Curious what working and living off the grid are like?
Posted by Jocelyn - Queen of the Meadow on 25th Sep 2023
Working and living off the grid.
Queen of the Meadow strives to be sustainable and to leave a small carbon foot print on our planet. To accomplish this, we built our home in 2011 that closely resembles an earthship. An earthship is tucked in a hill and built out of reusable materials and materials that would otherwise be recycled or end up in the landfill. The main structure of our home is made out of recycled items; tires, glass bottles, cans, and plastic containers.
When we built our home we also included a large workshop in the home where our products could be made, packaged and shipped - as well as space for an office, inventory, and daily business operations.
Integrating our home and business space into this earthship structure allowed us to fully operate off the grid. This means, we are not hooked on to the city for water, electricity, or gas. An earthship functions as its own system. Our electricity is solar and wind powered and we use the sun to heat the house (passive solar). We do not have a well, and instead all our water is harvested off the roof into cisterns that hold a total capacity of 8500 gallons. Additionally, the entire building works as a greenhouse, and we integrated indoor growing space for organic herbs that we then process into our products.