Linda Holliday, The Handygal Homesteader

Name: Linda Holliday

Occupation: Linda and her husband work full-time for their home-based business, Well Water Boy Products, LLC, where they design and build water well-related products and human-powered
machines for off-grid living.

Place of Residence: In mid-summer 2010, Linda and her husband bought a
45-year-old fixer-upper in the Missouri Ozarks that they are steadily readying to
go off-grid.

Background
and Personal History: Growing up in central Wisconsin in the 1960s and ’70s, Linda was
surrounded by dairy farms and forest. Her mother had the best garden anywhere
and stored a basement full of raspberry, cherry and strawberry jam, applesauce,
bins of potatoes, rutabagas, and carrots, frozen peas and berries, and canned
green beans, corn and tomatoes every year. Their meat usually came from the woods
– rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, deer, turtle, fish, frogs and assorted game birds. Linda spent many years trying to get back to that simple country lifestyle, finally
doing so for good three years ago. She now grows much of her own food year-round,
saves heirloom seeds and is relearning old-fashioned skills for
self-sufficiency. Linda’s husband is continually designing ingenious human-powered
devices so they will not need to rely on the grid.

Current Projects: Improving the soil, building compost areas, building greenhouses, establishing rainwater collection, raised beds, seed-starting and seed-saving
and designing watering systems. Linda’s husband is busy making their self-sufficient
lifestyle comfortable. He recently invented a unique hand pump machine and has
plans sketched for a pedal-powered log-splitter, firewood saw and washing
machine.