We finally got water.
After six months of hauling tanks, the well is drilled and the pump is in. It's not pretty, but it works. Here's what the whole process cost us and what we'd do differently.
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Lucyland
Farms
20 acres. A big dream. We're figuring it out.
Lucerne Valley, CA — high desert homestead in progress
We bought 20 acres of raw desert land.
No water. No power. No structures. Just Joshua trees, jackrabbits, and a whole lot of questions. We're a family building a self-sufficient homestead from the ground up in Lucerne Valley, California — and we're documenting every decision, mistake, and small win along the way.
This site is for the people who've been asking how it's going. The honest answer: slowly, expensively, and better than we expected.
About the land →The comic
Meet Lucy.
Collapse survivor. Reluctant goat farmer. Comic protagonist.
Lucy didn't plan on homesteading. She planned on a normal life — until that stopped being an option. Now she's 20 acres deep in the Mojave, learning to fence, drill wells, grow food in alkaline soil, and figure out what self-sufficiency actually looks like when the grid isn't there to catch you.
We're documenting her journey in comics. The wins, the disasters, the moments where she stares at a broken water pump at 6am and wonders what she was thinking. It's funny because it's real.
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Latest from the field
Fencing 5 acres: what we learned the hard way
T-posts, barbed wire, and a lot of blisters. We fenced the first perimeter section and immediately understood why ranchers charge what they do.
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The land clearing saga
We thought we'd clear the build site in a weekend. Three weeks later, with a rented skid steer and a pulled back, we had something resembling a flat pad.
Read more →What we've learned so far
Practical notes from people who had no idea what they were doing.
Off-grid solar in the high desert
Sizing a system for real use, not ideal conditions. What we got right, what we oversized, and what we wish we'd known.
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Growing food in Mojave soil
Alkaline, sandy, and bone dry. We're figuring out what actually grows here — and how to amend the soil without trucking in everything.
Read the guide →Want to follow the build?
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