If the SHTF today......

[lee&lyric]

WOW, Moolie, is that ALL you could come up with. Why so stingy????

Seriously, YOU are a godsend girl . Just what I needed, more excuses to tell Lee that keeps me from my affiliate marketing work. , I'll need a "wish list" too now. I'll gobble 'em up 1 at a time; oh yeah.

Uuh uuuh uuh, I think this'll be book no 2: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation (excellent resource). The title alone has me salivating. When we found out using the mason jar canning technique requires purchasing the flat part of the lid with each canning session we were like, NOOOOTT. Our thought process is always "What if you can't get to the store, how can we live off the land right at hand?" This book may answer that question.

 

[moolie]

WOW, Moolie, is that ALL you could come up with. Why so stingy????

Seriously, YOU are a godsend girl . Just what I needed, more excuses to tell Lee that keeps me from my affiliate marketing work. , I'll need a "wish list" too now. I'll gobble 'em up 1 at a time; oh yeah.

LOL!

I'm a total book-nut so I can go on for hours, when I go to the library I never come out with fewer than 20-30 books at a time

I've done a lot of reading on sustainable living over the years and these are the books I go back to again and again. I have lots more gardening books (perennials and veg) and lots more canning and preserving books, but many are (likely) out of print because they are from the 70s and early 80s.

 

[lee&lyric]

Hey Moolie,

I am fascinated with Canada you know. I visited there as a young woman (Toronto, it's just across the way from Ohio where I lived). I had never (even until THIS day) seen so many interracial relationships comprised of Black women with European men. It blew my mind and I fell in love with the place. The word where I'm from is that Canadians don't sweat such things and it's an everyday thing. KUDOS TO CANADA, I say!

Lately I have been fascinated with Vancouver. Don't know why and even suspect it's a city like any other. Still, I'd like to visit for a couple of hours, LOL. Oh, and the name Saskatchewan alone makes me want to see what life is like there, LOL. Edmonton, Alberta sounds ritzy to me. I could see the Queen's subjects living in such a place. .

My problem with books and libraries is I LOve underlining, coloring, and highlighting (too much university I think). I like taking colored small Post-It's and marking important pages I KNOW I'll be back to visit. Therefore, I am more into buying my own books. Thank God for Amazon dot com and the "Uses/New" feature. Rarely have I purchased a used book from them and it be in bad condition. Thanks to them I'll own most of the books you've listed and we'll be well on our way to SS living.

Oh, gang, we are hoping to move to our land by 12/1 (soooo excited, nervous-in a good way, of course). Armed with prayer, those books, an Internet connection to good folk like YOU ALL Hip Hillbilly Farm will be a success! Wooooooooooooooo whooooooooooooooooo!

 

[moolie]

Hey Moolie,

I am fascinated with Canada you know. I visited there as a young woman (Toronto, it's just across the way from Ohio where I lived). I had never (even until THIS day) seen so many interracial relationships comprised of Black women with European men. It blew my mind and I fell in love with the place. The word where I'm from is that Canadians don't sweat such things and it's an everyday thing. KUDOS TO CANADA, I say!

Lately I have been fascinated with Vancouver. Don't know why and even suspect it's a city like any other. Still, I'd like to visit for a couple of hours, LOL. Oh, and the name Saskatchewan alone makes me want to see what life is like there, LOL. Edmonton, Alberta sounds ritzy to me. I could see the Queen's subjects living in such a place. .

My problem with books and libraries is I LOve underlining, coloring, and highlighting (too much university I think). I like taking colored small Post-It's and marking important pages I KNOW I'll be back to visit. Therefore, I am more into buying my own books. Thank God for Amazon dot com and the "Uses/New" feature. Rarely have I purchased a used book from them and it be in bad condition. Thanks to them I'll own most of the books you've listed and we'll be well on our way to SS living.

Oh, gang, we are hoping to move to our land by 12/1 (soooo excited, nervous-in a good way, of course). Armed with prayer, those books, an Internet connection to good folk like YOU ALL Hip Hillbilly Farm will be a success! Wooooooooooooooo whooooooooooooooooo!

I love my country, and it's nice to hear that you find us an inclusive place. We Canucks have a tendency to refer to America as the "melting pot" and Canada as the "mosaic". We're certainly not perfect, but I think we generally have a pretty open spirit.

I've lived in Vancouver (was born there, moved around BC a lot, moved back for a while and my kids were born in the same hospital I was born in (!), and then headed out to Alberta for some different scenery) and it's a lovely city caught between the sea and mountains. I currently live in Calgary, which most people are delighted to find is a very metropolitan city and not the "hick" town they thought, based on our annual Calgary Stampede. We have a big of a rivalry with Edmonton, so I'll just let you have your own thoughts there

I totally hear you on library books vs. owning and I'm a big fan of used book shops. I've also purchased a few used books from Amazon as well and been very pleased as you have. I also download lots of info and have it organized on a hard drive as well as having some of it printed out (my own personal Gardening Info Book and Family Cookbook). But I use the library to "test drive" books I'm interested in

 

[SillySoap]

WOW, Moolie, is that ALL you could come up with. Why so stingy????

Seriously, YOU are a godsend girl . Just what I needed, more excuses to tell Lee that keeps me from my affiliate marketing work. , I'll need a "wish list" too now. I'll gobble 'em up 1 at a time; oh yeah.

Uuh uuuh uuh, I think this'll be book no 2: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation (excellent resource). The title alone has me salivating. When we found out using the mason jar canning technique requires purchasing the flat part of the lid with each canning session we were like, NOOOOTT. Our thought process is always "What if you can't get to the store, how can we live off the land right at hand?" This book may answer that question.

x2

Thanks Moolie. I will start looking for these books to get me started.

 

[moolie]

No problem, SillySoap

..When we found out using the mason jar canning technique requires purchasing the flat part of the lid with each canning session we were like, NOOOOTT. Our thought process is always "What if you can't get to the store, how can we live off the land right at hand?" This book may answer that question.

Definitely a great book, but canning (both water-bath and pressure canning) still has a solid place in how my family preserves food.

And you can buy re-usable canning lids from the Tattler company (read the product testimonials page for how long these suckers last!), or for anyone who happens to live in western Canada you can often find used Gem jars (at garage sales, Value Village, online on kijiji--I've managed to find about 200 over the past few months) with re-usable glass lids that work with rubber rings similar to the Tattler lids.

 

[Britesea]

composting toilet, micro-hydropower, drying and canning instead of freezing, evaporative coolers for keeping food cool, stuff like that.

Hi Britesea,

The CT is exactly what I was going to suggest. Glad to see you're up on it. We're not up on (micro-hydropower or evaporative coolers though). Will you please expound? We want to go totally off grid. As a matter of fact, we were sitting here discussing this a.m. how we could set up our homestead/farm to not need air conditioning. We're in Central Florida. We know of an older couple in our congregation that goes without AC, but, er ahhh, don't know that I want to go that route. There's got to be a way to stay cool without it. Lee knows stuff though. Meanwhile I want to find out about the things you listed above. There is so much to learn about being SS and for some reason (think SHTF) I am feeling time is running out.

Lyric

eta: We just looked up what I was asking about above. We have no river to take advantage of micro hydropower. The evaporative coolers would need electricity to run them. We're going to pursue wind power. One of the neighbors near our farm is using it successfully.

Wind power would be a good idea. I remember reading an article years ago in Mother Earth News about a wind powered generator made out of a 55 gallon drum. They cut it in half and welded it together so it formed an 'S' shape and mounted it vertically. According to the article it was much more efficient than the traditional shape- only needed a 5mph wind to turn it. I don't know if you could find any articles about it on the internet- the article was probably 20 years ago!

The non-electric evaporative cooler I was talking about is an ancient technique called a 'zeer pot', used in places like Africa to keep food fresh. You take two clay pots- one needs to be small enough to nest in the other with about a 2" space around it. Fill the empty space between the two pots with sand and saturate it with water. Place your food in the inner pot and cover it all with a something like a damp cloth or a clay lid. The water in the sand and the cover evaporates and cools the inner space. I have read it can bring the temperature down by as much as 30 degrees cooler than the ambient air. Not as good as an electric refrigerator perhaps, but definitely a help. These work better in dry heat areas though- not too sure how well they would work in someplace like Florida.

I'm not sure what you can do about air conditioning in a humid climate. If you could figure out a way to dehumidify the air it would feel cooler. What did people do in the old days before electricity?

 

[moolie]

Older homes in hot regions such at the US south and Mediterranean countries often had wrap-around covered porches to cool the breezes that blew around the homes. These homes are still more energy-efficient than more "modern" homes that do not have porches.

We live in an arid area that has cold dry winters and short, hot (for Canada) summers--we can often go without turning on our AC if we open our windows at night to catch any cool breezes and then shut everything down during the day and keep the windows covered. In fact, my kids often complain that they are cold and ask me to turn off the AC when we do this! We never had AC till this house, and when we do run it, it is only for an hour or two before we go to bed--our bedrooms are on the second story and get hotter than the rest of the house. But we seldom run the AC, only when the night before has been particularly still. Fortunately for us, we live in an area that tends to be windy.

 

[Britesea]

we are lucky to live in a similar situation Moolie. The only complaint I have is our house only has one tiny window on the north side, which is where our cooling summer breezes come from. My plan is to eventually put at least one more window in.

People living in the more humid areas have a tougher time of it. Earthbermed houses are a lot cooler, but they are a lot of labor to dig out and build, and if you live anywhere with a high water table you are SOL

 

[Neko-chan]

...