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How to Start a Fire With Water | True Activist - Nightly. How to Start a Fire With Water. What Is Your Off Grid Dream of The Perfect Homestead? What Is Your Idea of The Perfect Off Grid Homestead? Today I’m going to ask a question. It’s a pretty simple question, but one I think will have a rather complex and diverse answer from everyone, simply because everyone has their own wants and desires when they plan for their off grid move.

To start things off I’d like to share my own dream of my own off grid homestead. First and foremost I will need to choose the land. I want a place that’s not too cold in the winter, and not to hot in the summer. I’d like a place with a clean water source, whether a river, stream, pond, lake, or natural spring. The cabin will be built using natural material, trees, stone, mud, clay, and recycled and reclaimed wood and other building materials. I’d like a property close to or bordering a national forest. Ideally, I’d like to pick a place OUTSIDE of city limits and far enough away from areas governed by strict building code enforcement and restrictions or covenants. This is a good start.

So… How to Easily Heat Your Home Using Flower Pots & Tea Lights. By: Amanda Froelich, True Activist. Wanting to cut costs on the energy bill, especially now that temperatures are dropping for the season? Economics may be one reason to seek more sustainable energy sources, but this inventive way to heat the house is also purely fascinating. Journalist, YouTuber, and boat owner Dylan Winter created his DIY heater using tea lights and placed inside a bread tin and covered with two ceramic flowerpots. This creative system uses the scientific principles of convection heat transfer and, according to Winter, can heat his home for around 8 hours a day. His YouTube Channel KeepTurningLeft shows how the method works: The tea lights are first put into a bread loaf tin and covered with a small upside-down flower pot.

The hole in the top of the upside-down pot is covered with the metal casing leftover from one of the tea lights. This system works because the candles produce gases full of heated particles that are captured and channeled through the pots. Sources: 50 Amazing Life Hacks To Simplify Your World. Please Share This Page: Google + stumbleupon tumblr reddit If you are a first-time visitor, please be sure to like us on Facebook and receive our exciting and innovative tutorials and info! We discovered an amazing page of 50 Amazing Life Hacks To Simplify Your World and had to share! Introduction: The word “hack” has become an interesting word in our culture, laden with various shades of meaning, depending on the context in which it is used. The term “hacking” was once applied to software programming and implied an investigative approach to problem solving – particularly to back-engineering complex systems. Nowadays, these meanings exist side by side, which is somewhat confusing and problematic in a way.

A life hack doesn’t involve breaking into anything! The best life-hackers adopt a creative problem solving mindset and may be self-sufficient to a high degree. Enter Twisted Sifter, who have gone to great lengths to assemble a smorgasbord of life hacks – 50 to be precise. 210 Sq Ft Minim House Shelters Sweet Space-Saving Interior with Off Grid Versatility | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building - Nightly.

The Minim House’s green credentials include walls made from highly insulated prefabricated SIPs, a 960 watt solar array, a 290 gallon rainwater treatment system, and all LED lighting. Inside two people can live and work comfortably. There is a 10′ galley kitchen, a 8.5′ couch, 5′ closet, office space, bed, bathroom, large windows, a flexible dining table/bar/coffee table, a full audiovisual system and even a 5′ desk that opens up to reveal a full sized keyboard. The openness of the interior gives it a light and dynamic feel. Brian Levy spent his teenage years living in a relatively large family home with an accompanying long list of chores, high running costs and large number of possessions. During a trip to visit his sister, who was at that time working on an organic farm, he was impressed by the intimacy and efficiency of her small trailer living quarters.

There are challenges to be overcome in Washington. . + Minim House + Boneyard Studios + Foundry Architects. Sustainability in the City: A Perspective on Food » Love & Wild Honey Love & Wild Honey. What does it mean to be sustainable in an urban environment? Let’s start by defining what we mean by sustainable for this purpose, so we are all on the same page. From an etymological stand point, the word sustainability is derived from the Latin sustinere; to hold. Using the root of this word as a baseline, I think it is important to define sustainability as the ability to “uphold” something. In this case, we are looking at sustainability in food systems in the city.

The World Bank does a beautiful job at putting this idea into more eloquent wording. They state: “sustainability is defined as a requirement of our generation to manage the resource base such that the average quality of life that we ensure ourselves can potentially be shared by all future generations….Development is sustainable if it involves a non-decreasing average quality of life.” My favorite way to imagine a sustainable city is one that has made blurry the boundaries between what is wild and what is urban. 1. 2. 4. 5. Build a $300 underground greenhouse for year-round gardening (Video)

Growers in colder climates often utilize various approaches to extend the growing season or to give their crops a boost, whether it's coldframes, hoop houses or greenhouses. Greenhouses are usually glazed structures, but are typically expensive to construct and heat throughout the winter. A much more affordable and effective alternative to glass greenhouses is the walipini (an Aymara Indian word for a "place of warmth"), also known as an underground or pit greenhouse. First developed over 20 years ago for the cold mountainous regions of South America, this method allows growers to maintain a productive garden year-round, even in the coldest of climates. Here's a video tour of a walipini that shows what a basic version of this earth-sheltered solar greenhouse looks like inside: © Benson Institute It's a pretty intriguing set-up that combines the principles of passive solar heating with earth-sheltered building. SilverThunder/via. Is living off the grid worth the cost? - The Western Producer.

Independence from the power company is an attractive concept. Sometimes it is an anti-bureaucratic response because folks see the power company taking hard-earned money month after month. Others perceive power as expensive and believe going off the grid will mean economic savings. Sometimes folks are simply tired of blackouts and want power security, especially if they live in rural areas. The alternative to grid-connected power is off-grid power, which means just that: you are off the grid, on your own. In effect, you own the electrical utility and are responsible for it.

On the other hand, off-grid power also means your power will still operate when the grid-tied neigh-bours’ houses go dark. We use power for a lot of purposes, including lighting, appliances and tools. As an example, most of our equipment use is measured in watts, but our consumption is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWhr). Let’s look at a fictional residential power system in the southern Prairies in the wintertime. DIY: How to Plant a Personal Garden In a Small Urban Space.

Many people bemoan the fact that they can’t grow their own food (or even flowers) because they lack any kind of garden space, but guess what? You can actually grow more than you realize in really small areas as long as they get a bit of direct sun. Hell, you can even grow things indoors under a lamp, but there’s something special about plucking your own food from a stalk that’s been sitting in summer sunshine all day.

In any case, whether you have a little concrete slab behind your house, a fire escape outside your window, or even a tiny balcony, your urban garden can be a veritable Eden of fresh, healthy, home-grown vegetables, and herbs. Pots and Planters There are a variety of “one-pot” container gardens you can create that can be placed on a small balcony or patio to provide you with everything you need for basic dishes, all summer long. Tisane Planter: Do you like herbal teas? Hanging Planters Trellises and Pallets Troughs and Window-Boxes Companion-Planting Resource Books. Deep Green Permaculture | The Sustainable Organic Gardening Guide for Self-Sufficient People.

Permaculture - Regenerative Leadership Institute - Sustainability Education. Edible Garden How-To » Edible Landscaping with Rosalind Creasy. Rosalind Creasy’s 100-Square-Foot Garden While doing research for my new book Edible Landscaping, I became so aware of how much energy is squandered on lawns. What if, I thought, a small area of people’s lawns were converted to growing edibles? When I checked stats for fruit and vegetable yields, I realized that all the information online is for commercial growers, not home gardeners. Home gardeners harvest more often and don’t discard misshapen vegetables. So I decided to dedicate a 5 by 20 foot area to growing edibles and measure how much I produce in 100 square feet. The Garden – Spring/Summer 2008 I kept it simple, choosing vegetables that I could buy as transplants at my local nursery; those that in my experience are either super productive or the vegetables themselves are expensive to buy: After decades of gardening I’m probably a bit blasé, but even I was amazed that it all happened so quickly—within a few weeks we were picking outer lettuce leaves—as many as we needed.

Growing Salad Greens » Edible Landscaping with Rosalind Creasy. Many types of salad greens grow right off the kitchen patio. Spring is a great time for growing salad greens, the weather is cool and damp, just what they love. Plant edible flowers along with the greens so you can enjoy them in the garden as well as in your salad. Greens fit into your landscape, be they baby greens or grown to mature heads. The easiest way to start to grow your salad greens is to grow baby greens, which will be ready to harvest in about 6 weeks. - Order seeds for baby salad greens under the name mesclun mix or make your own mix by purchasing individual packages of seeds of 3 or 4 types of lettuces and a few types of greens such as: spinach, chard, mustard, rocket, or finely curled endive. - A garden bed about 10′ by 4’ provides a generous amount of baby salad greens for 3 or 4 people. - Harvest your baby greens by taking kitchen shears and cutting across the bed about an inch above the crowns of the plants.

Recipe for a classic French mesclun salad. The Salad: Vinaigrette: Compost is Black Gold! | If there was only one piece of advice I could give to improve your soil, it would be to compost. This dark, crumbly, “black gold”, is made up of decomposing organic matter. It improves your soil and keeps kitchen scraps and yard debris out of landfills. That’s 30% of household waste! So many items are compostable – more than you would probably consider. For example: grass clippingsleavesstrawhayyard wasteold potting soilhouse plants if they are not diseasedvegetable and fruit scraps such as peelings, cores, etc.nut shellsegg shellsbread and grainscoffee filterstea bagsfresh manureshredded paper (no colored ink)used napkins and paper towelsdryer lint if your clothing is predominately natural fibernatural fiber twine, string, yarn and threadnatural fiber fabric or clothing, shredded or cut into small piecestoothpickshairanimal furpencil shavings It is generally recommended that food scraps from animal products not be included with the exception of egg shells.

My Compost Bin Do you compost? Seeking Balance – Family, Farm, Work – LIFE. | Faulk Farmstead. I get overwhelmed. Not TERRIBLY often. But it does happen. Just don’t ask my husband – because he will tell you I’m always overwhelmed. (Ok, ok… I’m working on it…) I like to say that I get overwhelmed because I just have so many great ideas – I just want to make them all happen. For example – remember my humble idea to start a farm? See how quickly things spiral out of control?

And then I turned into that woman who decided she was going to make everything. I have learned to recognize a very simple fact. I cannot do it all. I sure as hell want to. My priorities have become crystal clear to me: Family. I recently started to do something whenever I would start to feel overwhelmed with the decisions I have made. Take a step back. Evaluate where my priorities are in relation to what is turning me on edge - and start there.

Emma has been dying to learn how to cross-stitch. And she rocked it (no doubt). And I’m not stressed out anymore - well, not TERRIBLY stressed out. 41 Ways to Waste Less Today | Earth911.com. How To Be An Apartment Homesteader - Apartment Homesteading - Self sufficent. I read. I read a lot. No really I am a book hoarder. One of my favorite bloggers posts e-books about homesteading every day and I must download at least 3 a day and just store them in my amazon library until I read them or can use them. I download books about raising goats and chickens and edible permaculture gardens. The thing is, I can not use most of the information I am given at this point in time. You see, I am one of the millions afflicted with apartment living. I wont bore you with how we ended up moving from a nice little house to a tiny sad apartment but suffice it to say, this is where we are and we are making the most of it.

My husband was listening to a NPR TED Talk pod cast “The Future of Cities” about what the city of tomorrow looks like from a sustainability stand point. Of all the blogs I follow, none of them discuss apartment homesteading. I will write a series with more details on each of these but here are some ways that we do apartment homesteading: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 12 Things You NEED To Go Off Grid NOW! What do you need to go off grid NOW? Do you think you’re ready to live off grid? Where are you going to go without money? Unless you’re planning on bugging out to the wilderness in Alaska or some other wild frontier with just the clothes on your back and a way to hunt for game and live off the land, you’re going to need money to buy the things you need to live off the grid. Especially if you’re going to bring your family. The fact is, to do anything nowadays you need money, and usually lots of it. Otherwise, you’re stuck in the poorhouse, renting, living paycheck to paycheck, and barely making ends meet.

There’s a whole list of things you need besides money, that money will buy you as you prep for your move off grid. First and foremost, you’ll need a place to go. A place to go seems obvious at first glance, and people know this of course. Consider first, the fact you will be OFF GRID. Who owns the mineral/water rights? Finally is zoning and county/city ordinances. Buy land which has WATER! How to Open a Can without Can Opener. Rural Connectivity. There’s been no greater benefit to the global world in recent years than the growing popularity of the Internet.

Connectivity has allowed a huge rise in exchange of information, for every outlet from news and politics to informational sources like GRIT to discuss the best advice for living in rural America. Where once rural residents were isolated from those outside their immediate surroundings, they now have access to any knowledge they desire.

Just as GRIT has examined the benefits of and given some tips for installing solar panels and weatherproofing, understanding and setting up your own system to receive satellite Internet can provide you with all the benefits of high speed Internet access while preserving your autonomy and requiring only a minimal investment of time and money. Photo: iStockphoto.com/Andreas Weber For many rural dwellers, it’s not easy finding a connection to the web at all, and high speed Internet has been nearly impossible to access in many areas. Pastured Chicken Stats and Butchering, 2013. | The Elliott Homestead. You Can't Compost Meat (And Other Ridiculous Myths) - Organic Gardening.

72 Uses For Simple Household Products To Save Money & Avoid Toxins. 7 Survival Life Hacks That Could Save Your Life. Off-Grid » 40 Ways To Go Greener At Home. Organic Gardening Advice: Our Complete Garden Know-How Series - Organic Gardening - Mother Earth Living. Do You Have A Thyroid Problem? Growing Sunflowers: From History to Cultivation - Organic Gardening. The Natural Health Page: 15 Foods That Can Be Regrown From Scraps. Finding Your Dream Farm: Ideas From Our Facebook Friends - DIY. Tiny Off-Grid Cabin in Maine is Completely Self-Sustaining.

26 Practical Homesteading Books for Your Inspiration | Blue Yurt Farms. 16 Veggies You Can Re-Grow from Kitchen Scraps. Small farms - Nightly. How to Make a Solar Still - DIY. 10 Healing Herbs You Can Grow At Home. Winter Squash 101 | A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit - Sarah Goodyear.