Forgotten Skills

Photo credit:  Village Green Network

One of the Facebook/Blog pages I follow started this morning off with these words:  "Amazing how a decision to start growing your own food cascades into so many different things in your life. New friends (invaluable support), baking your own bread, making your own taco seasoning, making your own laundry soap. The list goes on and on..."  (Karen Taylor of Old Pa Farm) Not sure my list of mostly forgotten skills would look exactly like that but the words and sentiment got me thinking about how many old and [by many people] forgotten skills I use in my day.  Some things I do because it's how I learned to do it growing up and some is a conscious choice for either thrift or to leave an environmentally softer footprint on the Earth.

I garden.  Most years I do anyway.  And I will be when this coming Spring finally gets itself underway.  In the past I've used much the same methods I learned from my Dad - organic for the most part but willing to bring in a chemical for limited use if I found myself dealing with a pest I couldn't otherwise control.  In the past, I've hired someone to rototill the ground but this year I'm going to experiment with creating permaculture beds.  That's something I'm pretty excited about!

I preserve garden produce for later use.  This summer I want to make red and green salsa, dilly beans, apple pie filling, applesauce, spaghetti sauce, garlic preserved in vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, refrigerator dill pickles, strawberry freezer jam, frozen diced tomatoes, and several dried herb blends.

I cook from scratch.  Well, sometimes.  I admit a lot more boxed stuff has slipped in during the past 18 months.  It's been a time of big adjustments that affect all parts of my life and that's part of the reason that real cooking has fallen by the wayside.  It's something I laugh about now and then, but Derek loves the TGI Friday's(TM) Tater Skins from the freezer isle and would eat them 3-4 times a week... I about had a heart attack right there in the frozen food section when I saw the price and started making them at home.  Mine are so much better he tells everyone that they "are the bomb!" And I want to get back to even more real cooking over the coming months.  One of the first things I plan on doing is getting my sourdough starter going again and making our bread.

I make many of my own cleaning products.  Again, I've slipped a little in doing this but getting back to it more and more.  I've found that I can make my own product that is very effective for much less money. Some of my forays in cleaning products have been laundry soap, dryer sheets, and a concoction (I hope I can replicate) that did an awesome job getting puppy stains out of our carpets.

I create things.  For Christmas I made Derek an afghan in his favorite sports team colors and since we have serious lack of bedding (thanks, in part, to puppy chewing) it's been helpful in keeping him warm on some of those unusually cold nights we've had lately.  Over the last year and a half I also made some of the items we've gifted for birthdays and Christmas, cards, our potholders and some of the decor on our walls.  Several items have used recycled or re-purposed materials.  I love that it saves money, but even more I love that it is unique, kind of quirky and very personal.

I do my own home repairs and upgrades.  Inasmuch as it's safe and I have the skills to do a reasonably good job, I do my own repairs and upgrades.  A recent example was replacing a burned out breaker in our box.  Calling an electrician would have run around $100.  A few friends telling me it was an easy do-it-yourself job and a Youtube tutorial later, I did it myself.  The new breaker cost $11.84, including tax.  Money savings aside, it was a powerful feeling when I flipped that switch and everything worked!

I get to know my neighbors.  For me, a sense of community is important.  I am a naturally friendly person and I like finding people nearby who can share information and skills and, sometimes, garden tools.  Besides, being sociable is a good skill to have... so many of us suffer from nearly unbearable loneliness these days.  I also want to try and barter for things I can't do on my own like get our one neighbor who co-owns a dog grooming business with his daughter to cut the dog's toe nails.  I've talked to him a number of times about gardening and learned that he's diabetic and baked goods won't appeal as a trade off... so I'm hoping this summer to woo him into a barter arrangement with lots of fresh garden-ripe tomatoes!

Could I do more?  Sure.  Will I?  In time, probably.  I've already started a list of upgrades and additions for the 2015 garden...

There's An App For That

Do you forage for food?

I'd never exactly put that word to it until recently, but I do.  I always have.  I grew up with parents who were foragers.  Some of my favorite childhood memories are fruit picking trips cleverly disguised as weekend family camping trips.  Not far outside of Shelley, ID (my... how far I've wandered!) you can, or at least you could 30-40 years ago, drive up into the mountains through Wolverine Canyon.  We did that a lot when I was kid because, looking at it with today's insight, it was both nearby and filled with resources.

I remember 'harvesting' these things in Wolverine Canyon:

• Chokecherries
• Elderberries
• Currants (Yellow, Red and Black ones)
• Oregon Grapes
• Crawfish
• Trout
• Deer
• Sage Hen
• All kinds of fallen trees for firewood
• Watercress

We'd bring one or more of these things home on any given trip.  The next day or two would be devoted to preserving (except the crawfish and watercress which were always used fresh) the bounty for later use.  Chokecherries, Elderberries, Currants and the Grapes were quickly turned into jams and jellies.  The trout was filleted and sage hens cut up and either frozen or canned.  Deer was usually processed at a local butcher who would do game meat.  And wood was chopped down into smaller pieces to burn as supplemental heat all winter.

A few times my dad cut Chokecherry branches that had naturally formed into a good shape for a cane or walking stick and then peeled back the bark, shaved them smooth with his pocket knife and, when they were well dried, oiled them so they are a luscious natural wood finish.   Later they were cut to height as he sold or gifted them away.  I still have the one he made especially for my mom and if I shrink the way she did in her later years one day it will be the right height for me, too.

It was just a normal part of how we lived.

Just like picking asparagus growing along the roadsides in the spring...  Or picking the extra apples, with permission of course, from a neighbor's tree for juice, jelly, apple sauce, pie filling and dehydrated apple chips.

Some day make your own apple chips!  Try dipping the apple slices in cinnamon and sugar before drying.  Or... my favorite:  strawberry banana jello powder.

Everywhere I've been after that it's a normal thing to mentally tally the resources around me.  Now there's an app that will track a lot of that for me.  I signed up on Neighborhood Fruit and took a look around this morning.  It seems like a pretty new thing that doesn't have a lot of information entered in for many locales yet.  But it's an interesting idea.  One I really like and will continue to check back periodically.

On Neighborhood Fruit, you can both enter information about fruit you have available to others who will come glean it and search for those opportunities for yourself.  Some estimates say that as much as 80% of the fruit growing in backyards around the country is not used while the fruit we do eat is grown in water-intensive orchards far from our homes.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  It's not sustainable or responsible.

In the spring, I have every intention of adding fruit trees to my yard.  And I know they'll produce more than I could ever hope to use myself.  I will be entering them on Neighborhood Fruit.