Organic farmers should appreciate the vigilance of the rat terrier breed of dog against rabbits, squirrels, rats and other nibblers of your produce. Calmer than Jack Russell terriers, rat terriers are also more appropriate as a typical family dog.
A Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about rats in an upscale L.A. community got me thinking […]
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said he grew tobacco among other crops on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee during summer vacations in his youth. Gore also likened what he views as today’s suppression of global warming evidence by Big Oil to the cover up long ago by Big Tobacco of the health risks […]
Louise Meyer and Patricia McArdle of Solar Household Energy, Inc. and the resource site SolarCooking.org, demonstrate several solar ovens, ranging from shaped trash cardboard covered with foil (cheap, effective, but not durable), one used in Afghanistan that sells for about $25, to an elegant origami folded aluminum product that will last forever. Solar ovens might […]
The folks at Project Off The Grid have a new video at their greatly improved website describing their off-grid community project in South Dakota. They also seem to share my enthusiasm for Ryan Is Hungry YouTube videos, like this one about Keith Thompson a.k.a. “Skeeter” and his off-grid homestead.
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Patrick Stanton asked me about root cellar requirements in an email message.
“I had a technical self-reliance question that you could address on the blog, MLL list, or directly: What are the requirements of a root cellar? We have a dirt floor, brick walled basement, but what alterations would be needed to store food through the […]
Last Thursday, Al Gore challenged the U.S. to stop using fossil fuels in ten years. He discussed his plan and the reactions to it Sunday on Meet The Press.
Wind power may be viewed as an indirect form of solar energy moving the atmosphere, but megawatt production (like the Pickens Plan) is restricted to select wind […]
Readers have asked (via email) for an off-grid-friendly fuel making how-to article.
A process that looks simple is found at kitchen-biodiesel.com. The “Automatic Alternative” shown below the animation is one of their sponsor’s systems.
Don’t take the abbreviated animated GIF thumbnail I made from images there as the whole process. Make sure to actually visit their site […]
Greywater Guerrillas help stop pollution of the water supply by using greywater to irrigate trees and other plants in the garden.
Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains–but not the toilet. Greywater may contain traces of dirt, food, grease, hair, and household cleaning products. While greywater may look “dirty,” it is […]
kabri over at the Forest and Farm adventures blog, writes about homesteading on forest land, with plenty o’ pictures.
The July 8th post includes the image of their cabin in the trees (cropped here in reduced thumbnail):
When we first bought our forest land, we tried camping in our trailer. The trouble with that was - we […]
A recent post at the T’a’grarial blog shows a TED talk video of Adam Grosser describing a new, improved version of a product from 1928 providing 24 hours of safe non-electric refrigeration from a device the size of a thermos using just one hour of cooking heat available anywhere in the world.
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A new project that seems at first blush to be Hobbiton Meets Starship Troopers (because its founding leaders are veterans) is the formation of an off-grid community designed to provide mutual aid and support with a “family values” emphasis.
The founders already have 100s of acres to start, from the 419 area code on the site […]
Gene GeRue’s Ruralize.com website promotes the homesteading author’s book, How to Find Your Ideal Country Home: A Comprehensive Guide.
Until urban centers in the U.S. become something other than crime-riddled, polluted cesspools of disease and poverty, I’m taking the rural side of the debate. Although I’m on five acres in Pahrump at the moment, I have […]
Just because PETA drives me crazy, don’t think I hate vegetarians. The Path To Freedom family in the video is a model for everyone.
I’m all for Food Not Lawns, Edible Estates, and Urban Homesteading if you’ve already got a house in the ‘burbs. My only quibble is that for renters looking to buy a […]
Digg front page item links to a report from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research that I heard yesterday on right wing talk radio saying Al Gore’s energy usage is up 10% even after installing a token solar panel and geothermal pump.
As one commenter at Digg noticed, TCPR’s headline unfairly compares Gore’s annual usage […]
Inspired by the historic Victory Gardens of San Francisco, which supplied the area with 40% of the food consumed during WW2, and motivated by a desire to eliminate the high energy costs of trucked-in produce, the Alemany Farm started by volunteers taking over a former illegal dump as an experimental urban garden, with the […]
Marketing expert Alex Mandossian explains how he noticed Al Gore and Tipper were signing Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family at a local independent bookstore in Corte Madera back in 2002.
Alex found out later that despite a full parking lot and packed attendance inside a fairly large meeting room, only a […]
The co-author of the permaculture design title Edible Forest Gardens (2 volume set), Ed Toensmeier, has a new book out called Perennial Vegetables.
The publisher, Chelsea Green, describes it further in the subtitle:
From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles
Cindy Dyer of the Garden Muse blog photographed Toensmeier receiving an […]
The RepRap Project (RepRap stands for “Replicating Rapid Prototyper”) has created a free open source “3D printer” machine that extrudes a fast setting plastic material suitable for building many products such as mechanical gears, tracks, wheels, gaskets, brackets, wine glasses, children’s toys, adult toys, keyboards, fasteners, hangers, enclosures, door stops, caps, connectors, levels (water in […]
One of Boing Boing’s editors, Mark Frauenfelder, must be in a “vegetative state” today, but at least he doesn’t have the steampunk fixation to Cory Doctorow’s extent. (Speaking of Steampunk, my brain puts today’s RepRap breakthrough news in that category.)
Back to Mark and his veggies, he’s joined the gardening brigades, but is having trouble identifying […]
A Homesteading Today thread begins with a post by the self-described “Revolutionary” Ernie, who says:
Gardening is hard work. It’s backbreaking, sweaty, blistering, and monotonous. While I love the alchemy of turning soil, sunshine, and water into calories for my family, I would much rather sit in the shade underneath the old maples and fritter away […]
Here’s a direct link to The Seasteading Institute.
I neglected to include in my previous blog post.
(It was in a draft, but the wrong version got published.)
There’s an Introduction To Seasteading section and a “Captain’s Blog”.
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Paypal founder Peter Thiel is funding The Seasteading Institute to investigate the legal and technical advantages of living offshore in off-grid artificial habitats.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn’t playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the […]
Digg links to an article at Remedicated.com about “20 Common Cooking Ingredients That Act As Medicines”.
Find out what turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, garlic, rosemary, honey, chili peppers, olive oil, rice, parsley, onions (and related plants such as chives, shallots, and leeks), lemon, mustard, cloves, apples, kale, licorice, peppermint, horseradish, and avocado can do for you besides […]
Off-Grid tells the story of Steve James and his battle to keep a planning commission from seizing his off-grid home. The Register’s description of the software designer who built his own design for a straw and timber off-grid house is a “cheap and cheerful Scottish ecogaff.”
According to The Register:
A 52-year-old software engineer has built a […]
Grow Your Own Pharmacy by Linda Gray, published last year by Findhorn Press, describes in detail the nutrients such as vitamins, minerals and other herbal compounds in various plants. The first chapters cover “Ingredients For A Healthy Body” and “Introduction to Gardening.”
The book gives some history, the conditions and methods of sowing each plant and […]
It’s not quite “Mr. Fusion” as seen at the end of Back To The Future, but EFuel100 does let you pour beer into a distiller that also serves as an ethanol fuel pump.
The cost for processing discarded liquor can run as low as $0.10 per gallon of ethanol produced. A typical bar or restaurant discards […]
Kurzweil AI describes near term WiMax deployment that should have an impact on off-grid phone and internet users. It may bring about free ad-supported phone and internet service such as a theoretical Google “Gphone.” The linked PhysOrg article reports:
WiMAX quickly moves large amounts of digital data such as video or picture files across kilometers, as […]
Kurzweil AI describes a surge in the supply of silicon, reported by Technology Review that by itself could make existing solar panel designs cost competitive to electricity rates from our not so beloved grid.
“In areas that get a lot of sun, that will translate to solar electricity costs of about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, […]
A few months ago, John Laumer wrote about Survivalist Green for TreeHugger.
The most prominent face of Survivalist Green is that of the city dweller; the second is of the suburban or exurban dweller. (Covers everything from apartments along the rail line to Mega-Mansions in the exurb zone.)
The third face of SG extends to the house […]
Green Wombat describes former Australian Greenpeace activist Danny Kennedy’s new California venture, Sungevity:
“Putting photovoltaic panels on residential rooftops remains largely a labor-intensive cottage business, often involving multiple visits to a client’s home to make the sales pitch, measure the roof, and design a custom system. Sungevity, which officially launches Tuesday on Earth Day, takes all […]
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