Jul 25 2008
Lazy Summer?
I have been a little on and off the diet these days. Been eating quite a lot of food that I haven’t caught myself. Fishing is crap because it’s July. Late June, early July is the most difficult time of the year on these parts, but now things are starting to look better, with trush chicks abounding in the forest (they are easy to catch) and berries starting to appear. To my luck it seems like it is set to be a bumper crop of berries and possibly hazel nuts this year.
In regards to projects there aren’t really enough hours in the day. I’ve worked on a new bow, made a few baskets (need a lot of them come prime berry season) and started on digging the foundations of my earth lodge (not using the digging stick, but using a common shovel to speed things up a bit). I always do some experiments to keep learning, one thing I’ve done now is to make a couple of birch bark kettles to test them out. Been checking out a few potential food plants too.
Things I’ve done (not mentioned above):
- Fishing (don’t catch a lot these days though).
- Weeding the garden (not fun, but I can eat some of the weeds).
- Made a stone hide scraper for dry scraping the fur clothes I need for winter.
- Made a Siberian (Evenk) berry picker.
- Burned a mallet.
Things I’ve eaten:
- Trush
- Canadian goose
- Pemmican made of moose meat and rendered fat
- Brown trout (As always)
- Alpine bistort
- Angelica
- Chickweed
- Pineapple weed
- Lamb’s quarters
- Orpine
- Cloudberry
- Blueberry
- Crowberry
You may wonder what in the world these two photos got to do with it all. The first one is of me digging a cooking pit for two Canadian geese. The second one is my brother Arne, posing behind the closed pit. He needs any exposure he can get. Hard to trick any women into moving into a remote location like this.
My family joined me in the lavvo for a night, since they are visiting. The kids seemed to enjoy it. This unfortunately means that I’ll be living more or less indoors during the night for a while (2 weeks). Too bad, since I much prefer to sleep in the fresh air of the great outdoors. Below are my two daughters enjoying a snack on the season’s first berries.
The water here is so clean that you can drink straight of any lake, river or stream. That also comes in handy when doing laundry. I just soak them for a few days and then air dry them. It doesn’t remove stains however. I’ll have to experiment with using ash lye for that I think.
Oh, and two scenery pics that doesn’t fit anywhere else: