Dave Tedford

I made some pine tar last year to use as a wood finish. Mixed 50/50 with boiled linseed oil it makes an excellent weather proof finish. I showed how to do it on my blog www.dirtybillyoffgrid.com You need a ton of wood for a little bit of tar. A paint can full of pine will produce an ounce or so. You can do all sorts of things with the stuff, soap is common. Logcabinlooms on youtube loves the stuff and puts it on anything that's made of wood. The same process with birchbark will produce a tar that thickens as it cools. The natives used to seal their birchbark canoes with it, and on the documentary A Happy People they use birch tar as a mosquito repellent.

I was actually thinking about what to do with excess water. It would only be an issue early in the spring. I'm thinking about putting some big-o drainage pipe along the bottom so that it can get rid of the excess. What exactly are mosquito fish? I don't think they will work in this application but we have a ton of water around here.

Ok. Here's my plan. Our back yard drains to the south into a natural trench about 2 or 3 feet deep and maybe 50 feet in length. This area is wooded and I am currently clearing it. The trench holds standing mosquito infested water all year. The plan is to drop three or four large poplar trees into the trench and throw every thing else that isn't lumber or firewood worthy on top of them. The theory is that the wood will sponge up the drainage from the yard and reduce the Mosquitos as well as provide gardens. Just wondering of these things can be too damp?

I have a panoramic picture of the area that I took a month or so ago when the snow was on the ground at www.dirtybillyoffgrid.com it's not great but I will update it this weekend.

We have been off grid for three years now. The first two years we used a small chest freezer on a timer as a fridge. It ran one hour in the day and one hour at night. Took a little while to figure out the sweet spot on the thermostat, but it worked well. We have a propane now, more expensive but convenient and easy to keep clean.

We went with Unique. It's the stainless one, not sure the exact size, but it's big. They don't use much propane. We were running our hot water and stove before we got the fridge, and the propane consumption after is barley noticeable. The down side is price. It was over 4000 Cdn.

Hey all. I have been reading posts here for a year or so, but this is my first post. I am just finishing up a twenty year career as an infantryman in the Canadian Forces. My family and I live off grid on a hundred acres in the Ottawa valley in Eastern Ontario. Last spring we tried a small hugel bed just to see if it worked. It did. I am currently clearing some bush in order to put in a much larger hugel system. Any way that's all I have.