Not sure whether the expanded shale is necessary everywhere. If I'm not mistaken the Earthkind program was carried out near TAMU and there are great swathes of that area plagued with heavy black clay. My guess is that expanded shale was used to loosen it up a bit. Organic mulch would disappear too quickly.
The sandy soil where I'm planning this expansion will certainly allow plants to root quickly, but it retains moisture very badly. It's near a seasonal stream, but that mostly means that there's more water available when it rains - not that there is water running by when the weather has been dry for two weeks.
We're very lucky here for many reasons. Most of the time we could get by without electricity. While our 'basement' is a few feet below ground on the north side of the house, on the south sice that same level is five ft or more above grade. We could have (and have had) water running in one side and out the other, but not much in the way of build-up. Electricity is also pretty reliable here. A few winters ago Arizona had a storm with 90 MPH winds ravaging the state. We lost power for an hour or two. Then there was a problem with our meter that kept half our house dark for four days while we tried to convince the power company that they really had not fixed our problem... Fortunately, the furnace & forced air fan ran on the phase that was working. Fortunate, too, that we still have a conventional wireline phone.
All our other utilities are city, too: gas, water, sewer. But we have solar panels and we sometimes fantasize about a backup generator and/or power storage.
As to remodeling to accommodate aging people, we put in an elevator a year back - along with a few more rooms to accommodate visitors in the near term and help in the longer term - so we could stay here for a number of years.
I'd like to learn more about permaculture. I played with a few food crops in the garden this year including blue corn, swiss chard, cabbage, and artichokes. I got a lot further this year with the project than I did last year when all the corn died of drought before making ears. But my successes have done more than my failures to convince me that there is no way raising food on this property could completely support a person for a year - not without employing it as bait and harvesting excess wildlife that visits the garden. The javelina enjoyed all the potatoes and chard. Corn sustained another generation of some moth/worm, but would have been a miserly crop even without the losses. Squirrels ate the green tops of my saffron crocus and went so far as to start digging up the bulbs along with the bulbs of hyacinth. The red amaranth draws dozens of songbirds but would be too much labor to extract for human consumption without a special power tool. Only cabbages, artichokes, and mammoth sunflowers have gone unmolested. And the squash, of course, which I lost interest in too soon. Still, all these things need supplemental water. The only thing of commercial value that I'm convinced could be grown here sustainably is lavender, lavandula grosso.
