Michael Qulek

Pecans on my site have been an utter disappointment.  I had 8 different varieties planted, two died, none of them is doing well, most are barely hanging on, and I have gotten ZERO nuts since they were planted back in 2007.

Walnuts however are doing much better.  Interestingly, the variety that is performing the best, and has given me the greatest harvest so far is "Chandler", a variety of English/Persian Walnut specifically bred for California.

I've just purchased some additional Chandler's that I'm planning on planting into the empty holes left by the pecans that have died this coming spring.

The key illustration here is diversity.  Do NOT focus your attention one just one or two different trees, but plant multiple varieties of many different things, and find out what works best for your site.  Visit your neighbors and find out what trees worked for them.  Then buy and plant those.  Remember that there are two different biotypes of pecan, so you need at least two different varieties for pollination.

All my trees are on the same water valves, so each individual tree gets about the same amount of water, maybe 20-25 gallons?  2500 Gallons of water/ 100 trees = 25gallons?  I use above-ground bubblers, which sometimes clog, so I routinely unscrew them while watering to blow out the plugging debris.  If a tree appears to be getting less water than it's peers, I unscrew the bubbler head, and fill up the swale with an equivalent amount of water.

BTW, the other trees that have proven to work well on my site are Chestnuts, European plums, and peaches.  Remember though that what works for me, might not be what works for you.

Kara Ann wrote: Can you say more about your water use? You are pumping for household use for a few people in your cabin/workshop? For irrigation / livestock? Are you in a climate that tends to have grouped days of overcast that exceed your battery / recharge capacity?

I use a few hundred gallons for domestic use, but the big consumer of water is the orchard.  I have ~100 trees in the ground right now.  Apples, peaches, pears, plums, cherries, walnuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pistachios, ect.  I consume about 2500 gallons per irrigation, which I'm now doing every two weeks.  

I'm in the Sierra Nevada foothills at ~5000 feet elevation.  Mediterrean climate still.  Enough natural rain to support Oak and Pine, but 95% of the natural rainfall occurs outside of the normal growing season, say May 1'st till November 1'st.  If I start pumping at 8am, and irrigate as I pump, I can keep the pump running till 4pm.  At that point the tank might not be totally full, so I usually finish up the next morning.  I'm actively pumping irrigation water from June till winter shutdown, around the first or second week of November.  I have the whole outside piping drained before freezing weather arrives.  So, maybe next weekend will be the last watering of the season.

In the winter when there are cloudy/rainy days, I don't consume more than 4-5kWh of power, just for household needs. I have enough solar now that I can still make 500-700W even in the rain.  If I'm conservative, I can have the batteries at or almost full charge by the end of a rainy day.  So, I really don't have to deal with serious battery drain.  That being said, I have a very BIG 35kWh Rolls battery, and it take about a week to drop it down to 50% if I'm not at the cabin using stuff.

You can operate a standard AC-powered well-pump via solar.  I have a 1hp pump 380' down the well-hole, powered by a Schneider XW+ 6848 sine-wave inverter fueled by 4500W of solar.  The solar charges the 48V battery bank, and the bank fuels the inverter.  The 6848 has the starting surge capacity to start heavy loads like a well-pump, which starts with about 9200W (< 1 second), and runs at about 2000W.  I find I can generate the 2000W required from ~8am to 4pm.  I've since added another 3000W of solar facing due West, which allows me to pump later in the afternoon till past 6pm.  My pump produces about 300 gallons per hour.

When shopping for an inverter, you need to know the numbers you are working with before you start buying solar equipment.  I have a clamp meter that can read "inrush current", which is the starting surge that electric motors demand.  They are typically 3-5X the running wattage.  You place the clamp around one of the power wires (not both), press the inrush button, and start the pump.  The inrush current is reported in Amps, which you can convert to Watts by multiplying by your AC voltage.

Please note that a lot of cheap imported inverters will state how MUCH they can surge, but that number is of little/no value for heavy starting appliances.  What you want to pay close attention to is how LONG the inverter can surge.  Cheaper inverters may claim they can surge to 200%, but that is only for 8-16 milliseconds.  Quality inverters surge for 5-60 seconds, totally adequate for starting a well-pump.  In illustration, my XW+ can surge to 12,000W for 60 seconds.  So, it starts my big pump effortlessly.

A good rule of thumb is to have 2X capacity for every component.  So, if you have a pump that needs 1500W to run, make sure you have at least 3000W of solar. Also, have at least a 3000W inverter to run that 1500W load.  As a general rule of thumb, you end of spending less money overbuilding, then underbuilding.  Finding out a smallish piece of electronics can't handle the power demand means you have to then sell it and build a bigger model.

One of the great things about designing you solar system around the well-pump, is that most likely is the single biggest load you will ever run on your homestead.  So, if you system can run your well-pump, it pretty much can run just about anything else.  At my own homestead, I've done just that, and have all AC appliances in the cabin/workshop.

With our 8000BTU wall unit, starting around 2:00pm, I run it full blast during the day, getting the upstairs as cool as I can, to ~70-72F.  With both South and West-facing solar arrays, I can keep the wall unit running with zero battery depletion till about 6:30pm, at which point the solar resources drop down below the ~750W (maybe 1000W total) needed to run the unit.

At that point, I start adjusting the temperature up to ~74-75F so the unit switches over to cycling on and off because it's reached it's set temperature.  What I've found is if the upstairs is already pre-cooled, I'm only keeping the unit turned on till about midnight.  At midnight, the outside air temperature has dropped below ~74F, and I simply turn off the air-con, open the windows, and run an electric fan instead.  Because the air-con is a wall-mount, it does not interfer with windows opening and closing.

So, no matter how many kWh of ac power I consume during the daytime, I'm only consuming about 2-3 kWh of power till sunrise the next morning.

No matter how hot it's been during the day, I have not yet had to run the air-con after midnight.  This might not be the case though if I was in a more humid SE US location?

The seeds are the sexual progeny of the parent, so there there HAS to be some variation.  During the sexual process, there are two primary mechanisms taking place, the swapping of whole chromosomes, and secondly "crossing over" between chromosomes.

If we are talking about a self-fertile variety, the male pistol of a flower fertilizes the female staman of the same flower.  Since the chromosomes can assort independently of each other, the proportions of each can change from generation to generation.

In "crossing over", segments of what was originally on a female derived chromosome might hop onto the male copy during meiosis, and vice-versa.  A gene sequence that was once on the male copy is now on the female copy, and what was on the female copy is now on the male copy.

If you want to have a guarrantied copy that's identical to the original plant, you need to pinch off branchlets and root them in water.  Only then will the tomatoes be identical to the parent.

There are table-top propane burners you can purchase.  In my own cabin, I used one for years before I bought a standard gas model from Home Depot.  I suppose you could even set it on top of your regular stove as long as none of the burners can turn on.  It ran to a 5-gallon barbeque tank I squirreled away under the table I was cooking on.

That would allow you to pressure can anything you want without acidifiers.  Once you the ability to pressure can, a new world will open up for you.

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:We don't currently use any major solar, other than some small rechargeable items with built-in solar panels. I want to change that. My plan is to start putting up solar panels next year, then add batteries, inverter, charge controller. Then, as various appliances need to be replaced, I want to replace them with 12v. Eventually we should have the whole house running on solar, or close to it, leaving the grid wiring in place if we still need it for a few things (like the two window AC units that keep us cool in Kentucky summers).  

I would strongly admonish you to skip 12V, and graduate directly to 48V.  Did you know that at the dawn of the 20th century, 6V automotive electrical systems were the standard?  By the 1930's, everyone could see the limitations of 6V and starting moving to 12V.  By the 1950's, 12V was ubiquitous.  Today's new generation of electric vehicles are all 48V, and 48V will be the new standard of the future.  You might as well get on the new standard now.

I myself started out at 12V, and attempted to run my own homestead cabin on a 12V to 120VAC system.  It worked, sort of, but left a LOT to be desired.  Certain LARGE items, like the 240VAC well-pump absolutely could not run on a 12V system.  I graduated to 48V in 2017, got a dual 120/240VAC inverter, and have been powering my well-pump with that ever since.  My 48V system powers everything else effortlessly.  Running your power at higher voltage allows you to use thinner copper wire, which is obscenely expensive now.

All the 12V/24V DC appliances out there are overpriced niche products, and you end up spending less money overall going with a standard AC system, with mass-market appliances bought at your local store.

Don't start buying stuff until you've fleshed out a plan.  A lot of those "great deals" end up costing more in the long-run as you attempt to fit them into a system.  Put together a plan and we here can help you troubleshoot the design so you can have the best operating system.

Solar panels have become so cheap now that I personally when the whole-AC method, and went with standard AC appliances I bought at Home Depot.  With a 18cuft refrigerator/freezer, I find myself consuming about 0.8kWh in winter, and 1.8kWh in summer.  With 15 300W panels wired 3S5P, I can keep the batteries fully charged even in the rain on a December day.  Do NOT try to buy panels online from Amazon or Ebay.  Shop for local panels on Craigslist, and buy locally with cash and carry pricing.  I would ignore anything less than 3W/$ for brand-new uninstalled panels, and I think now 5W/$ is a good deal.  Bring a voltmeter with you if you are concerned about panel quality.  Don't buy anything with a Voc more than 10% less than the documented Voc pasted on the back of the panel.

I taught myself to weld a couple of years ago, mostly to build the array frames for our off-grid solar homestead.  I'd say that a smaller 120VAC MIG welder is the way to go.  If you select flux-core wire, shielding gas is NOT required for regular steel.  I got a Lincoln Electric 140A model, that I've used on-grid, off-grid, and powered via a generator.  If you do add a gas cylinder, it expends the materials weldable to stainless steel and aluminum, though I have yet to attempt welding either of those.

There is a learning curve, and the very, very first frames I build were of such low quality that welds cracked as I dropped the frames into place.  They did get better as time went by.  Have to say though by now my welds are starting to look professional, and I go out of my way to build/fix things by welding them.

I think it would be highly recommended that you outline that what you are creating is a carbon monoxide generator, and you must take the precautions required for working with a poisonous gas.  It's very important to understand that CO is an accumulative poison.