Sunday (Yesterday) was the beginning of my fourth week on my 5 month fitness mission, so I thought I’d keep a short journal of the day to share here. I mentioned in my original post on this mission that I weighed 224lbs fifteen years ago when I was in my 30s and we had just […]
How We Do Stuff
How we do Stuff: Why you should buy baskets
Making Sauerkraut, the Plain and Frugal Way
I made a video for you! This is making sauerkraut the old school way, with the philosophy behind fermentation rather than a focus on ingredients and recipes.
A Day in the Life of an Off-Grid Author, Part 1
That’s something you have to think about in this life – another thing that makes life deliberate – you can’t just flip a switch and expect light to miraculously appear. Light is something you have to think about beforehand.
How To Make Coffee After The World Ends
Mesquite Coffee became very popular in Texas during the war years 1861-1865 when coffee made from coffee beans became unavailable. And the thing is, Mesquite Coffee is not a “sacrifice.” It is actually a fantastic coffee beverage, and doesn’t at all taste like a coffee substitute…
How We Do Stuff: Staying Cool Beyond Off-Grid
“I find your lifestyle very compelling, but I could never live without air-conditioning.” This is probably the statement I have heard the most over the last ten years from people who cannot believe that we are able to live, and thrive, without most of the modern conveniences that 1st world humans take for granted. I […]
Harvesting Wheat by Hand
I promised several people I’d do a post wherein I share our process of harvesting wheat by hand. Harvesting is actually a small part of the whole process of taking wheat from the field to a usable final product, so although I named this post “Harvesting” Wheat by Hand, I’ll actually include the post-harvest steps of threshing and winnowing.
How We Do That… Off-Grid, Part 1
About ten days ago I penned a blog post here entitled Living Beyond Off-Grid as a Sci-fi Writer, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of people because it got some attention and was shared around the Internets quite a bit. It also raised a substantial number of questions…
Living Beyond Off-Grid as a Scifi Writer
Not long ago I was in a hardware store in a small town not far from our farm. I was with my son buying plumbing parts for a water project for the farm. Robert and I were at the register with our PVC valves, couplers, and adapters when the clerk, a friendly local fellow named Buck, started […]
The Mud Years
This whole thing is a metaphor. It still works and is true the way it’s written, but sometimes I’m too subtle so… this whole thing is a metaphor. We live completely off-grid on an off-grid farm in an off-grid community. The grid really doesn’t have much to do with my topic today, but I thought […]