Now that the autumn foliage is turing all kinds of impossible colors, many people are “hitting the trails” to enjoy some brisk outdoor exercise while viewing the autumnal crazy-quilt as it brightens day by day. Both city dwellers and rural denizens have embraced the union of the Rails to Trails projects locally, across their states, all over the nation and crossing international boundaries with the recently popular pastime known as Geocaching.

What, readers may ask, is this “geocaching” thing? According to its official website, geocaching is “a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.” Because of the unique location of my homestead within ‘spitting distance’ of the Mount Mitchell trail from Graphite, abutting the Pisgah National Forest and comprising the interior of the primary omega loop of the Round Knob loops of the Norfolk-Southern grade over the eastern continental divide, we have known about this geocaching phenomenon for years. There are at least three caches within 5 miles of us, and there are summer camps just up the road near the trail-head that ‘specialize’ in organizing geocaching expeditions for teenage campers. Thus for geocachers to join with the Rails to Trails projects is a match mae it… natural world heaven!

According to the geocaching website there are 1,540,286 active geocaches at various obscure spots worldwide, and more than 5 million active geocachers who spend time seeking them out. Some are bikers, some are hikers, all enjoy the outdoors and being able to pinpoint their position on the globe via satellite device. How these interests work with the Rails to Trails projects is to enlist dedicated geocachers to help the Conservancy produce GPS-accurate maps of various landmarks along their converted trails. Once mapped the trails then become popular destinations for geocachers, who just might set up some caches here and there for others to find. Win-win situation all around.

The Rails to Trails Conservancy offers a site called TrailLink that uses your current GPS position to return a map overlay leading to its trails in your immediate area. Or it can be searched for any area you may be planning to travel to for an autumn break and some dedicated leaf-looking. In my neighborhood a mountain biking group recently purchased a lodge nearby educated to the many mountain bikers who use our trails and bikeways and such during the ‘nice’ 9 months of the year, including the annual “Assault on Mount Mitchell” and the later descent from, which makes those days not a very good time to try hiking. They have a nice geocaching station with its own GPS and really nice heads-up displays, and regularly updates its trail and road maps with GPS data collected by bikers who stay there.

Almost every state has a Rails to Trails organization working to buy up the right-of-ways to old, no longer used railroad lines that are converted into trails. This gorgeous October weather beckons, and the trees are busy putting on their most colorful gypsy costuming for your delight. So grab a pack and some hiking boots – or your handy-dandy bicycle – and your cell phone GPS, and head out into the countryside to enjoy the season’s fine offerings. Some of you may enjoy it so much you start thinking seriously about joining us homesteaders out in the boonies where we get to enjoy all the seasons and all the ‘best-of’ our regions have to offer.

Happy trails!

Links:

Rails to Trails Conservancy
Geocaching.com
TrailLink
Good Roads, Rails & Trails

Andrew Burger at CleanTechnica blog reported Monday [September 26, 2011] that Westinghouse Solar has introduced new plug-and-play solar panel kits for do-it-yourselfers, which can be purchased off the shelf at Lowe’s. These kits come with built-in AC inverters, brackets, roof flashings and panel splices, connecting easily to each other. Each panel is rated at 235 watts, making the basic 4-panel kit (~$1500) come in at just under a kilowatt.

Homesteaders are nothing if not do-it-yourselfers, and most of us would dearly love to be supplying our own power. Maybe even selling clean green energy back to the electric company by generating more than we normally need! And since we tend to live out in the boonies… er, countryside, we are often last in line to get our outages taken care of after storms or other problems cut electricity. It would be great to have alternative on-site sources for at least some electrical demands when the commercial power’s out, preferably not a gasoline generator that uses petroleum, contributes to global climate change, and is loud enough to be a public nuisance.

The price of solar panels has been coming down steadily over the past few years, as more companies get into producing the materials for them, and with China investing heavily to develop their domestic industry. There are still state and federal rebates and incentives available in the U.S. to help cover the cost of going solar, so now would be a good time to buy. Those rebates and incentives won’t last long once the price comes down to honestly competitive.

About the most expensive part of these DIY kits is the licensed electrician recommended to do the actual wiring into the home electrical box, or the grid feed-in. Our electricity company is Duke Energy, and while they will facilitate a tie-in, it has to be done by one of their own electricians, and those make $30-$50 an hour. Pay-back depends entirely on how much your utility supplier charges per kilowatt hour. That cost isn’t coming down with fossil fuels or nuclear, so a homesteader could see pay-back in 6-10 years. If you’ve enough money (or credit) to install DIY panels on your barn and outbuildings as well as your house, you could be a net energy producer through the feed-in and almost break even right from the start.

Your own needs will of course come first. Check out your most recent electric bill. It will tell you how much you’re paying per kWh for juice and give you a feel for how much electricity you use per month (round high). Our conservation efforts here will make a big difference in how much roof you’ll have to donate to the generation project. It can take up to 64 panels to cover the “average” homeowner’s electrical needs, and given the size of these panels, you’d have to have several roofs or donate some land to the effort. But of course, homesteaders aren’t “average,” always aware of our consumption habits and trying to lessen our carbon footprint.

Thus to go completely off-grid you’d still have to be independently wealthy. And solar panels only generate when the sun shines, so while you could make a good dent in your own draw on the grid during the day, you wouldn’t be selling back to the grid while you sleep at night. Better bets for a grid tie-in would be wind and/or micro-hydro, both of which would generate ‘trines 24-7. The 4-panel solar kit from Lowe’s could be used to power a dedicated circuit in the house for a specific appliance – like, say, an energy efficient refrigerator or chest freezer – and a 12V battery charger. That way when the electricity goes out you could still maintain refrigeration and household lights, maybe your computer.

At any rate, this is great news. Solar is finally coming into range for the average property owner, even just as an assist to offset continual price hikes in fuels the utilities use for generating electricity. The more people who take advantage of on-site generation, the fewer new big plants – coal or nuclear – the utilities have to build. Check out some of the links below and start dreaming!

Links:

Westinghouse Solar
Westinghouse Solar Introduces Low-Cost DIY Home Solar Kits
Everything Solar: How Much Energy Do You Need For Your Home?
Energy Matters: Wesinghouse’s DIY Home Solar Kits

Now that my terminally wrinkled fingers have finally recovered from the tomato harvest – two bushels dried and half-dried, a third bushel variously canned and frozen – I can get back to enjoying the break (finally!) in this summer’s all-time record heat wave that had us here in the mountains suffering 95º+ temperatures daily for two and a half long, long months. Back to more normal now with low to mid 80′s during the day, mid 60s at night. I love all the seasons for what they have to offer, but readily admit spring and fall are my favorites. Because by February I’m darned sick of ice and snow no matter how pretty it is, and by August I’m more than ready for fall’s crisp clarity and cool nights.

Homesteaders tend to make real sacrifices for as much self-sufficiency as possible even while our most major projects proceed over a period of years in a perpetual “work in progress.” We like to tread lightly on the earth, though as the temperatures steadily rise a lack of air conditioning certainly can make summer a miserable season. So thoughts of course turn toward more necessary projects for energy self-sufficiency that are bigger than just completely redoing the water system for a ram jet and gravity feed. Solar panels are still too expensive for my family at this time, but I have discovered some nifty wind projects we could build on-site without the multi-thousands of dollars it takes to even think about solar.

That of course being a big project for sometime down the road (still working on the water), but please do check out the Homemade Wind Turbine Plans site to get yourselves dreaming in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s good news for Florida utility customers this week, which may even end up helping out utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina as well.

If you’ve driven cross-country in the past year you may have noticed that the vast American Midwest is sprouting windmills at a fast pace. Given this year’s nuclear horror at Fukushima – and associated nuclear unease across the entire planet – you may be happy to know that it became official over the past year that renewable energy sources now produce more electrical generation capacity in the U.S. than nuclear. The statistics are that wind, small-scale hydro, solar and biomass energy production came to 381 gigawatts of capacity, compared to nuclear’s 375 gigawatts.

The nuclear industry – which is multinational and ever greedy for more multi-billion dollar annual handouts from first world governments – had other plans for a “Nuclear Renaissance” before 3 reactors and 4 spent fuel pools melted down at Fukushima Daiichi in northern Japan this past March. That ongoing nuclear disaster has pretty much halted the planned renaissance in its feeble tracks as the public all over the world gets a rare opportunity to critically examine our collective plans for the future in the midst of global economic depression and punishing ‘austerity’ measures imposed by the mega-rich. Seems that one of the belt-tightening measures regular people have begun to take for themselves as money supplies dry up is to get serious about conserving energy usage. Thereby cutting their utility bills. A great many are also canceling their cable television and finding that the information and entertainment they can get from online sources gives them a satisfying amount of control, freeing them from the 24-7 influence of paid propaganda.

On the utility front, Progress Energy’s clever plan to charge its Florida customers an average of $50 extra dollars a month to pre-pay for a nuclear plant it planned to build in Levy County north of its Crystal River nuke is getting some scrutiny from the courts. Originally justified by an always spurious target date of 2016 for coming on-line, it turns out that Progress has conceded that the plant has no chance of even getting built before 2027. Construction delays, dramatic cost overruns and the changing regulatory and public opinion realities since Fukushima are taking a toll. It is becoming completely clear given diminishing demand for the power during this global depression and public efforts at conservation that the Levy plant, as well as new plants in Georgia and South Carolina are most likely to never be completed.

Thus the Florida state Office of Public Counsel, which represents consumers in utility matters, is arguing in an administrative court challenge that charging consumers extra money for decades before a new plant comes on-line is unfair. Depending on how this suit before the Public Service Commission turns out, similar extra charges in Georgia and South Carolina may also be stricken.

Relief for utility consumers is always welcome, but the extra charges have helped to spur speedier deployment of renewable sources of energy by cash-strapped homeowners. Rooftop solar panels are proliferating all over the place in “The Sunshine State” as well as across the south. Recent entrepreneurial start-ups that allow homeowners to ‘lease’ solar panels atop their roofs and still pay less on energy bills are taking off even in this lousy economy. Costs to the homeowner are minimal, and the panels produce electricity at a cheaper rate than big utilities charge per kilowatt hour.

One such company is SolarCity, which offers a range of capacities for businesses as well as homes and has been getting quite a lot of press coverage. Business is booming. An arrangement like this could greatly benefit homesteaders who live in sunny climes but do not have the money up front to buy and install their own solar systems. Energy from the grid isn’t getting any cheaper with or without new nukes, though the costs of alternatives is falling. If you’ve a good credit score, this leasing situation may be your best bet for the immediate future. Some plans allow for the homeowner to purchase the panels over time, assume ownership at the end of the lease for a minimal pay-out, etc. But the value of having installation, repair and replacement services as part of the lease is high enough to seriously consider.

At any rate, here’s to more and more renewable generation capacity large or small, everywhere across the country and the world. It’s a change we’ve needed to make since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof as an inspiration to the nation. The solar panels Ronald Reagan had removed as soon as he took office and dedicated the national treasury (and all our military might) to the project of stealing all the petroleum in the world first. After a full decade of dedicated resource wars in the Middle East ad Central Asia, it’s time we the people got back to where we should have been all along. As those Hippies used to say back in the day…

Power To The People!

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

Right now the peas from spring are done and the fall crop hasn’t yet been planted. But beans are coming in fast in large rushes. If you are growing pole beans like I am (take up less room, are way more abundant than bush beans), you may be growing varieties best purposed for shelled beans than your basic green bean. I have for many years tossed the pods from shelled peas and beans into the compost bucket, but it turns out you can fry them up into a nice finger food once you’ve removed the seeds.

Another good idea is to maintain a good tight-lidded container in the fridge to hold scraps from various vegetables – carrot, leek and onion tops and ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, those pea/bean pods, tomato cores and skins, the tough stems of kale, collards and chard, potato and/or eggplant skins, fresh corn cobs, pretty much any actual food-food waste generated when processing for canning, freezing or drying. When the container nears full, put it all into a stock pot and boil it up with the addition of some fresh but less-than-presentable herbs (like older parsley, spotted sage, holey basil, etc.) for veggie soup stock. This can be strained and canned to keep all through the winter and used instead of water for meat-based soup stocks, gravies, etc., or just by itself as veggie stock for soups or for cooking dry beans and such.

You can salt it before canning so it’s ready-to-use, or omit the salt and add it later when you’re making something with it. Once the good flavor and valuable nutrients have been boiled out into stock, the leavings of course go right back into the regular compost. It’s like getting twofers from your hard gardening work, and well worth the effort. If you do the hot processing outside on the grill so it doesn’t heat the house, it saves energy and money as well.

If your homestead boasts some dogs – as mine does – you also know that dogs love vegetables as much as we do, and love leftovers even more. There are vegetables dogs shouldn’t eat, but about a quarter of their regular diet should be vegetable (and is in most dry dog foods). Vegetables for dogs should be cooked or steamed, though some like ‘em raw. Remove tomato and onion parts from your unsalted soup stock leavings and your dog will scarf it down no problem. Here’s a good source for pet nutrition, and another with info for home made pet foods.

When all is said and done, kitchen scraps can go into the compost as-is, along with the rest of the yard and garden trimmings, weeds and leaves in the fall. It all makes very good mulch and additions to our gardens, allowing us to grow more food. But the idea of us or our pets getting every bit of nutrition from our food crops is very good, and makes the entire system a whole lot more efficient.

As the economic situation gets steadily worse – the second recessive ‘dip’ is already upon us and once the economic indicators are recalculated we may already be in negative GDP territory. Now that the Congress has passed their very ill-conceived austerity program and put a “Gang of 12″ in charge of slashing and burning, we should be all the way into major depression by Christmas, with real unemployment pushing 20%. We need to be even more attentive than usual to getting the most out of our gardens and livestock, go ahead and plan for those winter crops we could grow in cold frames, preserve every last bit of food however we can, and hang on tight. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Toward that project, I’ll be blogging about grains this month. Grain is getting more and more expensive to buy, but few homesteaders without lots of flatland acreage and a tractor grow any of their own beyond sweet corn or field corn for the livestock. Grains being an important part of our (and our pets’) diet, I’ll be looking at the best and most productive grains to grow in the garden or along the edges of our yards and fallow fields, and how to process and use them. I’ll also be looking at wild grains that we may have access to, as well as local grains you may be able to barter for from a neighbor who grows wheat or barley. It will be important for us to have some poundage of whole grains carefully stored away to make it through until next summer. We are lucky, as many people will be going hungry before things get better. We have to be realistic, plan for this future, and get all our ducks in a row. So please stay tuned!

Useful Links:

Living Simply: Zero Waste
Foods Scrap Cuisine
Home Made Pet Diets
How to Compost Food Scraps
CalRecycle: Food Scraps Management
Frugal dilemmas: food scraps, or more food?

The Last Mountain is a new documentary film detailing the gross environmental destruction of mountaintop removal [MTR] coal mining, featuring interviews with some of the activists most involved in trying to save the beautiful Appalachian mountains from King Coal.

The subject of MTR has been covered previously on this blog in a number of posts, including EPA Halts MTR Permits for Review, with information about EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s attempt to slow the destruction – a task that has been less than successful due to the power of King Coal. Old King Coal vs. Reality talks about some of the legislative actions attempted by states impacted by MTR to prevent the continued destruction of mountains and entire watersheds – which have also been less than successful. Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul described some of the environmental horrors being visited upon the land, water and people of the Appalachian highlands by a coal mining method that has succeeded in eliminating 40,000 jobs for those same people while burying more than 2,000 miles of once pure mountain streams and flattening 500 mountains.

The film’s fine website includes links and outlines of ways you can help end mountaintop removal mining, something people even well outside the Appalachian region should support. We must not allow these most ancient and abundant mountains on earth to be utterly destroyed to serve the bottom line of criminal enterprises like Massey Energy – which racked up more than 60,000 environmental violations between 2000 and 2006 and criminal charges for violations leading to the explosion at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners in 2008.

It’s not easy to stand against King Coal. Just in the last two years more than 200 people have been arrested in civil disobedience protests just in West Virginia and Kentucky, two states that are suffering the bulk of destruction and the loss of more than a million acres of forest and dozens of towns. This extreme form of coal extraction has turned the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia into a moonscape of barren, toxic wasteland. What needs to happen, and needs to happen soon, is for so many people to make a stand that the unholy alliance of King Coal, state politicians on the take and law enforcement are forced to step aside.

Please see this film. Arrange a showing (can be done through the website) and invite all your friends and neighbors, maybe your co-workers and boss. Join or support some of the alliance groups that have supported the production of The Last Mountain. Some of these are listed and linked below.

If the Appalachians are destroyed for their coal thousands of homesteads will be destroyed along with them, along with the loving work all those homesteaders did to develop their little pieces of heaven on earth for themselves, their families, and all of us who are making the same effort in our own lives, wherever we are doing it. We all must stand with the people of Appalachia against the forces of destruction-for-profit. Thanks, Homesteaders! Let’s get together and end this outrage now, not later!

Alliance Links:

Appalachian Voices
I Love Mountains
Coal River Mountain Watch
Natural Resources Defense Council
Sierra Club
Waterkeeper Alliance
CREDO Action
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

As my family begins work to re-engineer our water system by tapping a new spring and installing a ram pump to a new cistern on the ridge, I am once again thankful for our semi-abundant supply of clean, fresh water on our mountain homestead via two clear-running creeks draining the National Forest uphill to the continental divide. I realize that we have something real and valuable here to work with that way too many people who aren’t lucky enough to live here do not have – a nearly endless supply of water pure enough to drink without filtering, fresh and cold enough to host ample populations of native trout, and fast enough to escape the winter freezes on its way to the piedmont’s rivers and lakes.

Serious shortages of fresh potable water across entire regions of the Middle East, Africa, central and south Asia have long been in the news as conditions grow worse with the advent of global warming. Extended droughts have caused increasingly destructive wildfires in Australia, Russia and here in the United States, where fires so far this year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have charred millions of acres of land.

To get a picture of how bad the situation is getting – and how agricultural policies, municipal waste and unsustainable consumption levels affect the clean water we Americans tend to take for granted, consider the fact that the mighty Colorado River no longer flows to the sea because every drop is diverted along the way. Running 1,450 miles through seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, the river and its tributaries have been impounded by 20 dams along its length to provide water to cities in the parched southwest and water for irrigation, golf courses, desert green-spaces and such. Some researchers are saying that Lake Mead, the source of water for 22 million people, may be dry by 2012.

With the human population growing at an increasingly unsustainable rate, irrigation for growing crops around the world has also increased by millions of hectares, more than doubling from less than 150 million to 300+ million hectares since 1960. As the climate changes more rain will fall in some places while other places turn to desert, and no one seems to be paying enough attention to our bad agricultural practices and lousy dietary choices that pretend clean water is something we can all take for granted forever. It’s not just the fabled Colorado that is running dry – China’s Yellow River, which used to flood so severely every year that my childhood never saw a year when hundreds of thousands of people weren’t drowned, no longer reaches the sea and has been known to go completely dry. One of the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea is now completely dry for part of every year, even as the Aral itself shrinks alarmingly.

Lake Chad in central Africa has shrunk by 95% in the last 40 years, and the Punjab region of India is facing a vastly diminished water table, as is our own Great Plains breadbasket region as the vast Ogallala Aquifer is drained steadily to irrigate genetically engineered crops used to feed livestock raised in unhealthy CAFOs for meat rather than human beings.

As we here at the homestead move through the summer being very careful to ration our water usage due to the cracked cistern, it’s not hard to see how it’s not just our bad farming practices that waste and pollute the earth’s water supplies, it’s also ourselves. Why doesn’t everyone have low-flow toilets and showers by now? Why do we still fill big bathtubs high for lengthy soaks when a few inches of water would do the job of washing away the grime just fine? Why do we insist on those ridiculous manicured lawns that serve no purpose at all, when a nice veggie or flower garden would be much more inviting, and local, well-acclimated wild plants would make for a much more interesting landscape?

UK’s Independent published an article citing details of the World Water Development Report released this week, and the outlook isn’t good. Right now 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, and nearly 2 and a half billion lack proper sanitation. Inertia among the world’s political leaders means that necessary efforts for conservation aren’t even starting despite the ever worsening situation. The projection is that by the middle of this century at least 7 billion people in 60 countries will face water scarcity. This adds up to hunger, disease and death.

What little fresh water the planet does have is being polluted unmercifully. Much pollution comes from chemically dependent agriculture, but in our haste to exploit energy sources the practice of fracking for natural gas is shocking in its gross disregard for environmental preservation. In some places water coming out of taps actually burns, and the chemical stews used in the process don’t even have to be reported for toxicity. The pollution is so shocking that the state of New Jersey this month passed a statewide ban on franking in order to protect their water supplies. Pennsylvania is considering its own ban, and more states are sure to follow.

At present more than 1,100 U.S. counties face water scarcity issues. That’s a third of all counties in the contiguous 48 – this is a very, very serious situation we should all be paying attention to. For homesteaders out here working hard to become as self-sufficient as possible, we might well begin to consider our own water supplies to be the most valuable natural resource of all in our efforts to protect and defend the land and our chosen way of life.

I know that our current water troubles here on my own homestead have certainly made me more aware of just how precious this resource really is, even though I do not irrigate my crops at all because there is no shortage of rainfall in these Great Smoky Mountains. I have been following the various models for projecting what is to occur as the climate changes, and have been somewhat gratified to see that while we can expect up to 4 degrees overall rise in annual temperature means, we are slated to also get about 4 inches more rain every year. I can always plant peaches, figs and pecans in the orchard if it gets too warm for good apples and pears, grow more watermelons and pumpkins for market. But ensuring the purity and continued flow of water through my land must become a passion that I’m as willing to pursue as my lobbying against GMOs to neighboring farmers in order to protect the value of my organic crops.

They attempted a couple of years ago to carve out sections of the National Forest we abut, so developers could create fancy log McMansion gated communities for wealthy people’s vacation comfort. These developments had carte blanche to divert the natural mountain streams that drain the eastern side of the divide for their own lakes and golf courses and such, which would discharge chemicals along with their sewage back into the streams uphill of us that then flow through my property. Every conservation group in the region got together, and with help from us landowners lobbied hard to the federal agencies who thought they could sell portions of our collective natural heritage to rich people just because there was lots of money involved. The very best thing to come out of the nationwide financial collapse – and real estate bust – was that this plan got shelved when nobody was buying. Though we are watchful, because once things pick up again they’ll be right back to buying up tracts of National Forest for their own amusement and dumping their waste on us.

This can happen anywhere there are state and federal lands, way too close to our beloved little plots of land we cherish so much. Even during times of economic distress like the current Great Recession bureaucrats may be moved to sell the water and mineral rights to irresponsible corporate interests for exploitation, and our water woes will get steadily worse. Look around closely at what’s happening in your state and area, and get involved with the conservation groups that are fighting this rape of the land and water. Don’t feel safe just because you no longer live in a city, or because your land abuts set-aside tracts of wilderness. We homesteaders must get active to protect it all, or one of these days we’ll wake up and it will all be gone.

Links:

Frack and ruin: the rise of hydraulic fracturing
FAO Water: water scarcity
EPI Eco-Economy Indicators
Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions
Global Warming: Water scarcity scares US counties
Regulation: an acceptable cost for frackers
N.J. legislature passes ban on fracking

As part of our plan to revamp our water supply system to get rid of the energy-sucking 220 pump and replace it with a ram jet, and concurrently installing geothermal collectors to supply a steady supply of cool air in summer and warmer air in winter, I’ve been checking into other ways of cutting our grid energy use. It will be years before we’re in a position to purchase solar panels or a wind generator to get the homestead off the grid entirely, so every little bit of electricity we don’t use from Duke Energy helps our bottom line.

A friend in Arizona long known for his bicycling prowess sent me a link to David Butcher’s Pedal Powered Generator website, which is chock full of information about getting a little exercise while charging up some batteries used to operate things like LED lights, computers, televisions, electric motors on your assisted transportation (Moped), even a washing machine. Though that last takes some real muscles for the spin cycle. I’ve often thought that as I’m sitting here at my desk surfing around on the internet I should be pedaling a stationary bike to power the machinery that lets me do that.

Butcher’s site offers free Do-It-Yourself plans, some videos for instruction, some hints for potential uses of your generator, and power stats for various appliances you may want to power in this way. you of course will need the DC batteries to charge, and the AC adaptor for many appliances, but those are available all over the place. MNS Power has both DIY plans as well as systems for purchase along with video instructions for installation of all components.

And for those who really get into the swing of things human-powered, there are even sites out there where you can purchase 12 Volt appliances you can power directly. Things like LCD flat screen TVs and DVD players, refrigerators and freezers, various kitchen appliances, fans and heaters, lights, etc. There are of course the usual cellular phone chargers, Bluetooth kits, appliances that come with their own built-in inverters and such. I particularly like the 12 volt refrigerator/freezer, which while quite small, could be powered by solar panels most of the time or switched to pedal power if the sun’s not shining enough to keep the batteries charged.

Refrigerator/freezers are one of the biggest energy hogs in any household, yet they are important for keeping food safely at temperatures where bacteria can’t grow enough to make your family ill. This is of course a much bigger issue in the summer than in the winter, when a simple window box or porch-mounted ice box could be used instead.

A friend in Pennsylvania once rented an old farmhouse that had a nifty water refrigeration system built-in. It was a concrete trough that ran across the width of the cellar. Spring water came in through a pipe at one end, and drained out of a pipe at the other end to a rock-lined depression that took the water to a stream. The spring water was about 40 degrees all year long, cold enough to keep things cool enough. Deal was, she had to use those Tupperware type containers to keep water away from the food, and bricks to keep those containers under the water. Still, it worked, and kept melons very nicely.

Knowing we have to do something about the water system (because the cistern cracked) has put me in a mind to be looking around for the many energy alternatives that homesteaders could be using to keep their footprints small on this earth. There’s much more available today than there has been in the past, as there are many more people both in the cities and countryside who are trying to save energy or become more self-sufficient. One of the best sources of information I have lucked upon in my surfing safaris is Home Power Magazine, which offers articles and plans for all sorts of generation systems, appliances, collectors, etcetera.

Please check out some of these good sources of information and get yourself thinking about how much more your family could do to nudge your homestead ever more toward independence.

Useful Links:

Home Power Magazine
12 Volt Appliances
David Butcher: Pedal Powered Generator
Free Plans Bicycle Power Station

As plans for the new water system move forward, we find ourselves in sudden possession of quite a lot of high-end good-sized PVC piping of various lengths, assorted odd couplings, some strips and scraps of new carpeting (good for insulation of trenches), and a surprising amount of aluminum ductwork. Salvaged from various places. Not being content to leave what look to be perfectly good but not immediately needed lengths of such pipe and ducting behind, we’ve been rescuing as much as we can get from the dumpster-side repository at the contracting facility next door to hubby’s day job.

Some of these lengths of thick-walled new pipe are 3 or 4 inches in diameter, so I’ve been considering how we could use them as we head into this major project, other than as the ‘head’ flow from the new spring to the ram jet in the pumphouse. Given as it’s nearly July, I have also been scouting around for some form of air conditioning that doesn’t require an air-tight home and way more not-cheap electricity than we care to use. We only need it occasionally during the hottest hot-spells of summer and only at times when it’s inconvenient to spend the afternoon in the basement, out under the shade trees, or down at the swimming hole. As part of that research, I’ve been looking at geothermal engineering concepts and technology as well as at modern iterations of good old evaporative cooler (a.k.a. “Swamp Cooler”). Which looks great and works well in places like Arizona, but is not so great here in the southern Appalachians where it’s around 85-90% humidity all the time. Geothermal still looks good, so…

A Do-It-Yourself heat pump! But without the compressor/heat element assist. This could work.

This old cabin is built right into the side of the mountain, thus the ground (basement) level stays almost AC cool all summer. I’ve previously considered installing an in-floor fan basically where the wood stove pipe rises through to the main floor and simply sucking that cool air upstairs, but in my experiments with portable fans to blow the cool air up, warm exterior air simply gets pulled in from the side of the basement that isn’t earth-shielded and then the basement level is as hot as the rest of the cabin. The installed in-floor fan is still a good idea, but needed to find cool air to replenish what’s blown up to the main floor.

This 100-year old chestnut cabin is anything but air-tight, and I must admit I like the fact that it “breathes.” We live on a beautiful mountain and love the fresh, green (and often pollen-laden) air, the constant breeze and such. Want to be able to refresh the air summer and winter to a certain extent, and this is where those pipes may come in handy to supply both cool air in summer and warm air in winter.

We’ll have to do quite a lot of excavation to get the water from the new spring and ram jet up to a new cistern above the house, which will also require a new supply pipe to the house from the hill-side rather than the bottomland-side. So I’m thinking we could hook these pipes together with ‘u’ joints (with an above-ground intake at the back end) as a geothermal collector about 2 feet deep out in the side yard. The ground doesn’t really freeze here in winter (just not that cold here), so the air that runs through this underground collector would pick up heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Then we could hook that to a small in-wall exhaust fan into the basement level to provide cool air in summer for the in-floor fan to blow upstairs. Thereby keeping the basement level cool while circulating to the rest of the house. Working just the opposite in winter.

In the dead of winter the air from this collection system is likely to be only around 50º F. But during the day when the leaves are bare and the sun is in the south, we get a hefty amount of passive solar heating when the sun shines. And the wood stove in the basement (our “central” heat) has always worked great to make the place toasty on the coldest of nights. The geothermal should help even things out quite a lot, and likely even save wood. If we can pipe in 50º air to where the wood stove is cooking and it’s 25º outside, the whole system should be more efficient. And the house would still ‘breathe’ in a healthy manner.

So once we get from the creek and springs up here to the house (on our way up the ridge where the new cistern will be), we’ll be doing work on two projects at once. As it takes shape I will be sure to take lots of pictures and report regularly on the progress. Again, stay tuned!

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!