SolFest Solar Energy Festival Last Weekend in Ukiah

Lew has designed and redesigned our book-selling booth over the years, and he and Evan put it up Friday afternoon. There were two problems: first, was the hottest weather of the year. Secondly, previous SolFests were at the Real Goods headquarters in Hopland, with its green grass and ponds and general pleasant ambience, but the Ukiah Fairgrounds were way different. Hot and glaring. Hopefully they’ll figure a way to move it back to Hopland next year.

We sold books and talked to a lot of like-minded people. One guy came up, pointed to the Shelter book, and said: “I’m a high-rise engineer in San Francisco, and I got my start with this book.”

I gave a talk on “The Half-acre Homestead in the 21st Century,” what I’ve learned in about 50 years of home-made shelter and garden experience. I made a list of about 25 tools we use — coffee roaster, cheese grater, table saw, garden shredder, grain grinders, etc. Not a complete list, but sampling of stuff we’ve found useful over the long haul. Posted at: https://www.shelterpub.com/_homestead/tools.html. I didn’t take time to write reviews, just linked to further information for each item.

My laptop got trojan-horsed while I was on the road, so I couldn’t post any photos for three days. Frustrating! I’m used to being able to get info out, and I love posting while traveling. now that I’m back in business, I’ll put up photos from the trip.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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