Picking Up Speed

I planted peas today...

...And then, my daughters and I went into the woods to gather wood for what may be the last maple sap boil we do this year.

It's been a very bad sugaring season, and I feel a bit sad for the people who count on the sugaring season for their livelihood. Either they won't make it until the next season, or those who are interested in real maple syrup will be paying a premium for it.

We're looking at our maple syrup right now like it's gold. Word to the wise: if you like maple syrup, buy it now, and buy a lot, because it's going to be in short supply by Christmas.

We did some general cleaning, organizing and rearranging of the yard today, too, and when Deus Ex Machina got home from work, we opened the beehive. The bees did not survive. Deus Ex Machina thinks they froze to death. They definitely didn't starve, as there was a ton of honey. We haven't decided, exactly, what we want to do with it, yet.

A Sacred mead is a possibility - or we may just store it for eating. It has a very dark color and a very interesting aroma. I can't wait to taste it. Looking around my yard and at my neighbor's yards, it looks like they certainly had a very interesting and varied diet. The flavor of the honey will reflect that, I'm sure.

It was sad looking into the hive and seeing the devastation. So sad. We're going to try again with bees that were raised in this area instead of imported from an aviary down south. We're hopeful that they will stand a better chance of surviving winter here.

We might have two pregnant does. We'll know in a couple of weeks. EJ, our buck, is a happy bunny tonight ;).

We've been living this homestading lifestyle for a long time. It's what we do, and I share our adventures freely here on my blog. I talk about other stuff, too, but mostly it's planting this or growing that or raising this other thing.

I read a lot of homesteading blogs, but I read many others as well, and some of my favorite blogs are focused on the slow decline of our economy and our current way-of-life. Most of them are edgy and dark, but mostly the things they have been warning us about for the past six years are, indeed, happening.

James Kunstler is one of those - edgy, and usually right on the money. His usual commentary is full of raw wit and keen observations about the State of our Union and our world. His prose is often biting, no-holds-barred, and when he really gets going, nothing in the political or socio-economic realm is safe from his scathing remarks. I'm not usually offended, but had to take a step back the one time he talked about visiting Maine and had nothing complimentary to say about the people he encountered in my home State.

He usually posts once a week - on Monday - and I look forward to reading what he has to say each week. I was late this week reading his blog and didn't get to it until a day later. Boy, was I surprised!

Instead of his usual political bashing, his post was about his preps - what he's growing, how he's preparing his property for what's-to-come.

All I can say is that it was a little unsettling to read James Howard Kunstler's gardening post, and I'm thinking he must believe things are headed much faster down the slope than he's been predicting. Given his sudden interest in prepping, it seems, perhaps, that he believes the crash is accelerating.

I planted peas today, and tomorrow we're going to boil down all of the sap that we've collected. Deus Ex Machina says he's going to leave the taps in for another few days, but if the sap isn't flowing (and looking at the weather forcast for the next two weeks, it probably won't), he's going to pull them.

We cleaned up the yard, harvested quite a bit of honey, have two potentially pregnant does, and pick-up our first dozen broiler chicks on Friday.

The Johnny Seed order arrived in the mail the other day, and as soon as it warms up a bit more, we'll start planting seeds.

While we were in the woods, we saw a flock of wild turkeys. That was odd, too, as I've often seen their prints, but never the birds themselves. We also saw deer tracks.

I think it's going to be a wild summer, and while we won't step-up our preppig effort any more than usual, we'll certainly be looking to expand our knowledge base.

I'm thinking, I might learn to fish from the beach ... and maybe take advantage of the law in Maine that allows individuals to own a lobster trap for personal use (i.e. non-commercial).

Me, lobstering. Heh. Could be fun.


Edited to add: Lobstering in Maine is a heavily regulated fishery, but lawmakers have expanded the law to allow RESIDENTS to catch lobster non-commercially. It's not as simple as throw a trap, and like all hunting/fishing in Maine requires a license, but if one is looking for food security and one has the time and motivation, it would not be a bad hobby. It still requires a license (and one must take a test), but then a recreational lobster-er can own *UP TO* five traps. The license is $65, and there are requirements for minimum size and gender (can't take egg-bearing or v-notched lobsters, for instance), but it looks like it could be a year-round hobby (unlike hunting, which has a "season"). One lobster per week would more than cover the cost of the license.

Mops and Other Kitchen Tools

I bought into the hype. I had five kids living at home, two of whom were under five and two of whom were teenagers who didn't do much more than eat, sleep, and grumble when they had to do a chore. My only goal in life, at that time, was to be able to do those things around the house that needed to be done quickly and easily. So, I bought into the hype around the Swiffer, and I coveted one. I was pretty well convinced that it would make my floor cleaning chore so much easier and more efficient, and I'm one of those people who needs a clean floor - some people like neat counters, I like clean floors.

My wish was granted, and I was gifted a Swiffer Wet Jet. It takes six AA batteries, some cleaning solution (custom sized to fit the little dispenser ... and not refillable), and little pads that velcro to the bottom of the handle.

I was so excited. I had my Wet Jet, and I was cleaning my floors and life was good.

Until, one day, I realized that my, formerly white, floor was starting to look a little gray. No matter how much cleaning solution I sprayed and how many times I used the Swiffer, the gray was there. I knew it hadn't been there before, and I realized that the Wet Jet wasn't really cleaning the floor. Actually, it was just spreading the dirt around. Instead of getting the dirt off the floor (like a regular mop), it was just distributing it more evenly on the floor, and the dirty "water" (the solution) was drying to the floor and leaving a dull gray appearance.

I didn't like that.

But worse, I started to look, very closely, at the product and what it was costing me, and I realized that I was pretty well being taken to the cleaners ... although my floors were no longer very clean.

And to use the solution, I needed to have batteries. Don't forget the batteries to power the motor that squirted the solution onto the floor.

Between the pads, the solution, and the batteries, I was spending a whole lot of money for dirty floors.

I stopped buying the solution and putting batteries into the swiffer, and I started just getting the pre-wettened pads that were made for the other kind of swiffer (the one without the sprayer). It worked okay, although my floors weren't any cleaner, and I found that I needed to get down on my hands and knees and actually scrub the floor every couple of weeks, using the Siwiffer just for cleaning up the inevitable daily spills from a family of five with young children and a dog.

And then, one day, I thought, "Why?" Why was I spending $4 every two weeks to purchase pre-wettened swiffer pads when a wet rag would do just as well?

In fact, it actually works better than the Swiffer pads, and it's considerably less expensive. I was using up to five pads every time I cleaned the floor, and with the wet rags, I can actually rinse them out when they get too soiled instead of throwing them away.

As long as the handle stays attached to the head, I'll never have to replace my mop. My swiffer "pads" are an old cut-up terry cloth towel ... it used to be white ;). If I want to get fancy, I sprinkle some essential oil, like Tea Tree or Geranium, on the cloth each time I rinse it.

I keep telling myself that I'm going to sew up some better looking swiffer pads, and I have actually seen something like it for sale online, but mostly, I figure why bother. It works just fine, as is, and as with a lot of other things in our culture, there's really no need to get fancy, because fancy may look better, but it doesn't, necessarily, work better. Besides, there are a lot of other things I could (or should) be sewing that aren't so frivolous - and as long as the towel square does the job of cleaning my floors well enough, there's little incentive to spend the energy ... that could be spent doing something really cool ... like harvesting the blue oyster mushrooms and cooking "all-local" beef stroganoff to spoon over homemade egg noodles....

... or bottling the lavendar/chaga kombucha (which is delicious and tastes like a Margarita - so far, it's my favorite).

Getting It Hot ... Without Wood

I live in a heavily wooded area. In fact, we can gather enough standing dry wood in an hour's foray into the woods for an all-day (eight hours) sap boiling session. And this wood is "seasoned" - not green wood. In short, for the past several years we haven't cut any trees to boil maple sap, and we haven't used any of our firewood, either.

For me and others who live in my climate heating and cooking with wood is a very simple matter of knowing what wood will burn right now, and what needs some time to dry and season, and it takes very little energy (in the form of fuel) to get wood from its place of origin to my house - i.e. no gas-powered vehicle needs to even enter the equation. For us, it just a simple matter of walking into the woods and picking up sticks - and those sticks are sometimes not sticks, but rather sapling-sized deadwood that would simply rot. In my area, we could gather a whole winter's worth of wood, one wagon load at a time. It would take every spare moment we had all spring, summer and fall, but it could be done without dependence on fossil fuels.

I'm not so naive as to think that my particular circumstance is true of everyone everywhere. Wood is the best fuel source in my area, but not everyone lives half in the woods, like I do, and I'm well aware of that fact.

There are many options for heating and cooking that don't require much - or any - wood, and I touch on most of the known ones in my book.

For those people who have a few trees that could be coppiced (or would need annual pruning anyway), a rocket stove might be the best choice for cooking. Rocket stoves use very little fuel, but can reach extremely hot temperatures. Coupled with a cob oven, which also uses little wood, one would be able to cook just about anything with just a few twigs. If I lived in a suburb more south of where I live, and I didn't have very many trees, I wouldn't want to cut down all of my trees to cook my food, and I'd certainly be looking into building a rocket stove and/or a cob oven.

Rocket stoves aren't just tiny cookers, and in fact, aren't just for cooking. The technology was being developed in the 1970s, but today's volatile fuel prices have seen a resurgence in the interest in low-energy heating options, and I'm seeing a lot of articles and stories about people designing and building rocket mass heaters, which are an incredibly ingenious marrying of the rocket stove and the age-old European masonry heater, which I think are just beautiful. If I could retrofit my house for a masonry heater, it would have been done already.

I like the super fancy, aesthically pleasing masonry heaters, but they don't have to be fancy to work well. When I was doing my own research on different heating options, I found a story about how those living in extremely cold environments where there were very few trees, like north central Asia, and basically, their heating solution amounted to building a fire on a masonry shelf. The idea was, at its core, the same idea that has created the rocket mass heaters, and that was to heat up a thermal mass. In this case, the fire was built on a stone shelf. When the fire had burned down to coals, the ash and coals were scraped off the shelf (and the coals were probably buried in the ash to save for lighting the next day's fire), and the people slept on the warm shelf.

For those of us in our suburban homes, where we don't have thermal mass heaters or wood to burn, other options will need to be explored, most of which I've previously discussed, as well.

For those with no wood, solar ovens are very popular - and one doesn't have to purchase a commercial model (spending hundreds of dollars). Dan and Beth Halacy's book Cooking with the Sun gives some great instructions on DIY solar cookers - and not just ovens, but also a solar hot plate.

I've researched other options for cooking and heating that don't even require wood. My favorite is a methane digester, which uses organic waste (could be yard waste, kitchen scraps, chicken manure, humanure) to create an anaerobic reaction and produce methane, which can be burned and used to cook or heat a space.

For cooking or heating very small, very well insulated spaces (like with a kotatsu), something as small as a sterno can might be enough.

There's one other heating/cooking option that I've, since the publication of my book, discovered. It uses the sun and a very simple, fairly inexpensive fresnel lens (it's pronounced /frā-něl'/ - long a, s is silent).

The most popular, current, application for the fresnel lens is a steam generator, but the basic concept is to heat water - which means, it could be used to cook, also.

Check out this video. There are several other videos, too. I recommend watching as many of them as one can.

Michael Douglas, who is a teacher at the Maine Primitive Skills School, recommends perfecting as many methods of making fire as are available to us, and I agree. In fact, I would apply that logic to other things, as well. It's wise to know several ways to preserve a certain food item, and it's valuable to know many ways of cooking a thing - in case one of those methods fails or is unavailable.

We use wood for all of our heat and for much of our cooking during the winter, because wood is what we have. We also use matches to light fires, because they're available, but we also know a lot of other ways of making fires ... and we know a lot of other ways to cook food and heat our home.

If I lived in a less wooded environment, I wouldn't be relying on wood for heating or cooking, and I'd be exploring some of the other options I've mentioned in my book or here on my blog. If I lived in a warmer climate, even if I had access to as much wood as I have here, I'd be looking at a methane digester, and if I lived in a very hot climate, without wood, I'd be getting myself a fresnel lens ... taking extreme care where I pointed it.

It's Not Just About a Pretty Smile

Health care has been an off and on topic of conversation on my blog for a long time. I was pretty clear about my opinion of the health care bill that passed several years ago, and nothing, so far, has changed my opinion.

In fact, it seems like the things that are heppening reinforced my statements about it being a mistake - that it would only line the pockets of the insurance companies, and that there would be no improvement in overall health care, especially for the demographic the bill was designed to assist - i.e. the 10% who were uninsured and (supposedly) had no access to health care.

In speaking of health care, a recent headline caught my eye. It said Dental Visits to ERs are on the Rise. The gist of the article is that, as the economy continues to worsen, States are being forced to cut expenses, and one of the first things that are being cut are dental benefits for those receiving State-funded medical assistance.

The irony in this is that good preventative care is far less expensive than fixing a problem once it's become an emergency. This is true of just about everything from the leaky roof to our bodies. In fact, there is significant research available to suggest a strong link between poor oral hygiene and cardiovascular disease. In short, people who practice good oral hygiene and have access to preventative dental care, may be at a lower risk of heart disease. It's a lot cheaper to give folks a toothbrush and let them get a couple of cleanings per year than it is to do open heart surgery.

In Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs, I discuss need for good dental care, but we should be doing it now, and not when we have an abscessed tooth.

Benjamin Franklin is attributed with saying: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, which is to say, that keeping our mouths clean (DAILY flossing, brushing, and rinsing with vinegar or saltwater) can really make a huge difference in our overall health.

And, frankly, in a world turned upside-down, I can't imagine anything worse than having a toothache and no access to antibiotics ... or nitrous oxide when that tooth has to be pulled.

Making "soft drinks" ... at home ... without High Fructose Corn Syrup

I have some very strange things brewing in my kitchen.

Ever since reading Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, I've had this (almost) overwhelming urge to ferment things. Luckily, Deus Ex Machina is also into fermenting, and so when I said I wanted to make Kombucha, he was very supportive - and even bought me a starter kit from Urban Farm Fermentory.

I've made several batches with varying degrees of success - with regard to taste. The goal is to find a blend that my daughters will really like, and that they'll find an adequate substitute for store-bought beverages.

I haven't found *the* one, yet, and I think there are a combinations of things that will make the beverage appealing to them. They like sodas, most of which I will not allow them to drink, and I think it's a combination of the bubbly water and the sweetness.

Kombucha is slightly effervescent and slightly sweet, but until today's batch, my kombucha hasn't been overwhelmingly either.

I had the most wonderful surprise this morning while I was bottling my latest batch of kombucha.

It was FIZZY - like soda.

I'm having a blast experimenting with different "tea" flavors. This latest batch is a peppermint blend, and that seems to be one of the family favorites - so far.

My next batch is a chaga/lavender blend. It should be interesting. I hope it fizzes, too ;).

100 Items - Making Power

I have an on-again/off-again series of posts I've been doing over at my other blog that's based on the list of 100 Items to Disappear First.

In my latest post, I explore the whole myth that we "need" electricity.

On a different/related note, my friend sent me a link to this Independent Lens project called "World Without Oil." The synopsis of the project states In May 2007, over 1,800 people combined imagination with insight to create World Without Oil (WWO), a realistic simulation of the first 32 weeks of a global oil shortage chronicled in 1,500 personal blog posts, videos, images and voicemails.

It is believed that the US peaked in oil production in the 1970s and that the world peaked in oil production in 2005, or so. Whether or not we believe that Peak Oil is a reality, it is true that the cost of oil per barrel has been increasing, and it seems that many of the top oil-producing countries have decreased the amount of oil they are extracting. Moreover many of these countries are employing extraction techniques, like pumping wells full of sea water, that suggest their wells aren't as prolific as they once were.

There's always the possibility that the information we're receiving is trumped up or flat-out lies. And it could go either way - the lie. The oil-producing countries may be lying about how much oil they really have, or those who are feeding us stories about those countries' peaks may be lying to us about the coming shortages.

But whether we're being manipulated or lied to really doesn't matter. What matters is what are we going to do about it?

I can't change the lies.

But I can change my life so that their lies don't hurt me or my family, and the first step is to change my attitude from one of fearing the loss of my privileged life to one empowering myself to live comfortably with or without all of these things we, Westerners, have been convinced we need.

In short, we can live so that we don't just survive, but instead thrive.

Happy Dance!

It looks like I might actually be getting the outdoor kitchen I've been nagging asking Deus Ex Machina to build for eternity a few years. Boiling sap this year, I guess, finally convinced him of how great it would be to have a permanent set-up outside for cooking. As much as we love our fire pit with the tri-pod, it's just not as useful for the sorts of cooking we need/want to do outside.

In addition to boiling sap, we're hoping to put the outdoor kitchen to use for canning during the summer. It will save on eletricity, which is, actually, one of the key reasons I want an outdoor kitchen at all.

Lowering our electric bill has been an ongoing pet project of mine, and I sing the Limbo song every month when we get our electric bill. On our last bill, our daily usage (10 kwh/day) was about the same as the previous month's usage , but we'd used less overall (281 kwh/month). My goal is to get it down to 6 kwh/day. The less we use, the more affordable an off-grid system will be for us, and, ultimately, my goal is to be off-grid ... in the suburbs ;).