Category Archives: Home Production

An element of the Foundational area in which one utilizes their available resources to replace and extend their supply of essentials.

Home safety: Fire extinguishers

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I was browsing some articles yesterday on a prepper site advocating preparation for the rioting we’ve seen lately to spread even further. They posted a list of suggestions for how to be prepared. One of the items surprised me: fire extinguishers.

What surprised me was that, when brainstorming my emergency preparedness list of things to buy a few months ago, I had completely forgotten about fire extinguishers. We had at least three of them located strategically in our last house, but we only have one here–and it’s located somewhere no one will remember to look!

It’s time I bought some more fire extinguishers. Safety.com recommends an extinguisher for every floor of your home, plus any areas more prone to fires, such as the kitchen, furnace area, workshop or garage. Take time to consider where the fires may start and how to place fire extinguishers where they won’t be on the opposite side of the fire from you.

As for what kind to buy, there are five basic types:

  • Class A – Involve combustibles such as wood, trash or paper
  • Class B – Liquid fires that are spread by gas, oil or other flammable liquids
  • Class C – Spread by electricity or electrical equipment
  • Class D – Metals that are flammable including magnesium, titanium or aluminum
  • Class K – Fires that stem from cooking oils and fats

Multipurpose extinguishers are available that can fight A, B, and C type fires. There are also dry chemical extinguishers that fight B and C fires. There are some that are specifically made for electronics that won’t short out equipment with wet materials, like those using carbon dioxide. Most general purpose fire extinguishers on the market are ABC rated.

One consideration, however, is that for certain types of fires the concentrated blast of chemicals may actually cause the flaming material to splash or scatter, spreading the fire further. For oil fires on your stove, for example, it may be better to keep a container of baking soda or salt on hand to dump on the fire, or simply put a lid on the pan ti deprive the fire of oxygen. In most cases that is all extinguishers do: separate the oxygen from the burning fuel, interrupting the burning process.

Once you have fire extinguishers in place it’s good to check them regularly to ensure they still have sufficient pressure. When starting out business in Boise, Idaho, we learned it was a requirement by the Fire Department to keep a fire extinguisher on the premises, and to keep it charged. We would need to get our extinguisher checked and verified every year.

There may not be any such requirement for domestic spaces, but it’s a good idea anyway. Nothing is worse than a fire extinguisher that doesn’t work when you need it most. And if you’ve ever had to use it, either replace it or get it recharged if you bought a type that is rechargeable.

For recommendations on fire extinguishers, see Safety.com’s page on types of fires and extinguishers, as well as their recommendations for the top 10 extinguishers on the market.

If you’ve never used a fire extinguisher before, or have never had training, go read through this site on fire extinguisher training as soon as possible. When a fire breaks out is not the time to go surfing the web for answers.

My wife and I visited our local fire station a few years back with the cub scouts, and they admitted that with all the safety features included in houses these days house fires are not very common. But they do still happen, and the better you’re prepared and the quicker you can respond the less the damage to your home and belongings.

Is it worth it?

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Ken Jorgustin at Modern Survival Blog takes up the question of whether it’s worth it to invest in self-reliance. He looks at various types of home production, such as raising your own chickens, growing your own garden, or even switching to solar energy all cost money, and often those same products can be obtained commercially for less.

During the process of building their palace, I’ve thought about the money it took to get this done. As well as the ongoing costs of maintaining the small flock, and feeding them. Let me put it this way. You might get depressed to realize the ultimate cost per dozen eggs output compared to the money input!

Ken Jorgustin

I’ve noticed that with gardening. In both places we’ve lived our irrigation and gardening water comes from the same water as our culinary and hygienic water, and the cost can more than double during the summer months. Whatever money we save by growing our own vegetables is more than eaten up in the water, seeds, tools, and fertilizer needed to grow them. We ultimately decided it simply wasn’t worthwhile to try to grow our own potatoes in Idaho.

We also looked at solar power ourselves a few years ago and realized that in spite of what the salesman told us, the system would never pay for itself, even if the power company paid for any excess electricity we generated–which they stopped doing within a few years. While we would like to have been able to do more to reduce pollution and our own energy dependence we just couldn’t justify the expense.

It can all be enough to make you step back and wonder if it’s really worthwhile to take a different path. But, as Jorgustin explains, the answer will be different for everyone. For some people cost is the only consideration, and they’ll likely not bother with many self-reliance measures. For my wife and I, we find home-grown food is usually healthier and better tasting. What’s more, there may be rough times ahead–times when the stores won’t be able to get the stock they usually get. We may very well need to supplement our food supply from our own yard. In the middle of the crisis is not the time to be learning what grows and what doesn’t, or how to lay out your garden, your watering, etc. And as we’ve seen, the price of things can increase quickly when it’s in short supply.

A considerable part of self-reliance, and especially emergency preparedness, is not just having the things you need when things go wrong, but knowing what to do with them. Maybe not everything we can do we should do, but it is worthwhile to consider what things you want to be able to do. And sometimes it just feels good to do it.

Garden planning from Mother Earth News

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Mother Earth News has an article and a video about planning your garden before the growing year begins. They pack a fair amount information into a 4-minute video, and it’s worth a look. They also plug their garden planning software, which got me all nostalgic for the old Sim Farm game. Supposedly it helps you map out your garden area, plan around shade, ensure proper crop rotation, and helps you know how many plants each area can support. It looks pretty cool, and comes with a 7-day free trial. After that it’s a subscription, cheapest if you sign up for two years.

Have any of you used this or similar software? If so, leave a comment below and let me know what you think of it.

And now, the video:

Spherical gardening?

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I’ve heard of Square-foot Gardening, but IKEA now has something new in mind: spherical gardening.

Read more at the link, but the idea is that the design ensures that all levels get air and light, and you can access it from both inside and out. Heck, it might even make a nice little reading nook or a meditation chamber. It certainly looks like the Yoda version of Darth Vader’s meditation chamber:

See the source image

I like the idea but, seeing as it’s made out of wood, how long before weather and water make it unstable? We’ll have to check back in a few years and see how well it works.

The plans are available online. If anyone out there has built and used one of these, please drop me a line and let me know how it works!

Home food production – Begin with the end in mind

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There is one good thing about uprooting your family and moving to another state: You get to choose a new home. Having lived in two previous homes, we’ve learned a few things about what is important to us. One important factor is home food production. Even if it’s a small garden to supplement our grocery purchases, it’s important to us.

So when I went house shopping in our new town (I say “I” because my wife was 400 miles away and only able to offer guidance based on the MLS listings or from photos I sent) one of the main considerations was either the presence of food production space or the potential for it. In some ways, the having the room to put in gardens or trees was preferable, as we didn’t want to inherit any bad placement or planning.

As it was, though, the house we chose has both–established fruit trees and dedicated vegetable garden space and room for more if we choose. The house itself was nice, but one look at the yard and that clinched it. This house had “us” written all over it.

I’m sure we’ll find some of the former owners’ choices don’t work well for us, and some changes will need to be made, but few things indicate “this will work” as well as fruit hanging on the trees and a garden rapidly approaching the point of harvest. We know you can grow food here because we see it being done. We are literally enjoying the fruit of someone else’s labors.

So whatever difficulties our new situation may introduce into our plan to return to self-reliance, at least our yard is not one of them. In that regard, knowing what we wanted up front has paid off already.

Be a good neighbor

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I read about this situation on the American Preppers Network site. A woman is growing an organic garden in her front yard and has run afoul of her HOA. I know I should be shocked, upset, outraged, etc., but you see, I’m the president of my HOA and have a different perspective.

HOA’s have rules, and everyone is supposed to receive a copy of those rules when they move in. They are responsible for reading and obeying the rules. The HOA is responsible for enforcing them. If you find the rules prohibitive, don’t buy a house there.

Now don’t get me wrong. My HOA is not nearly so restrictive. And I’m in the process of working to change the rules where they are. For example, when our neighborhood was built nearly twenty years ago they had rules against xeriscaping. Times have changed, and I think we need to allow xeric landscaping now.

But in changing the rules I have to consider all the angles. Let’s face it, some xeriscaping can look pretty trashy if not done correctly or maintained well. I don’t want someone saying “Hey, weeds are natural and drought-resistant. I’ll just let my yard go to weeds.” When we do change the rule we have to make a clear, enforceable standard about what we will accept.

I, obviously, am all in favor of self reliance and making your own property produce as much as you can. As HOA president I do my best to be supportive of that. I haven’t clamped down on the people who are keeping chickens, though the CC&Rs clearly forbid it, because they are out of sight, and are not causing a nuisance.

But at the same time, if you live in an HOA it’s your responsibility to know what the rules are and to live by them. If you don’t like the rules then let your HOA know. See if they can be changed. Work with your HOA to find ways to satisfy the rules (screening things with strategic landscaping can go a long way) and still make things work for you.

But in the end, if you can’t, perhaps you should move to someplace more accommodating of your lifestyle. If I were to decide that I needed to raise a few sheep as part of my self reliance program I wouldn’t dream of just getting them and waiting for the HOA to complain. It’s clearly against the rules. I would move someplace where it’s okay.

You see, I’ve seen the other side of things, too. We used to live in a neighborhood where there was no HOA. The duplex across the street was a rental, and the landlord lived in another town and didn’t care. The weeds and grass were seldom less than a foot high, and usually brown. Those weeds would blow seeds into our yard, and it was a constant battle to keep them out.

Down the street lived a man who kept his Vegas-style Christmas light display up and turned on year-round. Down the other way was a house where they hung a 6-foot inflatable pterodactyl from a tree branch hanging over the road. The last time I drove through the old neighborhood I saw they had also added a metal rocket as tall as the house to the front yard.

Certainly there are worse neighborhoods, but when people see that sort of thing they can be hesitant to move in. Would-be sellers have to drop their asking price to entice someone to buy, and the lower it goes the more likely the buyer will also be someone who doesn’t care about how their own property looks. Pretty soon property values in the entire neighborhood are dropping.

Yes, I’m probably venting a bit here. The attitudes expressed in the comments on the APN site were rather frustrating, and decidedly anti-HOA. I know some HOAs are over the top. But as the volunteer president of an HOA who continually feels caught between the “let it all rot” crowd and the “not one inch out of line” crowd, I see a definite need for balance–and for some external pressures to put in at least a minimal effort to keep one’s place looking acceptable.

So go ahead and use your land to the fullest, but please be aware of the rules and do your best to operate within them. You never know when you’ll need your neighbors. It’s best to be a good neighbor yourself. If more people would be, we wouldn’t need HOAs.

Survival gardening

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Our local garden columnist recently recommended a new book by writer, gardener, and scientist Carol Deppe, entitled “The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times”. I have not had a chance to read this book yet (its a bit more than I can afford both money- and time-wise right now), but the review raises some rather interesting points.

The book makes mention of five specific crops needed for health and survival: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. These foods are not included in the current “super-food” craze, but there is a reason they are considered staples. You can eat quite well for quite a long time on just these foods.

More importantly, the book discusses how to collect and use seeds, as it won’t be easy to obtain new seeds during a long-term period of economic instability. Most seeds used today are hybrids, and will not likely continue to breed true under uncontrolled garden conditions. Any experienced gardener knows that seeds will only keep reliably for a few years, so new sources of seeds are necessary for long-term sustainability. The book covers other survival contingencies as well, such as what foods store well in the absence of refrigeration.

I plan to get a copy of this book someday, as it sounds like a good source of information and should give one lots to think about. In the mean time, has anyone else out there read this book? Would you be willing to do a guest post book review on it? Contact me in the comments or by email at thom@thomstratton.com.

Long term fruit and vegetable storage

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Self Reliance Exchange continues their long term food storage series with Step 7: Fruits & Veggies. This is a big one. Grains, legumes, and so on are all good, but fruits and vegetables make those others more versatile and offer important nutrition. They recommend growing your own, but also point out that buying in bulk or buying pre-preserved are also viable options.

If you’re interested in home canning, check out my friend Tonya’s site, Country Home Canning. She’s got recipes and techniques, and can help set you up with everything you need.

 

Deck project update

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The deck removal/garden bed project is pretty much complete. After clearing away the decking we dug up the area. I quickly found that someone had devoted a great deal of concrete to making…I don’t know what. Every few feet I’d dig up another inverted gumdrop of concrete that served no purpose I could ascertain other than to annoy me. I now have the world’s largest concrete gumdrop collection!

The lot, when cleared, looked much like this:

In digging up the area, too, I came to realize this was not going to be choice garden soil. Much of it hadn’t seen water in years, and was little better than packed clay. I spread what compost I could get from our composters over the area and dug it in. It still looked rather rough and clumpy, but I started putting in dividers and marking out pathways before the final attempt to condition the soil a bit better.

Today, while I had my father-in-law still here to help (thanks, Dad!) I went to the home improvement store and bought 21 bags of compost. Two-thirds of it actually went around various trees in our yard, but the rest got spread over the new garden area. The kids joined in, and were actually rather helpful. It’s amazing how quickly five rakes can smooth out a garden.

Of course all we’d really done to this point is just cover over the clumpy, clay-ish soil. Next we dug it all in. Amazingly enough, it worked! The dirt smoothed right out! It’s still not perfect, and I’ll be surprised if anything grows all that well in it this year, but it’s a start. We’ve got leftover seeds we can use, so it won’t be that costly to see what we can get to grow. If it does well, every bit will help.

I’m glad the project is finally done–well, except for getting rid of the rest of the scrap wood and the concrete gumdrop collection. There are plenty of other things I can focus on now, like thinning the peaches.