Tour of an underground solar house
"Ooh!
That's a pretty outbuilding! I could live there," I enthused as
we toured the property Joey's renting.
"That's the outhouse,"
explained my long-suffering brother, rolling his eyes. He'd
already put up with me snapping photos of his
solar array
(pictured below), the wood stove, the grape arbor meant to shade the
long wall of south-facing windows in the summer time (pictured above).
I hadn't shown nearly
enough interest in the ingenious way he'd thought
of using a car radio to work with the existing voltage in the
structure, and I had instead peered at every fruit tree, at the
uncovered hoop house, and even down the cistern.
"Did
you know you have a swiss chard plant in there?" I asked him as he
pointed out a weedy cold frame the previous owners had left
behind. "And there's a volunteer kale, and one lone
collard. Is that an apple tree?"
Joey kindly didn't
explain to me that three tiny plants weren't going to give him enough
greens to bother picking. He just smiled and nodded as older
brothers learn to do with their babbling younger sisters.
If you ever get a
chance, I highly recommend touring someone else's
homestead. It's a great game to guess why they put this here and
that
there, and to see things in action that you've only read about in
books. All of the fun with none of the work --- what's not to
like?
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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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