Twenty Acres in Trinity County, California

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One "necessity" we've learned to do without totally is 110-volt (i.e., power company) electricity. For lighting, we depend on an Aladdin lamp and three Coleman lanterns. (We burn unleaded auto gas in the Colemans. It works just as well as white gas, and is far less expensive.) We heat with a small Franklin wood-burner. Carol cooks on an L.P. gas (propane) stove, and a gas-fired water heater is on this year's Christmas list. Carol wishes now that we would've got ten a wood/gas combination stove fo r the kitchen, since we have to haul our bottled gas home in 10-gallon tanks and we use one every six weeks. (What we really need is a single large tank that can be filled once a year.) Someday, we may acquire a refrigerator.

What little electricity we do use comes from a car battery that we have hooked up to our Sony black-and-white TV and one of our two C.B. radios. (The other C.B. is in the car.) I have to keep a close eye on the battery, though, because sometimes the boys have it connected to the TV upstairs and I'm stuck downstairs with a dead radio.

Naturally, we try to grow as much of our own food as we can. Our garden is abundantly supplied with red clay-the kind that needs all the mulch, ashes, and compost it can get-but the pinkish earth grows wonderful vegetables. (It also grows pretty good apple trees! Not long ago, we planted some apple seeds -which had been given to us by a friend -in the garden, and they came up like radishes! Now we have dozens of saplings . . . enough to start a fair-sized orchard. And this is in addition to the dwarf fruit trees we've already planted near the house.)

As for animals, we own one old nanny goat (whose main function is to clear the underbrush from along the fencelines so I can run fences next year), three rabbits (for meat), and four chickens (enough to keep us in fresh eggs, but not enough to run up a high feed bill or to give us a surplus of eggs that we can't refrigerate).

Soon after we moved here, I made the mistake of spending several hundred dollars on a small used crawler tractor. It was a handy piece of equipment, but we quickly realized that the cost of operation and upkeep more than out weighed the machine's limited usefulness . . . so we sold it. Now when we need work done we hire a backhoe, bulldozer, or road grader to do the job at $18 to $25 per hour. (That may sound steep, but a good operator can do an unbelievable amount of work in an hour.)

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