Living Off the Land

Years and years ago, my then husband and I were bitten by the wilderness bug. After I supported him while he got his teaching degree, we packed up the VW van and our six-month-old baby, Isabelle, and drove the Al-Can to Fairbanks, Alaska for his first teaching job.

There, we lived in a big apartment and lived off the canned veggies I put up before leaving Washington. Unless we could have lived on snow, the thing was a bust as far as self-sufficiency went. The four hours of daylight in winter was interesting but not something I cared to repeat. I don't like to complain, but sixty below zero was really too cold.

Some years and two more children later, we lived in Southeast Alaska. He taught school in Hoonah, a Tlingit (pronounced, inexplicably, Klinkit) fishing village on Chichagof Island. To this day I cannot eat fresh salmon or halibut, which we ate four times a week. I still love King Crab, which was a big treat up there.

Even though I spent two winters in Alaska and therefore am a genuine Sourdough, Alaska wasn't for me. The joke there was a Sourdough was someone who was sour on Alaska but didn't have the dough to get out.

Years later, I was a single mom when I found a better way to live off the land. I bought a farm in Missouri. Before long I married again. We raised chickens, bees and dairy goats and had an enormous garden. It was truly a land of milk and honey. My husband was raised on a farm in Iowa and had the kids and I baling hay and straw for the goats. It was all a tremendous amount of work.

He and I had parted company before the flood filled the house with water to the tops of the doors.

Self-sufficiency eludes me here, but a person could live on the deer that currently are leaving deep tracks in the Remote Garden. There are wild turkeys in the woods. If a person could develop a taste for raccoon they could turn the tables on those destructive varmints.

There are big catfish in the river. A neighbor stopped by to show me this one he got on a trot line a few days ago.

When I was little, my Grandma Belle grew strawberries for us "lil choldrun," so that's what I do.  My granddaughter Molly picked the last of this season's crop when she was up for a visit last week. She helped me make ice cream in the Donvier ice cream maker.

Molly and I also grazed on mulberries growing on trees along the road.

Sometimes, I am able to grow enough of a few veggies to last a year. I've made plenty of peach, grape and strawberry jams. Now, there are eggs from the hen. This year, there will be apples, pears and peaches from the trees. I still am eating hickory nuts from the huge harvest in 2010.

Black-caps do well here. I have tamed some of the wild things out behind the workshop. Last year, the hungry raccoons broke down the canes and didn't leave me any of the tasty wild raspberries. This year, the coon hound has roused himself to chase them off. Just starting to ripen, the berries are bigger and juicier than ever.

What can I say? Some of us love the idea of foraging.  We eat dock leaves in early spring and lamb's quarter in summer. We garden and enjoy canning and dehydrating food. We never will be truly self-sufficient or really be living off the land, but when we snack on black-caps, we think we are.

It's a Jungle Out There

When I was down at the bridge the other day, I happened to notice how many plants were vying for a place in the sun. This is the ground that slopes down to the river.

Several of these are invasive plants, but apparently none more than others. Wild roses, wild grapes and several different trees are co-existing with poison ivy.

Crown vetch dominates the roadside, along with chicory.

My front yard is mostly chicory, so I am considering changing the name from Hickory Acres to Chicory Acres.

After last summer's drought, conditions seem to be favorable for the return of everyone's least favorite weed, the thistle.

They are everywhere here in the country. Soon, their seeds will be floating hither and yon. The flowers are soft and fragrant but the plant is all stickers that make the other invasive plants look benign.

Years ago, there was a big outbreak of these pasture spoilers. There was  a weevil that attacked them and destroyed the roots. I'm hoping for a recurrence of that scenario. However, so far, I see no weevil, hear no weevil and can only speak about the weevil.

In the Company of Reptiles

It's nice to have company while I work in the flowers. This little toad hopped onto the shears yesterday when I went into the house for a drink of water. I hated to disturb it, so I left it to watch me with its beautiful golden eyes.

Once, a yellow-bellied racer snake was stretched out on the concrete. I offered it a little dead shrew, but it declined to accept it. I kept weeding nearby while it sunned itself. Then the silly dog started chasing a bumblebee. The dog hopped over the snake repeatedly until the snake got out of the way. That showed me why they are called racers. It zipped down the steps of the nearby fruit cellar, which was fine until that night when a tornado warning sent me down there.

For the record, the worst fruit cellar experience was sharing the storm cellar with three wet dogs who had been recently skunked. Gasp.

There was a beautiful red garter snake in the strawberry patch, watching me weed and doing beneficial work.

People keep asking me if I've seen any rattlesnakes here. I have not, but I know the reason why. There is a big black snake that lives in the big oak tree. Lissa noticed it stretched out on a limb one summer as we walked by underneath. I gave it to understand that I would not appreciate it falling on me. It's over five feet long.

Whenever I hear a lot of agitated bird squawks high in a tree, I go out and see the snake has gotten into a nest. Once, the birds were driving it out and several other birds had gathered on nearby branches to watch the neighborhood disturbance.

There were lots of mice here when I first moved in, but the racer lives under the house and now the cats have a hard time finding a single mouse.

When I was digging in the garden last fall, I came upon a clutch of empty snake eggs. That made me glad, because the more of the black snakes on my land, the better. I see them around and know all is well.

Even the poisonous snakes do no harm if you don't mess with them. A reptile presentation I saw when working at the library featured boa constrictors. The herpetologist said, "Whenever people are bitten by snakes, alcohol is involved, and it's not the snake that has been drinking."

Two years ago, on the path to the river, I came upon a beautiful copperhead, one of our poisonous snakes. It was stretched out as if for me to admire it. At the moment, I was hauling a big snapping turtle in a wagon.

That day, I learned about those turtles. The dogs had encountered it in the yard and were barking their fool heads off. Trying to get to the tail end of the turtle to lift it up into the wagon with the scoop shovel, I was surprised to see how quickly it could turn and face me with its scary-looking mouth. Finally, I shoveled it head first and loaded it into the little wagon. It  rolled off the shovel and landed on its back, which I thought would be better until I could finish relocating it. Halfway down the hill, I got Surprise No. 2: they can right themselves.

The copperhead, having heard my words of appreciation for how pretty it was, moved off the path. I used the dump feature on the wagon and the jumbo turtle scurried off. Surprise No. 3, they can really move fast when they want to.

People ask, "Aren't you bored living out there in the country?"