After using Photoshop for more than 15 years, I can do some pretty cool things digitally with photographs, but I did not retouch this image in any way. We just had a wonderful summer rain and this rainbow appeared.

It showed up to the south, where we’ve never seen one before. The message certainly is plain to me, that there’s a pot of gold at the base of my wind tower.

Well it may not be quite that simple, but our investment in a wind turbine is paying off in huge dividends with the improved quality of our lives off-the-grid. We are probably using 5 or 6 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity a day, and on an average sunny day our photovoltaic panels are generating 11 or 12 kWhs, and many days the wind makes a significant addition to the total.

By mid-mornings we are diverting excess electricity to our diversion or dump load hot water tank. This is plumbed before our propane tank, so that if we’ve had enough sun and the water in the electric tank is toasty, the propane tank won’t have to come on. An in-line or on-demand hot water tank is in the future for us, but we’ve had to look at some other areas first.

My priority was a new fridge. The small electric fridge we’ve been using for the last 10  years has worked well, but we got fed up with its limited room, so we went out and bought a new 18 cubic foot refrigerator which uses 353 kWhs a year. Since the old fridge was at least 10 years old, this new one will probably use less power with significantly more space. We actually found an exceptional sales person at Sears who knew his appliances amazingly well, and could explain in great detail why the new fridge was designated as “Ener-star”.

Then along came peak oil and the end of cheap food. We have a huge vegetable garden and store large quantities of potatoes and carrots and onions and garlic, and part way into the winter cabbages and squash in the root cellar. By August when the garden will be over flowing with tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and items that won’t store, we’re usually giving produce away by the wagon load. But not this year.

This year we’ll be freezing that produce in our new freezer. We started off looking at a very small, 4 cu ft freezer, but it looked like we could fill it up too fast. It also used 240 kWhs. When we looked at the 8.8 cubic foot freezer, it used 296 kWh. Then we looked at the 12.4 cubic foot one and it used 326 kWhs. So for another 30 kWhs a year, we got almost 50 per cent more space.

Now for someone living off-the-grid, this was a big step to take. It’s easy to get cocky on these sunny summer days when we have an excess of electricity. It will be a completely different thing altogether in the dark and cloudy days November and December. We’ll use our previous experience as our guide.

Two falls ago, we ran our gasoline powered generator about 15 times, for those days without enough sun. We did not have a wind generator that worked at the time. Then last fall we upgraded our photovoltaics with another 700 watts worth of PV panels, and we installed a 1 Kilowatt Bergey Wind Turbine, on a 100 foot tilt up tower. Last fall we ran the generator 3 times, down from 15 the year before. And we have not created a single pound of CO2 from our fossil-fueled powered generator since Christmas 2007, 7 months ago.

We’re going to put the freezer in the basement that is quite cold to hopefully make it have to work a little less, and hope we don’t have to run the generator to make up for the additional loads in the fall. If we do, we’ll rationalize it that as country dwellers, the storage of frozen foods has reduced how often we’ve had to drive to town for groceries, and the distance much of that food would have traveled.

Living on the grid, buying a freezer is a no-brainer. Living off-the-grid, it’s a major life style decision. We’re pretty excited about taking the plunge. I still remember one day last winter when Michelle made some amazing soup from tomatoes she had managed to cram into our tiny freezer in the fridge we’ve just replaced. It was like being transported back to a warm summer day when the tomatoes were harvested.

This winter, with diesel fuel costing $5 or more a US gallon, buying fresh tomatoes in Canada in February is going to be an expensive proposition. And trucking produce from southern states has a huge negative impact on the environment. So I’m going to use the abundant solar and wind power to store some of the abundant vegetables I’ve grown in my garden to reduce my carbon footprint in a significant way.

One thing living off-the-grid does is challenge you to critically look at what things cost, how far they travel, and how much carbon was created in getting them to your house. With oil at $140/barrel,  everyone will be forced to join us in our energy awareness.

For now a new freezer is going to be like finding a pot of gold at the bottom of our wind turbine. (I decided to provide a photo of the wind turbine and rainbow rather our new freezer. Somehow a freezer just didn’t have the pizzazz).

Bugs can ruin your day. And I don’t mean the whole ants at the picnic thing. I’m talking about if you are concerned about the rising cost of food and are growing some of your own.

I grew my first vegetables when I was 16, which means I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now, a scary thought. In all that time, I’ve never sprayed a commercial pesticide or chemical on my garden. Early on, it wasn’t that I was opposed to chemical-based products – it just didn’t seem necessary. I worked at a garden center as one of my part time jobs in the 70s. I remember someone coming in and complaining that their peony flower’s hadn’t opened. They had done everything right as far as they were concerned, and had even sprayed the plant with insecticide because it was covered in ants.

I did some reading, and I discovered that peony bushes actually like ants. The peonies secrete a sticky sugar on the bud as it develops, and the ants really like it. By eating this sticky covering it makes it easier for the bud to open. I think that’s when things started to make sense to me and I learned that sometimes nature has a reason for some of these weird relationships.

Since moving off-the-grid and striving to increase how much of our own food we grow, the challenges with natural pest control have intensified significantly. One of my biggest challenges here is cut worms. If you don’t have them in your garden, be grateful. They are insidious.

They are a caterpillar which lives just below the surface of the soil and they love vegetables. They love them when they’ve just emerged and they are most vulnerable. They will wrap themselves around the stock of the plant and cut it off. You’ll know that you have cutworms when you are doing your morning rounds and you find beans plants or any of your other tender little seedings lopped off. If you root around the soil at the base of the plant, you’ll probably find a cutworm.

We’ve read everything we can about how to deal with them naturally. Snakes supposedly like cut worms, so I capture snakes all over our property and carry them into the garden. I’ve even built a little snake hotel. They love my horse manure piles so I made a nice pile in the garden with places for them to hide. But alas, the snakes don’t seem to like the openness of the garden early in the season when I need them most, so they head back to the long grass.

There are toads and frogs in the garden but they can’t seem to keep up with the numbers. You can put toothpicks against the stock of the plant to prevent the cutworm from cutting right through, but unfortunately my garden is too big and I just don’t have the time to put toothpicks against every bean plant, corn stock and onion.

The cutworms come from moths that lay their eggs at night, which means I can’t use my patented badminton racquet “Eliminator” technique on them. Cabbage worms and a number of brassica pests are laid by moths that appear once the plants get going. So during gardening season I am often found in the garden whacking the moths to try and eliminate the problem before they lay the eggs. My daughters think this is barbaric, but it’s them or the cabbages, and they’re going to lose. To say their flight patterns are erratic is an understatement, so the image of me attempting to slap them with the badminton racquet is kind of like a hybrid dance combining David Byrne from the Talking Heads and Devo from the “Whip-it” video. It’s not a pretty sight, and my chances of being hired for “America’s Most Fluid Dancer” are out the window.

So, I’ve had to come to accept the cutworm damage. Now I’m saving more of my own seeds, which means I have more seedlings emerge. I can spot where the cut worm is working by the growing empty places, so it’s just a matter of rummaging around in the soil until I track them down. I used to drown them in a bucket, but now that the garden is bigger and I forget to drag around the bucket, I just squish them. I must admit, after it’s taken out some of my plants, I do take some joy in the squishing.

When I plant transplants, like tomatoes and broccoli, I put a collar on them. I save all my toilet paper rolls, cut them in half, and cut them open, so I can wrap them around the bottom of the transplant to try and discourage the cutworms. Sometimes it works, but if the cutworms are hungry enough, it will only slow them down.

I also use sacrificial plants. Each year in my garden, I always get lots of volunteers in the spring, from plants that went to seed the previous fall. One year it was lettuce, last year it was sunflowers, this year it was Chinese cabbage. So I take the Chinese cabbage plants and put them between the transplanted tomatoes, which have collars. The cut worms are drawn to the easier to access sacrificial plant, and I can usually see the outside leaves lopped off, which means there are cutworms in the area which I can track down.

Last year we had a Kildeer make a nest in the vegetable garden. This year, there are 4 Kildeers running around the garden. They feed on insects, and have a long beak, perfect for rooting around in soil and finding worms. They always descend on the garden after I’ve been hoeing weeds and the soil is newly disturbed, so I’m hoping they’re tracking down lots of cutworms too.

They still do lots of damage. This year was the second year for my raspberry patch and I was so looking forward to a good harvest. But as the raspberry shoots emerged, the cutworms were there ready to lop them off. I spent a fair amount of time trying to eliminate them, but I have a full time job, and the cutworms have 24 hours to do their damage, so they clearly won the raspberry wars. When you see your raspberry patch being devastated, it’s easy to think about calling out the heavy weapons. Just one little bottle of some toxic insecticide could take them out I’m sure.

But I drink water from my well. And might some of the insecticide migrate down into my drinking water? And what beneficial insects might also be killed? I know I have lots of lady bugs and wasps and other insects that are doing their best to eliminate pests. Would I be setting myself up to have to keep spraying in greater volume to stay ahead of the pests?

Nope. I don’t think I’ll go down that route. I think I’ll continue to keep my soil healthy, and water and compost my plants, and hope they are healthy enough to survive these onslaughts. I think I’ll continue to encourage beneficial insects to make their home in my garden.

Now is not the time to start playing the pesticide game. After reading Devra Davis’amazing book, “The Secret History of the War on Cancer”, www.devradavis.com  I’m going to stay out of that game. There is obviously enough empirical evidence to implicate these products that municipalities across the nation are banning cosmetic spraying with them.

The other reality is that commercial pesticides, and insecticides and fungicides and weed killers are all made from petroleum products. In case you haven’t noticed, the price of oil keeps going up… precipitously. Eventually these products are going to get too expensive for me to afford, so I think it’s better to stick with my low tech solutions. Better to lose some raspberries this year while I can still buy them from the farmer down the road. One day I will figure out how to beat the cutworms and in the meantime the water in my well will still be clean.

Your life is about to change. It might not be the end of the world as we know it, but it could be quite jarring.

With crude oil prices continuing to rise past $130/barrel, many aspects of our North American way of life are going to change dramatically.

The prolonged run up in prices would seem to indicate that the market is finally starting to recognize that we have found and pumped all the easy oil, and that the new discoveries are smaller and much harder to extract.

The concept of “peak oil” suggests that at some time the world’s crude oil output will reach a maximum and then go into decline. We won’t run out, we will simply produce less and less each year. Many countries like the United States have hit peak oil, and now it looks like many more are following suit. Britain and Norway’s North Sea oil is starting to slow and Pemex, Mexico’s national company reports that it’s Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico is in steep decline. It would appear Russia’s output is declining, and Matt Simmons made a very convincing argument in “Twilight in the Desert” that the world’s largest producer of sweet light crude oil, Saudi Arabia, has hit peak.

So we have maxed out at 85 or 86 million barrels a day, and yet demand keeps rising. As the gap between demand and supply increases, the prices go up.

Now there are many theories as to what is driving up the price of crude oil, including the low value of the US dollar which oil is traded in. Some economists suggest that speculators are flocking to commodities like oil for better returns, but if speculation was rampant, you would expect to see excess inventory sitting around, and most industry watchers don’t believe this is the case.

The reality is that the marketplace is starting to recognize that we have maxed out our ability to pump oil, at a time when demand from many developing countries is rising. Think about it - in 2001 oil was $20 a barrel, this time last year oil was around $65, and a year later it’s double that at $130. If you were sitting on a big pool of oil, wouldn’t you be pumping it like crazy to make as much money as you could at these high prices?

The reality is that the world is pumping it as fast as it can, and it’s not enough. And it appears that 85 million barrels may be the most we ever pump.

Numerous mainstream media sources, like the Wall Street Journal which used to refer to the concept of peak oil as being a very “out there, fringe preoccupation of survivalists”, are now starting to refer to the concept as a possible cause of the high prices. It is becoming the norm in the media now to suggest it as a possibility, if not a likely cause.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121139527250011387.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The International Energy Agency (IEA) which has been very conservative in its view of oil depletion, admits that it is happening much faster than it anticipated and is going back to the drawing board to try and get a handle on what’s driving up the prices and what world reserves really are.

I would suggest if you haven’t taken the time to critically look at your personal energy use, it’s time to do so. It’s time to think about where you live and if your pay will keep up with the rising cost of gas that you need for your commute to work. How do you heat your house? Have you had an energy audit done to see if you can improve its efficiency? Is it time to replace that fossil fuel powered furnace with a ground source heat pump?

The skyrocketing price of crude oil is starting to ripple through every facet of the economy and it will result in higher prices for everything. So there’s no better time than right now to take a critical look at where you live and work and how higher prices will impact you. If you are a city dweller “$mart Power, an urban guide to renewable energy and efficiency” is perfect as your guide book, and if you live in the country and think you might even like to pull the plug on your local utility at some point, “The Renewable Energy Handbook” is a step-by-step guide to make sure you do it right.