My Dad Is Looking Smarter All The Time, And He’s Been Dead For 10 Years.

I just binge-watched all 10 seasons of Homestead Rescue, a ‘reality show’ series on the Discovery+ channel, over the last month. If you haven’t watched it, a man of many talents, Marty Raney, and his two adult children travel to various homesteads around the United States and provide some support, guidance and major construction help to people trying to live ‘a homestead lifestyle’ which usually involves providing most, if not all, of their food, water, energy and security needs from the resources on their homestead property. I won’t drag you through the sad details, but usually these folks have tried their hardest to supply themselves with what they need to survive but have fallen short and need help to get into a better position. My dad didn’t make most of the errors that show up in the episodes of Homestead Rescue, and I never really appreciated how well he did.

My dad was a visionary who was a generation ahead of his time. He was NOT a back-to-the-land hippie, though he shared their interest in living off the land and organic food; he was part of The Greatest Generation and grew up in the city. Even though he was saddled with 11 kids to feed and clothe, he managed to spend some time and effort working on providing heat from wood grown on our property, put a whole lot of beef, chicken and pork in our freezers and grow a lot of organic produce. We built a new house from mostly used materials (bricks, doors, windows, flooring and wood from buildings that were being torn down in the 70’s) and we did that almost entirely without professional help. They had little to no mortgage when we moved into that house in 1974. Dad chose a spot to build the house on top of a large hill, which seems to have prevented so many problems that show up on Homestead Rescue, so we never had water drainage issues. He built a 6 bedroom, sturdy, well-insulated home that has withstood high winds and big storms for over 50 years now. We had big vegetable gardens that produced a lot of food, which we ate, froze or canned. We needed 2 big chest freezers for years to preserve the bounty. With no mentor or a Marty Raney to swoop in to help, we raised chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, cows and a friendly but rather worthless dog. Pops just figured it out, somehow. He always wanted to get solar power, but could never afford it, and never learned about DIY solar thermal. Every episode of Homestead Rescue brought up some issue that Dad had avoided in advance, by good judgement. He bought land in an area with good rains, low predator presence, good roads and proximity to amenities like hospitals and jobs. He got a good deal on the land by buying a big farm with his in-laws, splitting the place into 3 parcels and building a house from used materials.

I highly recommend the Homestead Rescue series, but my dad was one homesteader who never needed them.

I’m A Bloomsday Prepper And You Should Be One Too!

Are you as tired of bad news as I am? There is just no shortage of bad news related to the 8 billion humans now living on this planet, and it’s kind of our fault. We go to the news sites and click on the worst, most alarming headlines first – and it’s not a new phenomenon. The term “if it bleeds, it leads” is not a new concept. So it’s not a surprise that the news media focuses on bad news – a flood in the Democratic Republic Of Congo gets more attention since it killed about 140 people than an announcement of new housing for the homeless being funded in Saint Louis.

So, fear abounds in a time of relative, by-historical-standards prosperous time, which has given rise to the doomsday prepper movement that is increasingly well-known as one crisis after another goose steps across our collective screens. I’ve been observing this movement, from a distance, for quite a few years and have found some of their work to be fascinating, to the point that I’ve tried to learn about how I might incorporate some of the techniques into my life, but for rather different reasons.

I think it’s a really good idea to be more prepared for loss of expected goods and services – like food, electricity, water, etc. I have mostly just expected those things to be easily accessible and they more or less have been, with a few notable exceptions. Things are changing, as usual, and prudence dictates that I change my habits to adapt. I’m trying to grow more food, produce more of the energy I consume, and learn how to thrive when the supplies I’m used to having aren’t available.

Being more prepared to be able to be resilient in the face of crisis is what I’m calling a bloomsday prepper because I think that we’re all in this together, and we’re stronger together. I have enough food for a couple weeks, some ways to generate electricity, ways to cook without the grid being up, water catchment, some basic medical supplies and relationships. I can run some electrical devices from the battery packs in our electric vehicles. What resources do you have? Look around, assess what you have and add a few things over time. You, too, can be a bloomsday prepper!

Solar That Survives Hurricanes? An Update.

60 Minutes did a report on how the Bahamas are upgrading their electrical grid to better handle the increasingly violent and increasingly frequent hurricanes hitting their low-lying islands. I was very concerned about Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands installing solar panels, because of my concern about whether the solar panel installations would survive the brutal hurricanes that roll through that region fairly often. Well, hurricane Fiona just provided a data point – and the legacy electrical grid failed spectacularly, while the solar installations seem to have weathered the storm fairly well. I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised. I’ll wait for more information as the years go by, but this is good news for the hurricane-plagued Caribbean region. The non-profit organization Casa Pueblo says that their solar PV installation is helping the residents of Puerto Rico today, as usual, even after a hurricane. Here’s a link to a tiktok video talking about how solar panels are being installed, albeit slowly, in one town in Puerto Rico, and how the businesses who got solar panels installed by a foundation (presumably at no charge to them? Not sure) are charging themselves for the energy produced and re-investing that money into the community, to help residents. That’s good solar news all around! Solar panels are a superior choice even in regions with frequent severe weather. 🙂

Lock Your Doors. It’s Zucchini Season.

My brother told me years ago that someone told him that people in their small town didn’t lock the doors on their cars except in August. My brother said “why do people lock their car doors in August?” to which the reply was something like “because that’s when the zucchinis are ripe and if your car door is unlocked you might come back to a car full of zucchini”.

I can’t grow useful crops very much or for long, but boy, is it zuchini season in our middle east* raised bed! It was certifiably hotter than hades yesterday so I didn’t go outside, and you see the result above.

I also harvested some stevia, basil and mint to dry for later use. Being able to process fresh-from-the-garden food is critical to making a garden really useful. My garden doesn’t produce on demand – it’s not providing basil in December, for instance – so learning the best way to preserve food such that it provides sustenance when needed is critical. I suck at that too, but hopefully am learning.

Something else I learned is that the person who told me that stevia is hard to grow from seed wasn’t kidding. I saved a bunch of stevia seeds from my plants last year and planted them all this year – which netted me exactly zero stevia plants. I did a germination test beforehand and a fair number of those seeds germinated, but the overall germination rate seemed quite low – maybe 10% – 20% or so? It’s kind of hard to tell the seeds from the other fluff that grew around them, so maybe some of those specks weren’t actually seeds, meaning that the actual germination rate was higher? I’ll try again next year, focusing more on keeping the seeds in damp conditions until well after germination.

So if no stevia seeds germinated, how was I able to harvest some stevia for the picture above, you ask. I hedged my bets – I bought a couple stevia seedlings and planted those in a container, where they are doing just fine. It’s always a good thing to have a backup.

*We have 6 raised beds and we refer to them as either east or west, and top, middle or bottom, hence one bed is the middle east one.

Mint Orange Tea, Made From Scratch, Doesn’t Taste Or Smell Like Either Mint Or Orange. :(

Granted, I spend WAY too much time on youtube, but after watching some videos praising homemade teas, specifically orange tea and mint tea, I decided to give it a go for myself. Doesn’t mint orange tea sound delightful?? It did to me. We raise plenty of organic mint in our garden, and we buy organic oranges (when we can find them!), so I grated the zest of a bunch of organic oranges, picked a bunch of mint, and dried it all. Made tea in the usual way, by putting a couple teaspoons of zest and dried mint in a tea strainer, made tea with great anticipation, and was mightily disappointed. I won’t drag you through my various experiments, but eventually even the large amounts of mint and orange zest shown in the pictures above didn’t make the tea as aromatic as initially hoped. I’m just guessing, but they probably do provide some health benefits when brewed? I can’t prove that, of course. I’m going to keep adding mint and orange zest to my tea along with some black tea, heavy cream and homegrown stevia, in the hope of deriving some health benefit.

Sharing Solar-generated Electricity in Bangladesh – Could This Be Useful In The U.S.?

I saw a pretty interesting youtube video about a system (hardware and software) being sold in Bangladesh which links multiple solar PV systems together to form a mini-grid for off-grid people. And here’s a link to an article that explains the details of SolShare’s system. According to the youtube video almost 20 million in Bangladesh use solar power now, and Bangladesh has one of the largest number of solar PV systems in the world; I haven’t verified if that’s actually true or not, so don’t quote me. A company named SolShare has developed a piece of hardware and associated software to allow customers to form Peer-to-peer microgrid systems. One of the crucial services provided by SolShare’s system is the ability of people who are sharing electricity with their neighbors to be able to accurately charge their neighbors for electricity that leaves the solar PV owner’s system. It seems like a great idea, and theoretically should work well in Bangladesh – but is there any instance where this would work well in the United States? For this to work, you’d have to have a lot of people who are off-grid living quite close to other people living off-grid. I don’t think that’s common now, but maybe eco-villages might have an interest in this type of technology? Peer-to-peer sharing of energy between households is pretty far off in the United States, but this is an interesting concept.

Grid Down? Electric Cut Off? You’re Camping now!

I was pretty impressed by something my brother did last fall, and it was a light bulb moment for me. He was checking out some rural land that he intends to buy and decided to live in the falling-down house on that land for several weeks but the utilities were turned off. He has done so much camping that living off the grid for several weeks was no problem. When he was indoors he spent most of his time in one room and used a small propane powered heater for heat, for light he used his battery-powered light from a tool set that he already owned, and the radio from that tool set also had a micro USB port he could use to charge his cell phone and his iPad, as well as play the radio. He also had a small battery bank that he used for some charging. He had a propane powered cook stove to cook his food, he hauled in jugs of water, and used a lot of non-perishable food except for some things in a super-efficient cooler that only needed fresh ice every couple of days. He was able to go to a neighbors house twice a week to recharge the batteries he needed for the light and radio/charger. He was able to drive to a convenience Mart some miles away to get fresh ice and food. I think the propane tank he used lasted for quite a few days, and he was using the sort of small propane tank that’s easily available and often used for BBQ grills. He was comfortable and well fed as he checked out that property, and I think that’s a pretty good example of how you, too, can be comfortable in a grid-down or utilities-off situation. This presumes that you can get someplace to charge your batteries, so doesn’t apply to all situations, but I thought it was a good concept.

This applies more to a temporary grid-down situation than to having your utilities shut off, but you really can be off-grid in a basic way and still be comfortable. You would want to either have a smaller room (maybe 10′ x 10′) where you could close all your doors or be able to put plastic up in any doorways that didn’t have a door in them, in order to be heating a smaller space, which requires a lot less energy/fuel (in other words, less propane). If you are without grid power in a standard american house and the temperatures outside are near or below zero you may have to winterize the rest of your house – drain the water lines, put anti-freeze in your toilet tank and bowl, drain the water line going to your refrigerator. That would be more necessary in an extended power outage – if the temperatures in the house get to below freezing any sitting water is likely to expand and break things. If you had hot water heat, you’d need to drain that system too.

If you’re living just-off-grid (you don’t have utilities but places accessible to you still have utilities) your best bet for showers is to go elsewhere – a gym membership is often quite inexpensive, and would include all the hot water showers you would like. Laundry can be done elsewhere.

If you’re trying to live off-grid in the summer heat a fan is your best bet since air conditioning takes so much power.

If you were going to be just-off-grid for an extended time, I would highly recommend either buying or building a solar oven. There are lots of examples of solar ovens that you can build yourself on youtube.com – though if you can buy one you’ll probably really appreciate the power and convenience of a professionally made oven.

And yes, there’s always the waste disposal issue – as in, human waste. If this is a very short term situation, a trash bag in a trash can can be utilized. For longer term comfort, a 5 gallon bucket, a toilet seat and sawdust are probably your best bet. People do compost human waste, but you need to learn how to do it properly or you will have a stinky health hazard to deal with. There’s lots of info on this around the web.

Low Cost Lighting, Cell Phone Charging and Radio – KA340 Emergency Lantern

I recommend this device! I bought a Kaito brand device, KA340, for about $34 from my usual online retail overlord (smile.amazon.com) and it has a surprising number of features for the low cost. One issue is that, so far, low cost has meant low amount of power generated and stored. The paperwork included with this device claims it has about 8.5 watts of power storage built in, but I haven’t been able to verify how much energy this device will store IRL. The paperwork claims that it’s enough for 14 – 16 hours of light, presumably on a full charge. If you are able to put it in full sun on a clear sunny day and charge it using the built in .5 (yes, that’s one half) watt solar PV panel, with about 5.5 “peak sun hours” (not the same as daylight hours) in the summer (in Saint Louis, MO USA), you’d only be able to pick up about 2.75 watts of energy per day….so maybe you’d have to charge it for 3 days to fill the tiny batteries??? How in the world do they get away with such tiny PV panels and battery packs, you ask? If you charge it all day, in good sun, that’s still enough for several hours of light, which most people will accept. It probably takes about 5 watts to charge a cell phone, so if you want light AND cell phone charging you are going to spend a very long time using the hand crank as an energy input. Beware – there’s no indication that this is waterproof – keep it in a sealed ziploc bag if there’s any chance it could get wet – rained on, spilled on, etc. Please check out this review – this guy does a pretty good job of describing the features.