In this video I try to figure out how to get my power system going again before all my food thaws and spoils.
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.
Sustainable Vegetable Starts: Homemade Soil Mix and Pots
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
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.
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
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.
Sustainable Vegetable Starts: Homemade Soil Mix and Pots
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
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.
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