How "off the grid" are you?

We get a lot of suggestions of how to be "off the grid".  My feeling is that off the grid means no government regulated power, water,  or utilities. Other ways to be self sufficient are a bonus, but not a necessity.

We still have cell phones, and actually had to get another since there is only one local company that has service up here. We have satellite internet.  I quit watching TV over a year ago, and don't miss it a bit.

In Oklahoma, some things are bit more difficult. We had planned to plant at least 50 fruit trees on our property. But we've learned that doing so may be more difficult then we thought. What people don't realize is that deer eat everything. Not just the fruit.

We've seen wild persimmon trees better than 20 feet tall and have 3 persimmons at the very top. The tree is reduced to 1 main branch. All of the lower limbs, not just the fruit, but the branches have been eaten by dear. They will stand up on their back legs and eat everything they can reach.

Those trees will bear nothing next season, they may even die.

So planting small trees it's just putting out fresh feed for the deer. Whole trees will disappear overnight. Put a 6 foot fence around each tree? Not out of the question. But eventually they will be big enough to stand on their own, and the deer will trim them back to nothing.

People always say to us you should plant this, or you should plant that, and grow some of this. But they don't understand, we're not just off the grid, we're in the wild. We are competing with raccoons, skunks, dear, birds, and even rats out here. If you plant seeds the seeds are dug up and eaten. Any fruit or vegetable becomes food for the wild animals. One guy we talked to had to put up an electric fence to keep coons out of his strawberries.

So gardening and orchard planting becomes a game of building a fortress to protect your plants.  A game you'll probably loose. The blog is called More Bears than People - but it could be called Thousands More Coons than People.

I also thought that getting meat would be pretty easy.  We're surrounded by tasty critters here. All you need is a gun and you've got meat on the table.  But as I mentioned in earlier posts, that hasn't been as easy as I thought.

I still think there will be successful hunts, when I get the formula right. But we're still eating store-bought meat.

Lots of people turn to livestock to fill the need for protein. Goats for milk and meat. Chickens for eggs and meat. Rabbits, cattle, hogs, and whatever. But then you get into several tough tradeoffs.

Chickens, rabbits, ducks, turkeys and other small defenseless animals out here are BAIT. So you build them fences and fortresses and they get snatched and eaten a little slower.

Coons are near impossible to keep out, and you'll contend with fox, coyote, bob cat, owls and hawks, and potentially even bear and mountain lion.

Bigger livestock LEAVES. So again you're constantly fencing and fortifying - only now to keep them in. And with any of them, you're now trading your time and the cost of feed, medicine, and vet bills for meat. On the small scale, your hand raised meat will cost more than store bought.

The biggest drawback of livestock is that you can never leave. You can't just lock the chickens in the coop for two weeks with a bag of feed and a bucket of water.

Heck even fruit trees require year round watering for the first year or two.

Who wants to be chained to one place for a whole year?  Forget it.

Now and then someone will ask something like "how are you going to be really self sufficient?  You still have to buy clothes and stuff."  Yeah, no shit, what am I going to do - grow cotton, comb it spin it, weave it, and sew clothes out of it?  Screw that, I'll go to Walmart.

So the goal is to be reasonably sufficient on electricity, but we'll still need to supplement with propane. Though the pellet stove requires the purchase of pellets, and wood would be more abundant and free, it's also a hell of a lot of work. Wood piles have also proven to be homes for "special friends" like rattlers, scorpions, and spiders - near the house is bad enough - but carrying them in with the fire wood on a cold night is a bad thing.

I think we can get there on water, but there is more work to be done. If we can get the roof on, than a catchment system follows. If done before Spring, we could conceivably gather enough water for a year.