Me, yesterday, in one of my 21 gardens.

Yesterday was a beautiful, almost too-warm day for April 1 in Northern Wisconsin. It’s been over 70 almost all week, and I did quite a bit of work in the garden. So much work, in fact, that I dragged a lawn chair out there for an occasional break. I used to chuckle at the old goats who kept chairs in their gardens. Now I’m one of them, and that made me think.

I remember (a long time ago) when a reader asked what happened when a homesteader got old. “All the work is hard enough now,” she said. “How will I do it when I have even less strength and vigor?”

Many of the answers were practical: Use your head instead of your back, stuff like that.

But most of the answers we got from other readers who were speaking from personal experience were reminiscent of directions on how to eat an elephant: a spoonful at a time.

“I do almost everything now I did years ago,” was the common refrain. “It just takes longer.”

At the time I thought that was just common sense (like most of Countryside). But I had no idea how much longer everything would take!

There’s lots of good advice on using your head instead of your back. I wish I had written down some of the ah-ha moments I’ve had when finding simple ways to do difficult jobs, so I could share them with you. As you probably know, great memories are not one of the shining attributes of the older generation.

And taking things slower? Also great advice, and very easy, when your knees give out and your strength wanes and you avoid getting up out of a chair too quickly (even if you could) because the room starts spinning.

But the mainest thing (spellchecker tells me I just made up a word, but I’ve been using that for years and I’m too old to quit now) is that when you get old, you don’t need as much! My RN wife limits me to one piece of bacon—on the days I’m allowed any at all. (That has something to do with the AFib I had a few years back.) We also usually share a pork chop, and a small roast lasts so long we could write a cookbook on using leftovers. So there ain’t much point in raising a pig anymore.

Half an apple is a treat. Half of a Snickers is a real treat.

I make a big point of this in Self-Sufficient Living. You can become more self-sufficient by producing what you want and need, or you can reduce your wants and needs so neither you nor anyone else has to produce them at all. When you get old, reducing needs becomes much easier than producing stuff to meet them.

I vividly recall the day I first realized I was old.

Son Steve was helping me reroof the house. It didn’t take long before I got really, really tired. I was halfway up the ladder with an 80-lb bundle of shingles on my shoulder when I thought, why is this such a drag? Heck, as a Marine, I used to run up and down the hills of Camp Pendleton all day with an 80-lb. pack plus a 9-lb. M1 rifle!

Then it hit me. That was 40 years ago. I dumped the shingles on the roof, climbed back down the ladder, and never went up again. (Except to clean the chimney, of course.)

That roof is now almost 15 years old. It doesn’t need replacing yet, but when it does, I won’t be up there.

Roofing is a young man’s job anyway. Woodcutting? Eh… maybe. I use the smaller, lighter chainsaw now. But son Dave has a fine oak forest and my woods is mostly popple, so he delivers most of our firewood.

My beloved chickens flew the coop several years ago when I was diagnosed with poultry lover’s disease, a lung infection. When I came home from my second hospital stay due to a collapsed lung, all my birds were gone: chickens, guineas, pigeons, even the cockatiels, thanks again to my life-saving wife and two of our sons. I still miss my birds, which were supposed to be my retirement hobby. But our daughter-by-marriage Elaine (the editor of Backyard Poultry) furnishes us with fresh homestead eggs, which lessens the blow.

Cooking, including canning and baking, is an excellent occupation for an old guy with plenty of time. And of course gardening is the traditional domain of codgers who can’t do much of anything else except fish. To me, fishing is boring, but I could garden 24 hours a day and half the night.

But then there are times when the knees just can’t take it anymore, or the back gives out, or I run out of breath. Thus, the chair. After a short rest I can go back to work again, but it’s also pleasant to just sit and listen to the birds with my new hearing aids.

And in a way, getting that chair out there was a kind of celebration. Today is my 72^nd birthday.

A letter-writer in the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram recently chastised “Green fanatics” with all of the usual arguments, including the idea that those investing in alternative energy now are wasting their money. Here is my reply:

“Green fanatics wrong” (Voice of the People, Saturday, Feb. 27) is a wonderful example of using accurate data to reach a questionable conclusion. Jeff Nicol is right about the current high initial cost of wind and solar power, and other facts, but he ignores a lot of relevant information that’s essential to making a wise decision.

The efficiency of solar cells has increased more than fourfold in just the last five years. Even so, as of now, only 14 percent of the photons that strike a photovoltaic cell are converted to electricity. If Moore’s Law (which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years) has any application whatsoever to alternative energy — and it certainly does — the potential for solar power is enormous.

One reason Moore’s Law works is because early adaptors made use of microprocessor chips even when they weren’t “affordable.”

The first pocket calculators became available in 1972 (Hewlet-Packard’s HP-35). The price was $395 — more than $2,000 in today’s money.

Now we take pocket calculators for granted, and most kids (for me, that’s anyone under 50) have never seen nor used a 35-pound hand-cranked desk calculator, much less a slide rule. Even more astounding, today you can get a multi-functional Casio SL200-TE for under $10!

And please note, Mr. Nicol: it’s solar-powered.

Yes, as he points out, we do need fossil fuels — nonrenewable resources — to develop and produce new products. “Nonrenewable” means we will eventually and inevitably run out of them. It will be impossible to develop new and sustainable technologies using the last drop of oil or pound of coal, which is why we must act now.

Mr. Nicol calls for more common sense in the world. I wholeheartedly agree. However, I would add the caution that a little knowledge can be dangerous. Mr. Nicol, who “did a little research on the Internet recently,” has a different perspective than I do. My first wind and solar installations were more than 35 years ago, and I recently spent six months researching and writing The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living, which involves many aspects of sustainability — food, water, clothing, shelter and transportation, as well as energy and more.

In other words, to answer Mr. Nicol’s rhetorical question, I’m one of many Green fanatics who knows exactly what he’s supporting. As for “pushing” our agenda on others, as he puts it, consider this:

We’re investing in the nascent technology the skeptics consider uneconomical. As with the electronic calculator, this supports innovation, mass production, and lower costs that will eventually affect even the naysayers. So I don’t see us pushing them. We’re dragging them, kicking and screaming, into a sustainable future.

— Jd Belanger

Only yesterday I posted a blog about my take on global warming. (It would be one way to end the insanity of the consumer society and endless growth.) Today, there’s a story on MSNBC about global cooling. But hey, I’m adaptable: I can handle that.

For the past two years, William Patterson, described as an “isotope biogeochemist” (what does your daddy do?) at the University of Saskatchewan, has been looking at tubes of mud taken from ancient lakes in Ireland. It’s basically like the core you get when you take a soil sample, but much deeper of course. And it’s examined in slices about half a millimeter thick. Since this mud was laid down as sediment, each layer offers a snapshot of geologic history. Patterson and his colleagues have been studying this history, and they say the climate cooled — very, very  rapidly — about 12,800 years ago.

That ice age (scientifically the Younger Dryas) is well-documented, of course, and non-controversial, mostly. The “news” is that it might have occurred within a matter of months, or a few years at most.

And it was caused by global warming.

It was news to me that this was “news,” because a sudden Ice Age was one of the main themes of my book, The Place Called Attar, published in 1990. The theory was (and still is) that a vast influx of fresh water into the Gulf Stream turns off what climatologists call the “conveyer belt”, that “river within an ocean” that carries warm water from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic, and makes Maine and Nova Scotia, as well as most of Northern Europe, a more hospitable climate that what we have here in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, even though we’re farther south.

Twelve or 13 centuries ago, that fresh water came from North America’s Lake Agassiz, which held more water than all of the Great Lakes combined. Today, it could come from the melting polar icecaps.

When warm tropical water is no longer flowing north on that “conveyor belt,” those balmy climates of Maine, Nova Scotia and Northern Europe revert to where they should be, being even further from the equator than Wisconsin. Result: An Ice Age. And it could happen in months, not eons.

My point here is that I’m not taking sides. Global warming — or cooling — might or might not be happening. But either one would devastate what I call The Establishment, that stifles sane living, which I call homesteading. Therefore, even the prospects of either one interest me as a devious means to an end.

Here’s an amusing and personal little aside: In Diane’s last year of college, she needed one more science course for her RN degree. I suggested climatology, which I was taking as part of my geography minor. I figured it would be a snap course, which she deserved after a grueling 5-year nursing program – plus a year off for maternity leave.

In addition to the novelty of a married couple being students in the same small class on a (then) 12,000 student campus, I thought it would be interesting and perhaps even useful, long before tv meteorologists started educating us all about weather phenomena.

Little did I know what a hot topic that snap course would become, 50 years later!

Oh, by the way, The Place Called Attar has been out of print for years. I was happy to get rid of the second printing… until recently. I’ve been getting requests for it again. They’re selling on the web for $35 a copy. I have none left. Some guys just can’t get anything right.