consuming to invest 23

CONSUMING TO INVEST 23

Sprouting Trays And Seeds

Now, before you skip over this section, mumbling about sprouts tasting like green dirt, stop and think how much your last garden salad ran you in Greenbacks.  Not cheap anymore, are they?  Not too long ago, you bought veggies several to the dollar.  Now, you are lucky to get each one under a buck each.  I’m not going to get into all the reasoning-just keep in mind a primary cause of all the contributing factors is drought, infertility in most soils and energy costs.  In short, we will never go back to “too cheap to meter” vegetables.  Worse days are here again, and we won’t go back to a cheap oil era with less population.  Before, if your twenty five cent cucumber stayed too long in the crisper drawer and started to mold, you tossed it out without a thought.  Today, it is cause for weeping and anguish.  If the price goes up too much more, it might be cause for spousal or child abuse.  Yes, of course, everyone should grow their own veggies ( which will NOT translate into post-collapse pantry planting.  You need a farm for that.  Gardens are for your fruits and vegetables, your vitamin foods.  Not your calorie foods.  If you read a post-apocalypse story wherein a garden feeds the family, throw your Kindle at the wall, then promptly pour carbolic acid in your brain to scour the information away as everything the story “taught” you was dis-information most likely from someone you should protect yourself against with aluminum foil hats ).  But veggies take time to grow, sometimes if you see one more of veggie X you over planted you will plant the wife under next years crops and a lot of time it is winter.  For all those times, sprouts are a good vegetable substitution.

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Now, you can eat sprouts.  Most people put all those crunchy bastards on a salad with some low fat ranch dressing, then chew their cud for twenty minutes consuming them.  I prefer to put some juice in the blender, then add sprouts, then run on “liquefy” for a minute or so.  OJ works best for me hiding the taste, but you can use V8 or whatever.  I’m not a huge vegetable eater, other than potatoes a couple of times a week.  I crave salad once or twice a month ( I take a multi-vitamin with dinner, and mega-dose on vitamin C twice a day ), and I believe that is for the enzymes rather than the vitamins.  Sprouts works just as well with that craving.  A lot of folks claim sprouts are “over sold” on their health benefits, then site very low vitamin content.  Do your own research, then try them out.  If you listen to your body and what it wants, you’ll be able to tell if they can work for you.  You can buy your own commercial trays, or make your own for almost nothing.  All you are doing is wetting the seeds once or twice a day, then allowing them to drain so as to stay moist but not wet, so a Mason glass jar with a ring and a screen of cheesecloth should work just as well as a store bought unit.  Do a little online searching for seed ( such as Alfalfa ) sales, sprout instructions and sprouter construction.  It is pretty straightforward.  If sprouting works for you, you can save money getting your vegetables, while staying nice and healthy.

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CONSUMING TO INVEST 24

Buried Tube Cooler A/C

I tried this method and failed miserably, but my neighbor did it the correct way and it works perfectly.  I only went four foot deep with four inch pipe.  Even though I stretched it out one hundred feet, and went uphill, that wasn’t good enough.  The neighbor only went fifty feet long on flat land, but he had a backhoe go down eight foot and installed the largest PVC pipe they had, the sewer pipe.  What you are doing is drawing air through the pipe into your home.  The temperature of the dirt at the lower pipe is what goes inside.  So, the summer blows in close to fifty degrees ( and you use a 12v fan from the auto parts store ).  A PV panel and a few back stock fans and you can have twenty years of air conditioning for just the digging and the pipe cost ( in a small yard, you can loop around in a circle to get the required length of pipe, but follow online instructions as you need X amount of dirt between pipes ).  Some folks recommend a black pipe vent at the tallest part of the house to act as a natural draw for the air, no motor needed.  Do sufficient research here, as a backhoe is an expensive investment and you want to do this correct the first time.  I’ve even read of a commercial greenhouse that used this in the winter, to pre-heat with fifty degrees for the cost of the fan alone, so it is a “thing”.  Just do due diligence.

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