Forwarded from Living off the Land
Cabbage is my favorite crop, mainly because you can make delicious saurkraut out of it. My family has been making saurkraut using the same shredder that's been in the family since at least 1870.
Cabbage prefers sandy loam with a pH of 6.5 to 6.8. It is cold hardy, and does not like hot temperatures. It requires about 2 in of water per week, and full sunlight. I like to work in compost the fall before planting, as cabbage likes lots of nutrients. Rotate your cabbage, and don't plant it next to other brassicas.
Plant cabbage as soon as the soil can be worked in the spring (usually St. Patrick's day). Seeds should be put 1/2 inch deep, and 2 inches apart, in rows 24 to 36 inches apart. Thin the plants so they are 18 to 24 inches apart after a few weeks. In 90-120 days, your cabbage should be ready to harvest. 6-10 heads per person should be good, depending on how much you like saurkraut.
You can also plant them in late summer for a fall harvest should you desire.
Cabbage prefers sandy loam with a pH of 6.5 to 6.8. It is cold hardy, and does not like hot temperatures. It requires about 2 in of water per week, and full sunlight. I like to work in compost the fall before planting, as cabbage likes lots of nutrients. Rotate your cabbage, and don't plant it next to other brassicas.
Plant cabbage as soon as the soil can be worked in the spring (usually St. Patrick's day). Seeds should be put 1/2 inch deep, and 2 inches apart, in rows 24 to 36 inches apart. Thin the plants so they are 18 to 24 inches apart after a few weeks. In 90-120 days, your cabbage should be ready to harvest. 6-10 heads per person should be good, depending on how much you like saurkraut.
You can also plant them in late summer for a fall harvest should you desire.
Water woes. Depending on your water’s pH, brass pex fittings will “rot” in 20 years. The first to go are the elbows closest to your hot water heater. About 20-30 years ago plumbers starting using pex and it was so easy to use elbows they used a lot of them. They are buried in your walls. Or if on a slab a 3/4 trunk line may stub up only a few inches and go thru a TEE and a pair of 90’s back into the slab. In my own house we had to abandon the pex in our slab and rerun new pipes thru the attic. Take some friendly advice... use one continuous run of pex from your water entry point to each fixture in the house. No TEEs and no 90’s. Make it so that the only fittings are either a valve in the garage or the connector under your toilet or sink. Here’s what rotting brass pex fittings look like. This has happened to our house, a relative and a neighbor all in the past 3 years.
Nothing like coming home to find a pex fitting leaking under a tiled in garden tub. This was stubbed up thru the slab at a place you couldn’t reach without jack hammering the tub out. It leaked because it was the first drop on the trunk that fed the whole house water.
Many of you may be familiar with pitless adapters. In short, it's a "shoe" that goes on your well casing below the frost line. You can lower the pump and water pipe down in the well around it and you install a "wedge" that mates with the shoe on the end of the water line. Think of it as a quick connector for a water pump. The trick to it is that there's a pipe union that goes on the top of the water line... but it is not an ordinary union. The union does not allow water to pass all the way through. The top half of the union is a dummy... but it is threaded so that you can screw a "lifting pipe" into it and hoist the pump and pipe out. See the next picture....
SIMPLEPUMP-Pitless-Instructions.pdf
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What if we could use a pitless adapter for a hand pump? Simplepump and bison make hand pumps that can pump into a pressure tank by means of a pump cylinder at the bottom of the well. There is a teeter totter lever at the top connected to a "lifting rod" that goes all the way to the bottom of the well and moves that cylinder. The cylinder then pumps water upward and out the pump's spout. Google "simplepump" if you can't imagine this.
The folks at Simplepump have a great idea. You drill out the union on the pitless adapter so that water could pass through it. This also means that the lifting rod that goes from the manual pump handle to the pump cylinder at the bottom of your well can pass thru that union.
Here's the genius part... if you cap off the spout on the well head, the water will rise in the water pipe and have no where to go but out the side of that pitless union that was just discussed. That then connects to your pressure tank just as your electric well pump does.
The folks at Simplepump have a great idea. You drill out the union on the pitless adapter so that water could pass through it. This also means that the lifting rod that goes from the manual pump handle to the pump cylinder at the bottom of your well can pass thru that union.
Here's the genius part... if you cap off the spout on the well head, the water will rise in the water pipe and have no where to go but out the side of that pitless union that was just discussed. That then connects to your pressure tank just as your electric well pump does.
So my suggestion tonight is that you can buy an extra pitless adapter and go ahead and drill out the casting inside the union. You could also shorten one of the schedule 120 water lines included with the bison or simplepump by about 2" so the lifting rod still matches up. The pipes are 1-1/4, so you need to make sure the pitless adapter can work with or be adapted to 1-1/4.
Here's the beauty of this... in an extended grid down, you just pull your electric well pump and replace it kit and kabootle with the hand pump. It connects to the same pitless adapter that feeds your house. Now you can go outside and just start pumping... it will pressurize your bladder tank in the house and all your toilets and sinks work! Your shower works. Sanitation is key folks!
Here's the beauty of this... in an extended grid down, you just pull your electric well pump and replace it kit and kabootle with the hand pump. It connects to the same pitless adapter that feeds your house. Now you can go outside and just start pumping... it will pressurize your bladder tank in the house and all your toilets and sinks work! Your shower works. Sanitation is key folks!
An additional trouble of 20th century piping is "Orangeburg piping".
This was commonly used in sewer lines from the 1940s all the way until the 1970s. Orangeburg piping is made of wax paper and can be problematic.
Usage began during WW2 as the metals were needed for the war effort so that jews could be rescued from working 6 hours a day in camps. Paper was still readily avaliable so paper Orangeburg piping began to be used in new construction.
Later during America's big housing boom, Orangeburg piping was marketed as inexpensive and 'corrosion free'. As with any subpar material, problems began appearing due to tree roots literally crushing the paper piping in many neighborhoods.
If your home was built between 1940s and 1970s there is a chance you have this crap and your sewer line could suddenly back up or break. It's a good idea to inspect to ensure you don't have this piping and can replace it before it becomes a problem as the fix can be a very costly unexpected expense.
This was commonly used in sewer lines from the 1940s all the way until the 1970s. Orangeburg piping is made of wax paper and can be problematic.
Usage began during WW2 as the metals were needed for the war effort so that jews could be rescued from working 6 hours a day in camps. Paper was still readily avaliable so paper Orangeburg piping began to be used in new construction.
Later during America's big housing boom, Orangeburg piping was marketed as inexpensive and 'corrosion free'. As with any subpar material, problems began appearing due to tree roots literally crushing the paper piping in many neighborhoods.
If your home was built between 1940s and 1970s there is a chance you have this crap and your sewer line could suddenly back up or break. It's a good idea to inspect to ensure you don't have this piping and can replace it before it becomes a problem as the fix can be a very costly unexpected expense.
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Neighborhood Em-Coms.
FRS / GMRS radios can be used to allow neighbors to communicate in a grid down situation. Coordinate ahead of time with your neighbors and assign each household a unique channel and PL or CTCSS tone. In the case of Baofeng radios you can program a memory channel with the frequency and PL tone and name it by family (ie Brown, Jones, Smith). Otherwise, distriubute a chart on paper. Be sure to coordinate a public neighborhood channel with a PL tone in the high end (ie close to 250hz).
So for example:
Channel 1: PL 250hz: Public Group Channel.
Channel 2: PL xxxhz: Jones family
Channel 3: PL yyyhz: Brown family
CHannel 4: PL zzzhz: Smith Family.
Note you can reuse channels with differing PL tones for families that are further apart.
Note 2: higher PL tones will open the squelch faster than lower PL tones. Stay away from 67hz and favor 250hz tones.
Most of the time you’ll leave your radio on Channel 1, the public group channel. In our case the neighborhood kids started chatting a lot so we flipped to our family channel rather than switching the radios off or turning the volume down.
One of my neighbors needed to call us and they first tried on the public channel but got no answer, so they switched to our Johnkowski channel and PL tone and reached us. In one instance they dropped in on our family channel to invite us to a group chat on a beer run and a very important bon fire meeting.
FRS / GMRS radios can be used to allow neighbors to communicate in a grid down situation. Coordinate ahead of time with your neighbors and assign each household a unique channel and PL or CTCSS tone. In the case of Baofeng radios you can program a memory channel with the frequency and PL tone and name it by family (ie Brown, Jones, Smith). Otherwise, distriubute a chart on paper. Be sure to coordinate a public neighborhood channel with a PL tone in the high end (ie close to 250hz).
So for example:
Channel 1: PL 250hz: Public Group Channel.
Channel 2: PL xxxhz: Jones family
Channel 3: PL yyyhz: Brown family
CHannel 4: PL zzzhz: Smith Family.
Note you can reuse channels with differing PL tones for families that are further apart.
Note 2: higher PL tones will open the squelch faster than lower PL tones. Stay away from 67hz and favor 250hz tones.
Most of the time you’ll leave your radio on Channel 1, the public group channel. In our case the neighborhood kids started chatting a lot so we flipped to our family channel rather than switching the radios off or turning the volume down.
One of my neighbors needed to call us and they first tried on the public channel but got no answer, so they switched to our Johnkowski channel and PL tone and reached us. In one instance they dropped in on our family channel to invite us to a group chat on a beer run and a very important bon fire meeting.
There are a great deal of tutorials for radio online which amount to little more than instructions without explanation. There is also a great deal of radio theory online which tends to delve deeply into physics and math without properly explaining the connection to the practical. What follows is my attempt to bridge the gap with a very basic introduction to radio theory in five short parts.
1 What is radio?
Radio telecommunications, or simply radio, is the art and science of using portions of the electromagnetic spectrum outside of the narrow range of visible light to communicate over distance.
Radio signals are a form of non-ionizing radiation. Before the standard fear of radiation kicks in, I should clarify, ionizing radiation is the sort of radiation that messes with chemistry in bodies and causes cancer and death. Non-ionizing radiation includes visible light and the heat you feel projected out of a stove window.
This isn't to say that non-ionizing radiation is completely safe. Like the aforementioned stove, it can burn you in a very literal sense. It can release heat into bodies both on the surface and at depth. Generally, you have nothing to worry about with sources rated 50 watts or less. Even the FCC has exempted these from routine assessments as they do not release enough power to possibly hit the exposure thresholds. For reference, most handheld radios are below 10 watts and most vehicle-mounted radios are around 25 watts.
Radio signals behave most like light. They travel in mostly straight lines, with a little scatter and lensing under certain circumstances. Some materials are transparent to them, some are absorbent, and some are reflective. They can be projected in all directions like a lantern's light, or in a particular direction like a flashlight.
Radio telecommunications, or simply radio, is the art and science of using portions of the electromagnetic spectrum outside of the narrow range of visible light to communicate over distance.
Radio signals are a form of non-ionizing radiation. Before the standard fear of radiation kicks in, I should clarify, ionizing radiation is the sort of radiation that messes with chemistry in bodies and causes cancer and death. Non-ionizing radiation includes visible light and the heat you feel projected out of a stove window.
This isn't to say that non-ionizing radiation is completely safe. Like the aforementioned stove, it can burn you in a very literal sense. It can release heat into bodies both on the surface and at depth. Generally, you have nothing to worry about with sources rated 50 watts or less. Even the FCC has exempted these from routine assessments as they do not release enough power to possibly hit the exposure thresholds. For reference, most handheld radios are below 10 watts and most vehicle-mounted radios are around 25 watts.
Radio signals behave most like light. They travel in mostly straight lines, with a little scatter and lensing under certain circumstances. Some materials are transparent to them, some are absorbent, and some are reflective. They can be projected in all directions like a lantern's light, or in a particular direction like a flashlight.
2 What are radio frequency ranges and bands?
While a particular frequency is important for making contacts, contiguous swathes of frequencies share both propagation characteristics and equipment. The legal authorities that govern radio operation have taken this into account and divided the radio spectrum so that different radio services (i.e. business, amateur, commercial broadcast, police and fire, marine, &c.) have blocks in several different swathes with different characteristics.
Confusingly, both the broad ranges of frequency as well as the divisions given to different radio services within them are both often called ‘bands’. For clarity, I will refer to the large swathes by the alternate term ‘frequency range’ and the allotments within these frequency ranges as ‘bands’. In this section, I will first discuss the legal aspects of bands. In the next, I will cover technical aspects of how the different bands work differently from each other.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a treaty organization, is responsible for managing a lot of definitions, names, and broad frequency allocations to allow for both interoperability and mutual understanding of terms of art in radio around the world. The broad frequency allocations from the ITU allow for both interoperability and minimal interference between stations operating in nearby countries. National agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, further define and restrict frequency allotments within their jurisdictions.
Within the allotments for amateur operators, an organization, such as the Amateur Radio Relay League in the United States, will further adopt a band plan. This ensures that certain methods of communication are operating with compatible or non-interfering methods on the same frequencies. This keeps hams interested in QRP DX-ing (attempting to communicate with distant stations on extremely low power) from having to compete with contesters (people who attempt contact with as many stations on a set list during a set time period, usually with high power transmitters) for the same frequencies. It also allows for machine communication to be separated from human, and various other conveniences.
On a more granular level, there are the frequency coordinators for single metropolitan areas. Repeaters are fixed stations in generally high locations with sensitive and bulky antennas to detect weak signals and repeat them strongly over a broad region to allow reliable two-way communications on even handheld radios. Two repeater stations can interfere with each other in obnoxious ways. Frequency coordinators will coordinate your repeater's frequency, taking in to account its location, power, and coverage area to minimize conflict. It's not strictly required, but the FCC privileges coordinated repeaters to maintain their frequencies over un-coordinated repeaters.
While a particular frequency is important for making contacts, contiguous swathes of frequencies share both propagation characteristics and equipment. The legal authorities that govern radio operation have taken this into account and divided the radio spectrum so that different radio services (i.e. business, amateur, commercial broadcast, police and fire, marine, &c.) have blocks in several different swathes with different characteristics.
Confusingly, both the broad ranges of frequency as well as the divisions given to different radio services within them are both often called ‘bands’. For clarity, I will refer to the large swathes by the alternate term ‘frequency range’ and the allotments within these frequency ranges as ‘bands’. In this section, I will first discuss the legal aspects of bands. In the next, I will cover technical aspects of how the different bands work differently from each other.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a treaty organization, is responsible for managing a lot of definitions, names, and broad frequency allocations to allow for both interoperability and mutual understanding of terms of art in radio around the world. The broad frequency allocations from the ITU allow for both interoperability and minimal interference between stations operating in nearby countries. National agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, further define and restrict frequency allotments within their jurisdictions.
Within the allotments for amateur operators, an organization, such as the Amateur Radio Relay League in the United States, will further adopt a band plan. This ensures that certain methods of communication are operating with compatible or non-interfering methods on the same frequencies. This keeps hams interested in QRP DX-ing (attempting to communicate with distant stations on extremely low power) from having to compete with contesters (people who attempt contact with as many stations on a set list during a set time period, usually with high power transmitters) for the same frequencies. It also allows for machine communication to be separated from human, and various other conveniences.
On a more granular level, there are the frequency coordinators for single metropolitan areas. Repeaters are fixed stations in generally high locations with sensitive and bulky antennas to detect weak signals and repeat them strongly over a broad region to allow reliable two-way communications on even handheld radios. Two repeater stations can interfere with each other in obnoxious ways. Frequency coordinators will coordinate your repeater's frequency, taking in to account its location, power, and coverage area to minimize conflict. It's not strictly required, but the FCC privileges coordinated repeaters to maintain their frequencies over un-coordinated repeaters.