The expectation turned out worse than the reality. The common wisdom around here is that off-grid life in Slovakia simply isn’t possible. That’s not true. What is keeping you away is every comfort you’ve built up around yourself. Off-grid life isn’t a loss of comfort. You’re just the one responsible for the comfort you build — not someone else.

We’re a couple, each bringing two kids from earlier marriages into this — a blended household that shifts by the week. In the middle of that, a ten-month-old arrived in our lives almost overnight, and now we’re raising that one too. This farm is where all of those separate stories keep crossing paths: coming together, pulling apart, and somehow holding.

Off-grid isn’t the goal here — it’s the road we took to get somewhere else. We wanted to live where we’d planted the orchard, so we built the life that let us stay. It only works if you stop hunting for problems in it. It’s the art of what’s possible, not what isn’t. In the end, it’s less a technical decision than an answer to a simpler question — how do we live closer to what actually matters to us.

We farm 3,000 square meters in the geographic center of Slovakia, ringed by forest and long-dead volcanoes, run on permaculture principles — with the newest technology we can get our hands on, wherever it earns its place.

Living alongside animals here started with chickens and Indian Runner ducks. That brought foxes and hawks into the picture, which is how we ended up with livestock guardian dogs. Life here wouldn’t be possible anymore without our Central Asian Shepherds — thief or predator, these two sentinels never sleep. Then there are the horses. Horsemanship is, to me, the most complex problem-solving relationship you can have with an animal, and their biomechanics are the most beautiful of any creature I know.

What you’ll get here is what I go looking for myself — process, and whatever pushes things one step further. I’m not an expert in any of this. Most days I’m digging through the internet trying to work out what I’m about to do, and more than once I’ve hit the one detail standing between me and the next step, grateful to whoever bothered to share it. This is just me paying that back.

Some numbers, for anyone doing the math on a life like this: mornings run 05:45 to 07:15 — dog walk, feeding, then off to my day job. Back by 15:30, and onto the farm’s projects until 20:00. The first house cost €24,000. The power system, €7,000. The well, €3,500. Right now, we’re pulling in about 70 eggs a week.

None of this is particularly impressive on its own. That’s the point. Off-grid life isn’t built from heroic acts. It’s built from hundreds of small systems that have to work when nobody is coming to fix them for you.