Category Archives: self sufficiency

Simple Living: Building a Low Cost Panel Home (Structural Insulated Panels / SIP)

Using painted galvanized steel structural insulated foam panels (SIPs), my awesome brother (the one wearing the hat) put together my 96 square meter (including the large verandah) house in 4 weekends. That’s 1033 square feet. The building materials are all readily available and cheap, with the big expense being the concrete foundation that’s needed to bolt the panels to.

The panels are highly insulated and make for comfortable temperatures inside year round, saving up to 50% on energy costs compared to other building styles. I also chose a cool and breezy mountain-foot site to build. I have 3 solar photovoltaic panels and 2 wind generators for power, connected to a sinewave inverter.

I was initially going to make a much smaller house, but quickly realised that the panels were so cheap that adding another room and a large verandah wouldn’t increase the cost much at all. If I need more space in the future, I can close the verandah and turn it into another room.

Because we didn’t use a skeleton frame, the house has to be a bungalow. For multi-storey buildings, a steel skeleton frame is needed.

Panels: €11,000
Foundation: €12,000

More information about SIPs here: http://www.eco-panels.com/
(I didn’t use this US company as I’m European, but their website is informative)

Simple Living: Picking a Wild Salad

While foraging, I make a quick wild salad consisting of sea beets, corn marigold greens, yellow mustard leaves, mallow leaves and flowers, dandelion greens, prickly lettuce, smooth sow thistles, sourgrass, wild water-cured olives and lemon juice (from a street tree).

I wrote a brief article about a bad experience I had with Youtube’s
automated copyright violation system, and a company called
“Rumblefish”:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/2141246/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copyrighted-music

Basically, their system identified this video as containing copyright
infringing music owned by Rumblefish. They put ads on it, with the
proceeds of the ads going partly to Rumblefish, partly to Google.

Since there’s no music in my video, I disputed the claimed copyright
violation, and Rumblefish was sent a link to my video to check it and
see if Youtube’s automated system had made a mistake.

They checked the video, and told Youtube that there was no mistake,
and that they do own the music in the video. So the dispute was
closed, and there was seemingly nothing else I could do.

But I wrote an article about it on Slashdot, and somehow it went viral
today, spreading all over the web, and Rumblefish backtracked,
released my video and sent me an apology.

This is the notice Youtube sent me after Rumblefish reviewed my dispute:

“All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their
claims to some or all of its content:

Entity: rumblefish Content Type: Musical Composition”

I did email Rumblefish to complain, and posted a thead on Google’s
help forum, but they didn’t do anything until my article on Slashdot
went viral and woke them from their slumber.

So they’ve now released my video and removed their ads, but for a while they were making money from my video. I think if this were made more public, Google would be forced to change their system and this would stop happening. Rumblefish and other similar intellectual property companies have been gaming the system like this for a while now, and this is just the first time the public outcry has been big enough to force them to correct their behaviour.

Simple Living: How to Build Raised Beds on Compacted Rock

This is how I make modest raised beds on a particulary rotten corner of my land that’s almost solid rock, using all kinds of free materials from the forest and beyond.

Simple Living: Picking Pomegranates in the Old Jungle Garden

It’s Pomegranate season again in my old Mediterranean jungle garden. It now thrives without any care. There are papayas, apricots, dates, pomegranates and grapes growing alongside wild and planted trees, herbs and shrubs that self-mulch the ground and feed the fruit-bearers for me. There are even self-seeded young pomegranate trees under the canopy that have never been watered or fed even once. Mulch can really do wonders.

The many date palms volunteered from seeds I spat out randomly years ago. They should be making their first crop next year.

It’s somewhat of a guerrilla garden since I don’t own the land it’s on. It was a vacant lot no one was using behind my parent’s house, that I decided to experiment with.

Initially the lot was covered with towering tumbleweeds on compacted and extremely saline soil, with big chunks of concrete and rebar sticking out of it. It’s unrecognizable today.

There’s an aviary hanging into the garden, and the bird manure falls into the garden, supplying even more nutrients.

Note that this video was made in early October.

Simple Living: A Stroll in the Forest, Foraging Mastic, Carob & Strawberry Tree Fruit

I experiment with using cardboard boxes as mulch in the orchard and touch on some frugal uses for September’s gifts from the forest: leaf mould compost to start seeds, and moss for rooting cuttings.

I also sample a hearty selection of wild Autumn fruits as I wander the woods. I even come across some tree-cured olives still hanging on their trees many months after ripening.

I stumble onto a strawberry tree that has ripe fruit already; an astounding mutation considering that all the other strawberry trees I’ve seen won’t ripen their fruits until December-January. Just another example of the diversity apparent in wild seedling trees.

Finally, I happen onto another naturally-occurring edible tree guild, and before I head back to the cabin, I take a look at four ancient olive trees that were planted in the same hole. Truly the epitome of efficiency.

Wild plants featured in this instalment:

Golden Oak Tree “Quercus alnifolia” – (Acorns edible after leeching)
Mastic Tree “Pistacia lentiscus” (Edible berries & gum)
Strawberry Tree “Arbutus adrachne” (Edible berries)
Olive Tree “Olea europaea” (Edible after processing)
Sicilian Sumac / Sumach “Rhus Coriaria” (Edible / Drinkable)
Carob Tree “Ceratonia siliqua” (Edible pods)

Simple Living: Harvesting Heirloom Tomatoes, Cucumbers & Summer Apples, Foraging Wild Sumac

Wild plants featured in this instalment:

Sicilian Sumac / Sumach “Rhus Coriaria” (Edible / Drinkable)
Red Ink Plant / Poke Berry / Poke Weed “Phytolacca Pruinosa” (Not edible)
Iberian Milk Vetch “Astragalus lusitanicus ssp. orientalis” (Not edible)

Heirloom and open-pollinated tomatoes:

Tropic VFN (Heat tolerant variety)
Black Cherry (smoky tasting, my favourite cherry)
San Marzano (perfect plum tomato, good for sun drying)
German Orange Strawberry
Currant Sweet Pea
Principe Borghese (the nipple tomato – great for sun drying)
Roma
Ailsa Craig (shared with a mysterious tomato-eating creature)
Gardener’s Delight (a prolific red cherry tomato, makes up the majority of my harvest)

Cucumbers:

White Wonder / Bianco Lungo
Lungo Verde degli Ortolani
Mediterranean

From the orchard:

Anna Apple
Persimmon

Simple Living: Companion Planting Strawberries & Pine Trees, Making a Meal of What’s in the Garden

I make good use of some pine trees, and make some quick raw vegan cucumber spiral spaghetti using only things I picked from the garden (tomatoes, sweet peppers, mint, basil and cucumbers), as well a few of the olives I prepared in a previous video.

The tool I use to make the noodles is a Gefu Spirelli Spiral Slicer, but there are much better spiral slicers out there that won’t make your wrists sore. You can also use carrots to make this meal in the winter, or mix carrot and cucumber. Typically, zuccinis / courgettes are used, but they don’t agree with me, and cucumbers taste a whole lot better.

You’ll want to use cucumbers with small seeds, such as the Mediterranean cucumbers I use.

Simple Living: Water Curing Olives

I demonstrate the simple water curing method for olives I foraged for. A lot of people won’t eat salt, so this is a healthier alternative to eating traditional olives. They’ll be ready sooner if you change the water twice a day, but if you’re lazy then change it once a day and add a couple of weeks to the curing time.

An even better method – If you have access to a running stream, you can just put the olives in a net or a cotton sack and submerge them. Leave them underwater for a few days, and they’ll be ready to eat in record time. If you can’t do without the salty taste, you could also sink them in the sea instead of a freshwater stream.