Tree Huggers on Easter Island (updated)

It seems easier to get started this year.
Looking back over our seventeen years in the bush here we can see the dramatic ways our environment has changed.

Nobody had lived here for several years. The small cabin, with all its windows shot out, had been taken over by swallows and mice. A half dozen wrecked vehicles dating back to the fifties, dilapidated outbuildings, and old, weathered garbage strewn throughout.
But aside from the small stain of human's existence, this spot on earth was peace.
We cleaned, patched up the cabin, re-used the wood from the outbuildings, but kept the wrecks around for parts and art.

We're coming out of a very long winter. Spring is here but slow. The lake is still covered with ice. The garlic and parsnips coming up slowly. Fruit trees are showing signs of life. Should be a bountiful season.

Seventeen years ago we camped on the land. For a cool, rainy week in September we relaxed here. The mornings were enveloped in mist. There were hundreds of ducks and geese sliding through the mist, into and out of the reeds that surrounded the small lake. We were going to stake as a place to live. Isolation.
Around the lake there was a mature lodgepole pine, spruce and Douglas fir forest and there was an incredible display of mushrooms. Enchanted. Easy forage for oyster mushrooms, boletes, field and horse mushrooms.There were dozens more we could not identify.

Since then pine beetles and the mills have taken all of the mature forest. Left a few mature firs here and there. The mushrooms, bats and now the moose have mostly disappeared with the forest.
The province has a bounty on wolves. Anyone with a hunting license can shoot a wolf any time.
The science behind the wolf cull is so flawed. It's all about votes and money.

No

doubt we’re are going to burn every drop of oil and burn every pound of coal. A forester once told us, when we were trying to stop the mill from cutting the forest around the land we live on, that there is not a safe stand of trees in Canada and that it’s only a matter of time before they’re all cut.

10% of the world population owns 85% of the world's assets and half of the population of the world owns barely 1%.

Terrorism, fighting for freedom…We haven't seen the worste yet. Blaming it on fundamentalists and extremists while hanging onto our decadence.
You would fight to save yours and who exactly are the extremists.

Our standard of living was built on the backs of slaves.The Conquistadors.
It’s not complicated.

Tree huggers unite but watch your backs

or you’ll get eaten.

Aki and Scott

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

Harvesting

Our gardens have done well this season. Root vegetables, the brassica family, peas and most greens have thrived here.

Getting ready for the frost in the middle of August. By August 25 we had a frost every night for 1- 1/2 weeks, a break of 2 or 3 nights and then the frost was back. By October there's a hard frost every night.

It was a cool and short growing season this year with a couple of frosts overnight in July. Natural. It lets every plant know ...

Aki has dried our winter supply and she has been canning over the last couple of weeks. I brought in our second load of fire wood. Aki dries broccoli, kale, beet greens, wild mushrooms, rose hips, herbs like basil, oregeno, sage etc.., cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, cherries and horseradish.

We've been eyeing the rose hips - they're red and ready to pick, just have to get around to it. Perhaps that'll be a job for Kai, who is helping out more and more. We dry rose hips for tea and cooking and our rose hip wine is on the go. This year we'll try rose hip/apple jelly, as we're enjoying the first real crop of apples from our little orchard.

We love this time of year. Cool enough for the cookstove, warm days, no bugs. A good harvest is an added bonus. Things are coming together as we prepare for winter.

Bugs had their way this year but were overcome with a little extra work from ourselves as well as the plants. We've found that cardboard box makes for really good mulch and the worms and toads love it.

An organic farmer told us that rather than worms being good for your soil, they are more importantly a sign, with their presence, that the soil is good.

The cardbord biodegrades over the season. By next spring it is decomposed and the soil is richer for it. We're not worried about what it looks like because of the amazing things it provides for the garden. We have researched whether it will cause any ill effects to the soil and it doesn't. The cardboard is easily biodegradable.

The inks are vegetable based and degrade as well leaving nothing behind but great compost.

This is August

Lunch is fresh.

A fresh lunch becomes challenging

by the middle of October.

Now we are seeding rye grass and peas as a cover crop for the winter. All our kitchen compost is buried directly into the garden. We dig in rotten wood, egg shells, wood ash, composted chicken manure and grass that hasn't seeded. We find that what we prepare now will have a lot to do in determining next years yield in our bushcraft /survival garden.

Please check out the body of work we've done over the summer at, www.caribooblades.com/newknives.html

Gardening with the Tide

Lots of rain, thunder, spectacular lightning and the mosquitoes are to be reckoned with and getting worse.

This is all adding up to a great mushroom season. Morels and boletes . An excellent start for the saskatoon berries. All the seedlings have lots of water.

A great aspect to all the rain is that the range cattle have enough to eat out there and will leave us alone.

Ranchers lease crown land, range, for their beef cattle. We are surrounded by crown land. Some dry years they eat all the grass, flowers and shrubs in the gov't range so they begin busting down our gerden fences.. This is not an enjoyable experience. We end up harvesting early because they won't stop until they've eaten everything. If there is enough rain in May and June the vegetation grows , gets a head start. Fingers crossed, the beef won't bother us.When it comes to beef, we have no rights.

The lodge pole pine is gone but still standing supplying us with easy firewood and building logs.

Looking across the lake at the fringe of trees left in the riparian zone, it appears as though we live on the edge of a cliff, but the open space just beyond is a clearcut. Trees take up water, and when the trees are cut down, the water runs into the lake, and the lake rises. The tide.

The tilled garden plots that are now under water have sprouted cattails. .

Our new crop.

Each spring now we wait to see how much garden space we will have. Raised beds help enormously. We wait, but there is inevitably much mud-slinging in the turning of the soil.

We have everything in now, and the gardens are looking good.

The swallows are building, the air is full of birdsong, new life begins.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Harvesting

The month of August has been a busy one this year. It all started with a hard frost August 8th. First time this has happened and it was devastating to parts of our garden.





We survive the winter with the food we harvest and forage now.
















The main point to surviving here off the land is being able to sustain the blows that come. Between hail that set the garden back in June and the frost in early August, all in all it was a good harvest.


We picked up the pullets at the end of July.

Their combs are beginning to turn red now, Sept 22. We'll have a fresh supply of eggs all winter while the older hens take a winter break.









Aki dried about 16 kg of broccoli. Broccoli dries well and reconstitutes itself in stir fries, soups and egg dishes beautifully. She also dried cauliflower, beet greens, lovage, basil, mint, tarragon, she sun dried tomatoes and she dried a winter's worth of boletus mushrooms.


Fresh mushrooms










Dried Boletes




















We're big garlic eaters. This harvest will last till June.






With a small freezer of venison we're almost ready.

Fried Fungi

Lots of rain in the boreal forest brings out mushrooms. With the right balance of temperature, sun and rain mushrooms come out. In past years there has been so many mushrooms and of different varieties it is almost too much for my small mind to handle because of its quality of magical beauty.

We harvest edible mushrooms.

We take about 1/3 of the mushrooms we find leaving the rest to continue their life cycle.

Rosy larch and king bolete have pushed their way through the earth everywhere in the past couple of days.

Aki dries them. By the time winter arrives we have a mushroom cache; Oyster, field, horse and bolete.

We discovered an incredible delicacy yesterday. A large grouping of oyster mushrooms that had dried in the last week in perfect condition. We brought them home, marinated and reconstituted them in wine. Fried in butter, a touch of lemon, salt and pepper. It was one of the best meals I've had.

Rose hip wine is coming.

In the 10 years we've lived here surrounded by "crown land" we've lost 90% of our mushrooming grounds. Five years ago lumber mills got a blank cheque with the excuse of the pine beetle. They've taken everything around us. Fir, spruce aspen along with the pine. After they've taken what they wanted everything is bulldozed into a slash pile and burned. The trees go, the mushrooms go.
On a late fall evening, we drove up to the edge of the Chilcotin. It was dark. A red glow on the horizon grew larger as the climb home gave way to the plateau. The fires had been lit. There appeared dozens of red glowing halos dotting the ravaged forest along the roads. Massive fires fueled by gasoline and diesel, which would for weeks burn limbs, roots and unworthy trees, erase them as if they had never existed.

Dandelions

Dandelions are high in vitamins A, B and C and minerals like calcium, potassium, iron, phosphorous and magnesium.. The flowers are rich with vitamin D. The roots are said to be good for your liver and blood.

Aki, Kai and I eat dandelion as a main source of vegetable and green for the months of April, May and into June.

As we get our garden turned in the spring the dandelions we let alone the season before have small carrot sized roots. We stir fry them. They're excellent. The young greens are excellent salad material. The flowers we mix into omlettes, stir frys, salads and soups. Aki rolls the flowers in flour and seasoning and fries them in butter. They taste like a mushroom. We eat bags of them. We stop eating the greens as they mature because they become quite bitter but we continue feeding our chickens loads till the fall. We'll continue to eat the flowers and roots.

One dish Aki likes to make using the roots is based on one she grew up eating (her mother used burdock instead of dandelion root).

Slice roots and a carrot into thin strips.

Stir fry in a bit of sesame oil. Add soy sauce and a dash of chili pepper to taste.

Enjoy!

When bears come out from the high winter hibernation grounds one of their first foods is the dandelion. They get fat eating just dandelion flowers.

We've all heard about dandelion wine.