Posts from — December 2007

Well, believe it or not, I’m finally here, we left yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon (long story!), the trip was for the most part pretty uneventful, we got in about 3:30 in the morning, the moon was nearly full and it was great! Cold. but great, I just overheard someone mention that it is 28 degrees F tonight, it’s supposed to get down to 18 tonight, we have GOT to get that wood stove hooked up… another night snuggling under 6 or 7 blankets, it’s great! Sorry I have to be brief, I’m using my neighbor’s computer, and I’m ignoring everyone, so I have to cut this short, I’ll write more and post it in the coming days.

Dandelion…yummm!

If you go down to the woods today . . . be prepared to find them heaving with proto-hunter-and-gatherer types, not to mention the occasional itinerant film crew, crashing though the undergrowth in search of nuts, fungi and Wordsworth’s “lurking berries, ripe and red”, or snuffling out edible plants, herbs, bark and roots, along with the occasional trapped rabbit, in a kind of gonzo rustic rite of passage. Free food has become the most precious commodity of all.

Although mushroom-picking has long been a serious weekend pursuit elsewhere in Europe, the occasional blackberry ramble has tended to be about as far as most of us go in our back-to-nature moments. (more…)

A handful of seed

To grow a seed likes warmth and moisture, exactly what you should avoid when storing seeds! Can you recognise the seeds in the picture? They are all ones I’ve saved this year, answers at bottom of article.

Properly stored most seeds will keep and germinate well for several years, some – like tomatoes – can remain usable for a decade or more.

Storing seeds wisely enables you to save money and compare different varieties. I almost always grow more than one variety of each vegetable and there are often surprisingly large differences in how they perform and taste. This would be too expensive to do if I had to buy fresh seed for each variety every year so I take care of my seeds and add new varieties every year to sow alongside good performers from previous years.

Cool, dry and dark is how you should store your seeds. (more…)

Dylan Appleseed

On 22nd November Dylan Evans abruptly ended The Utopia Experiment (TUE) less than half way through its planned duration:

“The original aim of the experiment was to find out what life would be like in the aftermath of the collapse of industrial civilisation. I have now collected enough information to achieve this aim. There is therefore no need to continue the experiment any further.”

No doubt there’s a bit more to it than that but we’ll probably have to wait for Dylan’s forthcoming book to hear the much more. I have a brief explanation for you: Dylan changed just about everything in his life while setting up the experiment and, having arrived in his ‘new life’, felt very uncomfortable in it.

Fortunately the outside world still exists much as it was a year ago and Dylan has escaped back into it. If things develop as his scenario suggests – and I expect – that option will become less available within a few years. Nearly all recent news on the three main threats (economic, oil and resources, climate) has been about as bad as could realistically been imagined over this last year.

So I would say the original premise for TUE is even more valid than it was a year ago and the project should and will continue, we’re calling it Phoenix for now. (more…)

Keeping in the theme of kindness during this holiday season we wanted to highlight the Make it Right 9 organization that is dedicated to building 150 new energy and earth responsible houses for the Lower 9th Ward residents of New Orleans.

The effort for fundraising to make this dream a reality started on December 3, 2007 and already by today 37 of the 150 houses have been sponsored. If you don’t have a spare $150,000 laying around to sponsor an entire house you can sponsor anything from a light bulb, $5, to solar panels, $25,000, to a tree, $200.

You can take around and inside the house and see what earth and people friendly products they are planning on using. As you take the virtual tour you can see how small and large donations alike can add up to a wonderfully energy responsible house for a lucky resident of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Looking at this from an energy and earth responsible view it can be seen how this unique opportunity can show how it is possible to build and live in a more self-sufficient way without giving up our most beloved modern conveniences. As this will be done on a community scale so the advantages will be more easily seen by outsiders. Trying to show skeptics how being responsible for our own energy needs is not only the right thing to do but economically and environmentally sound can be grueling when doing it one home at a time.

We applaud the Make It Right 9 organization for not only helping those that time seemed to have forgotten but for not taking the easy road and throwing money at it, but for making a plan that not only will enable the residents to live again , but hopefully to thrive.

Since this is such an interest to The Off Grid Home we have started a page dedicated to keeping you up to date on Make It Righ 9.

Winderwoman turbine testing

If you are in the right location, wind power can meet your energy needs. It can be very cheap, and recoup startup costs in 2-3 years. But you have to make sure you have the right kind of wind. Local buildings or tall trees can disturb the airflow and mess up any turbine, however advanced. On the other hand, you might be able to solve that problem with a taller tower.

First thing is to buy an Anemometer, which measures the wind and makes sure you have enough of it. You can either make one, or buy it from Amazon (recommended).

Once you have decided that you have wind, the next thing is to choose the turbine. You have three choices:

A small yet perfectly formed Generator for under $500. Providing up to 400 watts of power, this model is relatively easy to install and can be powering your laptop just minutes after you take it out of the box. Compare that to a Solio which would set you back $80 with just enough power to run your night light.

A higher-powered Turbine for around $2,100. This one gives you up to 900 watts, and that’s enough power to run many of the gadgets and appliances in your home (although not all at the same time).

The most powerful Turbine that you should consider buying off the internet – for $5,500. (more…)

This is my bug, it’s a ’69 VW Beetle, even though it looks rough, it’s in pretty good shape, the engine is in great shape, the body is in great shape, very little rust, it shifts good, we just replaced the tires, actually put military tires on the rear, these have a very aggressive tread, they will take just about any abuse/road I can throw at it.

We plan on making it a Baja Bug, we will trim the fenders, add a different exhaust, paint it in camouflage colors (tan, green and black), I’m sure my husband has more plans for this bug, he had many of these when he was younger, and loves the bug. This car will take the abuse of the dirt roads in the mountains where I live, every one else’s cars out there are beat up, even newer cars & trucks are bounced to death in a year or so, my bug will not fall apart because of the roads, and anything that does need to be repaired, replaced or improved will cost much less and be much easier to do.

The last 2 times I was out at my property, I had my small pickup truck, and it worked OK out there, but it was clear that the roads were going to take their toll on my truck in very short order, they refer the roads as “washboard” and that is a pretty good description. I can’t wait to drive my little bug on the rough roads out there. :)

Well, it finally stopped raining, but the temp dropped to well below freezing for a couple of days, so we decided to wait until the weather warmed up a bit, doesn’t sound like we are very hardy pioneers… well the reason is a very good one, our food. We have several cases full of canned food and we couldn’t afford to allow it to freeze. We are relying on this food to keep us fed through this winter, so we can’t afford to let anything happen to it.

It got above freezing each day, but it got well below freezing each night (28 F), we knew it would take at least 12 hours to travel the 500 miles we had to go, there would not have been enough time to get there and still have enough time to properly stow our food and keep it from freezing.

The last two nights, we used a portable heater to keep our food from freezing on the trailer, the food is packed in a big cage in the middle of the trailer, we wanted to take the food off the trailer and take it into the house but getting to the food meant removing too many other things off the trailer, it became painfully obvious that we had to find a way to keep the food above freezing, there was no way we were going to get everything off the trailer to get to the food. So we used heavy builder’s plastic and canvas tarps to enclose the cage, then we placed a piece of stainless steel panel inside the cage as a base, and placed a small space heater on the stainless steel panel, there was a good 3 feet of clear space between the front of the heater and the first set of boxes so it was safe. We secured the whole thing to keep cats or any other animals from getting inside, we have lots of feral cats running around here and they would have done just about anything to get inside the heated space, it worked out great, our food stayed good, and no animals got inside.

Now that the freezing weather is past, all we have to do is make sure the vehicles are ready to go, we have to wire up the VW bug’s tail lights so that while it’s being towed, it will be legal (the brake lights will come on when I brake), and tweak the trailer load. We should be leaving for the final trip either Tuesday or Wednesday. Hopefully the next post I make will be from my property.

Oh, one last thing, I can send messages from my cell phone to this blog, the problem is I don’t do the text thing very well, I can type on a regular keyboard just fine, but it takes me a bit more time and effort to “text”, so messages from my phone will be brief and may have typos.

Benn during “vital” trip to India

Six months after being switched to the post of Britain’s Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn was still describing himself on his website as International Development Secretary. Perhaps he is trying to save energy by switching off his brain?

By the time you read this, his site may have been updated, but the detail is symptomatic of an ambitious but untalented and duplicitous man who has ascended smoothly on the coat-tails of his impressive father. (more…)