A Year Without Summer

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Ganado, Aug 29, 2016.


  1. duane

    duane Monkey+++

    If you read history in depth, up until the later 1700 there were always period of famine, and quite severe. Ireland is the one that always comes to mind, but China had a series that make that one look minor, India and most of Africa have also had several serious ones. The lesson is that it is not only climate, but war, "cultural revolutions", poverty. deliberate government actions as in the USSR in the late 20's early 30's, and a host of other causes that should encourage you to keep some hidden food storage as well as gold. How to keep the government and your neighbors from reaping the benefits of your preparing is another matter and I haven't got a good solution for that problem. Open to suggestions beyond being sure to vote and at least try to minimize the damage and good caches..
     
  2. arleigh

    arleigh Goophy monkey

    This is why it is important to learn to can as well as grow food , there are no guarantees that bad weather not forth coming along with what ever SHTF situation comes long.
    It's not only growing food but letting a certain amount go to seed for the next season .
     
    chelloveck and Motomom34 like this.
  3. Ganado

    Ganado Monkey+++

    canned goods mostly only good for a year to 24 months, I was thinking more long term. No summer means letting things go to seed is ok if the other birds etc trying to survive don't scarf up what hasn't sprouted.

    Looking at a 3-4 year scenario means having things put aside for eating and for growing when summer does return. Its just another exercise in being self reliant. No summer means cooler temps, @Motomom34 had a great suggestion for low light plants. Would need a green house as well because of temps (or plastic to make a greenhouse tunnel) or someother alternative.
     
    Meat and Motomom34 like this.
  4. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    High Tunnels, Low Tunnels, and Greenhouses. While I am not a fan of Government Grants I got one of my high tunnels using this program High Tunnel System Initiative | NRCS Hey figured I would recover some of the taxes I have paid. The high tunnel grant was insanely easy to get without a lot of paperwork, the NCRS person came out once to look at the proposed building site, again to inspect the the tunnel after it arrived, one more time after it was erected to inspect and make sure it was at their specs. After that they came out once per year for 3 years to make sure it was being used as agreed in the contract. The contract is 3 years and then you can use it how ever you want. Drawback is you pay for the tunnel up front initially I was approved for $9,800 for a 30'x72' up to a 30' x 96' 4 weeks after the inspection to make sure it was at specs and assembled correctly $9,800 was direct deposited into my bank. The tunnel I got was a FarmTek/ClearSpan premium hoop 30x96 for $7200, and if you spend less than the $9800 you get to pocket the difference just call it the cost of labor to erect it.

    For Greenhouses I scour craiglist and scrap yards for storm damaged carports. Usually the tin skin is what is tore up and the frames are fine. The Frames are the important part. Just set the frame up. bolt some treated 2x4s onto the bottom side of the rafters and some treated 1x6s a few feet up the sides from the ground. Buy the green house film (always get it a few feet wider and longer than what you need) the channel and springy things to attach the film to the ends and sides, go to whichever big box store and buy the cheap polycarbonate sheets to frame the ends and make doors with and you have a $8,000 pro green house for $500-$1000 depending on how fancy you want to get. And don't forget to anchor it down :) I had one I built last spring shoot straight up about 50 feet, fly over my machine shed and land 500 feet away in a twisted broken mess in a 70mph wind gust. Looked kind of cool watching it, was also kind depressing because I was going back out after I ate lunch to drive the ground anchors.

    I have built a lot of PvC pipe hoop houses and row covers. They work well enough but have some fundamental problems. It gets cold and the PvC gets brittle. The grey pipe and CPVC hold up a lot better in the cold. Problems I have had with them, water built up in the pipe driven in the ground and it froze and shattered some of the ground pipes. It got cold and the pipe gt brittle and lost its flex and strong winds broke several rafter pipes over the years. Bad part to that is the jagged edges when it breaks also tears up the greenhouse film once there is some play and slack in it. That being said I still use PvC until mid December since we usually don't get really cold here until January and February. Biggest problem with PvC is it won't hold much of a snow load, it is quite depressing to go to bed and everything is fine and wake up to see 3 of the 5 PvC hot houses flattened out because you got a half in of clingy ice and 4-5 inches of snow on top of it. If you know its coming you can stay up and broom the snow and ice off. I just plan the crops in the PvC to be ones that are done by the end of December and take them down and store them in a barn until the following October.
     
    Ganado and 3M-TA3 like this.
  5. Ganado

    Ganado Monkey+++

    Pics???
    [worthless]
     
  6. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

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    duane, Motomom34, Sapper John and 2 others like this.
  7. DKR

    DKR Raconteur of the first stripe

    eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death (1816)

    SOme first hand records from people who lived throught the weather

    Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death: 1816, The Year Without a Summer | ConnecticutHistory.org

    “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” (Wash DC)

    Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death: The Eruption of Mt. Tambora (the volcano)

    The summer of '16 (EU zone riots)

    No one who lived through the extreme climate of 1816 understood what caused the months of seemingly endless rain in Europe, the June snowstorms that hit New England and the Ohio Valley, or the prolonged drought in the eastern U.S. that convinced many farmers to sell their land and move west. All they knew was the weather was against them. Many blamed God: in America religious revivals intensified, particularly in Puritan New England; in Europe a succession of “prophets” foretold of a rapidly approaching apocalypse. Those with a more secular philosophy invoked an array of natural forces to explain the shifting climate, including earthquakes, sunspots, icebergs, deforestation and changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Meteorology was in its infancy — the first reliable weather forecasts were 140 years off — so few contemporary scientists, many of them amateurs, could comprehend the changing conditions.

    A search will show multiple books from all 'round the world where people recorded, day by day, their struggle with famine, the cold and the related deaths.
     
  8. Ganado

    Ganado Monkey+++

    Nicely done! @Thunder5Ranch How you build makes more since. I appreciate you taking the time to post pics [winkthumb][campfire]

    @DKR thanks for links. I keep thinking about this and perhaps with green houses a year without summer is doable.

    There is a guy in Michigan? Who does year around gardening using green houses. He heats them by placing big piles of manure in the corners as the composting manure generates heat. So his green houses don't need supplemental heat
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2016
    Motomom34 likes this.
  9. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    I tried the Composting the manure in the greenhouses and high tunnels and it worked but runs afoul of big brothers regulations if you want to sell to the public. The FDA's new found regulatory boner for small farmers is still not fully erect yet but the FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) despite giving exemptions for the time being has the mechanisms and language in place to unexempt. Raw manure even if composting has to be handled in a very specific way and not anywhere near crops. Makes sense on the surface, no one wants a side of cow crap with their salad :) But as Government tends to do.... everything is taken to the extreme. A rabbit is in the garden..... OMG That is vermin and vector for disease! God forbid the rabbit takes a crap between rows, nothing can be picked within 5 feet of the bunny pile. Gotta have a bathroom and handwash sink in the garden (Exempt from that at the small scale for now). They tried pushing through arming our farms with sound cannons so birds would not fly over. Early on it was suggested that any food production area should be layered with electric mesh fencing to keep rabbits, squirrels, mice etc from being able to enter garden areas...... LOL Armed FDA Farm inspectors, GAP Certification not far from being mandatory, and ever increasing regulations are making this farm to fork business more brutal than ever.

    I went to 55 gallon barrels painted black and set around the tunnel, they absorb heat all day and then release it at night. Keeps the overnight temps on a 20-30 degree night in the 40-45 range. 20-30 degree sunny days it gets up around 70-75 degrees. The green houses I heat with wood fired boilers and radiators. I can keep them 100 Degrees if I want to in the dead of winter but usually maintain a solid 75-80. 4 radiators in each green house with 12 Volt fans pushing the air through them and powered via my little solar system works very well.
     
  10. Ganado

    Ganado Monkey+++

    I love the greenhouses @Thunder5Ranch

    I keep thinking about this as a probable scenario. And how to prepare for the lack of sunlight as well. Because in my mind the most probable scenario is a large volcanic eruption where we lose daylight for a long period of time. if we still have electricity this is doable with greenhouse growing.

    But what if no electricity?
     
  11. MarleneK

    MarleneK Monkey

    I can't imagine a year without summer.
     
    Ganado likes this.
  12. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    I'm sure it will happen again as it's hadppened before.
     
    Ganado likes this.
  13. Motomom34

    Motomom34 Monkey+++

    I read a book series on Yellowstone going off and the climate turned into winter for years. This was a fiction series but the people did have green houses and they were able to grow kale. Kale is a hardy low light plant. It would be interesting to try to grow veggies in a basement or someplace to see what the production really is. Cold Weather/ Low Light (Shade) Vegetables | Survival Monkey Forums
     
  14. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    If geological record is correct it happens quite often in geological terms. Not so often in human terms.
     
    Ganado likes this.
  15. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    It's been 100 years, aren't we roughly due for another one?
     
  16. chelloveck

    chelloveck Diabolus Causidicus

    This is a particular kind tithing that I can whole heartedly support....seed saving and plant propagation is an important part of food sustainability.
     
    Zimmy, Ganado and Motomom34 like this.
  17. DKR

    DKR Raconteur of the first stripe

    You can heat with manure and still keep the Fed weenies at bay.
    Compost Water Heater - Renewable Energy - MOTHER EARTH NEWS

    Heat free (nearly) with a compost furnace

    How to make an easy compost heated greenhouse

    Manure Compost as Passive Greenhouse Heating

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
    You can do this 'at home" if that home isn't in Urban America.... (Namo apšiltinimas naudojant kompostą | Protingos medžiagos)

    Finally, many EU (old school) homes were built on top of the barn - and used both the heat from livestock and composting manure to help heat the home....
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
    House of a Black Forest "peasant farmer" around 1900. Peasent" must have meant something different a long time ago - because a lot of labor and material went into this Barnhause . Still, a good sized woodpile fo cooking/heating
     
    Ganado likes this.
  18. Ganado

    Ganado Monkey+++

    This is probably a dumb question but im going to ask it, if you had multiple cloudy days would solar work? I am asking because i have some led lights for indoor plants that need led lighting, So if i put them on a solar pak probably not getting too much sun if we had a cloudy couple of years.

    Would greenhouses still be sufficient if we had no sun for a couple of years?
     
  19. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Partial answers:
    Solar works as long as there is light sufficient to make voltage enough to prevent bleeding the battery back into space. A proper charge controller will take care of the reverse current. The more interesting question might be how much light (from any source) does it take to make power, and how many panels would it take to do what you need done during an extended outage of the sun.
    So far as greenhouses go, they work if there is incident light sufficient to offset heat loss. I'll dodge the rest of that question, my greenhouse experience was well over half a lifetime ago and related to floral, not food crops.
     
  20. oil pan 4

    oil pan 4 Monkey+++

    An MPPT controler will charge batteries but likely won't cover demand.
     
    Ganado likes this.
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