Jennifer Lapinsky

Thanks for the ideas Nancy!

Thanks Douglas and Anne!

I am definitely thinking hugelkultur is my best bet.  We have insane rodent issues in our existing garden (I have tried for 3 years to garden without raised beds but I lose at least 75% of my veggies no matter how much I plant!), so I'm building raised beds there this year.  I’m wondering if burrowing rodents (voles and gophers) will be much of a problem in the marshy section though.  It would be far easier if I don’t have to build raised beds there as well, obviously.  I’m really hoping this works bc it would solve my watering issues as well as utilizing the unused marshy area next to my current (smaller than I’d like) garden plot.  

As for the pathways, that is a very good question lol.  It’s going to be very wet no matter what.  I guess more woody material?   We have a good sized wooded area on our property and I was planning on chipping the scrub and fallen branches etc for the pathways in our current garden.  Any suggestions?  I am open to any and all ideas!

I’m wondering if anyone has any thoughts on, or experience with, building a garden over marshy land to help mitigate the effects of drought.  I was thinking hugelkultur beds possibly? Mainly I was wondering if beds of any sort built over marshy land would wick moisture upwards and reduce the need for watering, or if I’ll just end up with a mess.  We live off grid and don’t have running water, and our summer temperatures are typically mid to high 30s (Celsius) for most of June, July, and August.  I feel like this could work, but before I start building garden beds I thought I’d see if anyone has any ideas.  Thanks so much!

Hi Carl, thanks for replying!  I didn't know that the inverter would be so inefficient with our current usage.  We only bought 4 batteries because that's all we could swing up front.  But we are planing to buy 4-6 more when we are able, as well ad a small wind turbine, and then we would like to be able to run a few more things. So our inverter will hopefully be put to better use then.

As for the starlink... we love it!  Our acreage is in a dead zone for cell phones, and there is no option to tie into any sort of grid here... so sattelite was our only option.  We were lucky that starlink is available in our area!  So far we have had no issues with it.  It works beautifully.  Yes it takes a couple of minutes to get going when you turn it on, but it's not prohibitive. We will turn it off to conserve our batteries, and then turn it on for 2 minutes to check for messages etc, and then off it goes again.  It's definitely faster than dial-up, lol.

Hi Em, thanks so much for replying!  Well, i have to admit that in all the reading i did in order to figure out how to put this system together, 50% available consumption wasn't something I came upon.  I mean, i knew you don't drain your batteries down to 0... but i didnt realize that if your battery says it has 230 ah, then you are really only going to get 115ah out of it.  So, ok that explains a few things.  Thank you!

Help!  What are we doing wrong?  Long story short... we bought acreage with nothing on it with the intention of building a house and living off grid...eventually... but circumstances forced us to move to the acreage waaaay before we were ready, and we needed to put things into place quickly and with minimal funds.  So here's the problem: we put together a pv system just to get us started with a little bit of electricity, but with plans to expand.  We don't need a tonne of power, but it seems like we should have a little more power available than we do.  Here's what we have:


 4 x 250 w solar panels wired as 2 separate series, each pair connected to its own 60A mppt charge controller.  Then we have 4 x 6v 230ah deep cycle agm batteries connected as a 2x 2 series/parallel to create a 12v system with 460ah, and finally we have a 2000w modified sine wave inverter.


We live in a place with very hot sunny summers, so there's no shortage of sun right now...direct sun is on the panels from 8am-5pm  We are trying to run our starlink satellite (100w), and a small chest freezer (150w), plus occasionally charging a laptop, and 3 phones. We only charge the phones and laptop during the day when the sun is shining, and we can only run the freezer until the sun is off the panels bc otherwise the batteries are depleted and the inverter gives us an alarm at 9.8 v by late evening.  Even with the freezer being shut off (and the sattelite receiver being the only thing plugged in)  usually we have to shut the inverter off by midnight so we have a little power left first thing in the morning before the sun gets going again.  This isn't optimum, obviously, but it's all we could swing in the time we had.  Suggestions?  Ideas?  Obviously we have done something wrong... but what? 


TIA!