Butchering Chickens: Slow and Effortful

For five or six years, we have raised laying hens and enjoyed them immensely, for their eggs, foraging for bugs, and alerting us to predators, as well as for their entertaining antics.  We have kept 4-6 at a time, and named them.  I have never been able to kill any or eat those that died.

However, I do like to eat chicken, so I thought it time to explore raising and butchering meat chickens.   A friend  had the same idea.  So she bought 25 Cornish cross chicks, which are the ones  most commonly raised for meat in the U.S.  We agreed that she would care for them for 6-8 weeks, we would split the cost of purchase and feed, and then my husband and I would join her for the butchering work.  

Restraining cones with occupants

Here is what I learned and what I will do in the future.

When we arrived, my friend was fuming that the development of this breed is unconscionable and she will never buy them again.  The Cornish cross is bred to gain weight so rapidly that by 6-8 weeks (6 weeks for us), they are unable to live with their unnatural weight distribution.  Their hearts, lungs, and legs cannot support them.  Many had respiratory problems, three appeared to have died of heart attacks, and one had a broken leg.  None behaved like her laying hens, which are active, social, and curious roamers.  These chickens were listless and sedentary.  They also SMELLED BAD – which is apparently a known trait.   Her daughter cried at the state of them.

We set up the butchering area outside for five of us to work:

Moose Rutting Season in Alaska

It is axiomatic that hunters always see their target AFTER the conclusion of hunting season.  We have found that to be true of bull moose in our yard.

At twilight earlier this week, while my husband and I were thinking amorous thoughts, we heard a moose beyond the trees with the same idea.  He was repeating a gutteral “huh, huh, huh” sound which is apparently supposed to make nearby females of the species go wild with excitement.  Sure enough, a few minutes later, a large cow (moose) and her yearling calf emerged from the woods beyond our chicken coop, east of where we heard the bull.

Cow with calf this spring

The mother led the two of them on an ambulatory buffet, leaning down to the cranberries and reaching up toward birch and ash branches.    She seemed absolutely uninterested in the “come hither” sounds of the male in the woods.  The young calf, though, was curious or attracted.  She took a few tentative steps toward the sound, then looked back at her mom, and then a few more, reminding me of a teenager who is torn between a desire to date the bad boy in town and wanting her parents' approval.  She reached the edge of the trees and slipped among them before chickening out and trotting back to the cow.

Moose in game camera

Suddenly the bull appeared in the yard, like an actor making his appearance once the audience has anticipated it.  He was young, and smaller than the cow.  He halved the distance to the females and then displayed his manliness by swiping elderberry bushes with his paddles and pawing at the ground. The mother watched him out of the corner of her eye, while her calf peeked shyly from under her belly.  Then, with what struck me as absolute disdain, the two of them turned and slowly walked away from him up the hill into the darkness, leaving the bull alone, with no conquest for the night.   He trotted after them, in a half-hearted sort of way, maybe hopeful but without much confidence.  Any budding romance would transpire out of view.

Alaska Honey Harvest: Raise your own sweet

For the past few years, our four hives have produced a total of 11-17.5 gallons of delicious and useful honey each summer (depending on weather and hive population). And to my delight, each year's harvest tastes different:  2016 tasted deliciously like caramel and 2017 offered a wonderfully floral flavor.  This year's low production (because of all the rain?) is tasty but without the extra quality of the prior two years. What will next year bring?

Lots of bees making honey!

To someone who thinks of honey as a topper only for an occasional biscuit, our homestead production volumes may seem excessive.  Me, too, at first. The harvests inspired me to find many uses for that delectable golden syrup.  I learned that food is only one end product.  Below are various frequent uses as well as information about the bees we raise and how we extract the honey.

Hygiene:
Honey is a humectant, so it attracts water molecules in the air, as a natural moisturizer. It can soothe sunburn or windburned skin as well as dry hair.  I give myself a honey facial and hair treatment 2 or 3 times a month.  Imagine how lovely that smells!  I simply dilute a few tablespoons of honey and slather it all over my head and face, letting it rest for about 20 minutes.  It rinses out (easily) in a bath or shower, leaving soft skin and fluffy hair with healthier looking ends.  I have made moisturizing bars with honey, beeswax, and lanolin for friends, but at home, it is easiest to spoon the honey straight out of a jar. If you have a pint in your pantry, give it a try.

Medicine:  Honey tempers the sting of a burn or bug bite, and its anti-microbial properties have  been known for thousands of years to protect cuts and scrapes from infection.  Many people add it to hot liquids to calm a cough or sore throat, and to render strong tasting medicines more palatable. For example, some people soak garlic cloves in honey and pop those to ward off pesky colds.

Regular hive check

Alcohol:  I have made several batches of mead.  For some reason, the straight honey/water/yeast mixture ferments less reliably for me than those mixed with wild plants and their natural yeasts. So I favor the latter.  Raspberry mead is my favorite.  The results have been dry with a gorgeous color, a fruit forward scent and a lingering nutty aftertaste. I have also flavored mead with elderflowers which impart a delicate flavor.  Maybe I will try a cranberry mead this fall.

Canning Home Raised Rabbit and Vegetables for Winter Food

September is when we are busy putting up lots of food for winter.  This is a satisfying feeling, rather like graduation. The efforts expended in earlier months to feed ourselves prove fruitful.  

Some end-of-season herbs, I dry, crumble, and store in jars. I particularly love lemon balm, mints, and red clover in teas. Anise hyssop is good, too. I also save and dry orange peel throughout the year (great in pea soup and teas).  This year, I decided to dry nasturtium and mustard leaves,  to enjoy their pungent flavors in winter onion dips and baked potatoes.  (Nasturtium tastes like horseradish).

Other foods I can in mason jars, starting with vegetables.  Last week, I canned about 15 quarts of kohlrabi, beets, cabbage, broccoli leaves, and mixed vegetable broth (from tough stalks). (Question: Does anyone really LIKE kohlrabi?  It looks like an alien softball and the flavor is turnip-like, but it grows easily here.)

This week has been devoted to processing the rabbits, a time consuming, week-long endeavor for my husband and me.  We raised 15 healthy Flemish giants this year. (An adult is bigger than a house cat). Six will go to a young mom in Willow who will return them (or six others, since 6 become 36 pretty quickly) to us in the spring. The other 9 will yield plenty of food this winter.

After what I hope has been a happy and healthy life for the rabbits,  Bryan shoots them quickly with a .22.  To skin them with a super sharp Cutco knife, he built a plastic, waist-high abattoir and pulls up a little bench.  Saving the hides requires meticulous work, requiring about an hour per rabbit, so he harvests three in a morning.  That is about all I can cook in a day, anyway, if I expect to accomplish anything else.  

Remote Living: Food, Don't Take Mother Nature For Granted

The biggest lesson I have learned from increasing our reliance on personal food production is:  “Don't expect last year's harvest to repeat.” Maybe Mother Nature has a sense of humor.  She certainly throws some curve balls.  Because each season's harvest varies, I am learning observation and humility, and rebounding with a range of preservation techniques and alternative crops and recipes for when X or Y disappoints.  Below is a summary of this year's results with birch sap, honey bees, chickens, berries, vegetables, and herbs.   High points:  raspberry mead, nasturtium pesto, and naturalized cilantro. Oh, and moose didn't linger to devastate the berry bushes and apple trees.  Low points: birch sap and a rainy July.

An 8 foot tall swarm of honey bees

BIRCH SAP:  We were TOTALLY SKUNKED on birch sap collection, which absolutely blindsided us since the prior three years had been so easy and successful. In fact, we nearly doubled the number of tapped trees in anticipation (from 30 to nearly 55) and finished off the remaining sap and syrup from the prior year. The desultory drips and measly harvest result, I learned, from meager diurnal temperature differentiation.  Ah, yes, that.    Heard and noted.  So no syrup this year (need to reduce 100 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup).  We made twenty gallons of beer with the sap, which was fine, but this year's carboy of birch sap wine tastes watery.  Darn.

Spring Black Bear - Good Eating

On-line descriptions of bear meat as greasy and gamey give this tasty fare a BAD RAP.  I have NEVER found that to be true for the black bears we harvest in May and June (here in Alaska).  In fact, they are so lean (after a long winter in hibernation) that there is too little fat to save for lard.  

If you have been interested in trying bear meat but disappointed by the paucity of available recipes (almost always a stew), perhaps the list below of some of my preparations will be appealing. Since I am the kind of chef who cooks with a “bit of this and a bit of that,” the following meals are descriptions, rather than detailed recipes.
--------------------------
The backstrap is slim, like a flank steak, but as tender as a beef fillet.  We grill it and flavor it like any beef steak.

The huge hams (shoulders and butt)  I smoke (over local alder wood)  between 170-200 degrees F for 10 hours.  The meat looks like roast beef but in taste and texture is more like smoked pork loin.  We cut them up to use in sandwiches, such as reubens and ham and cheese, and as a meat in entree salads, pea soups, and bean dishes. I don't flavor them when smoking, in order to vary the recipes later for all those pounds of meat... over many meals.

The Unpredictability of Raising Food

Raising one's own food - whether it is a pot of herbs on a window sill or a farm - is a satisfying endeavor.  But the results can be unpredictable.  Usually the variances are due to my own errors, but Mother Nature throws curve balls each year, too. For people who live in a town, a failure of a crop just means a trip to the supermarket.  But for people living remotely, as we do, learning to grow, harvest, and store food is a high priority.  We made many naive mistakes, and sometimes took several years to draw logical conclusions and make appropriate changes.  Now, though, we raise and forage for about 65 foods, including meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and sweets.

For readers who think, "One of these days, I'll throw some seeds in the ground," may the following highs and lows of our experience help you start off better and advance faster than we did.  Notes are organized for perennial and annual plants, eggs, meat, honey bees, and harvesting/storing food.

PERENNIAL PLANTS:
Perennial plants, both native and domesticated, are NO BRAINERS.  They can produce for decades, require very little care, and the wild ones offer excellent information about the types of plants well suited to your locale.

How I Harvest Wild Plants for Food and Remedies

Fireweed, clover, and yarrow on our
property in Southcentral Alaska

Many resources (books and online) that encourage readers to collect wild plants for food, medicine, and other purposes, neglect to describe WHEN and HOW to harvest, dry, and store them.  This deterred me for several years.  Then I met a delightful woman who has become my mentor - the go-to person anytime a cartoon-like “Huh?” forms above my head.   By trial and error, year by year, I am learning about the bounty in my midst.  My new enthusiasm combines elements of botany, gardening, wandering, observation, research, and cooking.  It is increasing my independence as well as my respect for Mother Nature.

Below, I answer FAQs that may help other novices who want to get started on simple preparations of plants they recognize as safe and not sprayed by pesticides.  The questions are sequenced from plant harvest to storage through preparation.

Bees and Wasps: Hives, Stings, and Remedies

Because we are beekeepers in a remote, wooded area of Alaska, I have become much more attentive to all the pollinators on my plants.  For each of the last eight years we have cleared patches and paths in our  thickly wooded property, I have gotten “up close and personal” with a number of other stinging insects, too.  In fact, my husband, who was wearing Kevlar chaps while chainsawing recently, was stung multiple times just above the top of the chaps - near his groin!  Ouch!  He came bolting out of the woods like Forrest Gump ("Run, Forrest, run").

This experience, plus a “bad year” for bees and wasps here, prompted further research. (Informative insect information can be found at www.insectidentification.org, www.insectstings.co.uk and www.beespotter.org.)

The two most interesting factoids I have learned are about the venom (bee and wasp venom have different pHs) and the hives.  Both may help me (as well as readers) respond better to future trans-species altercations.

Yellow Jacket

All stinging insects are far less dangerous, even benign, when they are out and about on their own, pollinating (bees) or predating (wasps). However, they can be scary and dangerous if you disturb their nests/hives.  Not only may one sting you, it will emit a pheromone that triggers a warrior response to attract others to sting you, too!  Withdrawal is the better part of valor, followed by washing the clothes that may be imprinted with the pheromones. My husband washes his bee suit after every hive check.

Weeds: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Eat 'Em!

Several years ago, I earned a Master Gardener certificate through an excellent, on-line class via a state university.  But deep down, I know that I am just a weed farmer.

Everything grows so fast in an Alaskan summer that my property is overwhelmed by prolific “native plants” (which is the politically correct way to refer to weeds). I live the expression, "watching the grass grow."   My vegetable and flower plots wage  losing battles against nettles and horsetail. Dandelions proliferate everywhere. Sweet grass grows to 6 or 7 feet and then smothers everything near by.  We can't even find the ducks' eggs anymore.

This state of affairs used to bother me more until I made a concerted effort to learn about these plants.  As a result, I will never look at my property the same way again.  I still weed and weedwhack like a maniac, but I now appreciate some of this opportunistic vegetation for food and hair/skin care.   If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em, or pour them all over yourself.

Am I  justifying my overgrown yard?  Absolutely!  But, truly,  I have also gained immense respect for  the abundant vitamins, minerals, and flavors that lie at my feet..  Nowadays my husband encounters a demon scientist in the kitchen, conjuring up various teas and treatments that I test on him.  If he is still walking and talking the next day, that concoction is a keeper.  

Left to right:  raspberry, horsetail, nettle, fireweed, dandelion
Horsetail for hair and insecticide (how is that for a combo) and the rest for tea

What If??? --- Stocking Our Emergency "To Go" Bags

The FAA requires each private pilot to carry emergency supplies, not only for him/herself, but also for the number of passengers on board who could also be stranded in a remote location and have to fend for themselves either until help arrives or until they hike out to find some.

Aviation and personal gear, winter

My husband and I think that this is such a prudent idea that we also apply it  to our car and snowmachines.  Each one has an emergency bag, too.  Even our home, in a way.  Because it is small, we store clothes, food, matches, and supplies in various outbuildings. Perhaps some of those structures will be unimpaired even if our cabin is damaged by fire or earthquake.  Each year, we re-evaluate our “to-go bags” with the goal of reducing weight/bulk while improving efficiency and effectiveness. Currently, the largest (blue) one (for the plane and snowmachine) weighs about 25 pounds.  The small (black) backpacks weigh about 10 pounds.    

Permaculture: Dying Spruce = New Deck

Several years ago, my husband and I tried to build a birdhouse. No bird wanted to live in it. Then we built a stool. No person wanted to sit on it. And then we concluded that we never wanted to work together on another construction project!

I have full confidence that marriage counselors would be out of work if engaged couples attempted to build something together (or share a canoe or put up striped wallpaper). Let's just say that such endeavors clarify the yin and the yang in a couple and those who stick it out will last. In our case, because he can't cook and I can't fly, we need each other, so we stick together. However, we mutually agreed to never attempt future constructions together – never ever.

How Much Food Can a Part Time Gardener Raise in Alaska?

During WWII, Americans were encouraged to grow “victory gardens” of fresh food in their yards as a patriotic effort, and millions did, in back yards and on rooftops. After the war, the number declined, but in recent years, home-grown foods are enjoying a resurgence of interest among people who have never previously grown anything but mold in the refrigerator. (Including me!)  For those whose source of food tends to be a delivery van or a drive up window, the idea of growing food in the back yard (or window sill) may seem daunting. It doesn't have to be. In the future I will offer step by step articles for super easy seed starts to encourage the beginning gardener, since my successes and failures are still fresh in my mind. But with this article, I hope to inspire readers with the successes of an erstwhile terrible gardener.



Wild raspberries galore all summer!
I definitely did not grow up gardening and I gave up every summer in Texas.  Here, though, over the past three years, I have increased my production to 65 animal and herbal foods this summer. And guess what: most survive my care! Except for planting and harvesting at the beginning and end of the growing season, the time expenditure for all that is less than 1.5 hours per day. So a modest effort by someone else might require only 20 minutes, every other day.


Since a packet of (hundreds of) seeds costs about $2, a strawberry plant costs $1, a raspberry cane about $5, and a fruit tree sapling $10 – 50, depending on age/size/type (all these fruits are perennial – they last many years), the cost and quality of home grown fruit and vegetables is much more attractive than at a store. The cost of producing eggs and meat is higher than at a big box store, but we can justify that for a number of reasons I won't belabor here. My hope is that if I, a relative newbie, can grow so much food, perhaps this article will inspire you to start or expand your food raising efforts. (For more information about raising chickens, ducks, rabbits, and honeybees, see other articles on this blog).


Each section below lists the foods we raise/make, some notes about successes and failures, and comment about what foods in this category we still need to buy because we cannot raise/make them ourselves. I hope you will feel encouraged to grow something you can put in your next pizza or scrambled eggs.

Sweets: We tap birch trees for sap in April/May (used in cooking and making beer) and harvest honey in August/September (four hives).

Notes: Birch sap is less than 2% sugar, so it is a subtle replacement for water in oatmeal, coffee, and beer. It is also chock full of vitamins, including calcium. We collected 15 gallons last year from four trees in three days. Maple syrup is MUCH more efficient than birch syrup. But since maples don't grow this far north, we are preparing to collect 100 gallons from 14 trees over ten days in order to process a single gallon of delectable birch syrup! We will also collect additional gallons of sap for cooking and drinking. The sap needs to be chilled, but the honey is shelf stable, forever.

Honey about to be extracted from the comb

Our bees in Alaska do not overwinter so we have to buy new queens and “starter colonies” each spring. The first year, the bees spent more time building comb than making honey, so we netted only two gallons from a hive. The second year (with the existing comb), our honey harvest doubled. We do buy sugar for baking, but with next year's sweet harvests, I will endeavor to tweak recipes to use the sap and honey instead. I have learned that I can use honey instead of pharmaceutical products to cover a cut.  

Shopping: We buy flavorings that do not grow in a cold climate, like chocolate, vanilla, and coffee.

Flies in My Outhouse - Chickens to the Rescue

Most women I meet have a spontaneous “ugh” reaction when they learn that we rely on an outhouse at our off-grid home. Then they are silent. Maybe they can't imagine it. Or maybe they picture a disgusting porta-potty at an overcrowded public venue. So, as a public service to polite, silent, curious people, here is a ”tell all” about what it is really like living with an outhouse.

Perma-potty

The hole beneath is 4 x 5 x 6 ft: plenty large for the two of us for a decade or more! Every once in a while we toss some lime down there, but let's face it; an outhouse is a low maintenance space.  Above ground, I asked for a large space because I am scared of spiders, and so I wanted lots of elbow room. Thus, our outhouse is 4 x 8 inside, which, if you think about it, is about the size of powder rooms in many homes. For ventilation and light, it has two screened windows and screened soffits under the high, steep eaves. We also added one of those whirly-gig things you see on the roofs of many houses to release the rising heat in attics. In our case, this one punctures the hole beneath the structure and carries away any methane. Thus, there is no more disagreeable smell in our outhouse than when one is alone in a powder room.

There are other inconveniences, no doubt. It is outside and unheated, and in Alaska! So, in the corner of our bedroom, we have a “chamber pot” like your ancestors did. For us, it is a white 5 gallon bucket, on top of which sits a camper's plastic toilet seat with a round aperture for just such an application, topped by the bucket lid. The arrangement is about the same height as a regular indoor toilet, so it is easy enough for a sleepy person in the middle of the night, except for the privacy issue, which took me  some getting used to. Every morning, I dump the bucket in the outhouse and rinse it at an outdoor spigot. About once or twice a week I swish it out with vinegar.

Free Ranging Ducks and Chickens - Hide and Seek with Eggs

Geo-caching is a high-tech version of hide and seek, complete with GPS and computer resources.  Our decidedly low-tech version is finding where our free-range ducks hide their eggs every morning.

Waddling home, always single file

During the winter, Mrs and Daylate, our harlequin females, lay their eggs in the nesting boxes of the coop they share with our Rhode Island Red chickens. But as soon as the snow recedes around the roots of trees, they explore options for future nests – waddling under overturned root balls and digging their bills into rotted trees and surrounding earth to assess softness. When the top several inches of a desirable location has warmed up, we no longer find eggs in the coop and start our morning game.

Citizen Scientists Monitor Lakes in Alaska

Once a month from May to October, Laura and Bryan Emerson squeeze into their blue tandem kayak surrounded by $4600 worth of scientific equipment and paddle out to the deepest section of their remote lake to measure water quality. An hour or so later, they fly the samples and notes via their 1954 Piper PA-20 to a staff member of the Mat-Su Borough Volunteer Lake Monitoring program, who meets them at a roadside lake in order to whisk the time sensitive samples to a lab near Palmer.

Kayaking out to test the lake water
photo by Howard Feldman

To date, the Emersons are the only volunteers monitoring an off-road lake, and the program coordinator, Melanie Trost, would like to recruit additional flyers for the summer of 2015.  “Even people who cannot do monthly water sampling can help with occasional observations,” says Melanie. “We welcome reports of dumping, pollution, and invasive plants in our lakes and rivers. One concern is old polystyrene docks, which beavers and muskrats chew and burrow into, and the sun deteriorates, releasing the little foam beads into the watershed where it looks like food to birds, fish, and mammals. Pilots can tell us what they see on a particular time and day at a lake they visit.”

Float Plane Differences from Wheeled Planes

Are you a wheeled plane pilots who says, “One of these days, I'll get rated on floats?” Or perhaps you are a traveler who watches seaplanes take off and land?  Either way, below is a primer about some differences between planes on floats vs wheels.  (Our Piper has skis, floats, and wheels). 

Undercarriage:

Sleeping under the summer midnight moon

The most distinctive aspect of a seaplane (or float plane) is obviously the undercarriage. The floats (or pontoons) look like huge, bloated, Ronald McDonald shoes compared to puffy tundra tires and dainty tarmac tires. On our little Piper PA-20, the float assembly weighs 150 pounds more than wheels – the weight of an adult, cutting down on payload and fuel efficiency, and introducing additional drag. Other, less obvious differences are that floats are mounted directly to the fuselage with no suspension system, and that float planes have no brakes. They can rely on the friction of the water to slow down and stop.

Pre-flight:

Pre-flight checks of the floats underscore the fact that they are designed to function like boats, so many of the terms and design features are similar. In fact, we secure our float plane to an angled dock with a boat winch. In this position, most of each float is elevated above the water line, so we can inspect the keel (the bottom of the float) before sliding the plane down into the water and maneuvering it with a tow rope over to the adjacent boat dock, where we conduct the other pre-flight checks. Internally, the floats' bulkheads are divided into six watertight compartments, which must be “sumped out” with a portable bilge pump to remove any accumulated water (rain from above or seepage from below). Another chore is to check the retractable water rudder at the stern of each float. Some float planes also have a fin added under their tails for extra stability.

The ducks coming out to say "good morning"
to their floating friend

A Bear Family Moves Into the Yard - What to Do?

Cub in birch tree
photo from back porch

Two weeks ago, while playing backgammon after dinner, my husband noticed some dark movement through the window. “Bear!” he announced. He ran to the back window and I to the side. “Wow, it's a big one,” he observed. But through my window, I saw a cub. Oh-oh. One of the most dangerous combinations is a sow feeding and defending a cub, and in this case, she had three of them, each the size and bulk of a small sheepdog.

This black bear family was disconcerting for other reasons, too, namely the sow's seeming familiarity with cabins and her absolute fearlessness around us.

For example, we immediately started banging on the windows and shouting to discourage

Sow at kitchen window
"What - you want a piece of me?"

their presence. Undeterred, she climbed up onto our back porch, bumping our door in the process, stood up and looked in the window, eye level to me ( I am 5' 9"), with a look that I interpreted as, “What - you want a piece of me, punk?” Then, she deftly swiped a small plastic container off a shelf (in which I had the day's coffee grounds and egg shells intended for my garden) tossing it to the cubs who rummaged through the debris.

Bears are usually quiet, wary creatures.  A whole family in our yard, in daylight, is not a good sign. We wanted to encourage them to go elsewhere.  While they were distracted by the egg shells and coffee grounds next to the back porch, Bryan moved to the front door for a can of bear spray. We knew, from prior practice, that the spray reaches only about 20 feet – a closeness we did not intend to attempt, since bears can run 30 mph over short distances and moms can be especially prickly. Nonetheless, he sprayed, to saturate the air with the noxious fumes. The sound or scent caused the sow to turn and walk INTO the spray. When the pepper fumes irritated her eyes and nose, she

Two cubs climb spruce by outhouse

trotted away, giving an alert to the cubs who nimbly climbed the adjacent spruce trees for safety. In less than a minute, though, she turned around, walked THROUGH the spray, past Bryan, and toward our ducks, who were standing by the lake shore, squawking in alarm this whole time. They were able to glide off into the water to evade her, but alas, one of our hens had followed them, and was cowering behind some ferns. The bear spied her, dashed into the foliage and made off into the woods with her limp body clenched between sharp teeth. Two of the cubs followed into the alder thicket, but the third had found a duck's nest beneath a birch tree and was devouring the eggs. More willing to get close to a young one, I sprayed it with bear spray, so it ran off, too.

A Grizzly in the Garden; Bear Spray in the Cabin

Yesterday afternoon, I had an Alaskan experience that was 1/3 scary, 1/3 ridiculous, and 1/3 painful!

After the noisy, hot, sweaty work of weed whacking back by our power tower for more than an hour, I took a break with a big glass of ice tea and a book on the front porch, to cool down in the breeze wafting over the lake and enjoy the silence.  

In the woods to my right, a loud “crack” in the trees attracted my attention, so I looked into the upper reaches, thinking that perhaps a porcupine, which we have seen there before, had crawled out onto a weak branch.  Seeing no movement, I returned to my book.  

A minute later, I glanced right, riveted by the sight of a big, adult brown bear (grizzly) sniffing in my garden, 20 feet from the porch!  We have seen small black bears in the yard before (200 lbs), but the larger and more aggressive brown bears tend to “own” the nearby creeks, filled with salmon, grayling, and trout.  They cede the more limited appeals of our property – until now. Whether the bear was a boar or a sow, I don't know, but at close proximity, I could see that each of “his” padded feet was the size of a dinner plate, and the round head was as wide as a basketball hoop. He looked hale, hearty and big, more than twice as large as any black bear I had seen up close before.  What astonished me, given the size, was his stealthy silence. Had I not heard him break a branch in transit, and sensed movement in my peripheral vision, I would not have noticed his nearby presence at all.

Raising Honey Bees in Alaska, Harvesting Honey

Every year, we add a few new projects, as we endeavor to increase our self-reliance. This year, in the arena of animal husbandry, we added ducks and honey bees. Since I have written in a prior article about the former, this article will focus on the latter.

Honey bees are absolutely the lowest maintenance creature we have raised, but obviously some special equipment and instruction are necessary first.

To get started, my husband enrolled, along with about 60 other people, in an informative, two part class in February, held in Eagle River, AK, and taught by Steve Victors (Alaska Wildflower Honey), a 20 year, local beekeeper and vendor of beekeeping supplies.

In addition to useful, Alaska-relevant considerations, Steve summarized the history of beekeeping (the Mayans and Egyptians both domesticated them), medical uses for wound management and mummification, and the fascinating culture of the hive, with its queen, workers, and drones. I wish I had attended, too!

After the class, Bryan was enthused and decided to go forward, so he bought a bee suit and

Astronaut or beekeeper? 

disassembled hive boxes. The suit looks like something an astronaut would wear, made of thick white cotton and nylon, with sturdy elastic around the ankles and wrists, and a double layered, framed net head dress. The boxes are made of white pine. Each hollow hive box is about 20” long x 16” wide. The depth of the boxes varies from 6 - 10”, depending on whether they are intended for housing bees (deeper) or storing honey (shallower). In the South, most bee hives I have seen are white, which is to keep them cool. But Alaskan beekeepers paint theirs dark colors, to keep them warm. Ours are forest green, to match our various outbuildings.

The green honey boxes are shallower
than the unpainted brood box below