You Are What You Eat (feeding your food).

We sprouted whole wheat,
Covered it with water .
Stirred in some apple cider vinegar,
like they said,  and
it started to ferment.

Two containers, one to soak and sprout,
one to ferment.
Feed from the ferment. Replenish the ferment
with

A Bushcraft and Sustainable Garden

We live in the bush and have created a garden that was unheard of in these parts. In fact, the old timers thought we were crazy. Cultivating wild flowers, greens and vegetables along with domestic greens and vegetables. Enriching the soil with what is around us. Doing it all by hand with the help from tools we've made. Simply. Leaving a light footprint.
We call it bushcraft gardening.

150lbs of tomatoes

We've learned about patience, stamina and how to relax here.

Fruit trees have been difficult but now we have a small orchard. Between moose, deer, bears, voles and mice it has been a challenge.

Honey bees have been emotionally draining because they die from causes we can't control but now they are thriving.

We now raise them in empty boxes, no frames, They build their own natural comb all the way down. We've combined a traditional Japanese method with Warre managment methods. No chemicals, no treatments.




Growing our own food has taught us in between frost, hail, bear, moose and deer, birds, rabbits, mice, voles, bugs, hillbilly pigs and the dreaded free range cattle to relax. The boreal forest is filled with animals that want almost everything that we grow.

This gardening method is sustainable, organic and has very little impact .

It's a state of mind going into the wilderness with nothing but seeds and a shovel, an open mind, relaxed and keenly observing your surroundings with a sense of freedom and balance.

Everything around you may have a use for your bush garden. Rocks act like sinks storing heat energy from the sun that can offset cool nights. They are fertilizers slowly giving important nutrients to the soil. They collect and trap water. They can also be protection from animals and cover for others, like toads.
That old stump – do I remove it, or can I plant a garden around it and let it slowly fertilize?

Rocks picked for a garden wall

Rotten wood has got to be the supreme bush fertilizer adding organic material and fluffing up heavy soil.There are droppings from animals like deer, moose and rabbit which are good "on the spot" fertilizers.

Harvesting what you need with care and never taking more than 1/3 of anything.

Surviving with respect and again, with a light foot step

Those “weeds” or wildflowers – pull them out or cultivate them, let them flower to attract the bees.

If the location of your plot is covered with grass or weeds turn it over and leave it in place. It will decompose and become food for your plants.

Fireweed shoots--Excellent greens

Certain bugs, wild plants and critters can help. In a wilderness garden you may cultivate dandelions, wild onions, wild parsnip, lambs quarters, mushrooms, chickweed, cattails. In fact one could have an excellent wild garden cultivating just wild plants.

Crops like garlic, potatoes and broad (fava) beans can be grown without the stress of everything else wanting to eat them. We grow these crops without any protection.
Location.

I asked my son what his first thought was on our gardening in the bush. He said food.
It is about the food, the sustenance.

Soil, your climate, exposure to

the sun, access to water, location of your plot, predators...

We've been fertilizing by mulching with green grass (before it goes to seed) covered with an inch of sand then covered with an inch of rotten wood. We have some chicken manure that we fertilize beans and greens with. After the crop is harvested we plant rye grass or Chinese vegetables. When the thick head is 6 to 8 inches high we turn it over.

17 years Aki and I have done it this way. Kai can pick any 2 x 2 foot spot in the garden and pick enough worms for a day of fishing trout.

Regards,
Aki and Scott

Our business, http://www.caribooblades.com/

Finding Empathy

-30 this morning. Warmed up. Yesterday morning the thermometer tube was empty. Its lowest reading is -40.
This being our first year keeping bees, as we’ve written about in a previous post, the cold snap is a bit of a worry. Until a week ago it was a warm winter.

So far the hives are strong.

After a very wet late spring and wet first half of the summer, the bees began to seriously gather nectar in August. The frost arrived at the beginning of Sept so we fed them open trays of sugar syrup until they stopped taking it near the middle of October so they could build up their winter stores.

It seems to be a crazy idea keeping bees here, a subtropical insect. We see the honey bee collapse as a microcosm of the state that human beings are manipulating the environment. They have as good a chance here as anywhere else… being kept. Maybe a better chance.
We stuck to the Warre hive management philosophy.

All three of us spent hours observing the hives, reading and researching.
With observation windows built into a few of the boxes and the observation of the hive entrance we committed ourselves to everyday, we are building confidence that we can have a reading of the health of our hives.

Meat birds, healthy and thriving, becoming predators. When they arrive as day old chicks they grow seeming to have no idea except to stay warm, eat their feed and drink. When they get older, 3 weeks, you can feed them grower, feed them all day, keeping their trough full. They lie around and eat.

After a couple of weeks of this most get comfortable and may only move half a dozen yards for the rest of their lives. After nine or ten weeks slaughter them and fill your freezer.
We did this one year. We felt so disgusted with the operation that we didn’t raise meat chickens again and realized that this method of raising chickens was still so much better than what is out there. We stopped eating chicken.

After reading an article in Mother Earth News about raising meat birds in a humane way, we decided to give it another try.
As soon as the chicks arrived our son Kai gathered worms and bugs from the garden and introduced them to the chicks. It was hilarious. Leaping out of the way of the marauding click beetles. Then, one stopped, slowly, with trepidation, watching, studying and zeroing in on one of the beetles. It made its attack. Soon they were chasing each other around trying to steal each others' finds.
After a couple of days they would all wait for Kai with anticipation.
We have a couple of hens who have chicks about the same time and that are about the same size. We put the Cornish Giant meat chicks with the hens and their chicks. All together into the same run. The meat birds quickly learned how to forage from the lessons of the hens teaching their chicks. The Giants began to dwarf the laying birds. They turned into ravenous prehistoric mini raptors.
By the end of their time they’re travelling in flocks with free run of the property. Foraging for bugs, toadlets, worms, seeds and whatever else they need. Twice a day, first thing in the morning and in the evening Kai feeds them grower to satisfy their insatiable appetites. Every evening 25 giant Chickens gather out front and wait for Kai. Their lives are fast and furious. Ten weeks go by. We slaughter all the Cornish Giants and fill our freezer with chicken.
　
From the standpoint of having nothing. Come closer to your end than you feel comfortable with. Then push it a little further. You could die. With a little time and imagination you will be able to empathize. you can begin to see what you need to survive as an individual living amongst life on this planet. Maybe even become a brother or sister with most on the planet.

Every year the winter firewood piles have become easier to build.
The mature pine forests are dead. Huge trees collapsing on each other falling like dominoes.

Time and imagination.
There are a lot of changes coming fast.

Regards, Aki and Scott


http://www.caribooblades.com/

Pink Salmon & Dandelions

Our gardens have been tucked in for the winter.


After we harvested the potatoes we turned in the soil with the potato plants and the season's mulch of reeds, grass and cardboard. Aki broadcast rye seed and peas. Let them grow for a month and at about 5" high turned them under with some seasoned chicken manure, raised the bed, skirted the rise with bark and cardboard, planted 2/3 of the garlic crop for next and covered it in a thick blanket of reeds.
The reeds will be pulled back in the spring to let the soil warm. When the plants are up the reeds get distributed throughout the garlic as mulch.

Some yells, some screams.

Some friends gave us some red kuri squash. It looks an awful lot like pumpkin. So we carved it for halloween. We had it lit for a night...then we ate it... Jack's head. We found our halloween tradition.

We have been spending some time in the forest collecting firewood. Always rejuvenating. We are looking forward to the deep dark winter.

The three of us watched a movie a month back set in Afghanistan, "The Kite Runner". It spanned a timeline of 30 years. We're still thinking about it.

Basted in honey and butter. Roasted and eaten.

Served on a moose antler platter.

Pink Salmon, dandelions, artists and farmers all have something in common, and we are still trying to grasp and pin down this thread.

December 21st. We are alone and we've got something all to ourselves.

Deep in thought in the deep, dark winter.
http://www.caribooblades.com/

Entitlement

We both grew up on middle class streets in Canadian cities during the 60's and 70's. Gas was 35 cents a gallon. Electricity was almost free. Water was free.
During that time I watched my father convert our whole backyard into a garden with fruit trees. After reinsulating the roof and upgrading the windows, he plumbed in an 80 gallon preheating tank beside the furnace which received cold city water before entering the hot water tank, put a wood stove in the basement and plumbed it into the central heat, cut and dug a small root cellar off the basement. Our house was an average looking house on a city block but way more efficient. That was 40 years ago. If he was still alive he'd have at least a solar array on the roof and a heat pump in the cellar.


Following that patriarchal line, he was doing what his father and mother did. They did what my great grandparents had taught them. My great, great grandparents were pioneers and they did what they had to do to survive in a rugged environment.
The environment cannot be denied. All lines do lead to the same... survival. Our environment is everything.


Like so many boys of my generation, I didn't get to know my father because he died young. Heart attack. Doing all kinds of stuff for the environment and feeding everybody he could...didn't take care of himself. He was 56. Aki's dad died of stomach cancer when he was 47. Looking for a better life for their children, Aki's parents brought the family over from Japan in the 60's. The only "ethnic" family in their suburban neighbourhood. Aki was one of three Japanese-Canadians in her high school of 1200 students.

Shaking off our sense of entitlement.
By the second year we knew we were onto something but still a long way off. Now 16 years later we're still settling in and are just plain sad that more people aren't living this way. It is simple. Working with nature. More healthy physical work. Breathing fresh air, drinking fresh water. We grow all our own  vegetables, keep bees and keep chickens for meat and eggs. We know the organic farmers who raise the pork we savour over winter.

There are people doing this in the cities. Small , large backyards and container vegetable gardens...

for healthy food.

Eating fresh food, drinking fresh water and breathing fresh air, of course, is possible in the cities.


Nancy and Rosa's gardens in the lower mainland.

We initially came here for the same reasons that anyone would have.

We separated the compressor and condenser from the backside of our freezer, carefully bending the copper tubing so that it is away from the freezer.  Our Sears freezer is a bad design. Heating while you're trying to freeze. So much of this society is designed with the assumption of entitlement to cheap, unlimited and uninterrrupted power and resources. Separating just the motor will make a big difference. We throw a duvet over the freezer when it's not on.. Huge difference. We haven't had a fridge for 13 years. Between the freezer, pantry and root cellar we don't need one. We don't have a basement but our pantry floor is not insulated. From September until May the bottom shelf in the pantry keeps things cool. The root cellar always keeps things cool. An old sixty gallon water tank thermal cycling through our wood cook stove is like having a second wood heater and supplies us with hot water. A small green house off the south wall of our small house heats up for vented heat into the house, and supplies greens earlier and later in the season for us. For our power we've 416 watts of panel, a 30 amp controller, 8 - 6 volt heavy deep cycle batteries and a 1750 inverter. With cable, wire and connections, $3000 Canadian for everything.  A second 12 volt system for the water pump, a couple kitchen lights, pantry light and music we have 2 - 12 volt deep cycle batteries charged by a 50 watt panel, no contoller. This system is almost 17 and working fine. One battery is 17 the other is 12 years old. Maintainance is key.  These systems have paid for themselves at least 4 or 5 times.
The newest stat I've read is that the real cost of a solar panel operating in ideal circumstances is paid for in 5 years of operation financially and environmentally. In the city there is the huge advantage of being able to tie directly into the grid, eliminating the need for batteries. So many possibilities.

We went a little watt heavy as far as panel:battery ratio. During the dark months of January and December when the batteries get low repeatedly I'll sometimes disconnect 2 of the batteries to make it easier to break down the batteries' resistance to accept a charge. I found that reading a bit about batteries and 12 v (DC) was a good thing. From March until September power is not an issue here. We run our cabin and a small shop without any sacrifice. Working with the sun is the key.  We really live by the sun. For a couple of years it was an adjustment living off grid... now we wouldn`t live any other way.

Nancy Brignall and George Rammell's web sites, http://www3.telus.net/4.
Mike Edwareds and Rosa Quintana, www.rosaquintanalillo.com and http://mikeedwardsart.com
Together they're changing their neighbourhoods. Sites of art and rejuvenation.

Our site,

http://www.caribooblades.com/

We humans excel at adjusting, adjusting, adapting - until we almost completely forget how we used to do things... Forget what we've done, forget what we're doing. Forget where we're going.
Aki and Scott                        

 www.caribooblades.com

* It's an updated blog.

Don Quixote

Aki is reading Don Quixote. Every day or so she gives Kai and I an update on Don's exploits.

Reminds me a bit of Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky in the way that you almost want to close your eyes before it happens again. Before Quixote attacks again, donning his barber's basin. Before the underground man delves deeper into the depths of human despair and humiliation.

 Two stories more opposite to each other.



Our shop in the evening.

Thinking one's onto something when everyone else thinks you're insane.

A tragic folly? Interesting to consider these two stories from our little spot in the bush, with no curtains on our windows. Here we are thinking we are perfectly sane...

We are 43 dozen eggs ahead of ourselves.

Most winters our chickens take it easy and almost come to a halt in egg production.

During one of the cold spells, one of the chickens decided to go out for a stroll, found a nice spot under our work truck, and found herself frozen to the ground. That evening when we went to close up the coop we discovered we were missing one, went looking but couldn't find her. The next morning (-26 C) Kai found her under the truck, clucking softly. It took several buckets of warm water and an evening in a box infront of the woodstove, but she seems to have recovered completely.

We are eating a lot of eggs.

The temperatures of Winters past.

Some Chilcotin neighbours say 30 years ago it would hold at -40 C for weeks and dip to -50, -60 some nights.

I found that the wood stove door became a regular workbench for me.

The beast that plows our road.

We don't feel insane but are still trying to understand the point.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Just put in our seed order for the spring. Hope springs eternal.