Hog Wild West

Aki is just filling in the finishing touches to her show at the gallery. Cold frame and our windows are full of anticipation of the harvest in the fall. Bees have new brood just about to hatch. They are busy feeding and they are strong.

From the stillness and quiet.

The spring has begun. The noise level rises as the lake ice recedes. The ice has just left. Now all the birds are back.

You can just make out a bear holler and the thumping of grouse in the bush over the cacophony of sounds coming from the small lake we live on.

There is so much life happening on these small lakes, ponds and wetlands here. It is magnificent, wondrous and precious to us. To anyone. Every child should experience this.

It does set the scene

but is not the point of this blog.

A few posts ago a question was posed to us.

“Hi. Really enjoying reading your blog, but I'm curious about something. What do you do about the wildlife? In other words, don't you worry about bears or wolves or larger predators killing off your chickens or, even worse, being a threat to you? How do you deal with bears and wolves? Aren't they attracted by the garden or the smells from your cooking? I'd really like to know how you handle that”.

A bear walks through our yard in the spring every few years. This winter we had four wolves running and playing on the lake. I was within 100 feet of one. It had no fear, my heart was racing, it had no intention of coming closer.

A young bald eagle attempted to take a chicken one spring. We chased it off. That was 3 years ago and it hasn’t come back. A pair of bald eagles live here. They stand on the tops of tall fir trees.
A weasel killed a couple of pullets last year. Opened their throats and drank their blood. It never came back. We suspect our dogs and cat were on it.

May 7th

He shows up at our place at 9 in the morning looking for 30 missing pigs. No greeting, straight to the point. “Have you seen my pigs?”.

A new neighbour, Brad moved his pigs onto an abandoned homestead about 1.25 kms away, unnervingly close since our closest neighbour until then had been a lone old timer 4 kms away. He doesn't live there just his pigs. We knew Brad’s parents, old timers. His father had been an old time leather artist. In fact he had shown Aki how to braid. They were a nice couple, he died a few years back, she is close to 90 and healthy.

June 20th 2011.
Called for lunch, I came around the corner of our cabin and was confronted by a 400 pound pig… A pig. No idea where it came from at the time. I was dumbfounded but also a bit excited about the prospect of having an easy hunt.

I remembered it must be a neighbour’s pig. What was it doing here?
I yelled at it and tried to get it to move on. It did not move. It just stared at me. Kai and Aki came out the door and we joined together in our hollers. As we bent over to pick rocks it began to move slowly toward the forest and disappeared.

After lunch I went back to work in the shop on the grinder.
With my headset on and leaning into the grinder I could hear yelling. With a start I looked to the door and caught sight of a herd of pigs running by. Three astride and 7 or 8 animals long. 20, 25 pigs.
For the rest of the day we defended our gardens, fruit trees, berry bushes and bees.
We learned that day that dogs have no effect on pigs, pigs don’t give up, even for a grain of rye seed. Breaking into our chicken runs for the seed.
The pigs divided into two fronts. Some 8 or ten half grown pigs, a sow and 3 or 4 adult pigs. The second herd was lead by a huge boar standing at least 4 feet. Then there were a few who seemed to wander between fronts.
We would drive one group off and start on the second and the first would come back. It looked as if we were going to loose a battle at some point. They were getting closer to the gardens. They could smell them I guess.
Kai grabbed his pellet gun and began to hunt them. They didn’t like that. He would hide. Wait and then within 15 feet hit their sides. With their thick skin the landed pellets seemed to have a slight smart pain but was enough to drive them off. So it seemed.

This could happen again. We realized the only reason they left was to get back before dark.
I hiked through the bush toward our new neighbour. All through the bush the pigs had been digging. This man had been ranging his pigs on Crown land. When I got to his place there was no sign of him or any kind of human dwelling. All the pigs were there, in a yard with no pen or fence just one strand of wire with no power running through it. I nailed a note to a post at his covered gated area in plain sight. Could not miss it.

Hi Brad.
Your pigs are trying to get into our gardens.
Could you take care of this please.
Regards,
Aki and Scott

No response
For a few days there was some chain sawing over there. The pigs didn’t come back.

September 16th (harvest)

The boar and 5 adults with a dozen or so smaller piglets.
They were our small apple trees, spent the whole day fighting off pigs. Everything was threatened, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, parsnips, fava beans… we grow enough food in our gardens to sustain ourselves all winter and into the next year. Jam from our berries, sauce from our apples, dried greens from broccoli and kale, sauerkraut and kimchi from cabbage and a full root cellar.
We begin to run out of food in June of the next year timed with the garden production for that next year.
That’s how we live. We spend our time growing our own vegetables and don’t eat a lot of meat.

We had two pellet guns. Both Kai and I hunted them, surprised them and finally they left… Only because it was the end of the day. There was some damage but not a lot. We considered ourselves lucky… had fended them off. For the next three days we harvested everything early. It had been a wet spring and summer so the harvest was ok. It could have been great.

As I said we had known his parents. I decided to visit his mother.
Kai and I drove as far as we could down Brad’s muddy road to leave him a note. Left a sign on a young aspen sapling we fell across his road. We stated he must deal with his pigs or we were going to.
Kai and I continued on, driving to his mother’s some 20kms away.
Good visit. We told her the story and asked if we could meet with him over some dinner if he wanted but definitely do something to keep his pigs away. She understood. She said she saw him two or three times a week and would tell him. I was sure after talking to his mother the issue would be resolved.

No response.

October 22
The pigs terrorized us again. We drove them off 3 times.
We were at the end of our patience.

Winter came. Lots of great sun.

February 16th
I was forging in the shop that morning. Between the hammer blows I could hear someone yelling “hello” in our yard.

When I looked I had no idea who it was. A guy about my age,50, going on about how his friend didn’t return his generator, he had no money, truck wouldn’t start and could he borrow a car battery. Then I realized it was our neighbour Brad.

I gave him the piece of my mind that had kept me up nights. He apologised, told us how hard his life was and said he had gotten rid of most of his pigs and was getting out of the pig business.
We invited him into our cabin, had a coffee and caught up on the neighbourhood gossip.
We lent him our backup battery and drove him to the road into his place. Didn’t want me to come in.
He returned the battery that afternoon

February 28th
Brad showed up again. Needed to borrow the battery again. I was not there. Aki lent it to him.
Three days later he returned it.

April 19th
Two adult pigs are on our road ready to come in. We hit them with a barrage of stones, sticks, pellets and drove them off. According to what Brad had told us the situation was going to end. We could deal with his two pigs.

April 20th

Four adults and 7 or 8 piglets. We are late this time. 8 o’clock in the morning! They have dug up two smaller apple trees, our asparagus patch, the freshly seeded lower garden, damaged the raspberry and blueberry bushes and dug up our lupins and irises. We fought them the rest of the day driving them off at the end of the day.

Now we’re pissed. We’ve given the guy the benefit of a doubt, chances, 5 strikes…we talked to his mother.

We have pictures. We’ve documented the events. How do you sue this guy? We’ll complain to forestry and conservation.

April 21st

Two adults and a piglet show up in the chicken run eating the rye seed. We seed the run, let the rye grow. We hit them again with a barrage of stones, sticks, pellets and drive them off.

April 22nd
Brad shows up at our door at 9 in the morning looking for pigs. I tell him how pissed we are, the damage his pigs have done and now we are going to the authorities. He apologizes and tells me of his hardships. He’s lost some piglets. He’s getting out of raising pigs. It won’t happen again.

April 24th
A truck races down our road. It’s Brad’s truck. Aki is in the sauna, Kai is in his room. It is 8:30 am.
I'm in the cabin.
He yells, he's cursing and sputtering accusing us of stealing his pigs. Tells me the police are on there way.
It was ugly. He says we shouldn’t be here. We’re city slickers (No idea what he is talking about). We’ve got to go.
He demands to look around.
I tell him he is out of line and to get off our property.
As he leaves he tells me if I wasn’t a cripple he’d beat the shit out of me and says he is going to do something.
I’ve a slight balance challenge, no big deal.
Just unnerving. We're dealing with a man who's a bit off balance. Psycopathic Like a drunken stuper.

Living in peace for 15 years in the bush. Since the old timer, 4 kms up the logging road moved away, our next closest neighbour is 9 kms away and then the next is 20 kms away. Now we are 1 km away from disaster.
,

So now the police have a new file.   

We have 36 acres surrounded by crown land. The pigs have been all  like excavating machines.
We figure, time and labour, his pigs have cost us $2,000.
So to answer the question about how we handle situations with wild animals.
We seem to be able to co-habitate with the wild animals around us. We let them pass through, maybe with a nudge. Never would we have thought pigs would be a problem. But of course it's the people who own them.

Life in the bush?

Seems a bit unreal.
                                   Later...

Aki and Scott

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Swamped... A Forest Falls

I watched a tiny spider
Scurry across our rural road
Leaving no visible tracks
On the freshly fallen snow
It stopped at the edge of a sudden crevass
Left just moments before by our dog
Walking beside me
The spider hesitated
Then dropped into the abyss
Scrambled about the toe holes
Then back up to the surface
On the same side
The wrong side. A pause
The spider dropped back
Into the crevass
Scrambled about the toe holes
This time she crawled up the other side
And continued on her way
Leaving no visible tracks
On the freshly fallen snow







Aki is showing some of her work in a solo show on May 3rd through to May 31st.

The show is upstairs at the Station House Art Galley, Williams Lake, British Columbia.



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/

Winter Bees and Beethoven

                                                              http://youtu.be/FiXjzrBWqUs

Have a good New Year.

Kai, Aki and Scott

June Bees

Lots of rain, sun in between.

Our first thought was that the flowers are going to be incredible.

 

Imagine waking to a torn sky. Lying in your bed covered with debris. Falling. A cacophony of sounds, fighter jets, bombs....your child.

  Just planted the greenhouse in our bushcraft garden. In a month it is a tomato, pepper and basil jungle. You can refer to our post titled, "Sustainable Bush Gardening", posted on the 3/7/08 for information and pictures of our gardening methods. Dandelions and saskatoon bushes bloom, indian paintbrush, strawberry, silverweed, violets and on and on. Meanwhile fireweed and the wild roses are growing strong. It is almost surreal even in a normal year when the bloom happens. We've been having a wet spring similar to a season 8 or 9 years ago so . Survival. This chick didn't make it. Mushrooms that haven’t shown their fruit for years. Amazing to witness the boreal forest become rainforest. When it rains, when it pours the verdure explodes. There was a Moose and her long legged calf crashing the pond today. Just browsing. Lots of bears this spring. A pair of eagles seems to have taken up residence close. Lots of ducks. Mallard, golden eye, merganser, bufflehead, red head, widgeon, ruddy, coot, scaup, ring neck. Canada geese. The resident sand hill cranes and red tail hawks are back. Our presence may be a nuisance but they get used to us and thrive. Even the garlic, onions and peas are slow this year. Cool and wet. Most has started growing now. Potatoes still aren't up. Short season, higher altitude and things grow fast and recover. Maybe.. We planted more seed rather than seedlings for late broccoli and cabbage. Looks like the seeds may catch the earlier planting of small seedlings. We decided this was the year to start keeping bees. The more research we did the more daunting the task, between what they say you have to do, what humans have done to them and the short honey season and long winters here. The point of death and extinction instead of sustaining themselves like they have been doing for at least the last forty million years. There are so many opinions, so many who “know”. I read, “one question to 12 beekeepers and you’ll receive 13 different answers“. As far as I can tell, that is the case. We built our own honey bee hives with several design ideas in mind. A STUMP, Emile Warre hive management, Kenyan top bar hives and the 8 frame Langstroth design. Another design feature, that was mentioned by a friend who kept bees for 15 years was a honey bee hive he helped removed from between the walls in a cabin. He said it was the strongest hive he had ever seen. There has to be something more logical than an “all or nothing world“. Using 2 x 10, double end walls for hive boxes (3 1/4“ thick), a few boxes with windows and coverings. Warre’s dimensions wide (300mm) but 40% longer, 11 top bars each. Two boxes are deep and long enough to accommodate Langstroth frames. We ironed in bees wax and painted the outsides with linseed for moisture protection. We can easily lift the hives whole with the pulleys we installed to fit boxes in from the bottom keeping the disturbance to a minimum. The hives will not be opened until fall. The hives are by our kitchen window under shelter. We can watch the hives and check their progess by looking in the windows once in a while. We are feeding them sugar syrup because they arrived with nothing. We won’t take any honey this year. Next year they’ll eat their own honey during the spring. I’m reminded, when I rinse my face off in the rain barrel that we’re in this together you and I, everybody… they have no choice. We have no choice. Some we don’t mind sharing water with…How many millions of barrels of oil and how many tons of radio active material were dumped into our oceans this year not to mention all the stuff that is routinely dumped. For many years. To be people responsible for the way we live. Just being fair. www.caribooblades.com/shop.html

That Time of Year

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Imagination

The snow melts. Leaving . Started tomato plants, spinach, onions are peeking , chickens are preparing soil in the green house.
Honey bees this year. Modified Warre hives. Just a little bit of honey. For us.

We're at a cusp, Aki and I. This winter was the best ever.

The struggle. Lying on the lake in the soft snow. Thinking.