00:00Hi I'm Victoria and I'm Guy and this is Leon and we live off-grid in Devon.
00:08So we live at Landmatters Permaculture Co-operative which is an off-grid 44 acre community
00:16just shy of top nets in South Devon. We've been living here for about three years now
00:24and decided to start a family as well with little Leon and yeah I mean I think our main motivation
00:32was because we were quite concerned about climate change and so we came here to volunteer
00:39and we stayed and became members and now we're building our house. So the house we're building
00:46at the moment is a small footprint low impact timber frame structure using locally milled timber
01:00sustainable insulation and recycled material as well and as much as possible. And yeah we're doing it
01:08all by ourselves with the help of friends and family and yeah so far it's grown quite a lot
01:16and as we're going into spring and summer now building is becoming a lot easier. One thing
01:21we've learned and that's been quite a big challenge is to actually live seasonally and what that means
01:26when you're off-grid and living quite exposed to the elements that's been a big learning curve for us
01:34to really you know embrace the winter embrace the wet as well. Landmatters as a community was founded 20
01:42years ago and it's very progressive in its nature for the laws of England and at the moment there are
01:53eight families that live here they go for a trial membership process before having one of the planning
02:00information plots on the land. You have to have done at least one winter here before getting to have a
02:09plot to live on
02:10and so it's a real test of the faith. So to other young people or anybody interested to live like
02:18that
02:19I would recommend to definitely volunteer in different communities in different projects
02:25because it can be a low cost way of getting all those skills because it is very expensive to buy
02:32land
02:32it's it's very hard to do that sort of thing so by actually traveling around and like we did volunteering
02:39in different places you can learn the skills you can get to know people and learn about opportunities
02:45where to live, where to live, how to live.
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