How to be self sufficient

Our son, Dane, with trophy size potatoes.

  A big goal in my life since the Y2K scare back in 2000 has been to be really self sufficient. We have a big garden, about a half acre, and raise chickens, hogs, goats, and cattle. We are off grid, heat and cook with wood cut on our property. We do occasionally use a propane stove in the summer to keep from heating up the cabin but my wife is a excellent campfire cook so a lot of meals are cooked outside in the summer. I loath waiting for my coffee in the morning so I often put the perk on the propane stove to get it done sooner but I suppose I could survive without that if I had to!
   So what else can we do to be more self sufficient? We are big bread eaters so raising our own wheat is on the agenda for next year. We raised our own grain corn this year which was a partial success but has room for improvement.Sunflowers, the oil type, are also planned for next year. We use lard from the hogs for some of our needs but don't have enough usually so we want to try extracting our own cooking oil.
  We are still far short of our electrical generating needs. We have a chest freezer for the meat we raise and a clothes washer at my wife's son's house. These are two big power users that I have not figured out how to do away with.  Clothes washing is a big job on the homestead and even with the washing machine it uses a lot of my wife's time. The freezer provides the means of preserving hundreds of pounds of meat , fruit, and veggies that it would be hard to preserve quickly otherwise. We are trying to can more but we already can a couple hundred jars a year. We are also trying to eat more seasonally but we have five months of winter here. Our growing season is only about 90 days. We use a root cellar for a lot of produce too. More on this subject  as the winter goes by.

Butchering Time

 It is the traditional time of the year for us to get our butchering done. This year we butchered a steer and we have three hogs to butcher this weekend. This will be most of the meat two families use this coming year. A few chickens went in the freezer earlier. We will also be able to share some with our adult kids.
  Butchering is one of those jobs that I'm inclined to try to put off but can't. I feel a deep obligation to administer a quick and painless death to any animal I raise for meat.I have had people ask me how I can kill an animal I have raised and then eat it. I wonder how they can eat meat they have not taken responsibility for raising and slaughtering. My animals all have names and are pampered and treated kindly. Being sad that you are ending their life to continue yours is a good thing. Being aware that the circle of life also has death in it is also a good thing. Before any vegans out there get on their high horse, remember that all seeds are alive, actual embryos, waiting to start growing. That bowl of granola ends lots of lives too.
   
 

Chaga

 

 Upper right is typical black charred look of  the outside of a chaga conk.

The chaga conk, Inonotus obliquus, that part of the mushroom we see, is not the fruiting body of  the mushroom but rather a breaking out and hardening of the mycelium. Occurring mostly on  living birch trees, the conk  looks like a stub branch that is charred or like a black wart. The actual fruiting body is very seldom seen and usually occurs after the tree has died.
  Gathering chaga often requires a hatchet to remove the conk from the tree. They can be fairly large, twenty pounds is not unheard of, ten to fifteen pounds being common. The inside should  be a light reddish or yellowish brown, more or less the color of the birch trees cambium layer and sometimes streaked with white. It is believed that the chaga conk concentrates certain chemical compounds, including betulin, inotodiol, and active polysaccharides, from the birch tree. Betulin has been used to treat cancer in Russia since 1955.
   We add chaga to our teas as a antioxidant and for it's role as a immune system support.  It has a pleasant flavor reminiscent of cooking down maple sap. Don't make it to strong as it becomes bitter. We usually use it as a additive in our tea rather than the main ingredient but that's just us. We know several people who use it as their beverage of choice. We view it as another ounce of prevention. I have seen no reports of toxicity but as usual, all things in moderation.

Turkey Tail Mushroom

A turkey tail , typical color variations.

The turkey tail, Trametes versicolor,  is found through out North America and in many places around the globe. It may be the most widely studied medicinal mushroom in the world. It is very adaptable and grows in a variety of colors which accounts for the versicolor in it's name. This beautiful blue example was collected about 50 feet from our cabin.
  They have a very thin leathery flesh so they are usually used as a tea although some people will chew them as they stroll through the woods.  This mushroom is highly valued for being the natural source of the anticancer agent PSK. This mushroom is known in oriental medicine as Yun Zhi and is highly regarded. It is also considered to be an immune system modulator and is known as a powerful antioxidant.
    I have not found any reports of toxicity and so we add it too our teas occasionally. Would I spend big bucks to obtain it, probably not, unless I had been diagnosed with cancer. In our case it's an easy to obtain ounce of prevention.

Black Walnuts

Black walnuts after dehulling

  The foraging year is winding down here in north central Wisconsin but we still have lots to do. Ann found a neighbor with black walnuts covering their lawn. A short conversation with the owner lead to Ann spending several hours picking up almost six bushels of nuts.  After several days and a few evenings of removing the hulls, we now have very stained hands and about three and a half bushels of black walnuts. If you have never cracked black walnuts they are quite difficult. We use a hammer and a big block of firewood as a anvil! A little practice soon lets you control the force of your blow to crack the nut without smashing it. Even though they are tough we can produce clean nutmeats much faster than when cracking hazelnuts because of the size. Black walnuts have such a unique taste it is hard to decide what they go with. After some experimentation, Ann and I can recommend chocolate and maple syrup! Ann used them in a carrot cake which was very good. I am pushing for maple syrup fudge with them in it now. Today we had walnuts in our wild rice which was very good although I like hazel nuts better in my wild rice. Next year I'm hoping we can find butternuts. We found a few this year but only a handful. Unfortunately, there are few large mature butternuts around here because of a disease called butternut canker.

Shelled black walnuts

Cows and Cranberries

  Bella, the newest member of our homestead. We have milked cows and goats, both for our own use and commercially, over the years. For the last ten years or so we have just had goats. They are so much easier to handle and we think more economical for the homestead. The price of butter made us reevaluate that. While the goats we have been milking certainly produced enough butterfat to make butter making possible, separating cream from milk with goats is a difficult process. We have a separator, a 1940's Montgomery Ward Chief that holds 5 gallons at a time, it is just not worth the work it takes to clean up after running the milk through. If you were doing ten gallons or so it would be alright but when you are only milking a couple of goats it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why we now have a beautiful purebred Jersey cow. We simply let the cream rise in gallon jars and skim it off. Now we have to keep up with the butter making. We churn almost ever day with each churning producing about 1 1/2 pounds of butter. We don't pasteurize so care is needed to prevent our butter from going sour. The pigs certainly like the extra buttermilk they get in their food. Not sure yet that we will do with the extra milk after the pigs are in the freezer.

Two buckets of wild cranberries we picked yesterday.

On the foraging front wild cranberries have been a goal for several years. As the pic shows we were successful this year even if we were a bit late to get a lot of them. Wisconsin has two kinds of wild cranberries, large and small, that were both in the bogs we picked in. They both taste the same as cranberries you get in the store. Those are just a strain of the wild large cranberry that are cultivated. The pic below shows one of the bogs we picked in. This is a typical wild  cranberry bog. 

FORAGING REPORT

A bumper crop of wintergreen berries!

   It has been a good year here for most berries and apparently the wintergreen thought it was a good year too. Most years I see one or two berries on a few plants but a small patch along the side of our trail really went at it this year. We actually picked a pint of berries from a area about 5ft. by 30ft. Every where else I looked it was the normal one or two berries.
   Our big find on the foraging front this week was burr oak acorns. We found one big old tree at a county park that had dropped enough acorns to literally cover the ground. We picked two grocery bags full for a total of 38 pounds. We intended to go back the next day but we didn't make it. These acorns are very good, not bitter at all. We were munching on them as we picked. Since we don't have a nut sheller we hand cut each one into halves and then remove the nut meat to dry. It's not the fastest way to do it but we got the job done. It was cold a couple days after that so we were able to get them dry with the our wood cook stove. They smell so good when they are drying. They are slightly bitter now that they are dried down totally so we will leach them once or twice.
    We did find some hazel nuts still on the bush last week also. After getting them out of the husk we have about five quarts. I love them in wild rice with cranberries and maple syrup.NOM NOM! We picked lots of them earlier this year but most have been wormy when we opened them : ( . Still hope some of them will be alright.