TOTM 2016- Long Term Recovery

They make some great LED artificial light for green houses so as long as you have the means to make power your good to go .
Alcohol can be made from any organic material and is used all over the world for cooking and running engines for generators .
Some of what you don't eat, like stems and roots are fed to the chickens or pigs or used in mulch or methane production, or alcohol.
There will always be wind, so having a few wind mills as also a viable prospect .
In some ways my $500. wind mill (600 watt) though it doesn't get enough wind to push the limits, it is often more cost effective than a $500.solar panel $ for $ .
There are also thermal generators that use heat to generate electric power like a thermocouple ,which if your on a battery system, all these can be contributing to your energy needs while things are dark.
of course if you do nothing till after the event it won't be possible.

 

@arleigh it sounds like you have it well thought out. I wasnt trying to be negative its just that the downward spiraling vortex for preps can get pretty deep depending on what you are prepping for.

I just remember the farmers in eastern washington having to modifiy their vehicles with heavier filters that came out the top of the truck up to 5 years after Mt St Helen's blew. The ash was great for crops but hell on engines.

 

I priced one of those LED grow lights. $700.00! And expected to last two years tops. That puts them a long way out of my price range.

 

@kellory a good shop light with full spectrum bulbs will do the same thing as a grow light and its cheaper.

The puzzling part is what @arleigh was discussing, how to power the darn thing if you have heavy ash in the air and no sunlight. Windmills are a good option, depending on where you live. I don't know enough about geothermal heat to know if it is a good option or not.

 

That is a good point @shaman. We should be investigating what was grown in our area back in the day. Prior to plant and seed modification, farmers/settlers were growing something. Time is to find out what now, in case things hit the fan.

I read a couple of fiction books and both had volcanoes going off. Yes, i know fiction is fiction but sometimes facts are sprinkled in the story. One of the stories had kale growing in the greenhouse. Kale is a real hardy plant and I wonder how much light it would really need. What about the cold weather vegetables? Like beets. You can keep them in the ground for months. Eat the greens on top and eat the beet when you chose a few months later. I think root veggies & all those cold weather crops may be an option if sunlight is lacking

 

true but you do need some light for chlorophyll production in the leaves. The leaves are the powerhouses.

 

As a for-instance, my buddy O.T. just passed on over the winter. He grew up just up the road from my BOL. We used to sit for hours talking about how things were. He said everyone grew wheat along with corn, tobacco, dairy cattle and hogs. None of the wheat was sold. It all went for personal use. The hogs were kept until fall and then slaughtered and salt-cured and dried without smoking. That explains the curing shed I've got with a few hams still hanging. Tobacco was the big cash crop after the war and squeezed out everything else. The benefit of having wheat growing was it promoted quail. This used to be prime quail and grouse country, but they are all pretty much gone. I'll go 5 years between spotting either. That was O.T.'s big passion. After O.T. went a whole season without seeing a grouse, he pretty much gave up and waited to die.

Elsewhere, I've heard the hogs would be turned out into the woods in the fall to hoover up all the acorns. That would get them good and fat for free before slaughter. Hogs were an important part of an operation, because they converted garbage back into something edible. Chickens do the same thing, but you have to be careful with what they are fed. Some refuse will put them in a toes-up configuration in a hurry.

One other thing I've discovered is that, if you set a bunch of cows into a small pasture so they really eat it down in a hurry, and then move them on to another pasture, you can then run chicken tractors over that spent field and feed the chickens off the maggots in the manure. It is a very intense form of farming, but it can be made sustainable. You want the chickens coming behind the cows by just a few days. You want to keep the cows munching constantly along a front . You need to keep everything watered. With that much manure, of course, the pasture is getting massive amounts of nitrogen, so the grass grows back thick and fast.

 

TEG power generators make power from the differential of heat and cold they can be mounted on the wood stove your already using for heat and one can use the snow if any for the cooling differential a practical method of melting snow .
This same technology is reversed for making those iceless coolers that run on 12 volts from your vehicle.
In a dark environment this form of generation can be valuable along with using other power sources (one should not limit them self to a single power source.)
Grow lights don't have to be run 24/7,however it makes growing faster , another thing I learned recently is using CO2 to boost growth .Plants live/thrive on CO2 .
Since every other living thing burns oxygen and expels CO2, that makes a perfect trade off environment.
One would not depend on out side air at all.
Which means any engines that need to be run could use the air being produced from the garden.
it's exhaust however, would have to be expelled to the out side ,unless you create a catalytic converter for it, and run it through scrubbers. One may want to consider this action as well, if they are going to be using wood heat or any other heat source, that might give away their position .

 

With posts mentioning volcanoes and ash; I looked up the Yellowstone caldera.

 

The best prep in most cases is to not be in the path of a known danger .
One cannot be guaranteed "an" escape route , so several options should be considered.
Though I am 40 miles from the Pacific cost and at 1400 ft elevation and there is a mountain range between us and one behind me, I still am glad to have boats and the resources to move further inland if necessary.
In any event,if I have to move I'm taking my gardening supplies and tools along with all the food I've stored.

 

Michigan is well outside the Yellowstone ash fall zone so I dont expect an eruption there to bury us in ash. Experts do say it could put enough ash in the atmosphere to partially block out the sun causing an ice age or long winter. My goal this year is to have three years supply of food and fire wood already to go. Some one knows something and they are not talking. Corporations are leaving in droves, the country is being abandoned and parted out. Someone knows why. I don't. Could be we are heading for some major climate change or shift. All the attempts by governments to curb the planet from warming bother me. CHEM TRAILS, are they real?? are we spraying aluminum and Barium into the atmosphere in an attempt to deflect the suns rays?? I don't know the answer to that one either. There have been people who have come forward saying that we are spraying the atmosphere. Are they for real ??? I dont know. I used to think I had a handle on things but now feel more like Im being fed what they want me to see. There is no real truth to be found in search engines. I just dont know anymore.

I can only fight what I can see , in front of me. The more I speculate the more I worry and worrying isnt helping me get ready any faster.

 

I had a member PM me with some questions:

I was thinking of how people will maintain there property, equipment, and other tool or belongings in a long term... say grid failure or other SHTF. I can see how many may have generators to run/charge some power tools but do we have the knowledge stored away when we cant go to the local hardware store and ask for advice or buy a new shovel or box of nails. Do we have maintenance preps/knowledge?

I often question if my knowledge is enough to help me make it past the first 1-3 years. The member mentioned a generator. I have one of those. I plan on using it and I have some spare parts for maintenence but if breaks, it will become a piece of useless equipment. I do think we all have trouble imagining the worst. I think stepping outside of our materialistic world, no home depot, no spare part store is truly beyond most of us.

 

It is a very hard space to live in.

 

This is a site that I linked in TOTM Feb 2015
EARLY DAYS - THE HOMESTEADERS (SETTLING IN WESTERN CANADA)

There are a few sub-links that really get one to thinking. Am I truly prepared for long term? When I look at that site, I feel a bit of panick.

This is the tools subcategory:

 

I have a 10kw propane generator and 800 gallons of propane but do not plan to use it when the SHTF. That fuel allows me to cook out of the weather and out of sight and smell range and heat water for a long time.

 

i have an 8 k generator and 500 gallons of propane. doing thew same . going to use mine once a week for water and some power tools. Whatever I can do in 1/2 hour.

 

I'm doing basically the opposite. I'm planning on everything taking a long time, and being done with minimum tooling. Hopefully stuff I can build replacements for over time.

 

Once a week for 1/2 hour gets me 20 years.

 

Was a child back in the early 1940's in rural Minn and we had no running water in the house, windmill pumped into a tank in the barn loft and had running water in the barn, heated with wood, farmed with horses, no in door plumbing nor electricity on the place, used no commercial fertilizer, rotated the crops, kept our own seed, grew our own food, traded two bushels of wheat for 1 of flour etc. It was at a 1880's level and I thought at the time very comfortable and normal. No radio, tv, and movies about once in 3 months. Well the trip back would be very rough and many would die, life spans would shorten, and genetics would once again be important, it isn't a bad life.

My greenhouse uses a two layer plastic system and it only lasts about 5 years, most hard plastic, triwall ets are good for 10 to 15 years and only glass will last over that. In the short run 1 to 3 years, I can't see surviving without a greenhouse, but it is also a large sign telling the world that you most likely have food. Don't have an answer for that one. In long run, a green house and seeds and starter plants would be the best trading source I could ever figure out.