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Warm and breezy, a gorgeous autumn-like day, so I take to the strawberry patch to do some weeding, down on all fours. This is a very slow task, and I let my thoughts drift where they will.

I remember the John-Denver-like character we met in Kentucky a few years ago, and his story of turning from a career as an investment broker to become a plain Mennonite farmer. As neither he nor his family had been raised to the plain life, his deliberate aim was to retain a modicum of comfort via creative but humble means. With this in mind, he tapped into a natural spring on the opposite side of the holler, piped the water down to the bottom, where a ram pump pushed a percentage of it up to a tank uphill from his house, spilling the excess into the creek at the bottom. From the tank, he ran more pipes back down to his house, thus achieving water pressure in his house without running an electric pump. Then he ran a pipe through his wood-burning stove, and stored this hot water in an insulated tank in his attic. So, without burning gas or oil or electricity, he had hot & cold running water. I was quite impressed, both with the ingenuity of his system and with the reasonable principle from which he proceeded.

I can still picture him, sandy hair, wire-rim glasses, as he showed us the stove with the built-in water plenum. He had learned to be careful to temper the hot water with cold, laughing as he exclaimed, "Hot? Lemme tell you, son, that water'll blister yer hide!". He even sounded like Johnny Denver.

Newly inspired, I take a piece of scratch paper and start mapping out a fairly simple way to run some pipes to heat water with my wood stove in the winter, and with an attic (solar) tank in the summer.

Back to the garden. I pick green beans, chard, broccoli, and sweet corn, most of which I freeze. I plant a few apple seeds in the back yard and in the meadow across the driveway.