A Week of Off Grid Living
This post contains affiliate links
February 13, 2025
The last few days have been kind of random as are most days around here. On Monday Savannah spent time trying to get our rainwater system set up for our greenhouse because it was supposed to rain a considerable amount over the next several days. If you want to read more about setting up a rainwater system at your house, check out this post. She pretty quickly ran into a problem when she was trying to back up our truck to get it closer to the green house. The truck got stuck and wouldn’t go backwards. We originally thought it was literally stuck and then I noticed that when Savannah was flooring the gas, that the tires never spun.
The truck had a trailer attached, so we had to unhook the trailer and move it by hand so we could get it out of the way. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to move a heavy metal trailer by hand but it ain’t easy. Then we had to hook up the truck to our 1 ton van and pull it out. The truck could drive forwards but not backwards. The way it was positioned it couldn’t drive forward without hitting a huge stack of wood, so it had to be pulled out. We did record all of this, so this drama is coming to a YouTube video soon. Also during this ordeal a light flashed on the dashboard that said “trans fault”, so it likely has a transmission problem. Ugh. This is the truck we just put a new alternator in. So we were really grateful for our van, and if you read this post, you know we’ve been considering selling it. The truck problems are really pushing us towards keeping the van.
After the truck drama, we had to pull off the IBC totes (there were 4 of them) and roll them up to the green house. One of them was extremely heavy and we realized it still had a good amount of maltose in it. It’s extremely thick like glue, so we will have to power wash it out at another time. After that we decided to take a break and grab some lunch at the local Mennonite deli. Savannah worked into the night to get the rainwater system up and running and then we had to wait for the rain. The rain came around 11 o’clock at night and she realized there were a few problems with the gutters. So that woman was out there fiddling with the gutters in the rain at midnight. I can thankfully the report that we’ve had a lot of rain and everything is working properly and the IBC totes are filling up, but there are still a few things that need to be done to complete it all.
Tuesday’s highlights were that we sewed the dog’s Valentine’s bandanas- very important work. Savannah cut her own hair and I helped her trim a few pieces. She cut off 7 inches as her hair was “getting on her nerves”. I’ve cut & colored her hair before much to my dismay. She is very free spirited with her hair and I am not free spirited with my hair or hers. When I highlighted her hair it took me THREE days to finish it because she has an insane amount of hair. You can tell she has thick hair when you look at her but it’s even thicker than you can imagine. I had a whole new respect for hair stylists after highlighting her hair. I did a pretty good job if I do say so myself, and as per usual we consulted YouTube to figure out how to do it. You can learn how to do almost anything on YouTube.
Yesterday we tried out soil blocking for the first time with this soil block set that Bootstrap Farmer was kind enough to send our way. We started some onion seeds in those soil blocks. I am excited to compare starting seeds in soil blocks vs traditional seed trays. It’s exciting to start seeds and it’s getting me so pumped for spring. We are wanting to plant our biggest garden yet and we have a ton of garden projects planned. If you watched our latest video on YouTube, you saw our giant to-do list we will be working on all year. A big chunk of those items are garden/green house related, and we’ve been checking off a lot of those items on that list. I’m hoping by the end of next week we’ll be able to show you our big greenhouse reveal.
Lastly, today we’ve been getting ready for a big freeze. Our temperatures are going to be all over the place but we’ll have several times when the temps drop well below freezing. This means we need to drain all our waterlines- including the new ones connected to our greenhouse rainwater system. But before that I like to do all the dishes I can and run a load of dishes in our tiny dishwasher. I will also fill up a large container of water for hand washing and dish washing, and I’ll fill up our Berkey with water so we can have drinking water. We now have filtered water that comes from the sink but all of that will get turned off in a couple of hours. We hope to one day have all of our water lines insulated & heated enough to not have to do this. The water lines have heat tape now but it can only handle so much. The process isn’t as terrible as it sounds and it’s just part of off grid living.
And if you’re wondering…. Johnny Rose still stinks 😂 😂 😂 - he’s had another hydrogen peroxide bath and each one drastically improves his smell.
Thanks for reading!!