Last fall, you should have prepared your garden for this years crop. Aerate your soil and prepped your compost piles. Now that the winter season is about half way over, we should all start preparing our seeds over the next month. @LotLMain has excellent gardening guides for further reading

How they made ice cream in the old days. Interesting show - but I have never heard of cucumber ice cream before :)

This PDF is one of my favorites in the collection. Made in house by our very own admin Wes. All 8 sections of powering your house from the sun in one large PDF. Almost everything you need to know to set up your own solar power grid.

Addendum: Growing seasons change dramatically depending on what part of the world you are in. Always refer to your regional growing chart before starting seeds

How to Hide Anything

AS GOVERNMENT IMPOSES MORE AND MORE RESTRICTIONS on what we can—or, more importantly, can-
not—own; as the number of burglaries soar; as terrorism
by aberration or by design escalates; and as the possibility
of anarchy seems closer to home than ever, the need for
having a safe space for goods and persons becomes
pressing.

Here are the guidelines to the design, selection,
and construction of hidden storage areas small enough
to hide cash and jewelry and large enough to conceal
armaments and ammunitions or, in the extreme, a family.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Home-Base Hides
3. Elaborate Hiding Places
4. Secret Safe Spaces for Personnel
5. Away-from-Home Hides
6. Hints and Tips

#Survival
#General

The sun is well known for its crop and electricity production, but the suns energy can be harnessed in many more ways

Similar to a solar oven, a solar dryer can dehydrate your crops /fruits for seasonal preservation

During the Great Depression, much of the country still heated their homes with manually fed stoves designed for coal or wood. These can, with a bit of effort, burn a wide variety of other fuels less well.

Today, for most households, this isn’t an option. You most likely have an automatic furnace or boiler fired by natural gas, home heating oil, or propane. If you are particularly unfortunate, you have electric heat. Those of you who live in a rural area or have been preparing for a while might have a fireplace or stove for backup heat.

In a gas producing area, natural gas makes for a good primary heat source. As a secondary, you should be looking to something that you can provide yourself without having to bring in anybody else. The number of field tap natural gas customers being shut down in West Virginia shows that even being in a gas field doesn’t guarantee access to gas. While a homeowner with mineral rights could use a private well, with a going rate of $300,000 for drilling, it is cost prohibitive.

There are a number of fuels that you can use to heat independently. I am not going to go into great detail, there are far better resources available, but instead aim to provide an overview of the options available for further research. The most obvious are wood and coal, the mainstays of heating just a century ago.

The general rule of thumb, if you have no shortage of rain, is that 5-10 acres will supply sufficient wood to heat a good sized and well insulated home in most temperate climates. There’s a lot of variation both in how much heat a house needs and how much wood an acre of land can produce. Stove efficiency also plays a large role, with European masonry stoves, developed in response to wood shortages, being far more efficient than the iron stoves common in North America. The masonry stoves are able to extract far more heat from the exhaust gas and store it in the thermal mass of the masonry, releasing it over time into your home instead of out the chimney.

While wood fires burn from the top, down, with fresh air supplied to the top of the burning fuel, coal fires burn from the bottom, up, with fresh air coming up through the shaker grate and passing through the burning fuel bed. There are stoves designed to burn both fuels, with different air intakes that can be closed to change the air path, and some of these stoves succeed in burning both well.

One advantage of coal is that some coals, especially anthracite coals such as Pennsylvania smokeless, leave no residues in the chimney, negating any need for cleaning the chimney. Bituminous coals will leave tars, much like how wood leaves creosote, which can later cause chimney fires if the chimney isn’t cleaned regularly. The downside of coal is that surface deposits of it, while moderately common in coal producing areas, aren’t nearly as common as trees.

A hand-fed stove can burn just about any biomass that can be set on fire. Some people supplement their wood supply by blending their junk mail into a pulp using blades driven by a drill and pressing the resulting slurry into a cake using two 5 gallon pails, one with holes drilled in it, and letting it dry. Tightly packed straw bundles can also be burned, as can dried manure from large herbivores such as cattle or horses. There’s a large amount of information online, people with knowledge willing to help, and stoves and repair parts for stoves of this type. For alternative heating methods, this is a good place to start and learn how to start, manage, and maintain afire without automatic equipment and fluid fuels.

Another good fuel is sawdust, abundant around any sawmill or wood shop. A stove can be easily fashioned to burn sawdust using a 55 gallon drum or other cylindrical metal container. Legs are fitted to the drum to raise it above the floor and an intake hole is placed in the bottom of the drum and an exhaust hole in the lid, both centered. A pipe is stood up in the drum, covering the intake hole, and the drum is filled with sawdust that is tamped down tightly around the pipe. The pipe is carefully removed so as to not disturb the tamped sawdust and the lid and stovepipe replaced. The sawdust can be lit with a taper or a piece of paper from below. The fire burns from the inside, out at a rate of 1 to 2 inches per hour, depending on how well it’s packed and how dry it is. The sawdust should be as dry as possible to minimize smoking and deposits from smoke. If the sawdust is wet enough, it won’t light at all.

A sawdust stove can run unattended for many hours, both an advantage and a disadvantage. Once you light it, you should leave it to run its course for hours, unlike a wood stove which requires more frequent tending or may be allowed to go out to save fuel in the warmest part of the day. In some ways this makes it more like coal, which is lit and let run. Unlike coal, which is generally run for up to 8 hours, and then a new fuel bed lit on the hot embers of the prior fire, you cannot run a sawdust stove continuous as the fire must completely die before recharging the stove. Another drawback of a sawdust stove is that the fuel insulates the room from the fire except at the top of the fire box. For best efficiency, the flue should be designed to exchange heat from the exhaust gas to the room or whatever other material you are heating. The long runs of this setup make it appealing for heating water.

Pellet stoves are automatic heating systems that use a solid fuel made from pressing sawdust into pellets using a machine called a pellet mill. The pellet mill relies on lignin in the sawdust to bind the material together under high pressure (and sometimes heat). “Chinesium” pellet mills can be had from about $5000. Pellet stoves, despite being ‘automatic’, do require some babysitting as blockages or hopper bridging can disrupt the delivery of fuel. Pellet stoves, because they are automatic, also have a number of electrical devices that fail periodically or require specialized maintenance. Also, as with any automatic heating system, they do not operate without electricity.

Similar to pellet stoves are the automatic coal heaters. These use a fine size of coal commonly sold as ‘rice’ coal. As with a pellet stove, an auger supplies a steady stream of the fuel to the fire. Drawbacks are the same as the pellet stove, with the added difficulty of sourcing fuel if you lack a surface coal deposit on your property.

There are also fuels that can be run through your existing system that you might be able to produce with locally available materials. Naturally, these have the same drawbacks of being inoperable in the absence of electricity as well as requiring the periodic maintenance or replacement of components that might be difficult to source or produce in a survival situation.

If you have an oil heat system, you can substitute bio-diesel for the conventional petro-diesel or home heating oil fuels these systems more typically run on. A variety of blends are commercially available now, and industry consensus is that up to 20% bio-diesel blends (B20) can be run in a system with no modifications. Modifications to run higher blends, including B100, are changing various seals and gaskets to ones with chemically compatible elastomers, as bio-diesel has solvent characteristics that petro-diesels lack. Also, like most home heating oils, bio-diesel isn’t suitable for storage in outdoors tanks that are subject to cold temperatures because, unlike diesel fuel, it lacks anti-gelling additives to allow it to remain liquid at those temperatures. A tank heater is another possible solution to gelling.

Some newer diesel engines aren’t warranted for use with bio-diesel mixes either above a certain ratio or made from certain feed-stock materials. Older diesel equipment, including vehicles, is more prone to have seals and hoses made of natural rubber, an incompatible elastomer. Even if your equipment is compatible with bio-diesel and you aim to transition to that fuel, you must increase the ratio of bio-diesel to petro-diesel gradually, as the solvent action of the bio-diesel will remove deposits from the tank and hoses, which can clog filters if done too quickly. A gradual transition allows tiny particulates to be consumed so that much of what would have made up the clogs would be properly dissolved and burnt with the rest of the fuel.

Bio-diesel is produced from fats and oils of biological origin, be they animal or plant, such as waste cooking oil or any oil pressed from oil crops, such as oil-seed sunflower or rapeseed (also known as ‘canola’). The process is typically done in heated vats and involves reacting the fatty feed-stock with certain alcohols. Sourcing the correct alcohol would be the most significant barrier to sustainably producing this fuel in a survival situation, though the added advantage of being able to run diesel engines for pumps, generators, motor vehicles, or agricultural equipment may make the effort of vertically integrating the production of all chemicals required to produce bio-diesel worthwhile, depending on your particular survival plan or homestead requirements.

Requiring specialized equipment but little in the way of preparation for the fuel are heating setups that use waste oils, whether lubricating oils from automobiles or cooking oils. I’ve encountered quite a few waste engine oil burners heating automotive repair businesses. While waste cooking oils should be quite serviceable as heating fuel, I have never seen nor read of it being done. Either fuel should require filtration and water separation prior to use.

Another fuel that may be used for both heat in existing equipment or to fuel existing internal combustion engines is producer gas. Producer gas is functionally comparable to natural gas. Prior to the development of the modern long-distance pipeline systems used today to bring natural gas to major metropolitan areas from rural gas-producing areas, it was produced in gas plants in cities, from solid or liquid fuel transported into the city, and distributed to customers on the same distribution plumbing used today for natural gas.

Historically, producer gas was generally named for the feed-stock material used in its production, such as ‘wood gas’, ‘coal gas’, or ‘oil gas’. It was also know as ‘illuminating gas’ together with natural gas. Producer gas is a catch-all name for gasses produced by pyrolysis of organic materials, which has included everything from petroleum and coal to wood and manure. In layman’s terms and somewhat oversimplified, incomplete combustion of the feed-stock material is used to break the material into a combustible gas, generally a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Needless to say, this gas can be dangerous to human and animal alike. Unlike natural gas, whose principle hazard other than the obvious explosion risk is oxygen displacement, carbon monoxide kills quickly in very low concentrations. It is from the era of producer gas that putting ones head in an oven became analogous with suicide. The explosion risk of producer gas is complicated by the fact that, unlike natural gas which has a strong odor out of the ground and before gas utilities further increase the odor, producer gas has little to no odor unless it is added. The difficulty of producing the necessary mercaptinol on the small scales necessary to odorize producer gas simply means that it is very unlikely that your producer gas will have any odor, and any system must take that into account for safety. Carbon monoxide detectors are a practical necessity, so long as they remain functional and available.