Category: Renewable Energy

Making Fire-roasted Salsa Over a Hardwood Fire

One of the canned foods I eat most of every year is salsa.  In the late summer, I get a bounty of tomatoes and other salsa ingredients pouring in from my gardens and I like to turn them into a good supply of salsa for the year.  If you’ve never had real fire-roasted salsa, you should try it sometime.  It’s like a different animal from store-bought salsa.  So much depth of flavor and a smokiness that liquid smoke just can’t replicate.  In this video I take you through the process of making it from scratch.

Trying Out the GoSun Solar Cooker

I designed my house with the sun in mind, and since I get so much sun inside the house in the middle of winter, why should put a solar cooker outside to cook?  The GoSun,  a relatively new design for solar cooking, is small, portable, and powerful enough to use in my house with just the sunlight coming in through the window.  My DR neighbor Aaron and I tried it out last January to see how it would work even in the low intensity winter sunlight.  The GoSun is just another tool we can use to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and make use of the abundant solar energy that bathes our planet year round.

Southern Maple Syrup: Gathering Sap and Boiling It Down

Sugar often comes from faraway places and requires much processing to get the product we buy in our grocery store, but there are other ways to get sugar locally and more sustainably. Obviously there is honey, and there is sorghum syrup, which was a popular form of sugar in the past in our part of the country. But there’s also maple syrup, which in our southern region can be made from silver maples.

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Natural Refrigerator: The Root Cellar in My Floor

When I built my house I noticed that one corner of the foundation was really deep, so I planned to make it into a root cellar. Now I use this space to keep the food I grow in the summer fresh through the winter, without refrigeration. It was a rather simple design feature, but it saves me a lot of energy in the long run and allows me to eat my harvest year round.

Our economy expends a huge amount of energy on refrigeration, not only to preserve food so that it can be shipped across the world and eaten fresh, but so that the food industry can recreate the climate conditions of a root cellar. Continue reading

Design Details of My Strawbale Tiny House: Beauty and Function

In this video I take you through some of the design features of my strawbale tiny house and explain how designing a house to be efficient, sustainable, and functional can result in a byproduct of beauty.  Tiny house builders and owners know how important it is to conserve space in their homes.  Mine is no different. See how I make use of the space under my stairway.  A walk-in closet on the second floor provides a handy place to store and hide all my stuff. See how using natural finishes to the house add functionality and beauty.

My house’s passive solar design also reduces the amount of fuel I need to heat my home in winter.  I’ll show you how it heats up throughout a chilly day using only the sun’s energy.