Here is a letter from student Larry McAuliffe in Battle Creek, MI to Bill Wilson and I. If you remember, Larry lost his longtime job as an engineer a few years back and has been shrinking his footprint diligently ever since:
Hi Wayne and Bill,
Here we are at the end of October already. Happy Halloween! It looks like we’ll scrape by this year. Our fall and winter crops are growing, the greenhouse is packed with more vegetables than last year. I’m still waiting for our greenhouse tomato plants to finish up for the year so I can plant other crops in their places, we harvested a bowl full on Thursday. We had a hard frost last night, but it looks like we’ll have more tomatoes this week! This year’s microscopic CSA has finally wound down. Our members are all senior citizens (yes, they’re even older than I am!). I was surprised by the crops they loved and the ones they didn’t. Beets were a big hit as were salad turnips, we got requests for regular old fashioned turnips and will plant some next year.
We did sell our camper last spring, which helped some although we didn’t get any where near what we hoped for it. Still have the tractor. It’s just too useful to sell yet.
I also finished plumbing the heat exchanger for our domestic hot water. Here’s a photo and another one. This has meant a tremendous savings for our electric bill… on the order of $40 per month. Plus, all that energy is being put to good use and we’ve stacked yet another function onto the wood stove. All good things. Another savings, we converted a chest freezer to a chest refrigerator and pulled out the old inefficient and dying upright refrigerator. This saved about $30 on the monthly bill. Plus, and this isn’t a small plus, the electric company can burn just a little less coal.
Some of the next jobs for me this fall: finish getting the garden ready for winter, transplant a bunch of mulberry trees, transplant a bunch of plum trees, work out which seeds I’ll need to buy for next year’s garden, cut and split lots and lots of firewood, build a smokehouse, get my animals housed and ready for winter, sell a few more lambs… It just never ends.
Some observations from our experiences:
It’s too late to learn how to garden when you’re already hungry.
Raising animals is a tricky business. If you’ve got livestock that means you’ll get deadstock.
The middle of a crisis is a bad time to start planning for one.
When it comes to energy descent and the attendant economic unwinding, I’d rather be ahead of the curve (where we are, I think) than playing catch up.
Always have a backup plan that’s at least as good as your primary plan.
Be prepared to be able to eat, drink, stay warm, and be merry when the power goes out. (We had a power outage this year that lasted several days. Effect on our lives: ZERO)
Keep up the good work!
Larry
