Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

I looked over some of your other questions. At first I figured you to be a teenager, wanting to live the perfect “green lifestyle.”

Read your health problems. Now I see why the earthship answers probably received thumbs down. Earthships are the best type of home to build. However I do not think you would be physically up to pounding all that dirt, and it’s extremely hard to hire having an earthship built.

To answer you question, you really need to have a mix of power sources. There will be days the sun does not shine enough to charge the batteries…but the wind is probably blowing.

If you are going to be off grid entirely, you need a mix of 2-5 different sources for your household power.

We will be building entirely off grid. We live in the Pacific Northwest, about 20 miles from the Canadian border. So we can have some pretty cold and snowy winters.

We will have wind, active solar, passive solar, a Central Boiler (brand name), hydro if we can legally, wood stoves (heat), wood cook stove, solar gain from the proper positioning of our home, wind cooling of our home from proper possitioning. We debate installing gas appliances run on propane. That however makes us dependent on companies and we don’t really want that. Natural Gas is not an option where we are.

Active solar…charges batteries and provides electric for your use.
Passive solar…only heats up water, and provides hot water that way.
Wind turbines produce electricity
Wind mills grind grain, or pump water

Skystream 3.7 makes a very good wind turbine product for homeowners. Here’s a link:
http://www.skystreamenergy.com/

For a protien source, you really need to check out goats. Both the meat, and the milk from goats. Do some research, you may be suprised at how good they are for you, and how gentle both are for the human body to digest.

If you are building your own house, build it to take maximum advantage of solar gain for winter, and prevailing winds for cooling. You can make 50 degree differences in your home just by doing that.

Only build/buy in an area where it is legal for you to have a rainwater catch system. Install a metal roof on your home, and catch your own rainwater.

Start to make lists of what is extremely important to you (cannot live without) and what you are willing to be flexible on. Start doing lots of research. Check books out from your local library and read up on your topics of interest.

Think outside the box (or maybe in the box!). Those places you mentioned are very termite prone. Concider using Conex boxes to build your home. They are made of metal, and easy to use to build homes. You can insulate the outside of them, and get rid of the industrial box look. Best of all, termites cannot eat them!

~Garnet
Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years
Raising meat goats since 1999

GardenersCardiff answers:

This partly depends on where in California you are, as in Southern California the possibilities are much wider and growing salad crops is easier than elsewhere.

If you have a glasshouse in most of the state, and if it’s heated in the north, then you can grow much of what you want, though certain fruits are seasonal, depending on the amount of daylight as well as temperatures to initiate flowering and fruit growing.

If you have a favourable micro-climate you can use this to your advantage too, as each garden will tend to have some warmer spots than others. In the Bay area, for example, by the coast it is milder than just a small movement inland, where you can get frosts, but miss them by the coastal areas. This allows lettuce and leafy salad greens to be grown fairly easily, whereas the frost would kill these, without protection.

In San Diego, for example, where the climate is fairly similar year round, then you have a much wider choice of what can be grown outdoors.

Of the fruits that can be grown fairly easily under glass, consider strawberries, which don’t need much heat, and you can extend their cropping season quite easily. The great thing with fruit such as apples is that you can keep harvested fruit near ripe in fairly cool conditions, meaning that you can eat your own produce most of the year, even if it’s a while since it was picked.

So, this partly depends on where in California you are, whether you’d like to heat your glasshouse if you’re in a cooler area, and whether you’re a little flexible on what you’ll grow. Overall, the sun is fairly strong, permitting plants to photosynthesize, though some plants want to be deciduous in winter time, which will limit you.

Hope this helps. Good luck! Rob

GardenersCardiff answers:

You cannot rush plant growth they grow by natures clock but you could sprinkle liquid fertilser in the soil