Anais & Jordanne (daughters)
Justin (son)

Jules Dervaes is the founder of Path to Freedom, a family-operated, viable urban homestead project established in 2001 to promote a simpler and more fulfilling lifestyle and to sow a “homegrown revolution ™” against the corporate powers that control the food supply.

Since the mid-1980s, Mr. Dervaes and his three adult children, Anaïs, Justin, and Jordanne, have steadily worked at transforming their ordinary city lot in Pasadena, California, into a thriving organic garden that supplies them with food all year round. The family also runs a successful business providing fresh produce to local high-end restaurants and caterers.

Through their adventures in growing and preserving their own food, installing a solar power system, home-brewing biodiesel for fuel, raising backyard farm animals, and learning back-to-basics skills, these modern-day pioneers have revived the old-fashioned spirit of self-reliance and resourcefulness.

In 2001, the family began an impromptu journal on their website Path to Freedom.com–the first, largest, and most comprehensive urban homestead site. By documenting and freely sharing the steps they have taken towards a self-sufficient life, the Dervaeses have inspired hundreds of thousands of readers to pursue a sustainable future and have generated a 21st century urban homestead movement.

Mr. Dervaes has long been concerned with the state of the world and its environment, coming of age during the turmoil of the late 1960s. Anxious for the future of his family, he moved to New Zealand in 1973, where he homesteaded in an abandoned gold mining town and became a beekeeper. After returning to the U.S., he lived on 10 acres in central Florida where he continued homesteading, later moving across the country to one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena.

A period of drought in Southern California the early 1990s prompted Mr. Dervaes to remove his lawn and replace it with wildflowers and herbs, and, later, edible landscaping. In the Fall of 2000, angered upon hearing about the introduction of GMOs into the food supply by U.S. biotech corporations, Mr. Dervaes decided to take matters into his own hands by growing as much of his family’s food as possible. The urban homestead’s one-tenth acre garden now can produce over 6,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables annually.

Mr. Dervaes and his family have been the subject of numerous articles in newspapers around the world, including The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), and was recently featured on ABC’s Nightline and CNN.

Visit their website at http://www.pathtofreedom.com

growing food, homesteading, self sufficiency, stewardship, creation care

4, 000

DerVaes Gardens

Anything and everything