Herbal Cough Syrup

 At least once a year someone in the house gets a cold or the flu. It was me this year and I've been fighting the miserable thing all week. I prefer to use herbs to help lessen the symptoms rather than bought cold remedies. When I started coughing I got busy making a new batch of my cough syrup. We think it works as well as anything we have bought. One of the most important ingredients is the inner bark from the black cherry tree. I dug around in the cabinet we keep such things in and came up with all the ingredients except the cherry bark. Apparently I neglected to gather more when the last batch was used up. I should be thankful that it was the cherry bark I didn't have because I can gather that even though it is winter. If it had been any of the other ingredients I wouldn't have been able to find them now. It has been cold enough that the bark is frozen tight on the trees. I got around that by cutting a small branch and bringing it in to thaw. Once it had warmed up enough I pealed off strips of it's very aromatic bark. If you have the right tree, the inner bark should have a strong scent of bitter almond. Only the inner bark is used so the bark needs to be cleaned. Cherry bark is fairly easy to separate the inner bark from the outer. The pic shows me using a knife to peel off the outer bark. I will be bottling up my concoction today. It does take a few days to make it and of course I am just about over my cold, or at least I hope I am! The recipe is on the recipe page if you want to see what I put in it.
 Please be assured that this is not medical advice and you go see your doctor before doing anything radical like making your own herbal medicine.

Re purposing Old Knives

Having finally gotten most of the tasks I needed to get done out of the way, I have started on some other fun projects. I look for old knives at thrift shops and yard sales to recycle into other uses. I look for old carbon steel knives rather than stainless. The stainless steel is much harder to rework by hand.The top knife in the pic is one I cut down to hunting knife size and rehandled. I cut down and epoxy-ed the front leg bone from a deer for the handle and made the sheath from some scrap leather. The sheath is not much to look at but it does it's job.  The bottom knife is another I am going to cut down. It has a nice bone handle on it and is from a old meat carving set. I have no use for it as is but after it is cut down it will be very useful as a skinning knife since I can shape it to have a long belly curve.This one has very high carbon steel which is easy to test for. If you touch high carbon steel to a grinding stone and watch the sparks, it will tell you a lot about the steel. High carbon steel will throw very bright, almost white, sparks and they will bloom, or branch into multiple sparks. Don't stay on the grinding stone very long though or you will pull the temper out of the edge.I do not use any power tools on these so I don't have that worry. I start by putting the blade in a vise, aligned on the mark, with the part I want to keep below the jaws. I then wrap a piece of leather around the blade and strike it with a hammer. A carbon steel blade will snap right off at the vise. If necessary, I take several more small "bites" off the blade to get it fairly close to my desired shape. Make sure you wrap something around that blade, the piece that breaks off will be very sharp and will leave at a high rate of speed! After that it is just a matter of filing away at it until you have it nicely contoured. Once it matches the shape you want, start filing the blade to attain a thinner cutting edge and point. If you are after looks as well as function you will need to use progressively finer grades of sanding paper to get that mirror finish.  A lot of these old kitchen and chef knives have great steel in them, this is a great way to reuse them.
On a different note, I've been cracking nuts, black walnuts and hazelnuts, for Ann's holiday baking. Ann posted a recipe for one of the treats she made this year, Black Walnut Spread. I would call it nutella but that name is copyrighted of course. If you like that product you will love Ann's version. Scroll to the bottom of the Recipe page to see it.

Hand Made Cordage

I love learning new skills but more than that I love actually using the skill to make something useful. Making cordage from foraged materials is one such skill I acquired in the last few years. The light colored fiber and cord on the right is from a shrub we call "leather wood" but I a not sure if that is it's correct name.It is definitely leather like and so flexible that you can actually tie the limbs in a knot. The fiber to the left is the inner bark of' basswood'or 'little leaf linden'. It is one of the best foragable fibers in our area.Both of these fibers need to be collected in early summer or late spring when there is plenty of sap to allow the bark to be removed easily. Of course pulling off the bark will kill the tree so I pick one tree or shrub ,cut it down , take every bit of bark I can, and use the tree for firewood. This will provide fiber for a lot of projects. The basswood inner bark is made up of multiple thin layers that can be separated as is the leather wood bark to a lesser extent. The fiber can be used 'as is' but is much more useful as cordage. I could show you how to make cordage in a few minutes but I am not so sure about telling you how to do it! Starting with two strands of slightly damp fiber, the fist strand is given a clockwise twist.Strand one is now brought over strand two in a counterclockwise direction and strand two is twisted clockwise. Each strand is twisted clockwise in it's turn as the two strands are twisted around each other in the opposite counter clockwise) direction. It is much easier than that sounds. The opposite twist keep it from unraveling and is the basis of most rope and cordage Some people twist the fiber by rolling on their thigh with the palm of the hand. That method is very fast, several feet a minute can be made. I have not mastered that method and use my fingers to twist the fiber, I make a few inches a minute. A caution to any men who might try the thigh method, do not try it while wearing shorts unless you were wanting to remove those leg hairs anyway!

Wolf Track

I went for a walk yesterday and saw lots of animal tracks including these wolf tracks. The knife next to it is 3 1/2 inches long so you can gauge the size of it.We had several inches of snow on the ground and then light rain which made very soft mushy snow. That was Sunday and it got cold again that night preserving these tracks. There were all sorts of different tracks but it is hard to get clear pictures of them. I saw squirrel, snowshoe rabbit, partridge, weasel, fox, and deer tracks  plus the wolf tracks. There seems to be a lot of snowshoe rabbits this year.

They make lots of runs which they tend to move about on so they are very easy to snare if you are hungry for rabbit stew. Here is the track of a nice size whitetail deer. I wish this one had been around during deer hunting season! We have mostly chicken and pork in our freezer, a little venison would add some variety. I went for my walk to see if the swamp has frozen hard enough to allow me to bring in some of the firewood that is on the other side. It seems fairly solid except for the creek itself which has only very thin ice right now.

  I have about a half dozen little piles like this one I would like to get home. A lot of this wood is dry black ash. Black Ash makes a very nice fuel for the cook stove.These small pieces will make the quick, hot, fire you want to fry things on the cook stove. I have  mostly larger wood now so I have to do a lot of splitting to provide Ann with wood to cook with. Big pieces are great to maintain a even fire over night but you need small wood to fry your eggs!

Another Road Trip

We made a short road trip Sunday to visit one of the premier llama breeders in our area.It was a rare opportunity to talk with someone who has been in the business of raising llamas for over thirty years in this area. We spent a very pleasant three hours conversing and admiring his barn full of llamas and  alpacas. The reason for our visit was to obtain some of the fiber from this award winning herd. We brought home half a van full so Ann has been sorting and checking it all out. The pic is some gorgeous pure black.

 I didn't know we would get the chance to see his herd and didn't have my camera with me. He had one pen with a dozen or so baby llamas that were being weaned from their moms and one new baby with her mom that was only two days old. It is hard to imagine anything cuter than those baby llamas, which by the way, are called "cria'.
 It will take a week or so to get all this fiber sorted out and graded but it will be worth the effort to be able to offer such high quality fiber to our customers. I plan on doing a longer  post on this breeder soon so I'll save the rest till then.

Drum Carder

This is Ann's drum carder. It is made by Ashford from New Zealand and has been very dependable. Other than an occasional drop of oil and semiannual cleaning the fuzz out of the bearings it has required no maintenance. Very well made and more importantly, very well engineered. When too much fuzz builds up around the shafts and starts fouling the bearings partially dismantling is necessary to clear the bearings. I remove the hand crank by taking off the lock nut and threading it off. I then remove five screws that hold on the handle side.

Both of the drums can then be slide off their shaft allowing you to clean out the fuzz. Ann attempted to card some alpaca fiber yesterday. If a person was very careful and watched that tuffs of that very, very fine fiber didn't go wandering down in among the shafts it would probably work fine. If you don't watch carefully your drum carder is soon so tightly bound up that you can barely turn the handle. That results in the carder looking like it does in the second pic.About a third of that fuzz pile shown was jammed around the shafts. As I said, this is a well engineered piece of equipment so 15 minutes was all it took to get it back in business.Ann's spinning wheel is also an Ashford . I would recommend their products based on our experience with these two items.

On a unrelated note, here are a couple pair of mittens Ann's sister knit for us with some of Ann's llama yarn. Warm and soft.Thanks, Mary!

Llama and Alpaca Fence

I have been plug'in away at getting a enclosure done near our cabin. Ann wanted to have the llamas and alpacas closer than their former area which was a 1/2 mile walk. We were lucky at a auction earlier this year and bought several rolls of wire at a good price so I had most of the materials. I did cut some black ash posts for my corners. This is two strand twisted wire, not barbed. I stretched it as tightly as I could and ran six strands. I managed to come up with enough steel "t" posts for most of the line posts. I plan on adding a hot wire yet so the critters

don't get in the habit of pushing between the wires to get the greener grass on the other side! Here is a pic of the old corral. It was made entirely with poles we cut on the site. It gave good service for over six years so I have no complaints. We added the orange bale twine when we had goat kids in it and they would just walk right through. I will be salvaging whatever I can for fire wood. The new fence is in a different area so I will tear this down and then build a new fence around this area.

This pic is along the other side. This is the edge of a old railroad bed. It was tough going to get the post driven in. I need to add a few post between the ones I have in. They will be used to maintain the wire spacing. This pen will be used for llamas,alpacas and our pony. There are a few mature trees I will protect by putting some light wire netting around them to prevent chewing on the bark. Some of the smaller trees I will leave and see what happens. The alder and willow brush will get pulled out next spring. I will frost seed some clover yet this year.

Ann reassuring the critters after the move. They all lead well so that is how she brought them back to the cabin. All of them like carrots so that is our treat of choice. We will only leave the halters on until every one is comfortable with their new pen. If we did have to catch someone it is nice to have a halter to grab on to. They get their hay outside unless the weather is nasty. They have a nice snug shed to get into if they want to and we feed them there in bad weather.

Another pic of the critters. They all get along although there is a definite preference for the company of their own kind. Alpacas stay with the other alpacas and llamas do the same. Our pony , Sam, tries to be nice and groom the alpacas as he would another horse but the alpacas don't appreciate it!

Rose Hips

This is a wild food that is still available, rose hips.The fruit of the rose, call hips ,are high in vitamin C and make a very pleasant tasting tea. They tend to stay on the plant well into the winter unless eaten by the birds. This year that is a likely occurrence since most wild fruits that usually are present all winter are gone already. Rose hips are more seed than fruit but they can be used to make jelly as well as tea. Some roses have much larger fruit than others. There are several named cultivars available from nurseries that produce huge amounts of large hips. You often see these around homes and they present a chance for a little urban foraging. Most people are happy, if a bit baffled, to let you pick them from their plants. If you are picking the hips for tea, split them in half, discard the seeds, and dry the remaining thin shell of fruit. A nice addition to your collection of wild foraged teas, Free Food...Yeah!