[Petronski]

We will be canning and freezing, to be sure.

I’m growing potatoes and tomatoes quite successfully (so far so good) on ground converted from lawn in April. It is a matter of tilling in plenty of mulch and fertilizer.

I looked at the cost of those LED grow lights...holy schnikies! I think I’ll stick with my plan to use fluorescents (for greens and maybe cherry tomatoes). Could you tell me quite specifically which CFLs you’re using?

You could create a solar dehydrator with some bits of used lumber, a piece of glass and some dowels from the hardware store. I’ve seen one in action and it’s a pretty sweet setup.

[reformedliberal]

The main CFLs I use are on the AeroGarden hydroponic machines. You can look at them at the http://www.aerogrow.com site and perhaps figure out what the equivalents are. They are $20/set from AeroGarden & last at least 3 6-4 month seasons.I like the AeroGardens for miniature/dwarf cherry tomatoes and for lettuce. They have a trellis system that is either integral or available as an add-on that is essentially those reel-type ID badge holders. Quite nice and they keep the fully fruited tomato plant upright and support the bearing branches well. I like the Pro-100 and Pro-200 AeroGardens. The 24” lamp arm is excellent for tomatoes that grow under 2 feet tall. The shorter ones do well for lettuce. I also found that putting a low desk fan on the lettuce after they develop decent sized stems, makes the lettuce less limp, which is a problem with growing greens indoors. AeroGarden and its affiliates have sales throughout the year and sometimes they have reconditioned models at a 1/3 savings.

For the potted plants (tomatoes)I also used 2 24-watt fluorescent long tubes,called Sun Tubes by Ott Lite. I found them at Home Dept. They are on chain supports with hooks at the top of the shelving unit I used this winter, so I could easily raise them as the tomatoes grew. I used a space blanket tucked into the shelving unit frame to keep the plants warmer and reflect back more light and I added regular GE curly fluorescents (26 actual watts=100 watts)in cheap shop reflectors as soon as flowers appeared. It made a difference. I could see that the light from the regular fluorescents was warmer than the long tubes. Also, perhaps because of the reflectors(?) it seemed that there WAS some added heat from the curly bulbs. Logees (online) has heated pots that use very little electricity. They usually have them on sale for $40 in the summer. Tomatoes will grow in cooler temps if the roots are warm. I have two pots at the moment and they did well last year.

These are the LEDs I was looking at:

http://www.thelashop.com/catalog/LED-Grow-Lights-orderby0-p-1-c-47.html?gclid=CMnf6Y6PspoCFRIcawodRjvGcA

While there are some very spendy ones, there are smaller ones around $40. But I don't know enough yet about the color, except that the bluish ones are for foliage and the red ones for flowers/fruits. There are also $15-$30 long fluorescents used for aquariums that seem like they would fit into a regular fluorescent tube fixture.

People have told me they have used regular fluorescents for light supplementation for tropical house plants in the winter before the CFLs were available and it worked for that purpose. I tried the 75 watt incandescent grow lights, but they are expensive to use and get hot and they burn out much faster.

We have really humid conditions in the summer (SW WI). Would a solar dehydrator work, here? We get heavy dews, too. I know my electric one (elderly Ronco) is costing whatever it costs to keep a single coil heated, but I haven't figured it out. I did notice perhaps $5 on my fall electric bills that I am pretty sure were the dehydrator and perhaps the stove for boiling down tomato sauce, which I freeze in bags laid flat on a cookie sheet in the freezer....they freeze/defrost faster and store easier if frozen flat. I just don't have the extra storage room for jars. I hate water bath canning, too. I dried most of my tomatoes and it was really easy to make tomato paste and sauce by reconstituting them, using a food processor and then making sauce when I needed it. I just about ruined the processor trying to make tomato powder, but just using reconstituted dried tomatoes was fine.

We have a generator and are working on getting enough marine batteries and a solar panel array for charging them to keep freezers, hydro machines and a dehydrator working in case of power inaccessibility and gasoline shortages. If I had the necessary $7k and the correct site, I would put in one of those below-ground greenhouses with passive solar heating. But I don't have the money for that, at the moment, and our situation is a North facing valley farm, so we get very little direct sun in deep winter...perhaps 4-5 hours.

For now, we are supplied by a rural Electric Co-op and we are just hoping that electricity stays affordable and available. The Co-ops are really fighting the cap and tax while adding in all the wind, solar, methane they can. But we have gone up 10% in the past few months and have been warned about possible brownouts in the future, mainly because of the restrictions being put on coal.

I envy you the turkeys!! But I have kept chickens in the past and disliked it. I know people who keep chickens and we trade them for eggs and occasionally for butchered chickens. My husband does hunt, deer and grouse, so far...we have lots of wild turkeys, so perhaps we will get one of those sometime. People say they are good, but only the breast is really usable.