[FeliciaLee]

Thanks, guys, for the interest.

My pics look horrible, because something is wrong with our digital camera ($20 Walmart crap).

But here is a kind of introduction post I wrote recently on a self-sufficiency forum. Maybe this will help get a thread started:

We moved from a 3.5 acre lot to a one acre lot. On our 3.5 lot, we were about 65 miles outside of Washington DC in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was awesome and I loved it, but basically we were just struggling to get as far away from DC as possible, while still being in the "DC area." We worked for AOL, mostly telecommuting by 2000, and wanted just a little piece of rural land in order to get away from an urban setting.

We retired from AOL in 2002 and put our house up for sale, always having said that if things went to crap at AOL, we were going to move out west, to Arizona or New Mexico and live a simple, rural lifestyle. That is exactly what we did.

In September of 2003, we finally closed on our new house in Golden Valley (it took a year to sell our old house and make the move). We immediately started looking into solar and were told it would take "at least" 20k to even get us started. Yeah, right. Someone was just trying to make a killing. We only use about 1.5-2 watts per day. We decided to do it ourselves, but still haven't quite gotten there due to some huge setbacks which I'll get to shortly.

We had to do some repairs on the house we live in. It was only about three years old when we bought it, but the original owners were a young couple from California and they left some damage. From what I have heard via the neighbors, the husband was a former motocross racer, who was forced into retirement after he damaged his knee. The backyard was built into a motocross track, so that would tend to support the story. It looked like an amusement park (of dirt) back there, and we leveled it shortly after moving in.

He and his wife came to Golden Valley in order to work at the casinos in Laughlin, NV, which is about 25 miles west of here. They didn't like casino life and wanted to move back to California, so they just simply stopped making house payments and left. The bank in Oklahoma repossessed the house and made no real effort to auction it or aggressively resell it. So it stayed vacant for a year. We got it for a song, and it has tripled in value during the past 2.5 years.

Although the couple did none of the normal damage associated with repo's, it was still in need of repairs. All of the lighting fixtures had been removed, as had the refrigerator. Some doors and walls had holes and needed patching. I think maybe the husband had a temper. The carpet had to be completely ripped up. We did all of the repairs ourselves and the interior took about six months total to get into top shape again.

Luckily, we don't have grass, so lawn is not a problem.

We have our own septic tank and the water comes from a group of community wells, which everyone shares. We pay by the gallon and it's just like city water, only tastes a heck of a lot better. Our bill only runs about $20 per month, and we use as much gray water as possible. We have no water rights, so digging a well is not allowed.

Our house is all electric, so gas isn't an option.

Just as we were really getting into a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle and settling down, I got cancer. It runs in my family, the whole rural, inbred, bad gene thing. I figured I'd get it sooner or later. My brother had already been through it at only 24, and took a few years to recover because it was so advanced when he finally got treatment.

Anyone from Arizona can agree that medical care is horrible here, and definitely in the dark ages. I've never experienced such backwards thinking. There is a Mayo Clinic in the Phoenix area, and I should have went with them in the first place, but I didn't, so I got some really icky treatment and care (or should I say non-care), and learned a lesson.

I'm still alive, though, so no whining from me. It just kind of set us back a year in our mission.

Now we are at a stage where we are still living very simply, have no wants or needs, and just want to keep moving along that path.

I finally have a garden this year. I have cherry tomatoes, red onions, yellow onions, basil, gypsy peppers, strawberries, Thompson grapes, crooked neck squash, sunflowers, aloe vera, lavender, okra, two plum trees, blackberries, raspberries, chives, oregano, sweet potatoes and cucumbers.

Some have died (cukes, basil [basil provided for a year though]). Some are struggling to survive (okra, strawberries, plum cutting). Some have yet to provide any food (grapes, sunflowers, black & raspberries, sweet potatoes) and some are doing very well (tomatoes, squash, gypsy).

Gardening in the desert is kind of the opposite as gardening in most other US locations. We cannot really keep much alive in summer, but we can garden the other three seasons. The "spring" foods do better in winter or fall. The "summer" foods do better in spring. Most everything dies, goes dormant or must be brought inside for summer.

We only get about 10" of water per year, and it is very warm and dry with high winds most of the year. Instead of protecting my plants from frost and cold, I have to protect them from wind. We are constantly building windbreaks, but it takes so long for evergreens to grow here, and it will be years before I see a real lack of huge winds, due to not wanting to just go out and "buy, buy, buy." I want to do as much of it myself as possible, instead of just buying thousands of dollars worth of evergreens, trees, shrubs, bushes, hedges and ground cover. I'm trying, instead, to make cuttings of the things I already have. It's a slow process, with an acre of bare, flat, desert sand, in a valley of high, dry winds. Ornamentals are all xeriscapes.

We have recently started making our own adobe bricks or "cob." We use our sandy soil, old, dried "hay" made out of chopped up tumbleweeds and water. They seem a little brittle, but we are working on it

Glenn is studying up on trying to get us some cheaper solar material so that we can be more self-sufficient. He has an engineering background, so I'm hoping we can buy secondhand material and do most of it ourselves. He also found specs for turning our water heater solar, so he is trying to get some of those materials from Freecycle.

We have a small solar oven, but Glenn says it is not working optimally, and refuses to let me try it. I can warm some things up just by putting them out into the sun.

We have already done as much "passive" solar possible. We built our own solar shades for the windows, use ceiling fans, rarely use the heater and have low energy appliances. We use clotheslines for our dryer during almost the whole year.

So there you have it. Probably a long, boring introduction, but the best I could do on a moment's notice.

Felicia [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]