this is, I have the mic in my pocket so that's why I'm sitting weird. I'm trying not to cry. So this raises up the feet and I'm all about trying to do things in a more natural manner in a way that works with the body. And we were not designed to poop at a 90 degree angle in pretty much common sense. Why would humans have pooped at a 90 degree angle? So we actually poop squatting naturally. So this helps create that squatting position and it flows out so much more easily. There's things you can buy, I think it's called a squatty potty, but you don't need to buy it. This is just some two by fours and a piece of wood on top of that. You know, it's about designing things really simply. So poop goes in here, toilet paper goes in as well and then instead of flushing because there's no water in this system I have a bucket of sawdust and you can use any carbon, it could be dried leafs, sawdust. In the past I used when they ground the stumps of trees in the neighborhood, I picked that up so the carbon source just goes onto the poop and I'm actually going to have you look in here, you'll see this is actually full. This is full of poop and sawdust and there's very few flies you can't see but there's no smell. And the system works extremely well as long as you have enough of the carbon source which absorbs the smell and absorbs the moisture. There are systems that you can spend thousands of dollars on that work indoors. You can use these indoors as well but there's all sorts of systems, this is just the one that I use, I keep things quite simple. Now as far as pee, I have had a system set up here where there was a five gallon bucket and water where you'd pee in it and that would dilute it and then you would pour that on plants to water them but instead what I do is I planted a banana tree here and I simply pee not on the banana tree but around the banana tree. The banana tree is mulched all around it and that mulch, that carbon absorbs the nitrogen, no smell, bananas love a lot of nitrogen so this is me taking responsibility for my waste which is not waste in permaculture, waste is just a resource out of place so I'm putting it in a good place and my pee will be used to produce bananas. As far as where the poop goes, I put it into the 55 gallon blue drums and then that is brought to sustainable kashi where it's put on their fruit trees and it's used to grow food so again my poop is used to grow food and is not wasted. So continuing on with talking about hygiene, what about showering? I'll take you over to the rainwater shower. So this is the rainwater shower and as I do with most things I kept it very simple, harvesting water off the roof, I love this water because there's no chlorine, no fluoride, any of that stuff it's just water from the earth, collects into this barrel and then I fill up a five gallon bucket and then I have a bowl in there and I just use the water and then I just pour it over my head and that system works really great. I love being outdoors, I don't, I really don't like, I almost never take showers in people's houses I feel like I'm in a cave usually. Right here I'm out, I'm in the air and speaking of hygiene that's one of the biggest things you know talking about smell, first of all I think a little smell is fine, it's natural it's not a big deal but second of all one of the things that I think reduces smell greatly is exposing to the air, you know feet aren't naturally smelly it's because they're cramped up inside of shoes and armpits are a lot less smelly when they get plenty of time outside and they aren't all the time stuck up in clothes so just a natural mindset totally changes a lot of these things where we think we need products and such. So that's the simple shower and of course next to the shower is a banana plant and this absorbs the water, this is about four months, five months old and hopefully within the next year that will be producing bananas with my rain water, with my shower water and then as far as transportation I try, I bike mostly so I have what are called panniers which are bike bags that go onto a rack which allows me to run errands and do all of that stuff so I live without currently any bills, no debt, no credit card, no bank account, no driver's license, no car, extremely simply and there's a lot more that I want to tell you about those things because a lot of people wonder well how do you manage this financially how do you make money and what are you going to do when you get old and what about health insurance so I'm not going to go into all of that in this video but in the next video I'm going to go into those questions that I get asked all the time and some of those foundational frameworks of how do I manage to live this life outside the system because this life is very much outside of the system so how do I manage that and again all this is about living in a way that's beneficial to the earth, my community and myself everything that you saw here is simply designed to streamline my needs to make them as simple as possible and live in a way that I can dedicate my life to the service of others to the service of the earth to my community and the other species that are out there so I will cover more in the next video this is almost goodbye to Orlando it's been wonderful to be here you all will continue seeing me I don't know exactly where I'm going next I don't know where I'll be settling down next but you will be seeing me on here again if you've gotten inspiration from this video if you've gotten a lot of knowledge out of it that I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't already make sure you share this video with friends hit that like button to spread this out throughout YouTube and also leave some comments and I'll try to answer most of them so I love you all very much great to see you and see you again soon