What this is
The Clever Korner is a graded index of homestead, garden, water, food and off-grid tricks. Each one gets the same treatment: what it actually is, the numbers, why it is worth knowing, how you would automate it if you wanted to, and — the part that is usually missing — the catch.
It is free. All of it, permanently, with no account, no paywall and no affiliate links anywhere on the site.
Where it came from
It started as the last appendix of Autofarmation, a 54-chapter guide to automating a small farm with off-the-shelf parts — autosteer on a tractor that never had it, water from a creek with no electricity, soil probes, a root cellar that breathes, a cure chamber, a generator that starts itself, and a farm brain that runs the whole thing on your own network with nothing going to a cloud.
The appendix kept growing because people keep inventing clever things, so it moved out and got its own house. New entries land here first and get folded back into the guide as it is revised.
Why the grades
Because the useful question is almost never “does this work?” It is “does this work here, at my scale, with the time I actually have?” A hydraulic ram pump is magnificent and useless without falling water. A pot-in-pot cooler is real refrigeration in dry air and nearly nothing in humid air. Sorting those out is the whole job.
The grading method is written down, so you can disagree with it specifically rather than generally.
The family
- The Clever Korner — this site. The graded index. Free.
- Autofarmation — the full guide to automating a small farm. One purchase, no subscription.
- The Automated Prepper — the same engineering aimed at resilience: watch, security, power, comms and stores. In the works.
- Moringa Co-op — a tree that produces food, medicine and fuel, and that most people have never heard of.
A note on accuracy
Everything here is written to be checked. Where a claim rests on research, the entry links the source. Where a number is a planning estimate rather than a measurement, it says so. Where something is genuinely uncertain, it gets a ◇ and the uncertainty gets named instead of smoothed over.
If something on this site is wrong, it should be fixed rather than defended. That is the standard the whole thing is built to.