Your February Homestead Checklist For An Off-Grid Home

That half-used seed packet from two summers ago might still be good. Or it might be duds.

Seeds are alive, just sleeping. Each year in the packet, a few more of them lose the strength to wake up.

Illinois Extension has an easy test. Put 10 seeds on a damp paper towel, slide it into a plastic bag and keep it somewhere warm. Then count how many wake up.

If 7 to 9 come up, the seeds are fine, so just sow them a bit thicker. If fewer than 5 or 6 sprout, buy new ones.

When you choose varieties, look at the label. "Open-pollinated" seeds grow plants just like their parents, so you can save their seeds at harvest time and sow them again next spring.

Seeds marked "F1 hybrid" are different. Their own seeds won't grow into the same plant, a bit like a lego set that won't rebuild into the same model twice. Our guide to the off-grid garden explains how much to grow.

Ordering seed potatoes too? The RHS, Britain's big gardening charity, says to wake them up from late January in milder places, or by early March in colder ones. Stand them in egg boxes with the eyes on top, somewhere bright and frost-free. Gardeners call this "chitting".

After four to six weeks each one has short shoots about 5 cm long, and the first early potatoes go in the ground around late March.

So what do you plant in February? Mostly the slow growers, and mostly indoors. Summer is too short for them to grow from seed in the garden, so they need a head start on a warm windowsill.

Cornell University says to sow tomatoes indoors 6 to 8 weeks before you plant them out. They go outside one to two weeks after your last frost. Peppers are slower, so give them 8 to 10 weeks.

The University of Maryland gives onions and eggplant the same long 8 to 10 weeks, so their trays go in early too.

The cabbage family is quicker. Illinois Extension says cabbage and broccoli need 4 to 6 weeks indoors, and the young transplants are tough enough to go out without protection 4 to 6 weeks before the last frost. For the writer's own garden near St. Louis, that meant sowing by February 19.

Salad greens like cool weather. Lettuce shrugs off a light frost, though not a hard freeze, and it grows well in containers, so a pot of greens by the back door works fine. Maryland says lettuce transplants just 3 to 4 weeks old give an earlier harvest.

Spinach is tougher still. It can take heavy frosts, and the seed goes into the ground in early spring, once the soil warms to about 7 °C (45 °F).

Seedlings need lots of light. The University of Vermont says 14 to 16 hours a day, with the lamp no more than 15 cm above the plants. Too far away, and the growth turns tall and floppy, reaching for the glow.

Pruners can carry plant diseases from one plant to the next, like a sneeze on a shared spoon. So clean them now, before the busy season.

Penn State says to wash them with soap first, then wipe them with 70% alcohol and don't rinse it off. Colorado State says weaker alcohol, around 50%, doesn't work well.

Then sharpen. File along the angle the blade already has, take off the rough edge on the back, and finish with a drop of oil.

Here's a February treat. Maple sap starts to run when nights drop below freezing and days climb above it.

Sap is only about 2% sugar, so it takes about 40 litres of sap to boil down to one litre of syrup. That's a lot of firewood for one bottle, which is why real maple syrup costs what it does.

The days are stretching, but February sun still counts for little. Our guide to average sun hours shows why winter months drag the yearly number down.

So keep the generator ready for a few more weeks of grey weather, and keep lead-acid batteries topped up instead of half full.

On the sunny days, use the extra. Charge tools, run the washing machine and fill the water tank while the panels are working, instead of saving those jobs for a grey day.

Those seedling lamps burn 14 to 16 hours a day, every day, for weeks. On an off-grid system that adds up.

Check the watts on the lamp's label and add it to your daily use. A lamp of 30 watts running 15 hours a day uses 450 watt-hours, about as much as a laptop charged several times over.

After snow, look at the edge of the roof. A thick ridge of ice with long icicles hanging down is called an ice dam.

It means heat is leaking from the house into the attic. That warmth melts the snow on the roof from below, the water runs down, and it freezes again at the cold edge. Behind the ice, water can leak under the roof.

Energy experts in Minnesota say sealing the air leaks and insulating the attic is the best fix. A US government building guide adds that a well-vented attic keeps the roof cold, so the snow stays frozen. Our guide to insulation shows where heat escapes.

Many off-grid homes clean their water with a UV light. It's a lamp inside a glass tube that zaps germs as the water flows past, like a tiny tanning bed for bacteria.

The lamp's germ-killing light gets weaker over time, even while the lamp still glows. Viqua, a big UV maker, says to replace it after about 9,000 hours, which is about a year of running nonstop.

When you change it, clean the glass tube around the lamp too. Dirt on the glass blocks the light. Our guide to water filtration explains how UV fits with the other filters.

Outside, the compost heap is half asleep. Inside, worms can keep turning scraps into soil all winter.

The EPA says compost worms are happiest between 15 and 25 °C, which is about room temperature. A bin in a cellar, a shed that doesn't freeze or under the sink works fine.

They can survive from just above freezing up to about 35 °C, as long as they have at least 10 cm of damp bedding, like shredded paper, to burrow into. Our guide to home composting explains how a worm bin works.