I don’t know about you, but here at my homestead we’ve been watching the goings-on in New York City, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and elsewhere across the country (including our own small city 20 miles up the road) that comprise the burgeoning and growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement. As the authoritarian servants of the richest 1% of the nation’s population have moved to isolate and abuse the professional activists, the unemployed, the homeless who have gravitated to the encampments, the juxtaposition with astroturfed, billionaire-funded “Tea Party” demonstrations where denizens were allowed to openly carry guns and assault members of Congress is dramatic. I admit I feel a little guilty to be so enjoying the gorgeous fall colors while people are putting their lives on the line to demand equality and an end to taxpayer bailouts of the criminal 1%.

It is glaringly obvious that the well-funded astroturf ‘movement’ enjoys a far greater share of our supposed First Amendment freedoms than the downtrodden 99% of people who just want to make the rich share in the suffering they order our political class to impose on the rest of us as ‘austerity’. So far the demonstrations have remained entirely peaceful even when police officers start pepper-spraying demonstrators (and their fellow police officers), or when the riot squad barrels into the crowd to choke and fling demonstrators to the ground. Reminds me of 1968. I know ‘they’ say that if you can remember the 1960s you probably weren’t really there, but that was one action-packed year full of billy-clubs and fire hoses and cracked skulls… and that was just the Democratic National Convention. It was still a bit less than 3 years before the Powers that Be started killing college kids wholesale for rudely NOT volunteering for that generation’s dirty big war, but let’s not fool ourselves. The very same thing is possible in 2011, and I’m pretty sure those doing the demonstrating across the country are aware of that possibility.

Homesteaders like us long ago gave up the idiot-box hypnosis drug, get our news from other sources – internet around here, along with the region’s college newspapers and the several alternative rags produced in the nearest city. We have moved physically to take as much charge of our own sustenance as possible, and forever plan and work for more. We’re ahead of the “income inequality” game because we care much less about being filthy rich than we care about or families, friends, environment and self-sufficiency regardless of what happens on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. We don’t watch FoxNews propaganda or MSNBC’s endless prison-porn when we could be out there prepping the beds for winter, or digging the new spring to power the ram pump, or simply sitting on a log on the ridge and quietly watching the leaves change color.

We’re a different kind of ‘elites’ in the current sociopolitical struggles. We’re not the money-hoarders or the Snidely Whiplash home-stealers or even The Donald making a big show of firing hard working people just because we get a kick out of cruelty. I think that makes us members of the 99% who are not The Donald (or Tim Geithner, or JP Morgan or MERS or the day-traders on Wall Street). So while we certainly aren’t planning to close up the ‘stead and head for the city to camp out on somebody’s public lawn, I have gotten together with a few friends to discuss things we might be willing and able to do in support of those who have put their bodies on the line to say things that desperately need saying.

I remember the tales of apple-sellers from my grandparents who struggled through Great Depression-I back in the 1930s. Mom’s parents had to leave Miami when no one could afford haircuts anymore (grandpa was a barber), moved to my great-grandparent’s farm in Georgia to wait it out in a meager sharecropper’s shack. Aside from the vegetables and two pigs a year my great-grandparents raised for their own sustenance, there were peaches. Acres and acres of peaches in a well-kept orchard my mother remembered most fondly as a young tomboy with no financial woes to trouble her childhood. Grandpa would take bushels of peaches – his ‘share’ for helping with the harvest – to Atlanta in a mule-drawn wagon, where he sold them like apples on the street for a nickel apiece. Mom and her siblings looked forward to spending their dollar gift from grandpa’s annual efforts on big stashes of penny candy and an occasional pair of shoes. Well, not Mom on the shoe thing, she preferred going barefoot and remained that way her whole life.

Dad’s family lived in Cincinnati, grandpa was a railroad man charged with [not quite] policing the many teenaged ‘hobos’ who rode the rails in those days from city to city looking for work. Sometimes he’d bring a particularly lean teen home with him, granny would feed him well, put him to work in the back-lot garden, feed him again and gift him with bagged leftovers after a night in the barn before grandpa took him back to the rail yard the next day. Dad was 7 when the Depression began. Got a job with the newspaper hawking the late editions on the sidewalks. The paper wanted a nickel, so he charged seven cents so as to make two cents a pop. Told me people would often give him a dime then refuse change. Helps to be really cute, I suppose.

At any rate, it was clear to me all my life listening to the family tales of hardship that we are not and never were among this society’s elites. As Great Depression-II sweeps the country it seems clear to me that what the visibly courageous demonstrators need most is some of that good old fashioned food that us country folk can help to supply (since we’ve no money to send).

Which brings me around again to apples. The apple harvest here in the southern Appalachians is mostly finished for this season, but there are still orchards open to gleaning, will be until they’re bare or hard freeze, whichever comes first. A few very good apples still in the trees if you’ve got a kid or two to do the climbing, lots and lots of slightly bruised fruit under the trees for picking up. These make fine cider, and at least half an apple to slice and dry now that the wood stove is working nights. A group of neighbors and friends from the city – most kids from the community college where grandsons are enrolled – gleaned an orchard outside of Hendersonville week before last. Netted three bushels of good apples, and ended up with a full dozen gallons of pressed cider.

For a change, we didn’t donate the fruit and juice to the regional food bank where gleaned and ‘extra’ produce has been going all summer. This time we loaded it into the trunk and back seat of a little car scheduled to transport a couple of the college kids to New York so they could join the demonstration during their week of fall break. They got home Monday but still haven’t uploaded their pictures. They said they gave the apples away to demonstrators, didn’t last long but it got them a preferred place in line for when the pizzas ordered by supporters all over the world showed up. The cider made them several fast friends, heated over a little sterno stove to help take the chill off during long nights.

They said they talked up the gleaning projects and promoted the great homesteading and grower’s market ‘scene’ in our beautiful region. Don’t know if they managed to convince any of the big city dwellers to consider choosing this kind of life, but they did plant some seeds. Apple seeds, to be exact. If it all falls apart people are going to have to rearrange their lives accordingly. There’s still a lot of resistance to the idea that the 1% (millionaires and billionaires) would really let that happen, but at the point when job-insecure police forces are ordered to start bashing the heads of those who champion union contracts and middle class job security it’s darned foolish to believe they won’t. There is no social conscience where there is obscene wealth and greed for more. Never will be.

And so the pendulum swings. I don’t know any billionaire homesteaders. Would bet you don’t know any either, though there’s no doubt a few billionaires that own country estates and working farms. The economic situation is obviously not scheduled to get any better any time soon for the impoverished masses and winter’s coming on fast. Even after the demonstrators break camp there will still be great need in this country. I hope that all my homesteading readers, and all wannabe homesteaders out there growing a few tomatoes and maybe some beans in their yards, will bear this in mind when planning for next spring’s production. There is opportunity here to help, we should be at the forefront of that. No one should go hungry in this country, though millions do. Every day, even as politicians are busy slashing budgets for things like food stamps, school lunch programs, and WIC.

Politicians work for the 1%, not for the 99%. They and their paramilitary forces will continue to abuse the 99% on orders from the overlords. And no, they don’t care how many of us starve or freeze or die from simple lack of health care. The real change that must happen will come bottom-up, not top-down. Solidarity.

Occupy Wall Street

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

Those of us homesteaders who have been hoping the cost of solar panels would continue to fall until we can finally afford them on our houses and outbuildings have been watching with some trepidation the news that solar start-up Solyndra has filed for bankruptcy. What does it mean in terms of the push to secure truly ‘green’ jobs here in the U.S., as well as our struggle to get our nation off filthy fossil fuels like coal and gas, and to phase out ill-conceived nuclear power generation before Megalopolis ends up a ‘dead zone’ for 300+ years.

The New York Times reports that Solyndra’s bankruptcy bodes ill for the entire solar industry. But does it really? While we can be sure King Coal and Big Nukes would dearly love that to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

Solyndra’s collapse marked the third time in as many weeks that a solar company declared bankruptcy. Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts and SpectraWatt of New York also filed for protection.

Three investment-heavy solar companies in three weeks? What’s going on? Some analysts loudly tout the idea that the solar industry itself is in trouble – and there obviously is some trouble – but how bad is it? According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, part of the problem is that the cost of materials to make solar panels has been falling drastically as more and more investment in the technology has materialized, and more companies jump into the fray. In such a situation some of the most heavily leveraged companies who got in when material costs were high are going to fail simply due to their debt load. Solyndra also produced commercial rooftop systems with a unique cylindrical collection system, and that system proved to be entirely impractical in residential applications. This, analysts say, indicates that the company badly misunderstood the marketplace they’d entered.

Solyndra also produced the thin film solar panels I was hoping to use on my metal roof, so maybe their leftover stock of that will go at super-discount price now that the company is defaulting on its more than half a billion dollars in federal loans. Worst part, of course, are than 1,100 ‘green’ energy workers are now unemployed. Hopefully they’ll be able to find new work in the field soon. German energy giant just announced that it is getting out of the nuclear business altogether, and will refocus on its alternative and renewable divisions. ABC News reports that the Solyndra bankruptcy is unlikely to hamper government investment in green jobs or renewable energy sources, so that’s some good news.

Besides, despite the loss of those 1,100 jobs at Solyndra, the solar energy sector is still employing more than 100,000 people and has added more than 6,700 jobs just in the past year. Green job growth appears to be healthy despite some start-up upheavals in non-competitive sectors. These are good jobs, we need more of them.

The bottom line is that Chinese governmental investment in solar production is the biggest factor effecting cost of solar panels, as U.S. companies just don’t have access to the kind of sweatshop, prison and slave labor that the Chinese government can deploy. Much as American corporations would love to pay workers $2 a day for 16 hours of daily work, that’s simply not going to happen no matter how long they drag out this 2nd Great Depression.

The government’s exposure on these bankruptcies should definitely not prevent the necessary investment in alternatives, especially given the recent dramatic breakdown of half a century’s empty promises that nuclear energy would be “clean, safe, too cheap to meter.” The price of those is going nowhere but up, and they already cost more in initial investment than any other energy source. I figure the solar market will balance itself out over time, and those companies that install and maintain solar panels on your roof that turns THEM into your utility company (at a guaranteed rate, something you’ll never get from a public utility) seem to be doing great.

At any rate, I’m still hoping that by the time we’ve got the money to invest in full energy production for this homestead there will be available technologies made right here in the U.S. of A. that are both affordable and will do the job with enough extra to sell back to Duke. Why, maybe Duke will get enough from that distributed generation to cancel any and all plans for new nukes nobody needs or can afford. You never know…

Links:

U.S. Solar Industry Job Growth
Solyndra Bankruptcy Unlikely to Hamper Green Jobs
House Judiciary chair: Solyndra bankruptcy
Solyndra Bankruptcy Reveals Dark Clouds

Yet as is true of all the ‘best’ tools to amass for homesteading purposes, the question of what type of weaponry one may need is tied to what type of situations any weapon will be expected to deal with. Sometimes that may mean firearms. The homesteader will have to take into consideration what types of wild animals are most likely to be encountered in their location, whether or not someone in the family hunts for food, the likelihood of having to put down injured livestock, and any property or personal protection needs the family may encounter. In many cases the best tool for the job – and the person wielding the tool – could be a BB or pellet gun. Which is surprisingly effective at discouraging bears from the trash or compost without actually hurting them so as to leave an injured bear on the property (a real, live danger). These can be well less than deadly, but also come with CO2 cartridges that can turn them into effective small game/bird hunting weapons.

Your basic pump-action pellet gun will also discourage a fox from the henhouse without killing it, but you’ll probably have to spend enough time guarding the henhouse with it that the fox learns to associate chickens with the ouch. If you are a good enough shot with a long, compound or crossbow, these weapons are every bit as deadly as a rifle for most encountered critters that must be killed. There are entire weeks set aside in my area for bow hunting game, and there is never a shortage of hunters making use of the no-gun time span. Just remember that arrows are as deadly as bullets – small children don’t need access to pointy sticks of any variety. Older kids often take to archery like ducks to water, which is why it’s a regular feature in many youth organizations’ listed activities.

For actual firearms individuals will need to be aware of various regulations and responsibilities associated. Traditionally, homestead firearms have fallen into the long gun classification – rifles and/or shotguns. The caliber of long gun you may need should be dictated by what you’re most likely to be shooting, and how good an aim you are. You have to be a pretty good shot to kill a chicken-stealing fox with a .22, while also being educated enough about guns to know a .22 won’t stop an angry bear (but just make him angrier). And despite what you may remember from fictional television westerns, no kind of gun is the best weapon against a snake. Having had to deal with a rabid raccoon at our homestead this summer – big threat to pets and kids as well as all other wildlife in the area – the mess you can expect with a shotgun can be justified by being able to kill quickly and surely with just one pull of the trigger.

For home protection, the homesteader is in the same boat as anyone else with the expectation that the likeliest target in a showdown will be human. Some deep and honest soul-searching is required before rushing off to the gun shop, more than just the question of what type or caliber of gun you should get. If you honestly can’t think of any situation where you could shoot at another human being, don’t get any kind of gun for home protection. Bluffing with an unloaded gun can get you killed in a tense situation much quicker than simply giving a burglar what he came for.

If you have small children in the home or who visit regularly, keeping a handgun where it would be handy to YOU in an emergency situation could well prove way more dangerous to your family than not having a gun at all. My husband and I chose early on in our homesteading life not to own any kind of handgun due to a steady supply of children around the place at various times. Even though there have been a couple occasions over the past twenty years when grandpa’s shotgun did have to be pointed in the general direction of invading humans (home/property defense), in neither case would a handgun of any variety have served better.

Trust Mother Earth News to have excellent information on this very subject. This link is to an available 6-page article, and there are links to Mother’s over coverage in a sidebar. I think most homesteaders can get a very good feel for the questions and issues there.

Pioneer Living has some good member discussions some may find informative, and Homesteader Life blog has treated the subject as well. The FreeLibrary offers a good article on the .22 as an entirely adequate weapon from Countryside Publications, .22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon. It also takes a look at various types auto-loaders and the handgun vs. rifle pros and cons. Much good information is out there for anyone planning to enter a homesteading lifestyle, or is just now getting around to meeting the challenges of said lifestyle that would call for designed-to-be-deadly tools.

Meanwhile, for those of us who started our homesteading life with Better Homes and Gardens in our monthly magazine roundup along with Mother Earth and Organic Gardening, I have just recently discovered what is to me a ‘new’ high-end country-living (or just consuming) rag: Garden & Gun. A friend’s newly-opened establishment in WNC was featured in the June/July issue of Garden & Gun “Summer in the South” review issue, thus I encountered this publication. I’ve gone ahead and paid for a subscription, as I can see this will be a new favorite of mine in the rotating magazine rack.

Useful Links:

Choosing a Homestead Firearm
.22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon
Homestead Guns and Some Thoughts…

After heading down to the springhouse around noon today to patch together the badly jerry-rigged connection from the cistern so as to get the water going again (no, the new ram jet system isn’t there yet, but we did get the new cistern to bury on the ridge…), I was glad for the gorgeous, crisp and clear weather. For a change, the summer having been absolutely miserable hot and humid inch-a-day rainy yuck until the second week of August. It’s quite a hike, so I was resting in my chair being grateful for peace and quiet and gazing at the impossible Carolina Blue sky out my window.

Then I felt the shaking. I thought it was Starfish the German Shepherd scratching right under my chair and turned to look. She was laying across the room looking at me like it was MY fault. Then the china started rattling and knick-knacks on the shelves, and I knew it was an earthquake. It didn’t make that deep bass rumbling sound I remember from my childhood in the Philippines and California. Guess the piedmont here east of the continental divide is just too much mud and clay to generate those good deep basalt earth-groans.

Only lasted about 15 seconds or slightly less. Nothing broke, nothing fell, and all the trees are still standing. But the USGS now rates it a 6.0, centered under Mineral, Virginia. Little aftershocks continuing.

6.0 is a pretty darned big earthquake. Our very first experience with serious rural living was when my hubby got out of the Navy in 1975 and got a job at the North Anna nuclear plant just outside of Mineral. We rented a house on a 700 acre farm between there and Orange, some of the most beautiful rolling hill country anywhere. They hadn’t actually built the power plants yet, planned for four of them in a row on a big man-made lake they had to build for cooling. Deal is, they’d managed to site all four of their planned units smack dab astride a 15-foot wide earthquake fault they didn’t know about until they started digging. We got there just when the pit for the #1 reactor had reached its spec depth.

Now, you and I might reasonably suppose that if you found out your reactors were going to be suspended astride a fault, you might want to move them over about 30 feet in either direction so they’d be safely on one side or the other if the fault ever gave way. But alas, we are not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So on a tour one day I got a bird’s eye view from a specially built platform over the pit to see them busy like little ants attempting to wire the earth together with rebar. Really, I kid you not. Struck me at the time quite hilarious, and I’ve laughed about it ever since.

Hubby’s job consisted of going with another ex-Navy nuke across the lake every day in a nice utility company speedboat to change the paper at various seismic stations to monitor for earthquake activity. They found a floating slalom ski one day and took turns using it to get to the sites during that summer. It was all quite idyllic, but life intervened and we didn’t stay long enough for them to actually finish building that first plant. Only two ever got finished before the NRC wised up and nixed the other two.

Today that plant lost offsight power and operators had to manually scram, emergency diesels are operating to keep them cool. Power should be on before too long, but there’s quite a lot of damage in the area. Something to think about in the wake of Fukushima, as North Anna was identified years ago when I got that bird’s eye view as the nuclear facility most likely to suffer earthquake damage east of the Mississippi. There are of course more dangerous ones in California, right on the coast where tsunamis could wreak havoc as well.

Yet another reminder of how important it is for us to get serious about producing alternative power. For our homesteads and to feed the grid, all over the country. You never hear about horrible wind spills or solar meltdowns. When a wind turbine falls down it doesn’t make entire swaths of the countryside uninhabitable for hundreds of years. When solar panels fall off the roof it might kill whoever happens to be standing where it lands, but it doesn’t doom whole generations of children to gnarly disease and ugly death.

We homesteaders must be the backbone behind the vanguard. Today’s little shake-up is a timely reminder of that.

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!

Sure, we all remember the children’s story about three pigs and a big, bad wolf, who could huff and puff and blow the house down (unless it was made of bricks). The stick house held up a little bit better, but the straw house didn’t provide much in the way of protection at all. But these days, houses made of straw and stucco are getting quite sophisticated. Even looking sturdy enough to stand up to a good, stiff breeze, whether it comes from a wolf or a hurricane.

Bales of straw (usually wheat straw) as building material isn’t exactly new, though perhaps not as old as the Three Little Pigs tale. late 19th century homesteaders out on the Nebraska plains are credited with building the first straw bale and mud-wattle houses, much as Oklahoma homesteaders pioneered stone and earth-sheltered homes with sod roofs. These early examples of hardy home-building with whatever’s handy largely escaped modern notice until the early 1970s, when the hippie “back to the land” movement took off. Most straw bale houses built over the following couple of decades were non-code off-the-grid shelters, but the benefits of bale construction have gained new fans.

Featured in this New York Times article is a rather spectacular example in the Catskills hand-crafted with loving care over a period of years by Clark Sanders. For the new revival in homesteading pioneers for the 21st century, there are a number of outfits and websites offering education in straw bale building techniques, helpful hints, and contacts for associated material like stuccos and plasters, wall lattice, etc. Some of the most interesting and useful are listed below. There are even some very nice straw bale house plans that can be built as offered or altered to your own site’s needs and combined with other green technologies such as earth sheltering, etc.

A relatively small straw bale shelter could be built fairly quickly and cheaply by new homesteaders on their land as a place to live while developing the various water and energy systems that will support something more permanent at a later date. If sited well and built sturdily, such a shelter built into a berm or hillside could later serve as a well-insulated root cellar for food storage, or a cool shelter barn for ruminant livestock. Just be sure your plastering job keeps up with the normal wear and tear of time, or the livestock just might eat their own barn!

Check out some of the listed sites and their offerings, see if straw bale construction might serve you well in some application. All told, the recurring benefit theme of this construction method is low cost. Which is always something modern homesteaders need to consider.

Links:

Straw Bale Construction
StrawBale dot Com
Bale Watch: 50 House Plans
A House of Straw
NYT: Bale by Bale, Stone by Stone

No Dress Code

Dress codes aren’t very fun. Often you have to spend most of your day in something uncomfortable. You may even have to wear something that doesn’t look that great or feel that appropriate for your personality. When a t-shirt and jeans kind of person gets a “grown-up” job they usually have to suck it up and wear ties and uncomfortable shoes. However, when you work from home you can dress however you like. One of the biggest advantages to working from home is that you can dress like its laundry day any day you want.

No Commute

One of the great ironies of the modern world concerns people’s automobiles. Almost everybody loves to drive, but almost nobody enjoys going to the office. When you work at home you don’t even have to commute to use the fax machine thanks to the new release of the MetroFax app for the iPhone. This app lets you send and receive faxes from anywhere. Couple that with how you can e-mail, call and text and you start to wonder what all the expensive equipment most offices have is actually useful for. When you can spend a fraction of the money for more compact equipment it starts to look silly.

Couple that with not having to care much about gas prices and you really have a winner. When you don’t have to commute you no longer care very much about traffic, weather and a lot of other silly concerns all those office workers need to worry about. Being at home frees you in a way that’s hard to describe.

Flexible Scheduling

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to both work in an office and have time for emergencies and personal errands in your day? You find problems like that aren’t a big deal when you work from home. You can work at 3 a.m. if a project is especially challenging or exciting and sleep in if you feel like it. You don’t even have to call in sick.

When you work from home you have more responsibility. However, this is more than made up for when you realize how much additional freedom you take on from not having to commute anywhere. There’s no dress code and you can do practically everything at home that people used to need an office for. Overall, the benefits of working at home really shine. It’s especially good when your schedule lets you do things you couldn’t in an office.

I’ve been looking into the various classified ads locally for livestock I want, to get an idea on budgeting first for proper quartering and actual animals. Chickens are of course a first choice. Also want bees, been looking at hives and queens for sale. If I can site them properly, bears shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Goats are sometime in the future, will need more fencing than we’ve got.

On those classified pages I discovered an awful lot of meat rabbits for sale, and remembered some homesteader friends in Virginia about 25 years ago who were big into meat rabbits. At the time we’d recently become vegetarian and I rejected the idea for our just-started homestead, but all these years later I think the ease of raising rabbits might make them an excellent livestock choice… so long as I don’t have to be the one who slaughters and prepares them for sale. There are surprisingly ample markets locally for good rabbit meat, especially organically raised. Even including some of the high-end eateries and B&Bs who are my regular fresh organic herb and sauce customers.

I ordered a book entitled Raising Rabbits to Survive, which promises to be a very handy reference and educational tool. Even better, the book comes with 5 supplemental books covering just about everything you need to know.

In the meantime and most serendipitously, I also encountered an interesting 5-part blog series about the same subject, which is immediately accessible. Looks like this is something my homestead should be seriously aiming for, before the year is out.

Many of you, like me, will remember raising and keeping rabbits as pets as kids back when we lived in far more urban areas, and think bout how rabbits as livestock could be a considerable cog in our self-sufficiency machinery as homesteaders. Because homesteading these days isn’t always about living way out in the country.

Rabbits are quiet, they don’t take up much room, and with proper care and feeding will readily reproduce on an amazingly quick schedule. You might be surprised that there’s a market for rabbit meat, but homesteaders I knew a quarter century ago raised meat rabbits as well as chickens and goats, for that very purpose. They never could manage to saturate the market. Go surfing through some of the internet’s ample offerings of food and recipe sites for “rabbit recipes.” You’ll get way more than just a camp version of rabbit stew. Things like honey roast rabbit, Chinese sweet and sour rabbit, fried rabbit in breadcrumbs, Louisiana Creole rabbit… the possibilities are endless.

One Rabbit Recipe site notes that rabbit meat is high in protein, low in fat, uric acid, cholesterol, sodium and calories. It is also easily digested and is recommended in diets that restrict red meat. Rabbit is all white meat, fine grained and has a mild flavor. It substitutes well for any recipe calling for veal or poultry. I haven’t personally eaten meat (other than fish) for about 40 years, but I’m not averse to growing rabbits as an organic meat offering if I don’t have to do the slaughtering. I’m fairly sure I could find someone locally who would do the job for a cut of sale price at any of a dozen local organic meats suppliers and cooperatives.

So. How easy or hard is it to go with raising rabbits as a homestead food stock? Apparently not that hard, or even terribly expensive. If you’re willing to do the work. Here’s an overview of the series by DawnG I mentioned, and hope interested readers will take the time to check each installment out. They each contain valuable and useful information.

Part 1 introduces the many good reasons to consider rabbits as livestock, and lists some of the downsides. Such as how difficult it is to not love them as pets. Which for many of us, might be overwhelming.

Part 2 talks about food independence on the homestead, even if you don’t plan to make money (or trade) on your stock. Very good rundown on the details of proper housing for the rabbits, food and watering details, and things to look out for. DawnG also suggests supplying your rabbits with toys, as their teeth grow perpetually and they need things to chew on as well as to play with.

Part 3 looks in depth at rabbit food, commercial and supplementals. She includes the proper protein/fiber ratio for producing the best meat, and varying feed requirements depending on season. Some of the supplementals are things our homesteads can provide quite readily for free, which means they won’t be an added expense. Grass hay, sunflower seeds, fresh or dried fruit, fresh veggies and herbs, weeds and lawn clippings, etc. I figure all the bruised and otherwise compromised fruit and veggies I usually compost could go through rabbits first. Then I could compost the droppings!

Part 4 looks at the best breeds to get as your original breeding stock, and what to look for in each one as to health and pedigree. I had no idea there were so many meat breeds, or that there are show rabbits, and stud rabbits, and an entire sub-business involved in selling such rabbits to other homesteaders for starting their stock. Maybe that’s something a vegetarian could go for as far as participating in meat production.

Part 5 gets into the nitty-gritty about… um… rabbit sex. How old your buck and does should be before you let them breed, what to look out for, what records to keep to ensure your best breeders are the ones producing stock (and not getting eaten), and how to care properly for pregnant does and fresh litters. Also advice on paying attention to mothering traits, culling does that don’t measure up.

All terribly interesting, not very expensive an investment, and something to seriously consider as part of our homesteading adventures. The economy isn’t scheduled to get any better for at least a decade, as social support systems are scheduled to be cut to the bone or entirely eliminated. Self and community sufficiency is only going to become more and more important in the coming years, we homesteaders need to be ahead of the game.

Links:

Raising Rabbits to Survive

Series: A Rabbit in Every Pot – DawnG
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

As the energy situation in this country becomes more and more frustrating due to a myriad of factors such as costs, aesthetics and a troubling amount of stonewalling by rich, organized fossil fuel and nuclear die-hards, it’s nice when research and development produces technologies that can answer some of the most frustrating objections to renewable energy.

Here in the western North Carolina mountains – where the wind blows stiffly enough on the high ridge lines to cause constant issues with the myriad tall radio transmitter and cell phone towers that mark them with flashing lights high above the tree lines, some pretty underhanded lobbying by rich developers and the Big Energy lobby (nuclear and coal from MTR mining) amended the state’s 1983 Mountain Ridge Protection Act to exclude the windmill exemption (but of course keeping the radio and cell tower interpretations in place). Now, the Act only applies to ridgelines over 3,000 feet in elevation, which would apply primarily to the Blue Ridge debarking the eastern continental divide and the “J” shaped ridgeline of the Black Brothers, including Mount Mitchell and several others among the highest peaks east of the Mississippi River.

We do not have any coal to speak of on here on the eastern side of the Appalachians, which means we aren’t suffering the environmental horrors Tennessee, West Virginia, Western Virginia and Kentucky are suffering due to King Coal’s wholesale flattening of whole mountains. Rather, our mountains are a $2 billion-plus economic boon for the ample tourism industry. Between the NC portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park – which boasts 10 million-plus visitors every year – and the associated Blue Ridge Parkway that winds its way toward Virginia along the ridge. The law was intended to keep the greedy developers from building unsightly high-rise condos for the filthy rich on those high ridges. Having been locked out by the Act from doing just that, they were more than willing to help prevent wind development when asked.

The only other really feasible commercial siting for wind generation in our state would be offshore wind off the Outer Banks, which are much more expensive to install and maintain, and would no doubt run afoul of the protected status of the barrier islands themselves as well as THEIR ever so important views from North Carolina’s historic lighthouses, national seashores, etc.

Not everyone finds the graceful lines of big wind turbines to be “unsightly,” and many here in the mountains are very much for development of ridge top wind farming even if they make most of their annual income off the tourism trade. Heck, most of us don’t even believe the tourists would be averse to seeing big wind turbines along their drive. But the law’s the law, serious homesteaders and small-farm organic producers/agri-tourism entrepreneurs are content to use a combination of solar, small wind and micro-hydro.

My homestead is nestled in a sheltered cove on the south side of Heartbreak Ridge, which descends due east from Mount Mitchell. The property encompasses a section of a side-ridge as well, which gets some wind we’d like to tap. Luckily for us the elevation is less than 3,000 feet on these ridges in immediate vicinity, so we could do that on the side ridge – and even on the top of the knob that marks its terminal if we wanted to. But I keep looking at Heartbreak, which runs to the piedmont just outside our closest little town, and thinking how great it would be if the county would site some turbines along for power generation. They already get the power from a dam on the Catawba River that created Lake James, as well as the tourism dollars from the State Park and lakeside vacation homes that have been built.

So I have been looking into developments in Vertical Axis Wind Turbines. Verticals offer all sorts of advantages over horizontals, though until recently their inefficiencies have been an issue. Luckily, researchers have been on the job. At the CalTech Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy, John Daibiri has been able to increase power output of verticals by 10% and more. The turbines don’t require the height of horizontals, can be placed much closer together for more power per acre, and are as slender and unassuming a profile as your average radio tower – not even as ugly as a cell tower.

Thus there could be no objection under the Mountain Ridge Protection Act to these types of towers for commercial power production. At lower altitudes – like on Heartbreak Ridge toward my town – it would seem like combo units could easily be put to good use and supply much more energy than either vertical or horizontal stand-alone. Imagine one of those not very unsightly, very tall horizontals, the largest (3 Mw) size. Specially built vertical units could be placed on the tapered tower all the way to treetop height to gather wind as well, more than doubling the maximum power output of the installation.

Even better, there are efficient vertical designs any homeowner can build for themselves for less than $200 (plus the tower to put in on, lots of options there). Residential Wind Power has tested and reviewed some of those plans and kits, gave top honors to a nifty design by Earth4Energy’s design which can be built – with plans, videos and full support from the company – for about $150.

Some of the notable advantages of vertical wind generator designs are:

• No need to orient to wind direction. Vertical designs are ‘in the round’, always able to pick up wind from any direction.

• Will turn at much lower wind speeds, some even starting at 4-6 mph.

• Can generate energy much closer to the ground than horizontals.

• Can be sited in concentration much closer together than horizontals, even engineered to use waste energy from neighboring units simply by spinning in the opposite direction.

• Much lower profile and far less dangerous to migrating birds.

• With proper siting, wind generation provides a much steadier source of power because wind doesn’t just blow during the day or night.

So far the verticals don’t individually generate as much as the biggest horizontals, but efficiencies will continue to improve. But they could if certain site applications – like very tall radio tower size – making use of a stacked series of collectors to pick up air motion for the entirety of usable elevation. They could add wattage to the big horizontals by making good use of the vertical tower height. There is a whole direction in wind farming/harvesting here that is under development and definitely could be a big player in the renewable energy markets worldwide.

Any readers out there with experience in building, installing, or just getting homestead energy from wind are encouraged to respond with their thoughts. How difficult was it to build? What headaches came along with the tower, and how expensive was that part of the equation? How much average power do these things provide on a 24-hour basis? There is lots of information and testimonials on the internet about wind, some of them selling things, some of them just promoting certain designs. It would be good to get reports that don’t include the sales pitch, as well as individuals’ ideas on how to get the most energy from the buck (possibly with a little on-site re-designs and/or double-ups to take best advantage of the resources. Below are some links to good articles and manufacturer sites, so do your homework and get building!

Useful Links:

Mother Earth: Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
LA Times: CalTech FLOWE
Residential Wind Power Reviews
Clean Technica CalTech article
Century Wind Energy Vertical Turbines
Windspire Vertical Wind Turbines
Earth4Energy Vertical Wind Design