Juan Roble

Tereza Okava wrote:Joseph I love your idea and your thinking.
I would absolutely participate, but I also can entirely envision your situation and both your desire to awaken interest in gifting and also perhaps some frustration with people who don't see it the same way.

I often do kind of 'feeling out' with friends and even clients and colleagues to see who i want to work with or spend effort on. If someone doesn't get it, then fine, it was a gift (and when it leaves my hands, it's out of my control). But sometimes the seed falls in the right soil, so to speak, and the whole idea sprouts beautifully. Sometimes it just takes the right person. I love what you're doing and hope you continue. Wish you were my neighbor, I'd make you some bread.

I share the same vision about all of this. We may be few, but we are here.

Hi @ll !

I have been asking myself exactly this question for some time (and now I finally have the chance to start testing it in the real world). Last year I bought about 5.8 hectares (roughly 14 acres) in the Spanish Pyrenees. It is mostly permanent mountain pasture, with some woodland, a natural spring and an old stone building that I am slowly beginning to bring back to life. I am an agronomist and also an electronics guy (so perhaps my way of looking at all this is a slightly strange mixture of old and new), and I am trying to understand what scale of land can give you freedom without turning that same land into an endless source of work.

My goal is not complete self-sufficiency. I am not sure that producing absolutely everything yourself is necessarily freedom (sometimes it can simply become another full-time job). What I am trying to create is a place that will need few external inputs, can produce a good part of what I need, gives me useful work rather than endless work, and still leaves enough time to actually enjoy being there. At the moment I am still very much at the beginning, so many things are ideas, some are starting to be tested, and others will probably change completely once I understand the land better.

The land itself is already setting many of the rules. I have around 3 hectares of good pasture, some woodland, plenty of water from the spring, and a mountain climate with cold winters and dry periods in summer. So the idea is to work with what is already there (instead of forcing the land to become something it does not want to be). I am considering rotational grazing with sheep and/or goats, bees, a relatively small vegetable garden and orchard, improving the pastures, using the woodland carefully, and managing water so that gravity can do as much of the work as possible. None of this is fully established yet, and that is important for me because I do not want to design everything from a desk and then impose it on the place.

Energy will probably be mostly solar, and here is perhaps where I differ a little from the romantic idea of going back to a completely low-tech life. I love simple systems (very much), but I also like technology when it removes stupid repetitive work. So I am planning to experiment with things like sensors, electric fencing, GPS livestock collars, solar pumps and eventually small autonomous machines for mowing or pasture management. Not technology instead of nature, but technology to allow nature to do most of the work.

For example, my idea is that if a small solar-powered machine could spend several days slowly cutting pasture while I am repairing a stone wall, looking after animals in the future or simply walking in the mountains (which is also part of the good life), that would seem much more interesting to me than spending those same days sitting on a tractor. The same applies to water: I am thinking about systems where gravity, a tank, a few valves and a small controller could irrigate only where and when it is needed (without me spending the day opening and closing things). I do not see that kind of technology as making the system more artificial; I see it as a possible way of interfering less.

I am also beginning the process of restoring an old stone building rather than building a new house and, eventually, I would like the place to be useful to more people than just myself (a place to share practical knowledge, experiments, tools and mistakes too). I would like to show that rural life can still be attractive and possible without pretending that we have to live exactly as people did 200 years ago. For me, the interesting part is precisely that combination: old stone, pasture, water, animals, woodland and very simple technology used only where it genuinely helps.

So, after buying 5.8 hectares, I certainly do not have an answer yet. But I am beginning to suspect that the most important question is not simply how much land a good life requires, but how much land one person can care for well without the land eventually becoming his master. For me, 5.8 hectares currently feels like a very interesting scale to experiment with (perhaps not the perfect one, but a very interesting one): big enough to imagine pasture, some animals, woodland, water, food production and some genuinely wild space (which I also want to remain wild), but still small enough that I hope to understand what is happening almost everywhere on it.

At least, that is the theory. Ask me again in ten years (if the goats, the bureaucracy and the mountain have not defeated me first) and I may give you a completely different answer. That is part of the experiment.

Hi @ll !

I know there are quite a few people here who are not comfortable with AI, but for something like this I think it can be almost perfect — if you are very clear with it: do not rewrite my text, do not change my style, just correct the spelling and grammar and explain the corrections if necessary.

I am dyslexic too, and it has never really been a problem for me. Spanish grammar is genuinely quite complex, so for years my solution was simply to finish writing something, leave it alone for a few minutes, and then come back and read it again. You probably know that trick very well.

From my point of view, dyslexia also means that we often find different ways of solving problems — sometimes wonderfully different ones. So I tend to see it as a kind of gift as well as an inconvenience.

What really surprised me here is that, if I sometimes miss my own mistakes in Spanish, in English I actually had to read some of the suggestions people made twice before I could even see the difference!

So I really understand the effort you are making. And I love the determination behind it: let's go out into the world, write what we want to write, and make sure people can understand us!

Bravo!

Hi @all,

I feel this too. We all have to do everything we can to recover, heal, and take care of our bodies. Life changes when we do.

We build fences around ourselves all the time, but we can redesign our lives no matter where we start from.

Find the strength, or make the move.

And one question: do you dare to design your own life, or are you going to leave it all to chance?

Hi @ll!

Since you mentioned that you already have lots of flowers and plenty of bees around, I suspect the heat is the main issue rather than a shortage of pollinators. Colorado State University actually says that if daytime temperatures reach around 90°F by 10 a.m., tomato blossoms opening that morning may abort. With the 100°F days you've been having in Denver, that seems to fit pretty well.

Here in Spain, when tomatoes are grown under that kind of heat and intense solar radiation, shade netting is very commonly used. Tomatoes need plenty of light, of course, but they do not benefit from being blasted by direct sun all day when temperatures are extreme. Some shade during the hottest part of the day can reduce stress, flower drop and sunscald without depriving the plants of the light they need.

For the tomatoes themselves, I would probably try around 30% shade cloth during the hottest period, especially for afternoon sun.

I would also pay close attention to irrigation. Tomato plants can be surprisingly sensitive both to drought stress and to excess water. Keeping the root zone reasonably even in moisture is usually much better than alternating between very dry and very wet conditions.

I would avoid watering over the foliage if possible and irrigate at soil level instead. Tomatoes are quite prone to fungal diseases, and repeatedly wetting the leaves — especially if they stay wet for hours — can make disease problems much easier to develop.

For future years, though, I still think it is worth planting nectar and pollen plants around the tomatoes to maintain a permanent population of pollinators and beneficial insects. Things like dill, coriander, yarrow, alyssum and other flowering plants adapted to your area could work well.

You could even let an artichoke go all the way to flower — the flowers are spectacular and very attractive to insects — although in your climate I would see that more as part of the garden ecosystem than as a solution to this particular tomato problem.

And giving the flowering trusses a gentle shake now and then may also help release the pollen.

Once temperatures fall, I would expect fruit set to improve quite quickly.

Hi @ll,

I think the reason you're struggling to find it is that you may be better off separating the thermostat from the heater.

There are small 5V USB digital thermostat controllers with an external temperature probe. You can set a start and stop temperature, then connect an ordinary 5V USB heating pad to the output.

So basically:

USB battery output → thermostat controller → 5V heating pad

Try to found it at Walmart or other similar: USB 5V digital temperature controller with a probe and programmable start/stop temperatures.

I would probably use a 7–10W heating pad, put the battery in a lightly insulated enclosure and heat the enclosure rather than putting the heater directly against the battery. Put the probe against the battery case and perhaps set it to switch on around 2°C / 36°F and off around 5°C / 41°F.

That should do exactly what you're describing without needing to find a specialised “battery warmer”.

Hi Sophia, thanks for your message.

Yes, the project is still active and open to collaboration. If you think there could be a fit, feel free to tell me a little more about what you have in mind.

Juan

I would add that, at least where I am, the mono vs poly debate is now mostly outdated. The low-cost panels available here are already monocrystalline, around 650 W each, and bifacial. The current price is about €98 per panel, roughly US$114, which puts them at around €0.15/W, or about US$0.18/W. At that price point, the real decision is no longer mono vs poly, but system architecture: string voltage, MPPT sizing, wiring losses, shading management, and future expansion.

The main advantage of wiring panels in series is that it raises voltage and reduces current. For the same power, higher voltage means fewer amps, lower voltage drop, and smaller cable size between the array and the inverter or charge controller. Of course, the string’s maximum open-circuit voltage must always be checked, especially in cold weather, so it stays within the MPPT input limit.

There is also simple panel-level electronics available, usually called power optimizers. They can be useful when there is partial shading, uneven dirt, panel mismatch, or one panel in the string is underperforming. If one panel is shaded or dirty, the optimizer helps prevent that panel from dragging the whole string down as much. They are not magic, and they do not replace proper MPPT design, but they can improve resilience in imperfect real-world conditions.

Regarding orientation, I would not overthink it for a small off-grid cabin, provided there are no major shading issues. In the northern hemisphere, facing south with a tilt close to the average annual optimum angle is usually a sound baseline. If the cabin is mainly used in winter, a slightly steeper tilt may make sense to improve winter production and help shed snow or dirt.

With 650 W panels, the options for a 1–2 kW target are quite simple:

* 2 panels: 1.3 kWp. Cheap and simple, but with limited margin.
* 3 panels: 1.95 kWp. Very close to the target, but usually ends up as a single string.
* 4 panels: 2.6 kWp. Slightly above the target, but it allows two balanced strings of two panels in series.

For an off-grid cabin, I would choose 4 panels configured as two strings of two panels in series. That gives a 2S2P array: two panels in series per string, and two strings in parallel, or preferably two independent MPPT inputs if the inverter/charge controller supports it.

That way, you are not betting the whole system on a single string, the working voltage remains sensible for the MPPT, current is reduced compared with a low-voltage 12 V setup, wiring costs stay under control, and there is real-world margin for lights, a small fridge, laptop use, and possibly a well pump later on.

That means it works??? I’m hoping now!

Too far away, Melissa!

But honestly, it is incredible to find someone like you here: open, sincere, direct, and genuinely willing to find what you called a “soul mate”.

Your place, your animals, your ideas, your love for water, gardens, self-sustainability, 3D printing, art and practical projects… it all sounds like a very real and beautiful life project.

I truly wish you the best, because I think many of us in this “singles” section are here hoping to find exactly the kind of connection you describe: someone to share life with, build things with, laugh with, and make a small piece of paradise a little more complete.

Spain is probably a bit too far from South Carolina, but I still wanted to say: your post made me smile. I hope the right person finds their way to your door.