Of course it doesn’t help to be exhausted and have a cold, to boot! Will’s got the cold worse than I do; he’s coughing and I’m just running at the nose like a fire hose. We had to toss a bunch of tomatoes that had gone “over the edge” while we were gone. But it wasn’t that bad as it seemed that tomatoes just didn’t keep as well, picked green, as they usually do. Maybe they had frost damage that wasn’t obvious.

While we were gone, David cut our cabbage that the deer hadn’t gotten around to eating yet. So I have a wheelbarrow full of cabbage sitting in our entry way waiting to be canned, turned into sauerkraut, and into Amish coleslaw. Hopefully tomorrow will bring more energy and a whole lot of chopped cabbage.

Wind-chargers

Our trip was interesting, although long. We were amazed at the huge wind farms dotting the Illinois landscape among endless fields of corn and soybeans. The white wind chargers looked majestic, slowly turning in the breeze. It was noteworthy that they actually took up very little space in the fields and the crops were planted right up to the bases.

Cranberry-bogs

Then when we came back through Wisconsin we came upon huge cranberry bogs under cultivation. Here we only have wild cranberries, but there we saw acres of cultivated cranberry bogs. It was pretty impressive to say the least. — Jackie

11 COMMENTS

  1. All,

    There are concerns with any type of power plant; costs, dangers, things you don’t like. But wind is free where coal, biofuel, diesel and nuke are not. We have several big wind chargers south of us and saw them hauled and built. No roads were damaged and there was no problem with community. I guess it depends on circumstances. We aren’t planning on buying one of those multi-million windchargers any time soon. LOL Our little windcharger does make a hum while charging but to us, its the sound of free power and we don’t mind it any more than we do the wind in the pines.

  2. arm2008,

    I wasn’t really wanting one in our back yard, but if you’ve lived off grid, you can understand why looking at those huge machines, turning slowly in the breeze would make us wish for more than our little 400 watt windcharger. With a bigger unit, we could have an electric freezer and run our generator much less often! So what’s the problem with bats? I’ve never heard about that before. We do love our bats and know that our little wind charger hasn’t damaged any so far.

  3. If you want to be independent, you deal with the side effects. I would love a wind turbine in my field. I would love to not have to pay $200.00 a month for power.

  4. Like everyone else, no you don’t want one of those in your back yard. In fact you don’t want one any where near you. The pasture full just north of us shows up on the radar as a severe thunderstorm. I live in tornado alley. Is it real or the wind farm? The noise factor is real. Ever see a lightning strike on one of those blades? Glad I was a couple of miles away.

    You know how grain trucks tear up a paved road on a hot summer day? Add in 6 over-length/weight tractor/trailers for each wind turbine plus all the loads of cement, rebar and gravel that were need to build the pads to support a wind turbine. What a mess! The county gave the wind farm a 10 year tax break, guess who pays for the road damage? Irony, the life expectancy on a wind turbine is 10 years.

    And finally, the social fabric of our community was ripped apart by the controversy of placing a wind farm on a tall grass prairie pasture. (Think environmental concerns.) The last I knew, the family that allow the wind turbines on their place are still not welcome in any of the small communities in the area.

  5. They have the wind towers here in ND too. They are huge, the semi truck to carry the wing isn’t a typical trailer, extra long and has to have an escort to go down the road. They are expensive to fix. ND tends to have a few ice storms and it does havoc on them. We have seen wings broke in two and hanging. It would be scary to have one to close if the whole thing should fall over. I have only heard of that happening once. Fields are good places for them. But I would like a regular windmill.

  6. The size of those windmills is deceptive. I happened to see one once that was in the process of being build. The part with the blades was laying flat on the ground. There was a semi truck parked UNDER one of the blades, and it looked like an ant by comparison!

  7. I saw the wind chargers also while on a trip to Wisconsin to visit my sister this past summer. There were miles and miles of them. Very impressive!

    Get well soon, Will and Jackie.

  8. Nope, you don’t want one of them in your back yard, they make annoying noise and raise heck with the bats. I hiked up around some Saturday and the noise isn’t horrendous, but definitely want them out in the back 40 :-) If they would put their mind to fixing the bat problem I think they could (but they currently seem more interested in denial).

    Hope you get well soon. Extra rest goes a long way in recovery.

  9. Hi guys, sorry to hear you have colds. I would say get plenty of rest, but you and Will are as busy as bee’s. Lots of vitamin C :) It would be amazing to have a couple of wind chargers in ones yard and of course a nice big cranberry bog would be nice as well. Sorry to hear about your tomatoes, we had similar things happen this year with ours:( Take care and get better!

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