Pickled Beets And The Cosmic Confirmation

Harvest Moon rising over the Acadian forest from our window.

We have been canning pickled beets over the past couple of days for the first time. We finished our latest round of canning just in time to watch the Harvest Moon rise over the Acadian forest in our back yard.

It felt like some sort of cosmic confirmation as we continue to bring in our harvest and process the bounty.

While the potatoes we have harvested have all been small so far, our garden produced several contenders in the "Mother Of All Beets" category. It took only 3 of the behemoths to fill twelve 500 ml canning jars.

And we have about 15 more MOABs in the garden waiting to be eaten/processed. 

With all the beets still in our garden, this is just the beginning.

Pickled beets for all. It has been cosmically confirmed as the right thing to do.

Pickled Beets Recipe


Wash beets well, remove beet greens leaving 1" stem and root.

In large pot, cover with water and boil until tender. Drain, saving 1  1/2 cups liquid.

Remove skins under cold water, slice or if small leave whole.

Pack beets in sterilized bottles to 3/4 inch and add brine (see below) to about 1/2 inch from the top. Cover with lid, put ring on until finger tight. 

Process for 30 minutes in boiling water canner.

Brine

1   1/2  cups vinegar
1   1/2 cups beet cooking water
1   1/2 cups brown sugar
1   tsp salt

Bring to boil and simmer 5 minutes.

Garlic Harvest

It's the last two weeks of summer, but the signs of fall are everywhere.

Our grassy field is turning brown, temperatures are cooling, and the hummingbirds are almost all gone. It can only mean one thing - harvest time. 

Freshly harvested garlic. We cured it outside and in the garage for two weeks.

One of the joys of this year's harvest has been our first ever crop of garlic. Our experiment was a success. The challenge now? Could I learn to braid it?

Hey, this isn't what the nice lady's braid looked like.

Linda and I watched a video posted by a woman that had been working on a garlic farm for decades and had probably done hundreds of braids in her day. She had prepared the scapes (stems) beforehand by soaking them in water to make them more pliable, and put together a beautiful braid in no time. It was hard work, even for her.

My messy twist of cured garlic.

Having watched one video once, I gathered together our cured garlic to try my hand at a new skill. It was fun to work with, but I did not soak the scapes first and it was amazing how tough they were to manipulate. But I persevered bravely, and attempted to organize the uncooperative stems into something both functional and beautiful.

I got functional, although garlic plants are inherently beautiful, so you can't really go wrong, even if they aren't perfectly put together.

Our first homegrown garlic, ready for eating.

After I was done I downgraded my description from "braid" to "weave".  Then maybe to "twisted"? Or "mangled"? But I did end up with a structure that had a handle on top, and all the garlic together so it can be hung.

Just a few more weeks and we will be planting next year's garlic plot. It will be the first using our own cloves. It will be another opportunity to perfect my braiding technique.

Self-Reliance

Well designed houses can make their residents self-reliant in energy production, 4D Home / Massachusetts

Sometimes the thought of changing the world seems like too much. Just taking care of ourselves is a full time job.

Often what works against both self change and world change are dependence and self-doubt. Both are magnified when we settle into overly comfortable physical and mental landscapes that lull us into settling for the status quo.

Author Pandora Poikilos writes, “We are so accustomed to the comforts of "I cannot", "I do not want to" and "it is too difficult" that we forget to realize when we stop doing things for ourselves and expect others to dance around us, we are not achieving greatness. We have made ourselves weak.” 

A healthy dose of self-reliance is beneficial because it is empowering to be able to take care of ourselves. It makes us strong.

In recent decades we have increasingly become dependent on corporations to provide almost everything. Instead of taking care of ourselves, like previous generations, we work at jobs that are often mundane or worse, to make money, so we can exchange it for the things we need and want.  

We buy fast, prepared, and restaurant food so we don't have to cook. We buy child care so we don't have to stay home with the kids. We buy music so we don't have to make it ourselves. We buy food from the other side of the planet so we don't have to grow it. We make ourselves weak.

Things like growing/preparing food, and raising children are not things that get in the way of life - they ARE life. What kinds of pleasurable experiences are we foregoing by choosing to work so we can pay other people to be responsible for the parts of our lives for which we no longer have time?

How will we know the joys of gardening and cooking if we are paying Monsanto and McDonalds to do it on our behalf? When will we discover that we can make our own energy if we are dependent on large utility companies and the grid? How can we raise our kids if we don't spend time with them?

It may be that your neighbours will help out in a crunch, but you can never trust that you will be saved by anyone. You will certainly never be saved by a corporation.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "nothing can bring you peace but yourself." No government, or corporate entity is going to save us - we are  going to have to do it ourselves, individually, and cooperatively. We can make ourselves strong through healthy self-reliance, then we can change the world.


See more energy self-reliant solar homes here.

No Mischief Monday

Living simply has allowed us the time to improve our cooking skills. We steer away from processed foods and try to prepare all food from scratch using whole ingredients.

Highlighted here is Baked Vegetable Salsa, freshly made and ready to grace chips, nachos, and/or burritos.

When we make it with up to four jalapeno peppers it can be a very firey concoction. We call the hottest of the hot our "Satan's Silly Salsa", and savour the burn... twice.

Simple living, simple food, simply delicious.

Free-Spirited Builders of the Pacific Coast

“If I have a right to life I have a right to living space… I wasn’t born with dollars in my pocket. I shouldn’t have to chase the big buck all my life just for a place to live.” Barbara Oke.

Lloyd Kahn, hand-built home and simple living guru, has published several books to inspire the frugal free spirit that lies within us all. All of his books not only explain and illustrate how to build your own shelter, but introduce you to people from around the world that have done it themselves. The inspiring message is that regular people with basic skills and tools can house themselves. Without a monster mortgage.

This is what grannystore.com said about Lloyd's book on free-thinking alternative builders and their structures on the Pacific Coast:

There's been a vortex of creative carpentry energy along the Pacific Coast over the last thirty years. Lloyd Kahn made four trips up the coast over a two-year period, shooting the photos that appear in this book.

Many of the builders shown here got started in the countercultural era of the '60s and '70s, and their work has never been shown in other books or magazine articles. As in the author's previous books Shelter and Home Work, there are three featured builders: Lloyd House, master craftsman and designer who has created a series of unique homes on a small island; Bruno Atkey, builder of a number of houses and lodges built of hand-split cedar on "The Wild Coast" (the Pacific Ocean side of Vancouver Island), and SunRay Kelley, barefoot builder tuned into Nature, who has designed and built wildly imaginative structures in Washington, California, and other parts of the country. In addition, there are working homesteads, sculptural buildings of driftwood, homes that are beautiful as well as practical, live-aboard boats, gypsy-type caravans, and examples of stunning architectural design.

The two predominant features of the landscape along the Pacific Coast are water and wood. Most of these buildings are on or close to the sea. Trees grow fast and tall in rainy Northwest forests; many of these buildings were constructed entirely from logs off the beach or trees from adjacent land. You are invited to join Kahn's journey up and down the coast: driving the roads, riding the ferries, camping on the beaches, meeting these builders, and seeing their unique creations.

In Kahn's second book, Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter, he ruminates on simpler times when peace, permissiveness, trust and freedom still dominated in North American life. He says, "Looking back, it's hard to believe you could ever do something like this, just an hour away from San Francisco. A home that costs practically nothing. No taxes, building inspectors, electricity, cars, roads. Are there things like this going on in American today? Could this be the same planet?"


It reminds me of the local example of Sombrio beach that for over 30 years provided a sanctuary for a group of simple living folks braving a radically alternative lifestyle.

"For decades, it and a chain of other beaches on the Canadian side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca have been home to free spirits who refuse to march to middle age and conformity with the rest of the baby boomers. Here amid abundant plant and animal life across from Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, the old ways -- early homesteader meets flower power -- prevail."
From: factsandopinions.com

The Sombrio "squatters" living in their "hippie shacks" eventually saw the dream die in 1997 when the BC government evicted them to make way for the newly formed Juan de Fuca Trail.


Paul Manly produced and directed a 2006 documentary on the Sombrio Beach community. Paul says, "Sombrio is an important story because it was an example of self-sufficient living in the modern age. Most of the people living there had ideological reasons for doing so. They wanted to create a smaller footprint and disengage from the world of excessive consumption. Although it looked like easy street in the summer, living at Sombrio was not always easy and required perseverance and a lot of daily work."


Is anything like this still going on anywhere in North America? Is this even the same planet?

Old Skills For A New World: Canning, Baking, Gardening on The Upswing

Modern society moves at a bewildering pace. Hardly able to keep up we succumb to the enticements of technology, entertainment, and the fast life. We are busy having fun, but along the way we have forgotten how to take care of ourselves. Basic skills of self sufficiency are dying with our elders. Increasingly, people are looking to low tech 'heritage' methods of living.

Progress and prosperity have made us into the largest collection of humanity in history incapable of taking care of ourselves. Houses and cars have become wombs, government and big business the umbilical cord. What will we do as we are born into a new world of expensive energy and deteriorating environment?

Our fault is to feel safe and secure in our habits, as if the way things are now is the way they will always be. Recent global economic turmoil has shown us the precariousness of this illusion. Things can, and will change, and we best be ready.

Heritage skills, as we refer to them today, are tried and tested instructions for taking care of ourselves. Activities like sewing, canning, and kneading bread seem like quaint pastimes from ancient history. Victory Gardens are making a comeback, as are food preservation workshops.

VicinSea, commenting on a previous post here, let me know she is a 20 year simple liver and part-time heritage skills teacher teaching food preservation, basketry, sewing/repairs and other self-sufficiency workshops in the Seattle area. It looks like she is keeping busy.

We are dependent on technology and low cost fossil energy to provide us with what we need. What happens when cheap energy is gone? Will you reach for the power can opener, or its hand-powered equivalent? What happens if trucks stop delivering food to our supermarkets, or the food they deliver is so expensive we can't afford it? We can learn skills to take care of our needs within our communities. Victoria, B.C. has a variety of options for learning.

Who has time to bake bread, let alone can your own produce? Make your own clothing? Right. But when cheap energy is gone, or we have lost or quit our job, we will need to look for healthier, less expensive alternatives. Life skills from days gone by will serve us well in the future.

Choosing a less complicated lifestyle is about freeing up time so I can live in ways that are beneficial to myself, others, and the environment. You either spend time in the blackberry bramble and the canning corner, or you spend time at work so you can pay someone to pick the berries, process them, and ship them to your local store.

I would rather harvest the berries and risk the bramble thorns. I would rather tend a bubbling cauldron of blackberry jamiliciousness. I would rather live a slower, less money-oriented, independent existence.

I love having the time to choose to pick berries and get scratched... in the rain. An added benefit is that I know what is in my food. I am in complete control of ingredients. No MSG, no high-sucrose corn syrup. And it saves me money.

If you are a life-long student, creating a simpler, slower-paced lifestyle could be for you. My household has already had Blackberry JamFest 2009, and a case of the freshest Blackberry jam available awaits the whole wheat, home-baked bread. We have had time to learn about a whole food, vegetarian diet. It has not been a burden, this change to simpler, lower-tech living. It is an interesting, thrilling, and tasty adventure.

Now my partner and I are learning how to cut each others hair. This is a money saving idea that is sure to be popular with the women, most of whom would rather go out in public without makeup than let their partner anywhere near their hair with scissors. Go slowly - you can always cut it shorter, you can't cut it longer. What could be next? Rock wall building? Hide tanning? Flint knapping?

What will you do when the power goes out? How about setting your songbook up on your inert laptop, take out your acoustic guitar, and, using your old-style ipod shuffle as a slide, sing the power's-out blues. Then have some home-baked bread with your own canned jam, followed by canned peaches by candle light. When it is time to turn in you can crawl under the bed cover you quilted with scrap pieces of fabric from your electric blanket. Heritage skills, not just for your grandparents any more.