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what we had done wrong. Several weeks later our childrens friends parents, whoare professional landscape artists told us that in fact, if we dug under the soil wherethe potato plants had been wed find our long lost harvest! Yes, apparently thepotatoes dont grow on the potato plant stems. They grow underground and are safefrom harm even after the plant above ground dies. What luck! The potatoes aredelicious and we may have enough to last us a few months into the winter.The success of our very first vegetable garden, the many pleasurable hours pluckingout weeds, fussing with the bugs, using straw bale remains as a perfect groundcover, and picking the fresh vegetables for our dinner has been enlightening.Sharing our tomatoes with friends and family has proven a great gift during theirtime of plenty. The onions have been a wonderful sweet addition to our summerpastas. The kids have also enjoyed the magic of seeing those seeds transform intoplants and then food that is more delicious than anything weve ever had from thesuper market. We all learned a great deal about the food we eat and how precious itis. There is something wonderful about sharing the fresh vegetables from yourgarden with family an d friends on a warm summer afternoon.Solar PanelsAs I make the last few edits on this revision of the book the folks from PhantomElectron, Ben and Chris, are installing the photo voltaic solar panels on the roofabove me. Next week the wind turbine will be erected on the sixty foot tower.Weve started to log the amount of electricity we generate. Monitoring the electricalmeter has illuminated how much electricity certain activities use. When we r un theclothes dryer for instance the disc in the meter spins so fast it is almost a blur. Justthe other afternoon, however, I got to see the meter run backwards as our newSiemens photo voltaic array composed of ten modules, in the middle of the day wasable to generate enough electricity for our needs and send the excess into theelectrical grid thus moving the meter backwards. It was a thrilling experience. I felt abit like David fighting the powers of Goliath.Wind TurbineThe Bergey XL wind turbine was installed in January 2002. The monitoring thus farindicates that we get lots of power generated from this device especially duringthose blustery winter days. In our location, on the top of Hockley Valley, we getbetween 2 and 7 kilowatts per day typically. Ben and Leonard of Phantom Electron277