Winter Prep | Car Emergency Kit...

1:50 pm - 49 degrees - drizzling...

When my siblings and I started driving, our parents made sure we all had emergency kits in our cars, and we have all continued with that habit. Now that our kids are at that stage in their lives, we make sure they also have emergency kits.

Really everyone should have some basic emergency kit in their car - they come in very handy when on road trips and even in daily life.  Anything is better than nothing, and it's always good to be prepared.

Now that fall is here, we're starting to do our winter prep because snow is right around the corner... which for us means winter storms, and possibly getting stuck in the snow until we can get dug out. So I'm checking what I have stored in my SUV and restocking as needed.

Love that my Telluride has this storage compartment where I can keep everything out of the way and organized. 

The black bag is for random tools and misc. items - zip ties, fire starter, knife, matches, compass, mirror, handwarmers, duct tape, etc.

The red bag is for first aid related items - band aides, gloves, tweezers, gauze, pain killers, etc.

Between the back to chairs, I have a basket full of snacks, that gets regularly refilled. (Please excuse the dirty car - we live the mountains, and it is impossible to keep a clean car!)

Here's a list of what I have in my car...

Acetaminophen (Tylenol), Benadryl, Ibuprophen (Advil)

Bottled water

Car Safety Tool

Emergency Mylar Blanket

First Aid bag

Hand Warmers

Hand sanitizer

Hats, gloves, warm socks 

LifeStraw Water Filter

Nylon Rope

Outdoor Edge Knife Set

Snacks

Storage Bag

Portable Solar Wireless Charger

Rechargeable Flashlight 

Rechargeable LED Emergency Road Flares

Roadside Assistance Emergency Kit

Wipes

Zip ties

Harsh Truths About Homesteading and Off-Grid Living...

10:12 am - 65 degrees - clear sky, 24+ mph wind gusts...

First things first - you need to realize that the "simple life" isn't so simple. Too many new homesteaders fail to realize that a simpler life does not mean an easier life. In many ways, you will be working harder than you ever have before.

With that being said, if this lifestyle is the right choice for you and your family, all your hard work will be more than worth it!

Here are a few harsh truths that we have learned along the way...

A lot of family members and friends will think you are nuts. -- Get used to it. Some people just will not understand or embrace your lifestyle choice. They may even try to talk you out of it. That's okay, just keep doing what you are doing.

Instead of getting defensive, or frustrated, try to stay focused and positive. Try to surround yourself with supportive people who can help you achieve your goals.

Homesteading is unpredictable. -- Often times you are dealing with the whim of Mother Nature and she cannot be controlled. Not enough rain, and your garden or crops suffer, or the threat of a wildfire gets high. Too much rain, and it ruins your garden or crops, or your road washes out. Crazy howling wind (which is a normal thing here) causes its own damage. And snow... trying to keep our driveway/road open is a full-time job and makes all the chores 10 times harder.

Forest fire about 1.5 miles from our home.

Besides Mother Nature, you also have to deal with whatever Life throws at you. Every year is different. Every year has its own difficulties, hardships, and rewards.

Homesteading and off-grid living is year-round, long hours, and hard work. -- Homesteading is 365 days a year... in sickness and in health... sunshine, rain, howling wind, and snow... and often involves long hours with hard work. 

It is also hard to get away. Want to go on vacation for a week... a weekend... or even an overnight trip? Who is going to take care of the animals?

The Rules Of 3. -- Everything takes 3 times longer than expected. You think building the chicken coop will take 1 week to build - wrong it will take 3 weeks to build.  

3 regularly used items will break within a week of each other. The washing machine will die, then the next day the power inverter just stops working, then a several days later something breaks on one of the cars.

And finally, the top 3 - time, money, and healthy - one always seems to be missing when you're getting ready for a big project.

Both Homesteading and off-grid living cost money. -- Some people may choose to develop a sustainable income from this lifestyle, and some may choose to continue working their traditional jobs. Either way is great, just choose whatever works best for you and your family. 

Just keep in mind... you will still need some sort of steady income. This lifestyle is not free, in fact, sometimes it is quite costly. You will need financial resources to pay taxes, insurance, purchase equipment, medical expenses when they occur, and any other supplies you may need. Just try to take things one step at a time.

This lifestyle is not for dummies. -- In reality, there is a drastic learning curve for beginners. Unless you grew up with this lifestyle, you will find yourself looking up how to (fill in the blank) quite often. 

If you want to grow your own food, you will need to learn how to garden, and how to properly preserve that food. You will need to learn construction, plumbing, and electrical work. You will need to know how to build a chicken coop, or raised garden beds, or how to build a fence, or how to build a shed or barn, or how to wire your off-grid power system, or how to plumb your garden's irrigation system.

The vast amount of knowledge, over a wide spectrum, that you will need is sometimes daunting, and much of your education will be in the form of on-the-job training, and learning as you go.

You won't always be able to do everything yourself. -- Regardless of how hard you try to do it all yourself, sometimes you will need help. Whether that help is in the form of barter, trade, paid help, or simply getting advice from someone with more experience - it is nice to have a network of like-minded people who you can look to when needed.

You are going to fail at some things. -- Some of your failures may not be pretty. And some may result in should of, could of, would of moments.

This lifestyle is going to have its major ups and downs. Your farming equipment may fail. Your snow removal equipment may break during a snowstorm. You may run through your savings more quickly than you thought you would.

But if you try to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, you will hopefully maintain a healthy attitude.

Windstorm broke our first set of solar panels.

You may occasionally have a love / hate relationship with this lifestyle. -- You are going to have times of frustration, disappointment, failure, and ask yourself "what the heck are we doing?" "Why isn't anything going as planned?" "What have we gotten ourselves into?".

You will also have feelings of accomplishment, appreciation, and sometimes awe - which, at the end of the day, somehow makes all of the chaos worth it.

These harsh truths are not to discourage you, but to hopefully help you. With some advance planning and forethought, and by learning from other homesteader and off-griders' mistakes, you will be able to weather through the initial rough periods. With each passing year, you will gain more experience, more knowledge, and more confidence to handle the inevitable problems that come with the territory. You will also gain the satisfaction of living out a rewarding lifestyle that you and your family enjoy.

Self Reliant Living...

6:35pm - 56 degrees - scattered clouds...

Here's the thing... I'm a bit of a worrier. I find that when I'm worried about something, being able to take a positive, substantive action, makes me feel like I'm a bit more in control. This is true when preparing for the harsh upcoming Winter season. This is true when preparing for natural disasters - both small and large. It's true when dealing with any medial issues. And it's true when fretting about the economy. With the world in a bit of a turmoil these days, it seems that there's a lot of worrying going on, and not just in my own head.

With the rising costs (which everyone is feeling the pinch) I started wondering about the people who survived the Great Depression. My grandparents were teenagers during that time, and I've listened to their stories. But I still wonder... in hindsight, how would they have prepared themselves for such a tough time. If their parents, my great-grandparents, had known what was coming, what would they have done differently? What did they wish for in the midst of their survival efforts? What would they have deemed mandatory survival needs?

I'm a voracious reader... and once I'm interested in something I seek out every resource I can find to learn everything I can about a topic. And maybe I've been reading too many apocalyptic novels lately, but these are questions that are concerning to me.

These days, we're so conditioned to jump in the car and run to the store whenever we need (or want!) something. What would our world look like if you weren't able to do that as often, or possibly not at all? 

In this day and age, we also heavily rely on the internet. During a power outage, or when the internet is down, you can't Google, or ask Alexa, how to do something, or look something up. That's why it is essential to have physical resources to turn to when digital isn't an option. 

Being prepared for when times are tough is an exercise in self-reliant living. Getting through tough times - whether it is nature related or man-made related - will be easier if you have skills. Knowledge is power, especially when the unexpected happens.

Here are some invaluable books you'll want on your shelf to get you started... 

Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition

Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival

Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine

Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants: Identify, Harvest, and Use 

SAS Survival Handbook, Third Edition

The Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual

The Survival Medicine Handbook

The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, 2nd Edition

Ultimate Guide: Wiring, 9th Edition

When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes

Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook

...then you can continue to add to your collection - cook books, gardening and wild edibles specific to the region you live in, bread making books, animal husbandry, general food preservation, herbalism books - really the list could go on and on.

I would absolutely love book recommendations, and I encourage you to let me know your favorites in the comments below. 

We Moved Our Driveway...

2:03 pm - 68 degrees - watching thunder clouds roll in...

We finally did it! We moved our driveway over and made a parking area that is big enough to turn a trailer around. We have been wanting to do this for a while now, and I am so excited that it's almost done – all we have left is to finish planting out all the dirt areas.

From the main driveway, you were able to see down into our place, the house, the yard, the cars, everything. In the dry summer months, when someone drove by or it got windy, the dust would roll on down into our place. So with moving the driveway over, building a burm across the old driveway entrance and planting it out, it will give us that extra bit of privacy and hopefully keep the dust out.

Last fall, Tony roughed in the new driveway and was able to get some base rock down before winter.

Then in early April Tony started cutting down trees, this was originally to expand our wildfire defensible space around the house {click here}, but it evolved into a much larger project...

After a few of the trees came down and we picked up the mess, we walked around our driveway (new and old) and started tossing around ideas of how we wanted to get rid of the old driveway entrance, and just how everything would lay out and come together. Then Tony suggested that we could take some dirt from over here and put it over there and voila, we could have a really large parking area. I said let's do it!

A few weeks went by and then I came home to a big surprise! Tony was in the excavator and a friend was in a bulldozer and they were moving a TON of dirt! I was giddy with excitement that the driveway project was actually happening!

From the time Tony started moving dirt, it took 3 and a half days (over a week and a half time period) to complete the driveway and parking area project and since Tony was able to reuse the rock from the old driveway in the new parking area, we were able to save about $2500 because we didn't need to buy rock - I really loved that part!

I could not be happier with how this project has turned out, it's even better than I anticipated. Now we just have to finish planting out all of the dirt areas.

New Parking Area

We can park cars/trucks - 6 wide, 2 deep.

Just above the row of boulders on the middle terrace, we planted some Everybearing Strawberries. I know we're taking a bit of a chance having the strawberries out in the open like that, but hopefully the deer will leave the majority of them alone and they will spread and creep around and down the boulder wall.

Everbearing Strawberries

About 6 feet behind the strawberries, is a row of Cascara trees, and right behind those are two rows of Redstem Ceanothus.

Cascara
(Rhamnus purshiana)

Redstem Ceanothus
(Ceanothus sanguineus)

Going up the back wall of the burm that blocks off the entrance to our old driveway, we have several rows of Redstem Ceanothus, followed by several roes of Western White Pine, one row of Rocky Mountain Maples, and two more rows of Western White Pines. On the very top we have a row of Cascara trees and below that, on the main driveway side, is a row of American Cranberries. We will be adding some more mature Vine Maples and maybe a few Noble Firs on the top to help block the view a bit more until everything else starts to grow up.

Western White Pine
(Pinus monticola)

Rocky Mountain Maple
(Acer glabrum)

  

American Cranberry
(Vaccinium macrocarpon)

And finally back towards the house I built a stone retaining wall to make a flower bed where we planted some Kinnikinnick.

Kinnikinnick
(Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)

Current Plant Count:

15 American Cranberries

14 Cascaras

26 Ceanothus' 

50 Everbearing Strawberries

7 Kinnikinnick

15 Rocky Mountain Maples

43 Western White Pines

In addition to all of the baby plants we are putting in, we're also going to throw down more grass seed to help stabilize all of the dirt. I am so excited, I can't wait for everything to grow up. 

Still Need To Plant/Transplant:

Evergreen Huckleberry

Kinnikinnick

Noble Fir

Oregon Sunshine

Pacific Crabapple

Ponderosa Pine

Thimbleberry

Vine Maple

Berry Hike...

3:30 pm - 72 degrees - cloudy...

I love, love, love living in the mountains.  Being able to step outside the front door and walk around our property harvesting wild berries, is just amazing!  Now that harvest season is upon us, it’s time to go on another berry hike and see what we can find.

There are so many different types of shrubs and trees that offer up a berry tempting variety of fruits for our taste buds.  However, it’s always important to keep in mind that not all fruits found in our forest are safe to eat.  So after a tasty stroll around the property, here’s what we found...

Blackcap aka Wild Black Raspberry {Rubus occidentalis}

Blackcap aka Wild Black Raspberry {Rubus occidentalis}

The Blackcap or Black Raspberries are closely related to the Red Raspberry but the black fruit makes them look like Blackberries.  Even though many may get them confused, they have a taste that is uniquely their own and oh so delicious!

Blue Elderberry aka Blue Elder {Sambucus cerulea}

Whether it be red or blue, Elderberries are easy to like.  They are user-friendly.  Jam, jelly, pies, syrup, schnapps, brandy and wine can all be made from those tiny little berries.  The flowers are also edible and can be used in pancakes and muffins or just dipped in batter and fried.  They also make a nice tea.

Blue Huckleberry {Vaccinium deliciosum}

Any hiker in the Pacific Northwest worth his or her weight in Huckleberries, know that late summer hiking has joys all its own...of a juicy, purple/blue variety.  The wild Blue Huckleberry is a very coveted berry.  Pickers often find themselves competing with Black bears, cougars, and other native animals for the sweet, juicy huckleberries which are just delicious in pies, jam, pancakes, muffins, ice cream, syrup, and oh so much more.

Oregon  Grape {Mahonia nervosa}

The Oregon Grape is not related to true grapes, but gets its name from the purple cluster of berries whose color and slightly dusted appearance are reminiscent of grapes.  The berries are highly acidic (sour), but they make a delicious jam.

Oval Leaf Blueberry aka Alaska Blueberry aka Early Blueberry {Vaccinium ovalifolium}

The wild Blueberries that we found in our yard are likely the most well know berry on our list of berries we’ve found here.  And personally I think they taste just as good if not better than the ones bought in the store.  I even had to pick a handful so I can make Blueberry pancakes in the morning.

Red Elderberry {Sambucus racemosa}

Some references say Red Elderberries are edible, some say they are not.  Basically what I have found out is that if you eat a lot of raw, whole, Red Elderberries, you will most likely end up with an upset stomach.  If they are deseeded and cooked, then they are just fine.

Red Huckleberry {Vaccinium parvifolium}

These delicate translucent berries have been a source of food for generations of Northwest natives, animals and people alike.  As heavily used as they are, not everyone enjoys their tangy-tart flavor.  It is for this reason that the Red Huckleberries are usually combines with other berries, like the Blueberry to add sweetness.

Salal {Gaultheria shallon}

The Salal’s dark blue berries and young leaves are both edible, and both with a unique flavor.  Salal berries were a significant food resource for Native Americas, who both ate them fresh and dried them into cakes.  More recently, the berries are used in james, preserves and pies.  They are often combined with Oregon Grape berries because the tartness of the Oregon Grape is partially masked by the mild sweetness of the Salal berries.

Salmonberry {Rubus spectabilis}

The Salmonberry, Thimbleberry, Trailing Blackberry and Black Caps all share the fruit structure of the Raspberry, with the fruit pulling away from its receptacle.  Books often call the Salmonberry “insipid” but depending on ripeness and where you found them, they are good eaten raw and when processed into jam, jelly and wine.

Stink Currant aka Blue Currant {Ribes bracteosum}

Stink Currant is named for its skunky aroma.  It’s far less pungent than Skunk Cabbage, and the name doesn’t always translate to flavor.  It seems that the flavor of these berries can range anywhere from nasty to delicious. 

Thimbleberry {Rubus parviflorus}

Thimbleberries are larger, flatter, and softer than Raspberries, and have many small seeds.  Because the fruit if so soft, it does not pack or ship well, so Thimbleberries are rarely cultivated commercially.  However, wild Thimbleberries can be eaten raw, dried or made into jam.

Trailing Blackberry {Rubus ursinus}

This Blackberry is not the big brambly invasive bully lining area rivers and roadways.  Our native Trailing Blackberry likes to spread.  Instead of forming self supported brambles, it rambles about the landscape as a vine-like ground cover, but tastes just as delicious as the brambly Blackberry.

...we found quite a few actually!  I just love having all these delicious wild edible berries around our home!  

Mountain Chores...

3:42 pm - 40 degrees - raining...

Yesterday we had a break from the wind and rain.  It was in the mid-40s, that’s winter t-shirt weather up here; basically it was the perfect day to spend outside and do a little outside spring cleaning.  

We still have patches of snow here and there, but the majority of it has melted away.  So yesterday I started to rake all the small rocks that were tossed into the yard from the snow blower back onto the driveway.  One bad side effect of using the snow blower on a gravel road are all the rocks that are tossed up to 16+ feet into the yard.  There are so many little rocks in the yard that unfortunately it doesn’t even look like I did anything there yesterday. 

We also spent a good portion of the day picking up and burning most of the fallen and broken tree branches from around our main driveway.  Tony walked around with a pole saw cutting off the broken branches from the trees.  He got a little side tracked and started limbing the trees up, so we had quite a pile of branches and twigs to burn. 

The kids decided to take a break from all the yardwork to sneak in some bow and arrow practice.

By the end of the day, everyone was tired as we sat around our bonfire to roast some hot dogs and marshmallows.  All in all, it was a good productive day.