Self-Sufficiency

Winter’s coming, get ready now

Warm BootsIt’s the middle of August, smack in the middle of summer, and it’s time to start thinking about winter. Yes, the cold air is coming. I have a hard time thinking about cold weather when I’m sweating and grumbling about where the breeze went… But there are little reminders about the coming  cold, the sun is setting sooner and sooner each night. The evenings are cooling off nicely, it’s all but getting cold at night. Of course cold is relative, when it’s been near 100° F, then 55° or 60° feels cold, after it’s been in the 30°s, then 55° to 60° will feel like a heat wave. :)…

Read More »

The new-old way to cook / book review / video

retained-heat-cooking
Retained Heat Cooking
Have you heard about hot box, hay box or cook box cooking? It’s the new-old way to cook that saves energy, improves flavor and increases the nutrition in your food, and frees up your time. All you do is heat up your food to boiling then retain that heat by insulating the hot pot of food until the cooking process is completed.…

Read More »
Community

Alive and well-updates

Alive and well
Alive and well
Here is an update on what has been going on in our off-grid life. I know I haven’t written in a while, I took a mini-break from blogging and writing, it was something I needed to do, but now I’m back. :)…

Read More »

We’ve come a long way baby

CabinI’ve been going back over the first pictures we took of our cabin, before it was renamed the sky castle, it’s hard to believe we have done so much with so little. Here are some of the original pix followed by more current pix. Enjoy!




Read More »
Community

Off-grid medicine – horehound

horehoundNow I’ve gone and done it, (a Texas phrase), this is such a rare thing to happen to me, I am sick. There I said it. About 4 days ago I could feel my throat getting sore, this does happen from time to time, but usually it lasts 3 days and is very mild. Not so this time, I  have been coughing so much that it feels like someone is punching me in the chest. I haven’t had a fever though, just this miserable cough. Now is as good a time as any to try out some herbal remedies.…

Read More »
Community

More “as seen on TV”

pumpThe other day I was talking to a friend and we touched on the subject of the Pump-n-Seal gadget , I have had mine for a while, but I must admit that I haven’t been using it as much as I should. So I pulled it out and waited for an opportunity to use it.  I didn’t have to wait long.

Yesterday, I was cutting up an apple and only ate half of it, I needed a way to store the other half. You know what happens to apples, without chemical intervention (an acid, lemon juice, vitamin C…), apples quickly begin to turn brown, they oxidize.…

Read More »
Community

Updates and the new shed

wretha00001Here’s an update on what has been going on with us. Things have been going pretty well, we have been living here, 100% off-grid for a year and a half. We have fallen into a regular routine, I cook, clean, garden, work at the Country Store and other miscellaneous things, Mountain Man Bob works on the sky castle and the various things that make our lives better and easier.  We have gone from living in a 1 room cabin, with 2 out of the 4 walls being 2 layers of building plastic, with no heat or running water, actually we slept in a tent inside the cabin because the cabin would not keep out insects. When we first got here, it was December, and it was cooooold! I know it got down to at least 14 degrees F, overnight, with the winds blowing a gale, we didn’t have our wood stove installed yet, we put all of our canned goods inside the tent in hopes that our body heat would keep the cans from freezing. We have come a long way baby!…

Read More »
Community

DIY laundry soap – video

DIY Laundry SoapToday I made another batch of laundry soap. I had ran out about a month ago, I was using the leftover powdered store bought soap, wow is there a difference! When I use the commercial soap, I often need to run a second rinse cycle, especially if I look at the rinse water, it’s nearly as soapy as the wash cycle, I know that is just being dried into my clothes, that can’t be good for my skin. When I use my homemade laundry soap, I use so much less, and it gets my clothes just as clean if not cleaner, and I don’t see that residue of suds in the rinse water.…

Read More »
Community

Soilcrete

wretha0001

It’s been a while since I’ve written an update on what we are doing on the cabin, so this time I’ll write about concrete, or more accurately soilcrete. What is soilcrete? It’s nearly the same thing as concrete but using local materials instead of using purchased materials. We use local dirt, gravel from the creek, portland cement and of course water. This makes a strong and inexpensive concrete/soilcrete to make walls and such.…

Read More »
People

Save our Mountaintops

Judd Palin
Judd Palin
The clean-up crews are slowly moving in to deal with the smoking craters and ecological detritus of the Bush years. The latest teams actress Ashley Judd with the Sierra Club

After her successful work in drawing attention to Sarah Palin’s aerial wolf hunting policies in Alaska, Judd, from Kentucky, and Sierra want the Obama Administration to step in and protect the mountains, streams and people of Appalachia from mountaintop removal.

Judd, 40, joined about 500 people at the state Capitol in Frankfort for legislation that would end the blasting away of mountaintops to unearth coal.…

Read More »
trailer19-2419609
Community

Travel Trailer/Redneck Games pt 2

Getting the trailer up the hill and past the boulders and trees was more challenging than we thought it would be, but when you have to do something, then you figure out a way to do it.…

Read More »