The Home Canning Season

Sorry for the haitus. Summer, while being one of the best times of year for prepping projects, is also one of the busiest times of year for my day job. My goal is to post once a week during the rest of the summer and hopefully share all sorts of fun projects with everyone. Today my wife is starting the first batch of canning for the year, cherry almond jam canned with honey. It's a new experiment in that we have never canned with honey before, so it should be an experience. The kids love the cherry pitter, so they have been conscripted to help. So far it's been a fairly productive season for fruit, even our new plants are starting to show fruit. We planted 3 new blueberry bushes from North End Organic Nursery, and a Nanking Cherry, Black Lace Elderberry, Red Currant, and Mulberry from The Nature Company. There is a lot to be said about buying plants grown in the same soil you will be moving them to. In the past we've always purchased from Zamzows or the big box stores, and always had to deal with shocked and stressed plants. So far, no shock, and our blueberries and currant bush are already producing new fruit despite only being in the ground a few weeks. If you are in Southwest Idaho, I strongly recommend either company for quality fruit and veggie plants. The Nature Company will also take plants removed when you change your landscaping, rehabilitate them, and find new homes for them, so if you are doing any major lawn rennovation this year, give them a call!

The First Sprouts of the Season!

As previously mentioned, we started our garden indoors this year, and now, just one week into the process, we are already seeing some vegetables of our labors. Our broccoli and cauliflower are sprouting very nicely. If our goal was just to get sprouts to eat, we would already be harvesting the young, succulant greens. But, we have bolder ambitions for those little verdant stalks, introducing a new strain of broccoli to our town.

Coping With Disaster... and Children

Parenthood can be stressful enough, but dealing with disaster and small children sounds like a recipe for an aneurysm. However, it doesn't have to be a painful experience, at least, more than the crysis itself will demand. One small step in helping your kids cope is to make them familiar with things that will be around even after a disaster. Today, we purchased two Lego dynamo flashlights for our youngest boys. The friendly faces and bright colors will help keep their spirits up, no matter how dark the night. They are fairly large, but they put out a significant amount of light from each foot. With LED bulbs and a dynamo charger, there's no worry about the kids burning them out or running batteries dead any time soon. Granted, their time to play with them is limited and supervised, but helping our kids become familiar with the equipment that may some day be relied on so heavily will give them some basic mechanisms to cope with a world that is otherwise so chaotic.

The Gardening Season is Officially Here

Today marks the beginning of the 2011 Gardening season. It was a great day to start tomatoes, celery, and several other crops indoors. Our planting is usually done in little Dixie cups, and we had to finish last year's store of them before moving on to our biodegradable planters. Over the last several months, we have saved all of our empty toilet paper tubes. When cut in half, then notched and folded, they make great planting cups that can be used, then transplanted with the young plants when we pass the last frost.

I also started my long procrastinated indoor herb garden. Basil, cilantro, thyme, and oregano are now sitting in their new homes, basking in the little bit of south facing sunlight we receive until the days grow longer. My wife spent most of her early afternoon planting the vegetable seeds, her hard work is definitely adding an urgency to the garden expansion and new beds that need to be put in before mid-April.

Looking towards the short term as well

If the events in Japan these last few days have proven anything, it's be prepared in the short term as well as the long term.

This weekend has been a real eye opener to my wife and I as we have noticed our 72 hour kits have become woefully disorganized and underequipped. Looking at the most likely potential disasters for our area, we've realized we need to really focus on those disasters and hope anything that really happens either falls in those categories or is generic enough to be survivable with common sense and good basic equipment.

We have also gone through our pantried food storage and reorganized our shelves after the Ridley's case lots sale purchases. It's amazing both how much and how little food one can have, plenty of food to survive for 3-4 months, but there are some gaps in our coverage that need to be addressed. We have plenty of canned vegetables and fruits, and plenty of dried grains and legumes, but basic items like yeast, salt, and vinegar need to be built up considerably.

With all the focus on Japan, let's not overlook the lessons taught to us from this tragedy. If the tsunami that hit Sendai had hit any metro area on the West Coast, the death toll would be considerably higher. Japan has encouraged it's citizens to be prepared for exactly the event that happened, and it paid off in a big way.

Small Disappointments

Well, this weekend I was reminded that I do not have control of everything. While hoping to get the rain cisterns buried, I instead woke up to find a couple inches of fresh snow on the ground. As tempting as it is to dig a 5 foot cube in frozen ground, it will be thawed again in a few days and we'll try then.

On another note, I found this morning that my 2 year old had found one of the jello cups we made over the weekend and smeared it across the carpet and walls. It cleans easily off the walls (heat does wonders for sugars), and the floors cleaned up using our homemade floor cleaner. To make up for lack of progress on the water cisterns, I'll include the recipe we use instead.

Carpet Cleaning Solution

1/4 C. liquid dish soap (preferably without dyes)

1/4 C. hydrogen peroxide

2 C. water

Mix ingredients together. Soak area to be cleaned with mixture and let sit for 1 minute. Then scrub with stiff bristled brush, the foam should gain the color of the stain. Remove excess mixture with a clean rag. Let dry, then vacuum. Stronger stains may require additional treatments.

We have a light colored carpet (the naivety of pre-children decision making) and it works great, but as always, test it on a small, inconspicuous patch before attempting to use on your entire floor.

Projects for the weekend

Well, if it doesn't rain and snow all weekend, it will be time to continue one of our aforementioned projects. Currently we can only store 50 gallons of water, which is a 10 day supply for our family. As we do not live within walking distance of any open body of water and are currently reliant on municipal water, it was decided that our best option is rainwater capture. So this weekend, weather permitting, we will be burying 2 250 gallon containers and using them for rainwater collection. Their primary use will be to water the garden, but should the city water not be available, we can also filter it for our use. We will also have to build a filtration system going into the tanks, and a variant on the roof cleaner so we can prevent the majority of crud from our normally dry roof from getting into the tanks. With their position buried underground, they would be a pain to clean. I'm undecided at this point on whether to use a solar pond pump or a hand pump to retrieve the water, but as the project progresses, we'll make a final decision on that.