Prepping gets Personal

I've been depressed and unmotivated lately.  It has caused me to examine my lifestyle and motivations again, and to do some tweaking.  Things that work for me, that add something to our quality of life, or at least don't take much away from it, made the cut.  Some things that I was doing purely out of guilt or fear, or based on someone else's priorities, were set aside for now.  Life is too short to live by someone else's priorities.  Am I the only one who does that?  I tend to get on a certain intellectual and lifestyle track that I find appealing, read a certain type of blogs telling me how to live, and proceed to shove my square life into that round hole.  For the past couple of years, it's been the homesteading/DIY/prepper/declinist/peak oil community.

But my situation is unique, as is everyone else's.  I've been mostly trying to adapt to a future of food and energy shortages, climate change, economic collapse, and other universal, generic, and somewhat abstract concerns, the kind that are commonly discussed in the "blogosphere".  I've largely ignored the factors that are most likely to affect me and my family in the short to medium term, and the things that give us the most bang for our buck. 


For example, getting my husband's green card this year is a more important investment for us than, say, solar panels or a wood cook stove.  After that is done (because I can't move before it's done), deciding whether or not to move to Mexico by myself with my son should be my highest priority.  My inertia in regard to that decision has been bothering me for a long time, and I need to give it more attention.  While I don't make decisions based on pros-and-cons lists, I think they can help to organize my thoughts.  So I made some lists: pros of staying here, pros of moving to Mexico, concerns about staying here, and concerns about moving to Mexico. 

I found that the things on my list "concerns: moving to Mexico" were things I've already given a lot of thought to, like: being alone, far from family and friends; separating my son from his father; having to start from zero in finding a place to live; homeschooling without access to good libraries; depending on my husband to send money; and having to transport or replace all our stuff.  But the things on the "concerns: staying here" list are things I have been reluctant to think about, such as how we're going to get by on one income when my unemployment runs out; what we're going to do if the car dies before we can afford to replace it; my son not having kids his age to play with here; the probability of eventually needing medical care and not being able to afford it; and the possibility of losing the house we live in and becoming homeless (for example, if something happened to my mother, who owns it).  The list of pros for staying here is quite small so far - the principal one being that our homestead is fairly well established.  The list of pros for moving to Mexico include the fact that it is a more resilient society and much better adapted to living in poverty; a more pleasant climate (I despise our humid summers); being able to escape from my unhappy marriage; and my husband being free to take a traveling job (installing roofing, with some relatives) where he would require neither a car nor a home.  

Making decisions based on incomplete information and educated guesses about the future is hard.  It sure would be nice if there was someone writing a blog about my specific concerns, whose advice would be really helpful.  Of course, I'm on my own on this one. 

Canning Shad

Shad is my favorite fish, and my favorite springtime food.  An ocean fish that spawns in rivers, like salmon, it is a seasonal delicacy.  Its main drawback is that it is a very bony fish, so bony that it is difficult to debone even a small piece to feed to a small child.  The other day I had an inspiration: why not try canning it?  Of course, the internet provided a recipe.  It involved simply brining pieces of fish for one hour in a solution of one cup salt to one gallon water, then raw packing with the skin-side towards the glass, and pressure canning pints or half-pints (with one inch headspace) for one hour and 40 minutes. 

I had one jar fail to seal, so we had shad cakes for breakfast the next day.  My son loved the "fish burgers".  I expected it to be like canned salmon, with bones that are not dangerous but still present.  We could not find a single bone in the whole pint, and I assure you there were a lot of them in there!  They completely dissolved.  Of course I used the liquid from the jar so no nutrients were lost.  I also cooked the fins and backbones and fed those to my chickens, who left no trace behind!  (If I didn't have chickens, I could have buried them under a vegetable plant.)  So other than the scales and the head, which were cut off before I bought them, nothing of those fish went in the garbage.  And, we benefited from all the calcium in their bones.  Both high-quality protein and calcium sources are a weakness in my long-term food storage, so I will be canning another batch this week.  This time I won't bother to remove the backbone.

I purchased 3 fish and ended up with 8 and a half pints.  It cost me $13.43 at the locally-owned seafood store across the street from my house (for the fish, not counting 15 cents or so for salt, and not counting the electricity to run the pressure canner for nearly 2 hours).  If shad is a local food in your area, I encourage you to try canning some!

Why I'm Not a Survivalist (A Rant)

I recently joined a "prepper" group here in Richmond.  I was looking to broaden my social network and went browsing on Meetup, and this was the most active of several groups I joined.  Since my son was born, my main social interactions have been with through a local "crunchy mama" group, but it's not as good a fit as it used to be.  The prepper group has some very good classes, and they seem to be nice enough people.  Urban homesteading, which is my defining interest and activity these days, overlaps in many ways with survivalist "prepping".  Does this make me a survivalist?  I have a lot in common with many survivalists, but I do not consider myself one.  In fact, I often find hard-core survivalists really irritating.  For example, I keep hearing how great this guy is that writes the "Surviving in Argentina" blog.  Supposedly his experience surviving the economic collapse in Argentina makes him an authority.  But all he seems to write about is guns, self-defense, bugging out, and similar topics.  Although he lives in Argentina and has a Spanish name, his writings betray no interest in, participation in, understanding of, or respect for, the culture of that country.  He could just as easily be writing in Texas or Montana, and I'm sure that's why he's so popular. Admittedly, I haven't read very much of what the guy writes, because I get overwhelmed with disgust when I try.  

I have not experienced an economic collapse.  But, I have lived through personal crisis and extreme poverty in Mexico City, and if I were to write about that, it would look very different.  I would tell you about how I adapted to a very difficult situation, and how different it was in reality from what I expected, and how much courage I discovered in myself, and how the experience changed me.  I would tell you about the interesting people I got to know and the subculture my street-musician boyfriend introduced me to.  I would tell you about having only two changes of clothes, and going as long as 10 days without a shower.  I would tell you about taking care of my boyfriend, who was diagnosed with AIDS and tuberculosis after we had been together for a year, and who I alone supported.  I would tell you about the first time I got on a city bus to sell chocolate bars, because I could make as much in a few hours doing that as working an office job all day, and I couldn't leave my boyfriend alone all day when he was sick, and about how long I sat at the bus stop trying to get up the courage to do it.  I would tell you that in Mexico City, it's hard to starve to death, because there's always someone who will lend you a meal if you know how to ask.  I would tell you how we maintained friendships in a city of 30 million without knowing anyone's address, phone number, or email.  I would tell you about the homeless shelters and rat holes we slept in.  I would tell you about the wonderful food we ate, and the culinary revelation that is Mexico.  I would tell you about how I lost my fear, and even the police couldn't intimidate me.  I would tell you how I managed to live in the city that even most Mexicans are afraid to visit, and walk down its streets in the middle of the night alone, without being afraid.  I would tell you what things "preppers" worry about that are silly, and what I think they should worry more about.  I would tell you why it broke my heart to leave Mexico, and why I still want to go back. 

I do want to hear stories of economic collapse in other countries, just not the kind of stories this guy is writing.

Planning for Food Preservation, Part 2

In this second part, I'm using the term "food preservation" rather loosely.  These are the foods you don't have to do any work to preserve, but that form an important part of the winter and spring pantry.  While your canned foods tend to be heavy in condiments and sauces (important to sustain your spirit), these are the calorie crops that will really sustain your body.

First, the root vegetables.  Potatoes are critical, and we're planting more this year, but still not as many as we should.  That's because we had a total crop failure of potatoes last year, and we're being cautious about how much space we give them, until we find a reliable system of growing them.  Potatoes are supposed to be one of the easiest things you can grow, so getting a negative harvest (fewer than what you planted) is very frustrating.  Sweet potatoes also did very poorly for us last year, and we are trying them again this year, but I ordered some heirloom varieties, including one from right here in Virginia that is supposed to do well in clay soil (ordered from Sand Hill Preservation Center).  Sweet potatoes store really well at room temperature in my pantry (we keep our house around 62 degrees in winter).  In fact, I don't think I've ever had one go bad, though they will start sprouting in April.  I've got a box of them I need to finish off now, in fact.  

In the fall garden, turnips and winter radishes grow quite well for us, and, at least in winters like this one, keep right in the garden until spring.  I will be planting a lot more turnips and winter radishes this year, because we ran out of the latter and could have eaten more of the former.  These crops take so little work to grow, and whatever we don't eat can just be tilled in to add organic matter to the soil, so there is no reason not to grow plenty.  I cut up the turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and whatever else I've got and toss them with oil and/or butter and salt, and roast, for our basic winter side dish.

Collards are reliable and also overwintered well this year.  I will add kale, cress, and spinach next year to have more variety of greens.  Now, if I could just get someone in the house besides me to eat them....

I am growing some keeping tomatoes this year.  Keeping tomatoes are a type of tough-skinned tomato that keeps well in storage.  It's not a popular thing these days, because greenhouse tomatoes have replaced them.  But, I think it's important to preserve these varieties for our descendants, who won't have plastic greenhouses. 

Winter squashes and pie pumpkins are an important part of most local diets in winter.  I always end up buying some kind of winter squash seeds, because the descriptions are so wonderfully romantic.  The incredible variety of squashes, their beauty, their size, and their keeping qualities make them very appealing.  If I have a few big pumpkins in my pantry, I feel secure.  The problem is, I don't like eating them.  Other than in pie, I much prefer sweet potatoes to winter squashes.  And, I always end up with some winter squashes that I either can't resist buying at the market, or that someone gives me, so I have no need to grow them.  So, I'll be growing seed pumpkins instead.  Pumpkin seeds are the most expensive ingredient in a seeded granola recipe I like to make, and they are in ingredient in Mexican sauces.  I don't know how to shell the seeds from ordinary pumpkins, so I'm growing a naked-seed type called Lady Godiva.  This marvel is quite hard to find - of all my seed catalogs, only Sand Hill offered it this year.  The flesh of these pumpkins is good food for livestock, like goats.

Oilseed crops are an important part of our diets, which most of us don't grow.  In addition to the seed pumpkins, I'll be planting peanuts, sesame, sunflower seeds, and rapeseed this year, all of which, besides sunflowers, are new crops for us.  I want to buy a hand-cranked oil extractor and start making fresh vegetable oil.  Fats for cooking are something I wouldn't want to be without, and I don't have a way to produce significant amounts of animal fats on my homestead.  

Grains are also important.  We will be growing field corn, more seriously this year than we have in the past.  Corn is not only the easiest grain to process at home, but is central to my husband's food culture and therefore to his happiness.  This is the crop I have the hardest time narrowing down to only two varieties, and this year I've chosen a gourdseed corn, which I will plant early, and a flour corn, which I will plant late, both of which are supposed to be good for tortillas.  I'm growing sorghum Sudan as a cover crop this year, but next year I want to start experimenting with grain sorghums, which can also be used to make tortillas, are excellent chicken feed, and require less fertility than corn.  We will be experimenting with amaranth this year.  We will grow millet for the chickens.  I am planning to plant a little buckwheat as a cover crop, and since we don't like it, the chickens will probably get that too.  Feeding chickens is something I'm taking very seriously this year, because I'm tired of buying GMO grains for them.  The good thing about pressing oil at home is that the oilcake that is left over afterwards, which is high in protein, is a good ingredient for homemade chicken feed. 

Dried beans are also an important staple for us.  Growing dried beans is one of the least profitable uses of one's time and land that I can think of, considering what they cost, but it's something we want to know how to grow.  My husband loves fresh blackeyed peas, so those can't be skipped.  We're also going to experiment with planting the ubiquitous Central American bean, the red silk bean.  No one grows it in the USA that I know of, and we don't know how it will do, but we're going to try it.  There simply isn't any other dried bean we like as well for a simple bean soup and for refried beans.  I don't often have good things to say about Central American cuisine, but they do have the best beans.

Planning for Food Preservation, Part 1

I am taking stock of my pantry and how we fared over the winter. This was the first year that home-preserved foods made up a significant part of our diet.  There were things I wished I had (or had more of) and things it's been a chore to eat, so I will plan my garden and shopping this year around these changes.

I really love the pickle relish, which was something I only made to get rid of a surplus of different-shaped cucumbers.  My husband wants some dill pickles, and wasn't crazy about the bread and butter pickles.  I need to plant more cucumbers because I didn't have enough that were the right size at the same time for different pickle recipes - the mental note I made last year was to plant 10 (I had 4 last year).  

I love watermelon rind pickles, but two batches was probably more than enough, because they really aren't something I serve with a meal, they're almost a candy.  The pickled beets are pretty good, but I'll never again can plain beets - they bleed out all their color and flavor.    

The last time we raised chickens for meat, in 2010, I canned a bunch of chicken pieces (skin-on, bone-in), and those have been surprisingly good, considering they look like they belong in a mad scientist's lab.  I'll do that again this year.  

Red salsa (the kind you eat with chips) is good, but I don't need much of it.  No one was crazy about my ketchup, but I might try a different recipe.  I really wished I had more spaghetti sauce and/or whole or crushed tomatoes.  My assessment last year was that 50 tomato plants would give me enough for our annual consumption, if I stay on top of harvesting and preserving.  When my husband asked me what I want for my birthday next month, I told him I want him to build me a solar dehydrator.  Tomatoes are going to be the #1 thing I dehydrate, for grinding into powder, which will be used to make tomato paste.  The bulk of the tomatoes we grow are paste varieties, or small-fruited varieties that can and dry well, and are also more productive and less fussy than large tomatoes.  

I am also planting some squash varieties for drying, as discussed by Carol Deppe in The Resilient Gardener.  Canned squash is another never-again for me, as is frozen squash; but squash pickles are good.

The tomatillos and green salsa I canned haven't been as useful as I'd hoped.  I actually enjoyed the frozen versions I made better, so some tweaking is needed there.  

With jams and jellies, I've had more failures than successes by far, and very frustrating failures.  My strawberry jam, which is too ugly to share, tastes and smells good at least, so I'll plan to try that again.  That means a pick-your-own field trip, because my strawberry patch is small enough that the berries never make it indoors.  I want to make mulberry jelly this year with our own mulberries and some foraged ones (our one tree would probably provide enough if 95% of them weren't too high up to pick.)  My gingered peach preserves were delicious, if a little stiff, and I might make two batches of those this year (and be more careful not to overcook them).  The canned peach halves are so pretty I can't bring myself to eat them, but they were great for Christmas gifts.  So, I might need two boxes of peaches this year.  The early peaches I bought were much sweeter than the late ones, which is the opposite of what at least one of my canning books suggests.

A single $20 box of sweet corn grown down the street (I grow field corn so I don't grow sweet corn) gave us more than we could eat this year, though we would have eaten it if times were leaner.  I felt like the pressure canner gave it a funny, metallic smell.  I don't know if it's my old canner, or if this is a characteristic of pressure-canned foods (I've noticed it in other mild-flavored foods I've pressure-canned too).  I might try dehydrating some sweet corn this year.

I'll cover root cellared and overwintering vegetables, and grains, beans, and seeds, in Part 2.

Neighborhood Foraging

My goal this year of foraging one wild plant food a month has met with total failure.  For one, I started in the wrong season.  For two, I don't know of any good places to go foraging, especially with a 3-year-old in tow.  For three, to be perfectly honest, I lack any survivalist fantasies that feature fleeing with my child on foot into the wilderness.  Maybe it's my urban surroundings, but it's hard to imagine that scenario.  So, for now, I've decided to focus on neighborhood foraging, and other nearby, known sites (I'm thinking of the house we lost to foreclosure, which is still bank-owned, and has a bunch of mulberry trees in the backyard).  I took my son on a walk with the objective of harvesting some bamboo shoots from a site about half a mile away.  When we got there, I realized that we'd have to go down a steep bank and cross a small stream to get to it, and I couldn't see any shoots, so I didn't.  I don't know if I was too early or too late for shoots.  But I found something better than bamboo: access to a small, fast-running stream half a mile from our house, which looks much more promising as an emergency water source than the drainage pond that is our other option (though it looks like it might dry up in the summer).

I'm keeping my ears open for local wild-food walks.  Meanwhile, I've been making mental notes of all the houses that have prickly-pear cactus planted by their mailbox (it's a thing here), figuring some of them will be vacant in the future.  There aren't a lot of other edibles nearby, but there are other useful plants.  According to my Richter's catalog, forsythia has fruits that contain antibiotic and fungicide, who knew?  And a friend pointed out that the shrubs growing all around the drainage pond I mentioned are bayberry trees.  I plan to harvest their berries this fall and make candles.  I also want to try processing some acorns for food this year, because oak trees are pretty much everywhere.  One "edible" that I can't bring myself to eat is those nasty lawn onions that are so plentiful in the winter.  I hate the smell of those things.  I do plan to transplant some dandelions and plantains from the lawn to a more protected place this year, if not for us to eat, at least for the chickens.  Our hens really like dandelions, more than garden greens or comfrey. 

I also want to inventory the plants that are growing in the power line easement (all around our garden), which they cut with a tractor a couple of times a year.  If there isn't anything poisonous, I might be able to rake up some free hay for the goats I still hope to get.  Otherwise, I can rake some up to mulch my potatoes.  I might overseed the area with some perennial alfalfa or something to improve the quality of the hay.  As long as no one else is making productive use of that land, I might as well do so.  

Foraging isn't just food, it can be any resource that's available, that can be responsibly harvested or would otherwise go to waste.

Toothpaste

I've been buying natural toothpaste for a while now.  The problem is, a $5 tube of toothpaste lasts about two weeks in my house because my husband is a big waster of products (he loads up his toothbrush like they do in the toothpaste commercials, while I put just a smidgen on mine).  So, I've started making my own.  I didn't like the recipes I found because they tasted so salty they made me gag, so I made up my own.  Here is the basic, supermarket-ingredient version.  Start with one tablespoon baking soda.  Add a tooth-friendly sweetener.  I used Truvia because I had bought some, hated the taste of it, and it's sitting in my pantry.  Stevia or any sugar alcohol would work.  If your sweetener is large crystals you will want to grind it to a powder.  I used 6 packets of Truvia, but sweeten to your own taste.  Add a few drops of mint or cinnamon extract or essential oil.  Then add hydrogen peroxide, stirring, until it's moist enough to form a paste.  There's all kinds of things you can add to this, such as kaolin clay, tea tree oil, neem powder, saponins, etc., and I'll be experimenting more in the future.  Store your paste with a clean popsicle stick which you will use to stir it up and put it on your toothbrush.  It will be a little gritty at first but that gradually decreases as the crystals dissolve over time.