Lighting, and mobile garden

Yesterday I packed some of the "fun" stuff!

We each have a small plastic tote for our helmets and "fun activity" stuff.
Laying over the crate is my "dry suit", like a wet suit but not. It's made of neoprene, and I can wear it to swim in Lake Mead until it warms up enough to go without it. It'll already be as warm in February as a lot of Montana lakes ever get!

To go with it, on the left is a pair of neoprene booties to keep my footies warm in the water,

and in the middle is a pair of batter's gloves (Baseball), which make good cold-water swimming, kayaking, and fishing gloves!

Inside the crate, my bicycle helmet is on the left, with cycling gloves inside it, and my motorcycle helmet is on the right, with leather riding gloves inside.

My container garden for the trip!

This morning I planted cantaloupe in the one on the back left.

Romaine lettuce in the front left pot.

I've got pea seeds on the dirt in the one on the right, which I pressed down in after

I took the picture.

In the rear is a pepper plant I brought in from the garden in the fall.

These will all to go Nevada with us, more for experiment than anything.

During germination time I keep the pots covered with plastic to keep the soil moist while the seeds sprout, and I keep them covered until the seedlings are up and strong.

The pepper plant has had it's soil covered with plastic around the plant all winter because the air in the cabin is dry and sucks the moisture out of the potting soil.
We'll be growing sprouts, such as alfalfa, bean, and salad mix sprouts, for fresh greens, too.

Sixteen buckets filled and ready to load into the uhaul.

Some have an assortment of things inside, as you see written on the sides, and

some have only one thing in it, like oatmeal, rice, flour, sugar, pinto beans, etc.

Lighting for our bug-out trip.

Back row, starting at left, is a Jeep LED lantern that uses AA batteries. The switch works like a dimmer switch, so you can turn it only as bright as you need it. It goes a long time on a set of battteries, and puts out nice light.

Next is a flashlight with a capaciter inside it, and you shake it to charge it.

To it's right is a solar flashlight. It uses rechargable AA batteries and I've laid it on the dashboard on car trips, in the clear cover of my bicycle handle-bar bag on cross-country bicycle tours, and hung it from a backpack. Great light.

Then we have a pack of candles I bought on mark-down at the grocery store. I doubt we use them but thought we should take them.

On the far right is an oil lantern. The nice thing about those is they put out heat along with light. In a small space like our uhaul truck, using the oil lamp on the table will probably put out enough heat to take a light chill off the air.

In the front is a clip-on lamp that operates on 110-volt AC house current. It currently has a 3-watt compact-flourescent bulb in it. We plan to take 2 or 3 of these lamps. The uhaul is wired with outlets, and we'll have a solar panel on the roof, which will charge two 12-volt deep-cycle batteries, and an inverter will change the power from 12-volt DC power to 110-volt AC power.

Next to the lamp are two LED lightbulbs that will go along too, to replace any of the other bulbs that cease to function!

I missed this one when I took the other picture. We're taking two of these solar garden lights.

They use AA batteries, and can be used simply to charge batteries, and after they're charged you can take the batteries out and use them for other things.

You're supposed to use rechargable batteries. I stuck a set of Costco batteries in to see how long the light would run on a set of regular batteries without charging. A month later it was starting to get dim.

That's a pretty efficient light!

In the middle you can see the little dot of the LED lightbulb. We glued small pieces of foil on either side to reflect the light and make it brighter.

They make great nightlights for children in off-grid homes. They can be set in the window each morning to charge, and they don't get hot or have a fire risk like candles and oil lamps, and the only cost is purchasing them. They come with a set of rechargeable AA's.

Three more lights I missed! The red one is a Nebo LED flashlight, which is nice because it's bright but it's small enough to hold it in your teeth and have both hands free!
In the middle is a wind-up flashlight. That black plastic strip down the middle is a handle that folds out and you wind it to charge the flashlight. It doesn't hold it's charge as long as our other rechargable lights, but all you have to do is pull the handle out and spin it some more, and you have good light again.
The light on the right is an LED headlamp light. It has a clip so you can clip it on a hat or other surface, and a stretchy headband so you can just slip it on your head and twist it to point where you want it (such as more up or down).

I guess we won't be "in the dark" on this trip! Ha ha ha ha ha!