Spring is wonderful: ever longer hours to garden and do things outdoors. Even spending 8 hours indoors developing equipment and keyboarding, leaves almost 8 hours of light to mow, fix fences, weed, dig, and plant.

One neat trick I’ve found that insures that the planting progress proceeds is to soak a variety of seeds in small containers (I use plastic cups that yoghurt comes in) for a day, then wash and drain them twice a day until they sprout, or until they don’t. I save lots of varieties of seeds and when they get older, fewer and fewer sprout, until usually year four or five, none do. By pre-sprouting seeds you can see how many are viable within a few days. Because nights are usually cool and it take quite awhile for leaves to show, planting seeds in soil may take a few weeks before you know just how many plants you have. It’s easy to get properly spaced, or the chosen number in a hill, of beans, corn and squash for a three sisters garden. This process also works well for other large seeds like peas, cucumbers and melons. Another benefit: incentive! As roots grow longer in the pile of seeds, you want to plant them before untangling them becomes a chore with the risk of breaking roots. Because my fingers are typically covered in soil while planting, I like to shake the container of sprouted seeds into holes or rows and not pick out individual seeds, getting the rest all dirty. When the roots grow too long, this shaking routine no longer works!

This past week we had a few severe frosts that set back many varieties, especially the grapes and asparagus. I never heard anyone covering asparagus to protect them from freezing but any spear that was showing is now shriveled up, or rotting. No frost tender transplants were yet outdoors, so our gardens are doing fine. Onions, garlic, greens and radishes don’t seem to mind getting frosted, although many broccoli leaves look burnt but seem to be growing. The cold temperatures did allow me to cut the trees around the bee hive without them bothering me. These trees and some others, in addition to supplying firewood, also provide tomato stakes. We like to train tomatoes to grow up on structures so they are easy to pick, and the fruits don’t get damaged like they often do when on the ground. This year we need at least 100 new stakes because the wire cages made of concrete reinforcing mesh that we typically use we’ll use this year for pole beans so we don’t have to move them. Because we grew tomatoes on them last year, we’d have to move them to use them again for tomatoes again this year.

On days that the sun shines brightly it important to periodically water seedlings in a greenhouse. As the plants grow, the larger sets of leaves transpire lots of water so that plants wilt if watered only once a day. Another incentive program: get the largest plants into the ground so you don’t have to water them! Many of my tomato and tomatillo plants are now well over a foot tall and should be watered three times on sunny days. Eggplants and peppers the same age are only two to four inches tall and need water only once a day.

Shoots of our non-native nut trees were severely damaged by the late frosts: heart nut, hazel nut, and English walnuts, and even our native chestnuts and hickory have many dead shoots. It’s too early to tell if the actual nut crop was damaged.  Many berries including black, rasp, mull, and blue were also nipped. The currents, champagne, red and black, and gooseberries look okay. Berries and grapes supply most of our beverages, jams and jellies and we’ll really miss them if they don’t come through.  Apple blossoms came and went before the heavy frosts and maybe their fruit will make it. Hope you are all have a better spring, at least in terms of cold weather, than we’ve had.

Sixty years and still delivering: Our electric stove, lathe, drill press and our well, with a jet at the bottom. Our freezer, refrigerator, sewing machine, microwave, and tractor are going strong after 30 years. Only our freezer, drill press and sewing machine have not needed attention. I upgraded the elements and controls on the stove, replaced the well pump, back flushed the jet, and fixed the lathe, refrigerator, microwave and tractor but a few dollars in parts have kept them running like new. As I develop new solar equipment I like to keep in mind these proven items and try to avoid shortcomings of others not in this list: vehicles, engines driven equipment and entertainment equipment that don’t last long or have other regrets.

When my grandparents were young, they walked, biked and rode in horse drawn carriages, streetcars and trains to get around. Indoor plumbing, central heat, electric lights and cars were rare. My parents saw these become ordinary and I remember my mom being very happy to leave our rental with an outhouse and move into her own home with two indoor toilets (that still flush 60 years later). Three generations experienced the wonderful transition from animal and manual labor to engines and electric motors doing most hard work. My baby boom generation expects clothes driers and dishwashers, microwave ovens and computers, and we fly across continents and oceans without a second thought. Two generations from now, petroleum and coal that provide our transportation and electricity will be gone or their use restricted. Although we are well aware this is happening, we’re not focusing on the tools we’ll need for living well without burning fossil fuels. We burn fossils like there will b no reckoning and subsidize solar equipment that has no future. Big Energy does not want solar equipment that is as easy to use as the underground deposits of stored solar energy. But future energy systems should become even easier to use, universally available, less expensive and certainly less damaging than what fossil purveyors now sell us. And run well when they are 60 years old.

The only available renewable energy equipment that can compete, without subsidies, in our fossil fueled infrastructure that I’m aware of, and then only for those without access to a utility grid, are PV panels and related equipment. Even though current PV is inefficient, it’s better than running a generator that is noisy, requires trip after trip for fuel, needs lots of attention and wears out quickly. If our national budget had a surplus, creating real jobs making and installing inefficient solar equipment where a grid is available might make some sense. But there are better things to do with the money we have to borrow from our future.

Passive solar overhangs that let sunshine in during cool months and shade in summer make sense as do incorporating thermal mass so space warms up slowly and stays comfortable for a long time. Windows and skylights provide light and fresh air. Smartly designed buildings are very comfortable with minimal conditioning equipment. Since many of us live in homes and work in buildings that were built without considering energy, it’s up to us to minimize the energy we have to purchase for comfort and light. Proper insulation (ceiling, walls and foundation), managing infiltration, adding skylights and overhangs, improving windows and doors, incorporating thermal mass and wearing appropriate clothing all help conserve energy, fossil or renewable. Investing in passive techniques that harness natural energy flows year after year without attention is better than paying for any kind of energy.

Supplementing a clothes drier with a clothesline, seeing how few minutes the hot water heater can be turned on (we have ours on for 10 minutes for showers on weekdays, and only a few minutes on weekends if a load of laundry requires warm water). From burning 1,000 gallons of fuel oil per year it now takes us three years to burn 250 gallons. We’re working on getting that number to zero. My brother, who lives nearby, cut his natural gas use by half through adding ceiling insulation, high performance windows, a condensing furnace and a programmable thermostat. We both close off rooms we are not using.

So, when you’ve reduced how much energy it takes to make your home comfortable, it’s time to look into ways of providing the energy that natural energy flows can’t supply. Some might consider a heat pump powered by electricity because it can come from remote large wind or water turbines. Our utility generates power at Niagara Falls and can transport power from wind power projects but since we have space, we’d rather let others who do not have room for solar collectors take credit for those sources of renewable energy. We live on a hill surrounded by open fields, an ideal place for a wind turbine. After talking to folks who have lived with their own wind turbines, listening to how much noise they make when it’s really blustery and hearing of a few fatalities of careful people falling off towers during storms when this kind of equipment typically fails, we no longer consider using wind as our energy resource. So we consider solar equipment our primary future option. In the meantime, we burn wood.

Seven of eight photovoltaic, PV, panels that we purchased more than 20 years ago still work. The passive solar tracker they’re mounted on has seized up but the array, facing south, still works, as it would on a roof or other static structure. A solar thermal collector might deliver heat for a long time also but the problem with both is the amount of materials it takes to make them and how much useful energy they make available. It takes typical PV and thermal panels years to replace the energy invested in the materials, manufacturing and shipping so in 25 years they return less than 10 times the energy invested. This means they have an energy profit less than 10. Where there’s lots of sun, point-focus solar collectors that track the sun using two motions can harvest more solar energy than any other and might have energy profits of more than 50, and perhaps more than 75. So we have to develop affordable new energy systems that are simple, can harvest and homeowners use not 12% but 80% of the sunlight and work more than 60 years without much attention. How they should be able to do this I’ll get into over the next months.

Spring weather has been really great and the peas, lettuce, greens, potatoes, onions and four flats of seedling vegetables are reaching for sun. We’re already giving away pounds of asparagus to neighbors because after eating them every day this week we want something else. We’ve tried freezing them but didn’t like the results, except in soup. I’ve collected the grass clippings off four acres and used the tons for mulch, four inches deep on 20% of our acre garden, so far. It’s really worm food. Most of the dried grass disappears and has to be replaced a few times over the summer. This mulch almost eliminates weeds. Another benefit is that it takes only a few minutes to uncover a container of worms for fishing. We have over 300 tomato plants, 19 varieties that now range from 4 to 10 inches tall. I’ll start planting them next week. Peppers grow much more slowly and our 8 varieties and over 250 plants will go out later this month along with the eggplants and flowers.

Mirrors shining on power towers or miles of pipes in thermos bottles not only waste resources but also waste time. They look impressive and deliver electricity without dumping greenhouse gases but are a façade that give the impression we’re moving in the right direction. Solar power plants and $60,000 PV arrays on homes do reduce our need for electricity produced by burning coal, natural gas and nuclear fuel, so what is wrong?

Where I live such a PV array can deliver only 30% of the electricity I use. And since electricity is about 30% of my total household energy budget, a $60,000 system would address about 4% of my total carbon footprint. When we install large solar plants in deserts, which have more sunlight than cities, we hope to solve both peak oil and climate issues. But they do not. Those projects are way too expensive and, like PV panels, we actually use less than 14% of the sunlight. But PV panels can use much less material, and less labor, yet deliver the same electricity. Adding storage makes desert power plants even less efficient. Neither delivers any heat, or cooling.

Simply inviting solar thermal power stations into our communities and utilizing much more of the sunlight could more than double the performance of power plants that generate power with steam. Why should taxpayers pay $Millions to build inefficient and ineffective solar power plants in deserts? Big Energy makes money burning fossils in large plants and bureaucrats support only this “business as usual” approach. And future generations will have to pay these $billion bills.

Let’s consider some numbers. Solar 2 demonstrated solar power tower technology and annually delivered 7.9% of the sunlight as electricity. Similar projects soon hope to get this conversion efficiency to 13.7%, see: http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/34440.pdf .  Solar parabolic trough power plants have many more years of experience and the Solar Electric Generating Station VI annually converts 10.7% of the solar energy to electricity. Future solar power tower and trough projects hope to get conversion efficiencies to above 14%, see:http://www.solarpaces.org/CSP_Technology/docs/solar_trough.pdfand the 34440 article above. Making power in remote deserts and transmitting this clean electricity loses around 7.2% (in 1995) in transformers and power lines, see:http://climatetechnology.gov/library/2003/tech-options/tech-options-1-3-2.pdf diminishing desert solar effectiveness targets from 15% to 14%. These solar power stations generate steam and use turbines the same way as coal burning power plants. Every day, a typical fossil plant needs to burn 110 cars filled with coal. No one wants to live near plants that handle coal and spew mercury, ash particles and greenhouse gases. But trains don’t bring sunlight and solar power plants have no emissions, can be absolutely quiet, and can shade parking lots – so why not foster them in communities?

Power plants dump heat. Solar power plants convert about a third of the energy in steam into electricity and need cooling towers in much the same way as vehicles use radiators to get rid of their “waste” heat. But if an appropriately sized plant were near a hospital, government buildings, a mall, or condominiums, this solar energy could heat water and space and, using absorption air conditioning equipment common in large facilities, provide cooling.

Last week I mentioned a solar collector that had 1,000 square foot mirrors as the front end of a personal energy system. Although this 36 foot diameter dish is the size of a small roof, it would deliver enough power and heat to make a significant dent in the carbon footprints of farmhouses, rural homes, businesses and others with large backyards or room. They have to follow the sun from east to west so only very small ones can be on roofs.

A plug in hybrid electric car will diminish responsibility for oil spills (or ocean oil platform mishaps) but will require electricity. Though cheaper than gasoline, coal-fired power costs thousands of “black lung” deaths and otherwise injured miners and does not make the electric transportation option any better. But solar power can. Any area of concentrating mirrors can intensify sunlight 1,000 times so that smaller dishes say 20 feet in diameter delivering 7 kilowatts in full sun, may fit in some neighborhoods. On the other hand, since it takes a similar effort for site work and to make parts, much larger dishes, say 100 feet in diameter (175 kWe) would be most cost effective for those who use a lot of power, heat and cooling. One almost this large was built in Australia last summer, see: http://solar-thermal.anu.edu.au/2009/12/500-m²-dish-construction-highlights/

Before looking seriously at what it will take to replace the energy we get burning fossils, we should look at our carbon footprint and identify ways to live well that require less energy.