Homesteading gear windfall
It turns out that a
like-minded neighbor was living a mere half mile down the road from us
all this time, and we only learned the extent of our similarities when
she got ready to move away. For health reasons, our neighbor is
having to return to her home state, and she decided that much of her
homesteading gear wasn't worth shipping south. Did we want a rocket stove, hand-cranked generator, solar oven (with one broken pane), and much more? Definitely!
I'm most excited about
experimenting with the rocket stove and the solar oven, while the
Chinese military-issue generator from 1972 tops Mark's list.
However, what I actually
used first was an item I thought wouldn't be much use to us here.
A simple wooden rack of drying trays makes sense if you live in a
climate where the humidity doesn't often hover around 80%, but if we
tried to dry food in such a device without building a solar dehydrator around it, we'd just grow mold.
Still, when I realized
I'd picked too much basil for my current batch of pesto, I thought ---
maybe the simple drying setup would work for herbs? I filled the
four trays with basil, oregano, chives, and Egyptian onions and will
report back in a few weeks once I discover which, if any, dry quickly
enough to maintain their flavor in our wet climate.
A huge thank you to our soon-to-be-ex neighbor for sharing the bounty with us!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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