(02-19-2023, 10:18 PM)ABNARTY Wrote: Awesome thread Ninurta!
Finding good information on this topic is a quest. There are plenty of paths that lead to the wrong place. I was watching a couple on YT doing their "off grid" living.
To be fair, perhaps my idea of "off grid" and their idea of "off grid" are two different things. For me, I see it as a return to generations past. Learning how to make do with not much. Canning, small scale agriculture, home remedies, neighbor networks, etc.
But for them? Well, I'll provide some examples. They needed a road to get to where their off grid house would be. So they bought a bulldozer to build it. That wasn't enough so they bought an excavator too. Of course they need to keep it free of snow. So they bought a military FMTV truck. And a giant snowblower from the national park service. Of course the two do not come with a compatibility kit.
So they bought a used car, striped the motor out and mounted that to the snowblower. But they needed some fabricated mounting gear. Never fear, they have a pile of sheet stock on hand and a large CNC plasma cutter. Now it all fits.
This is all powered by a giant solar array. But in the winter it is covered with snow. So they have a giant military surplus generator to provide the power. They never mentioned where they get the diesel fuel from.
What I am getting at is, I don't not see that as sustainable. They must have a pile of money to draw upon right now. But what happens when circumstances occur that produce an "off grid" reality? All they did was bring civilization to their home in the mountains. They never adapted to the mountains. Once fuel runs out, then what? What happens when they need parts for their fleet of machinery? I have never see them garden or raise an animal.
... how did I get here? Oh yeah, great thread and I look forward checking in. This gardening season will be my first no or low till. I will keep everyone updated on how it goes. Trying a lot of of new veggies and preservation techniques.
Yeah, all that machinery and geegaws is not "off grid" to my way of thinking, it's just extending the grid to one's own location, and not sustainable.
Farm machinery, to really be "off grid", cannot depend on fuel available only ON-grid.
Here is a photo of some of our "farm machinery" back in the day:
That's my Dear Old Dad, circa 1974, tilling the garden with a Shetland Pony. In this photo, he's cutting the furrows with a single-foot plow that we made out of scrap iron pipe and a mild steel plate for the foot, all salvaged. Yes, there was color film then. It's black and white because I took it for an "art photography" class I was taking back then.
We got the pony-size harness from an Amish man dad worked with. You can make out the reins looped around Dad's neck, (over his left shoulder and back out under his right arm) but he didn't really need them. he had that pony trained to "gee" and "haw", and she knew it was time to turn around and head down the next row whenever dad picked up the plow out of the dirt at the end of a row.
We had a 7-foot cultivator that we also made out of scrap iron pipe and mild steel "feet". That was for cultivation, digging the weeds out from between rows. It had 7 tines in a chevron pattern that dug the weeds out as it went along, and churned the dirt. Weeding inside the rows was done with a hoe, and that hoe was "man powered". Fuel for it's engine came off the supper table.
That was the sort of "tractor" we used. There was a mechanical tractor on the farm, but it sat in a shed, and I never did see it in operation. It just sat there, unused.
We also made a cart - refurbished it, really, by repairing and fleshing out an old dilapidated frame. We made a horse drawn sled or sledge from scratch to haul stuff by horse power in the winter time and wet times. it had half-soles made of hickory pegged to the runners so we could change it's "shoes" whenever the old soles wore out. They were fastened on by boring holes into the split-hickory sapling to match holes in the wooden runners, and then tapping tapered wooden pegs through the hickory soles into the runners to bind them in place and cutting the pegs off flush with the soles so they didn't snag- that made it easier to just pop them off and replace them whenever necessary. I have a photo of that sled with the same pony hitched to it here somewhere, but I've never scanned it for electronic storage.
The ponies and horses were fueled with locally produced hay and being turned out in a pasture. "hay burners" is not just a concept, it can be a way of life even now. I "grained" the horses with cracked corn and oats mixed together and mixed with molasses.
I tried "no-till gardening" for my tobacco production last year, but I'm pretty sure i didn't do it right - I didn't hack off any grass, I just dug holes to transplant the tobacco into, and it didn't fare as well as I would have liked. So over the winter, I burned empty boxes, of which I have an overabundance, in a patch of the yard to kill off the weeds and grass and enrich the dirt with more carbon and minerals. I still have no means of tilling it, so it's probably gonna be something like a spading fork this spring to just break up the topsoil and churn it a bit to loosen it.
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