How to: Homemade Dog Treats, Toys, and Shampoo

When we adopted a one year old chocolate lab in early summer, both animal shelters that we visited told us that they were so full that they could not accept another animal until adoptions clear space.  I read that this is true across the country.  Part of the reason is that so many people adopted pets when they were isolated by municipal Covid measures.  Later, some people had to go back to work, leaving an anxious dog alone to tear up the house or yard.  Another reason may be that the rapid rise of inflation has increased the costs of both human and pet supplies. So Fido is returned.

One amelioration of the latter issue is that many foods, hygiene supplies, and toys can be made, cheaply, quickly, and easily, from scratch.  Below are a few that I make for our dog, Buddy.

DOG TREATS

Dogs go through packages of dog treats fast, and they can be pricey.  But they are SO EASY to whip up at home from common ingredients and MANY websites offer great recipes. Just search for home made dog treats.  I have made several dog treats.  The simplest is:

2 cups flour (any kind)

½ cup peanut butter

Enough hot water to make a firm dough

Knead, flatten, and cut into preferred shapes and sizes. 

Cook at 350 degrees.  The duration depends on the thickness of your biscuits and how hard and shelf stable you want them to be.  For example, ones that are ½ inch thick and cooked for 20 minutes will have a brownie-like texture.  Thinner and 45 minutes yields a harder product.

I vary the recipe by adding salmon oil, oatmeal, pumpkin puree,  chopped dates, toasted barley.  The latter three provide fiber/roughage.

One great idea (again, for roughage) is to slowly dry (in an oven or dehydrator) a sweet potato or yam that has been cut into thin rings.  When the tuber is leathery hard, string it on a leather strand, like a necklace, for the dog to chew.

DOG SHAMPOO

The dog shampoo I make is very similar to the people shampoo that I also make, with castile soap, water, a bit of vinegar and a drop or two of essential oil.  I do not use nearly as much of the last ingredient for the dog as I do for us, since his nose is so much more sensitive.  After I brush him, I dip a cloth into the shampoo and rub it into his hair, with special attention to the insides of his back legs, that can have been splashed with urine.  I have read that once a month is about the right frequency.

 

DOG TOOTHPASTE

My son kindly sent me some purchased dog toothpaste and several plastic finger “brushes.”  My dog enjoys the almost daily ritual when I rub the nubby finger over his teeth and gums.  When I finish this tube, I will make my own.  Of the internet sources I have read, I have found that some ingredients used by people (including us) like baking powder and hydrogen peroxide are NOT appropriate for dogs since they do not spit out the residue as we do.  Coconut oil (which we use for oil pulling) IS OK for dogs, as are aloe vera and olive oil as bases.  Look up homemade dog toothpaste.

 

DOG TOYS

Our 5 acre woodsy property on a lake offer a variety of outdoor entertainments for a dog who likes to

run, grab sticks, and play in the water.  But how will be entertain him during our long Alaska winters, particularly during snow and rain storms and deep cold when we are not too enthusiastic about spending much time outside?

All dog owners know how fast their pets can tear through purchased toys.  Even Kong toys, which cost $15 + and are marketed as tough and long lasting, remained intact for less than a day with Buddy, although the sad remnants remained play worthy, longer. 

The internet offers lots of creative ideas for homemade toys. I have tried several to good effect and concocted some others:

·         I save food grade plastic containers, like peanut butter and popcorn jars.  First he rolls and sniffs, licks, plays with them.  Once he crunches the side of the container into an hourglass shape, I shove a dog treat into the lower portion.  He enjoys the mental stimulation of figuring out how to get to the treat. 

·         I tie string, rope, or paracord from the spiral staircase, looped through a dead tennis ball, rubber toys, or a pierced plastic jar.  The thinner strings he breaks and then plays with that.  The paracord lasts longest before he bites through it to release the toy. 

·         Cardboard toilet paper rolls or small cardboard containers taped shut with a treat inside.  At first he played very gently with these, but now they last about a minute.  Still, sometimes that is all the distraction one needs to redirect behavior.

·         Three rags or old socks wrapped around dog treats or peanuts and then tied, one inside another, entertain him for about 20 minutes.  

·         We bought bags of golf balls, tennis balls, and what look like croquet balls at thrift shops for very little money. Buddy strips the shell off the golf ball in an hour, shreds the tennis ball in two hours, and peels the skin off a baseball in about two hours, after which he unravels the tightly wrapped yarn over several days.   

·         Of course he loves sticks and slim logs and we have lots of those.   

 

I think I derive as much enjoyment from creating these supplies as he does from utilizing them. 

How to: What Size Generator for a Remote or Urban Home?

As seen on www.survivalblog.com

The European organization, 2000 WATTS, proposes that 2000 watts is the amount of power available to humans if each one of the 7.9 billion people on the planet had access to the same amount.  Their concern is that our power resources are dwindling.

Some of our solar panels

Whether you agree or disagree with their assumptions, it is interesting to consider how much power our frequently used appliances require.  When I lived in a city, I never thought about this.  I just flipped switches and paid utility bills.  However, with so many parts of the country suffering power outages, I imagine that more people are now wondering, “If the power goes out, what do I do?”  What could I run with a generator of this or that size?  How much fuel would that require?”

Here, we built our own power supply so we are alert to power hogs and power sippers that we decided to buy or do without.  And since the generator we use as a backup to our solar panels and wind turbine is a HONDA 2000 (watts), we know how much our various appliances and tools require and which ones we can or cannot use simultaneously without blowing a circuit breaker.

A fabulous resource for prudent people adding up their power usage in order to determine an appropriately sized back up generator is Generatorist.  It identifies the power draw of appliances ranging from full house A/C units to a night light, as well as commercial equipment and RV gizmos!  It also lists products you can buy to measure each appliance in your home.  We have one.

Additionally, home owners will find that many, but not all, machines list their amp, volt, and watt requirements in a plaque on the back or bottom.  

FOR OUR HOUSEHOLD

The power hogs in any home are appliances that create heat and move water. 

Therefore, at our off-grid home, we do not have ANY of the following electric appliances:

• oven:  2150 w
• stove: 2100 w
• dishwasher:    1500 w
• clothes dryer:  5400 w !!!
• hair dryer:       1250 w
• home heater: (highly variable, with furnace and fans or radiators, other)
• Air Condit:       (highly variable, by BTU size, and window or central).  See Generatorist for examples. 
  

Instead, I hand wash dishes, line dry laundry (I love that fresh scent),  cook on a propane stove/oven with a manual pilot light ignition, heat the main cabin with wood and warm the guest cabin with a propane heater.  We open and close windows and curtains to impact interior temperatures.  And we have an outhouse, not a flushing toilet, so no power draw there. 

We also lack gizmos that I think rather unnecessary, like electric can openers, bread makers, and TVs.  

  

A few high wattage power tools are important here because we have found no convenient alternative. Most of these function for short duration, and we ensure that we are not maxxing out our power with other demands at the same time, otherwise the circuit breaker turn off all power as a safety precaution.

For example, we occasionally use the following useful electric tools:

• circular saw:  1400 w
• disk sander:   1250 w
• shop vacuum: 1100 w

A very important power tool we use frequently is a 5 ton log splitter, which draws 1500 w.  Bryan turns on the generator almost every time he uses this, which is an hour per day ($1/hour of gasoline) about 4 days per week in summer.  This $16 of gasoline saves his shoulders from hand splitting 11 cords of dry wood to warm our home and heat our hot tub during our long, Alaskan winters.  

For the kitchen, I bought my first new appliance in over a decade: a small air fryer.  I love it, but it draws 1700 w!  So I make favorites like salmon egg rolls or fried chicken as an occasional treat.  (This appliance replaces the need to fly out cans of Crisco (at a $.50/lb transportation cost) and then figure out what to do with the left over oil.) My husband bought a microwave oven as a back up in case our propane oven suddenly died.  I hardly ever use it, but others may routinely use theirs.  This small one draws 1050 w.  The powerful meat grinder that we use when we process bear and rabbit meat draws 575 watts.  Other appliances: a blender/food processor (450 w) and a coffee/spice grinder:  (150 w).  Many  kitchen tasks I do by hand with a mortar and pestle, a nut crusher, a food mill, and hand kneading bread dough.  

Moving water from our well to the house, washing machine, and yard hoses requires 1500 w.  So we tend to time water projects for sunny or windy days, or when the generator is on.  Our on-demand water heaters for the sink and shower are powered by propane, with electric ignition. 

FOR OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

For a household to figure out how powerful a generator is needed to power its priorities, it is important to know that  “running time” wattages can be magnitudes lower than “surge” or “start up” requirements.  Some of the following might be priorities for a house impacted by a power outage in a hot climate, thus requiring a powerful generator:

Appliance                         Run wattage Surge/start up wattage

• Chest freezer                         500   1500
• Central A/C (24,000 BTU)   3800 11,400 (!!!!)
• Elec water htr                        4000
• Ceiling fan                     60
• Garage door opener        875   2350

I have not added up all of our routine power uses but they are modest:  two laptop computers, a cell phone, and the freezers in summer.  Is it  at or under 2000 watts?

I think it may be, except when we use the washing machine.  One day we water the gardens for several hours (1500w).  Another day we briefly cut (3 minutes) and sand (10 minutes) wood (to replace planks in steps or the dock. (1250 w and 1400 w each).  A third day I cook egg rolls in the air fryer for 8 minutes.  On a sunny or windy day, with little else on,  I run a high value load of wash (1250 w, but with a high surge + moving water from the pump). 

Within these parameters, we live a low cost, low power life in a lovely setting with low pollution, low stress, gourmet meals, and the satisfaction of  tasks well done. 

Who needs an electric can opener?

Highbush Cranberry Harvest and Alaskan Recipe

My adult version of Halloween Trick or Treating is to gather highbush cranberries when they are red and ripe in the autumn.  In cool weather (40s F), I amble around the hundreds of plants on our property, delicately raking the glistening red fruit through my fingers and depositing them in a bag slung over my arm.

 

Mature, fruit bearing plants range from waist high to 15 feet here, with an airy arrangement of opposite maple-like leaves on slim, upward curving branches. (see photos below)  Both in spring and fall, they are very pretty.  This time of year, the foliage varies in color as far as the eye can see - green, yellow, orange, red, and burgundy - depending on whether their locations are sunny or shady.  I pick a gallon at a time of the reddest fruit, letting the orange ones imbibe their full complement of sunny goodness for a few more days.  

Most bushes prefer to grow in dappled shade under or near birch trees.  But the “blue ribbon” producers thrive in a sunny thicket in front of the lake where no birches grow.  I puzzled over this anomaly for a while until I remembered all of the waterlogged birch trunks we had hauled out of the lake back in 2007 and 2008, to ensure safe passage for docking float planes.  Based on the birches leaning precipitously over the water elsewhere on the lake, I presume that the root balls of those erstwhile trees probably drowned in saturated shore side soil, and tipped into the water.  In the meantime, they created an ecosystem conducive to my beloved cranberries.

As I wander about, kicking yellow birch leaves, I can feel that the cooling land is getting firmer under foot.  I breathe in the musty scent of the woods, and listen to the rasping sound of drying and brittle leaves as they rub against each other.  I pop a few of the tart, juicy fruits into my mouth and feel them squirt out their load of vitamin C.  To me, this is the iconic taste of fall.  What a pleasure these daily excursions are.  They stimulate all five of my senses.  

After each day's harvest, I rinse the berries and sort out any debris before popping them in a bag to store in the freezer until I have enough to go through the process of assembling, using, dismantling, and cleaning my manual food mill.  Unlike bog cranberries, these have a flat seed to extract, so I set up two bowls - one to receive the juice (for people), and the other to collect the seeds and pulp (as a winter treat for the chickens).  Most of the juice I sweeten with our newly harvested honey and drink thick, like a nectar, hot or cold.  Some I set aside unsweetened, to add a wonderful flavor to barbecue sauces, vinaigrettes, and fruity desserts. 

As a child, my exposure to cranberries was limited to canned jelly on Thanksgiving.  Now I nurture the plants for the spring and fall beauty as well as their tasty, vitamin rich addition to my larder.

----------

Recipe for Barbecue Sauce:

2 cups fresh, unsweetened cranberry juice

2 cups beer

2 cups molasses

2 cups vinegar

1 small can tomato paste

1/2 cup black coffee

Dried orange rind, about 1/4 of a fruit

Herbs and spices to taste.  We like it hot, so add a lot of hot dry peppers and garlic.  I also like a "dark" flavor so I add cloves and cinnamon.  

Simmer and cook down a bit to thicken.  Flavors combine best if consumed the next day or many hours after cooking and resting.

Remote living in Alaska - How Long?

Now that we are in our early 60's, friends and colleagues ask us more often “what will you do when you are older?”  

Cutting dead Spruce

This is a fair question for anybody, in any location.  In our case, we live a physically active life in which our health determines the amount of firewood and food we produce, as well as things like a medical license to fly to and from home or the stamina to drive a snowmachine 7.5 hours cross country to retrieve a sled load of supplies.

Fortunately, we are both in fine health: no medicines, no chronic or acute ailments, but I don't take this for granted.  Many people we know in their 50's and 60's take daily pills for pain, anxiety, depression, shots for arthritis, and have undertaken surgery for joints, ligaments, eyes, and spine.  The only person I know older than me taking NO medicines is my 78 year old aunt, who controlled incipient diabetes with diet, exercise, and clearly, lots of will power.  We realize that unexpected health problems derail many people's best laid plans.

So I demur when I hear from readers who say that they plan to move up to Alaska and live like us “when they retire” or when people start a physically challenging business at age 60, or even buy a bigger home than they had when they raised kids.  I hope that those decisions work out.    

Our approach to “aging in place” , such as it is, is to contemplate what can we do NOW to reduce effort when we are 70 or older.  What tools, equipment, construction, plantings and time commitments CAUSE or SAVE wear and tear on aging people, structures, and machines?  We want to SHED the former.  EMBRACE the latter.   

Some of this is as simple as doing a cost/benefit analysis, just as we do in business.  “Do we want to do this task by hand, by ourselves, or with tools or with the help of other people?  Or is xxx a bad idea altogether?”  

Hauling supplies

My husband has been a serial entrepreneur who has started some businesses that worked for decades and others that “seemed like a good idea at the time” only to turn out to be far more time consuming and far less lucrative than he anticipated.  He kissed that time and money goodbye and moved onto other things.  Life is like that, too. There are some things we have done already that will yield GREAT benefits in the future (like planting perennial food crops and building with steep, snow shedding roofs).  Other decisions or lack of attention caused problems or delayed solutions (like (a) not paying attention to a builder who constructed a plywood food shed flat on the ground, without treated lumber or elevated footings.  (b) not planting fruit trees sooner and protecting them better). 

 

 Below are some of the aspects of living remotely that are likely to get harder as we get older, and for which we either have or have not yet figured out alternatives to enjoy living out here longer.  

WINTER CHORES:  Shoveling, snowmachining, and flying

Roof raking

I can understand why many northerners flee south, part time or full time when they reach a certain age.  Winter chores are tougher than most summer ones.  

Shoveling:  We have 9 buildings.  The main ones all have 45 degree roofs that shed snow easily.  No problem.    The 33 degree roofs need more attention, especially after wet snow or sleet which can build up to a dangerously heavy load.  Reaching overhead to shovel off roofs is exhausting to me NOW!   I pity people with flat roofs (or more roof space) in cold climates.  For the future, I wonder if we might steepen the shallower roofs (what an expensive “do-over”) or if we can figure out easier ways to access the tops of the roofs.  So far, we have experimented with rope as a sort of windshield wiper of light roof snow.  Feasible.  We also plan to screw in  bolts and a chain to hold a ladder in place on the high side of shallow roofs, to push off snow with a snow rake.

Shoveling out the fire pit

Snowshoeing and snowmachining:  Because the snowmachines we bought (Bearcat 660) have narrow skis and low bellies, they tend to tip over or get stuck in deep, soft snow, especially on angled terrain but are fine on firm snow.  Therefore, we have to pat out the paths we want in snowshoes after every deep snowfall.  This may be good exercise now, but I don't want to have to do this to walk to the outhouse and chicken coop  all winter when I am 70.   I would like to buy a snowmachine better suited to the grooming we need – either riding high and light or plowing through soft snow.   

Supply Runs:   Even in cities, winter driving hazards can be challenging as people age.  We are alert to our transportation issues, too.  Winter maintenance of the plane involves snowmachine grooming (and regrooming after each snowfall) a landing strip on the lake ice, sweeping snow off the wings and fuselage all winter, preheating the plane before departure, and tying and covering the plane on return.  (in short winter daylight).  Shopping by snowmachine, across country and two rivers, the route is 42 miles and 3.25 hours one way, on short, cold days in January – to about the first week of March, when the rivers are safely frozen and the snow route across bogs and lakes is firm and not slushy or soft.  Winter temperatures and transportation wear down both machine parts and people.    

Applying our cost/benefit calculations, we analyzed whether to buy a beefier snowmachine (about $12,000) or hire a professional snowmachine hauler to deliver supplies (that we have pre-ordered and pre-positioned for him) once or twice each winter.  The latter won.  Roger's machine is much more powerful than ours and can haul 2 sleds, carrying 3-4 times as much as Bryan can haul on one long day's trip.  So this saves time, gasoline, wear and tear on the machine and my husband, so he can spend his time on other endeavors (like shoveling!).  I am sure that our machine would have died an ignoble death somewhere along the route by now, rather than limping along on local projects.  Heck, we know of two people with strong and expensive machines that had to buy new transmissions two winters ago because of terrible (icy hard?) conditions.   

Flying:  Another cost/benefit analysis resulted in leaving our plane in town with our airplane mechanic during the winter.  If we need only one air taxi trip, this decision is cheaper than changing out the undercarriage from floats to skis and back again.  If we need two trips, it is about break even.  On the one hand we lose the spontaneity of flight on spectacularly clear winter days.  On the other, we shed all the work and worry that accompanies an unhangared plane and landing strip on an icy lake during and after storms of wind, snow, and sleet in Alaska. 

SUMMER CHORES:

Gardening:  Gardening is emotionally and physically satisfying but the first several days of constant bending over to transplant hundreds of seedlings is getting uncomfortable now.  Five gallon buckets of water hauled here and there will start to feel heavier and heavier, as will stringing together five hoses from lake pump uphill to the back gardens once or twice a week.  At the end of the season, dragging heavy tarp loads of fallen birch leaves to mulch each garden and fruit tree/bush could become burdensome.  I can envision hiring seasonal help twice a year to help with beginning and end of season tasks for gardening as well as fuel production (below).  We have done a good job of planting many low maintenance edible perennials (like berries, apple trees and cherry bushes, mint, horseradish, rhubarb, sorrel, and asparagus).  Also, our raised bed gardens will keep getting higher as we add to the soil.  I plan to add a triangular seat/table on the corner of each raised bed for resting tools... or me.  We also placed 50 gallon water drums close to each garden.  I sewed a fabric bag that hangs over my neck to hold a plastic bin for berry collection, so I can use both hands and not have to bend down to a bowl on the ground.  Each year we figure out little improvements like these.  I find this sort of practical creativity fun to think about.    

Tree cutting:  Bryan labors throughout the year cutting down trees, limbing and bucking them, lifting them in and out of the deep ATV trailer (or I do that on the lower and open sided winter sled), splitting them, and filling the wood corral with about 11 cords of logs.  Chainsaws have a very uneven weight distribution. The work inordinately impacts one's non-dominant shoulder/back.  Bryan's left shoulder tends to stay sore for several months in the autumn, so that is unsustainable.   This year, he decided to stop after one tank of gas.  Next year, he is going to use my little, lighter 20 inch chain saw for limbing.  Both should save his shoulder.  In the future, it might be useful to hire short term help.  Unskilled labor could load and unload the ATV at the wood splitter. Skilled help could cull the trees.   Still there is a lot that has to happen before cutting, like paths to trees and culling the surrounding devil's club.  I am not sure what we will do about that in our dotage, but we are becoming more attentive to placing our winter snowmachine paths near trees we plan to cut. 

Tower Climb

High work:  I feel nervous when Bryan climbs up to our roof tops on ladders that I am supporting as best I can on uneven terrain at the base.  He wears rapeling gear to climb the 120 foot power tower to adjust antennae and change out dated equipment, but surely there will be some point when such tasks are better handed off to someone more agile.  For this spring, I plan to (have Bryan) attach eye bolts on the logs below the roof wide enough to “enclose” the ladder with a length of chain for his spring cleaning of the chimney.  

As my father says (he may be quoting Bette Davis), “Aging is not for sissies.”  I hope that we can prepare ourselves with prudence and creativity for the challenges that will befall us.   I know that we will still be suprised.  But at least I hope that we will not chastise ourselves for ignoring something obvious that we could indeed plan for.

How Does a Remote Home Get Mail?

Almost home!

Living 42 miles from the nearest road, we receive no mail service.  A frequent question we hear is, “How do you get mail?”  The short answer is “infrequently.”

Maybe in the future people will receive deliveries by drone, but in the meantime, we maintain a P.O. box in a nearby town and check it every few months.  For several years, when we acquired frequent products on-line, a UPS type shop was convenient because it would send us a note when a package arrived and hold it for us for several months, if necessary.  But their price doubled from $150 to $300 per year and we decided to switch to a local post office that charges only $95/year, since our purchases had declined.  However, I did not realize at the time that their policy is to return any packages too big for our box after 14 days - and not notify us.  The first year, a friend called to say that her birthday gift to me had been returned!  I felt so bad.

Unfortunately, one type of bulky and time sensitive purchase can ONLY be shipped to me during the fall and spring months - a time of year when we have NO means of transportation to town.  These are the live roots, rhizomes, and bulbs of vegetables and fruit that I grow.  I missed a entire year's season when we first switched to the Post Office box because I did not know their “return without notification” policy.

Since then, I made arrangements with a dear friend and fellow gardener who will take delivery of such seasonal plants as asparagus crowns, seed potatoes, horseradish root, and garlic bulbs for me, in exchange for a few of the items.  I am grateful for her assistance.  And the purple asparagus and blue potatoes are great!

Do I miss mail service?  No.  Important items, like checks, taxes, and correspondence with clients, friends, and relatives are all conveniently done by email.  Most of the paper that fills my P.O. box is  a plethora of unsolicited catalogues... which I repeatedly call to cancel.
The only personal mail we receive there tends to be from older friends and relatives who send thoughtful cards for birthdays and Christmas, which we retrieve... eventually.  Plus seed catalogues, which I do love.  Any untreated paper is transported home to start fires in the woodstove or hot tub. 

 

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:

Want to Buy a Remote Property? Think Again or Think Ahead

We routinely hear from friends or colleagues who say that “one of these days... I too will move out to the boonies.” Are you sure that is what you want to do? Developing a remote property is challenging and perhaps that is good, because living there is too and it is not for everyone. In fact, it may appeal to one family member immensely and to another not at all. Below are seven suggestions based on our experience buying and clearing woodsy land for a cabin and various outbuildings in the middle of Alaska, 42 miles from the nearest road.  However, several of the points are also valid even for people who decide to move across the country to a condo in Boca Raton.

In general, the suggestions are to take stock of what you do and don't know about yourself (and your spouse), the land, and the people in the targeted area before you commit to move long distance to an isolated property.

16x24x2 + porches

1. SPOUSAL COMMUNICATION:
   
   a) Do not buy the property before your spouse sees it. He/She will never let you forget it.
   b) If you make the mistake #1, make sure that the property looks REALLY GOOD when you take your spouse to see it. Do not, as in our case, take your Texan wife up to Alaska in her little Land's End jacket when it is 30 below zero and windy and act all enthused about walking around the property in snow shoes. (When my father-in-law showed his wife his proud, rural purchase, the appealing log cabin was obscured by several rusted cars up on blocks and empty barrels of diesel). I promise you, your spouse will never let you forget that first impression, either.
   
   

2.  LEARN ABOUT THE LAND AND WEATHER before you build, garden or buy virtually anything.

a) If circumstances allow, visit the property in different seasons before committing AND TALK TO LOCALS. Ideally, rent a property in the vicinity first. This information absolutely will save you money, time, and regrets. Before even considering the obvious importance of seasonal variations for future buildings, gardens, landscaping, clothes, and activities  is the relevance of allergies!  If you have never lived in the region you are now contemplating, you need to find out first if you are allergic to anything there or if you will be miserable at certain times of year.  In Alaska, for example, the trees bud out so quickly (in Fairbanks, literally overnight) that the pollen count is astronomical during that period, but it is brief.  My sister's dogs are on allergy medications in Phoenix, AZ (!!!) 

Relative to more mundane building placement possibilities, are assessments of where does the sun rise and set at various times of year?   From which directions are the prevailing winds (and rain and snow)? (See websites such as www.suncalc.net).   Such data will impact your desired activities,  your placement and sizes of porches and windows, the angle of your roofs, positions of gardens, trees to keep, and many other decisions. Our location is protected by the ridge behind us, but the hunting cabin at the end of this lake had to have the roof tied down with pulleys to the ground because hurricane force winds tunneled up between the ridge and the mountains!  

Some places that are particularly beautiful have tortuous rainy seasons.  If that was the time of year you most wanted to be there, think again or ask early about adding on huge porches that can function as outdoor rooms.  Add grow lights for plants, etc. Long rainy or dark seasons can be depressing for people.  Research precipitation by month. Plan ahead.    

Favorite Remote Cabin Purchases under $50

 Favorite Purchases under $50 for our Remote Home

 

(no compensation for any of the following testimonials) 

Living far from any store means that any rural or remote property owner relies on supplies on hand.  Some of our least expensive purchases have been worth their weight in gold because we use them over and over, or in a variety of ways, or they specialize in increasing our safety or comfort in a way that no other item can do as well.

IceTrekkers.com cleats

I have purposely NOT included obviously important items, like matches or an axe, that anyone should know.   

 

 Here, I just wanted to illuminate some of the “unsung” products that we rely on to great advantage in the categories of attire, home, yard, tools, and communications devices.  Perhaps this list will be of interest to readers considering a move to a rural location, particularly in a four season locale.

 

I encourage readers to respond with their own "best"purchase lists for various eco-systems and climates.

Remote Alaska Healthcare

Among the top questions people ask us about living on our own in the Alaska Bush are,

“What do you do for medical care? What would you do in an emergency?”  These are insightful inquiries, especially since four months a year there is NO transportation to/from our cabin, except, when feasible, by an emergency helicopter.

Obviously, we can't take care of every awful scenario, but we have endeavored to assess health risks here and mitigate them where we can.  I imagine that our approach might be prudent for any home, anywhere, especially since national statistics indicate that about 30% of all emergency room visits are the results of injuries, https://www.nsc.org/home-safety/tools-resources/odds-of-dying/emergency-room-visits, particularly falls. For us, I imagine that dirty cuts by power and passive tools could be a problem, and possibly burns and lung issues, too, since we heat the house and hot tub with wood fires every day.

First Podcast Interview by Off the Grid News

Michael Foust of Off The Grid News conducted a fast moving 30 minute interview with us last week, asking us about water, power, food production, bears, and sources of revenue at our remote property.

Here is the link to the podcast.  If you are interested in this, you may be interested in some of his other weekly interviews with off-grid families throughout the US and Canada.

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.

Forest Scavenger Hunt for Food, Remedies, Useful Products

Birch trees

Climbing the learning curve from “erstwhile city slicker” in Texas to remote rural life in Alaska, my acclimation has been immeasurably aided by several courses in botany, which have enhanced both gardening and foraging for food, home remedies, and construction materials.  Currently, I am enrolled in a fascinating on-line course in Applied Ethnobotany (offered by the University of  Alaska-Fairbanks).

As the name suggests, this field studies human use of plants - for food, fuel, textiles, shelter, medicine, and anything else.  I am learning how indigenous peoples and settlers utilized the resources all around them, that other people, like me, surely overlook. Interested readers will see below a list of resources they may be able to utilize for their own regions.

At the very beginning of this course, our professor instructed us to harvest some local plants for

Witch's Hair (lichen)

several projects.  Really?  In February?  In Alaska?  What could I find this time of year?  Well, duh, trees.  I live in a forest!  But besides use as firewood, construction, and spring birch sap, I did not know much. So one day, my husband and I pulled on our snowshoes and dragged a little plastic sled through the woods for a scavenger hunt. How fun!  In half an hour, we gathered two species of pendulous (hair) lichen with the evocative colloquial names of “witch's hair” and “bear hair,” chopped some chaga and “punk” conks off old birch trees, peeled off some loose birch bark,  gathered a handful of frozen spruce resin globules,

chaga

and cut a wrist thick swath of sweet grass sticking up through shallow snow beneath the shelter of a large spruce tree.

Winter Solstice Day at an Alaska Cabin

Everyone's life undulates with daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms, determined often by routine tasks.  At our remote home, winter chores are determined by weather and prioritized by heat, water, and food.

Below is a sample winter day, at this off-grid, off-road home in the boonies of Alaska (with notes about the subsequent -2 and -22F days that followed).

Dec 21 (+17 degrees)

HEAT and POWER:  When my husband is home, he gets up several times a night to stoke the fire.  But yesterday he flew out to attend a meeting in Anchorage.  Since I am a sound sleeper, I awoke to a chilly interior temperature of +47F. The power had gone out during the night, too, darn it. Naturally, at latitude 61 at 6 am, it was pitch black - and would stay that way for another three hours.  I donned my winter-usual attire: two shirts, two socks and a pair of lined sweat pants, as well as a headlight that I keep by the bed, to venture down the circular stairs to the main room, where I started  a fire in the squat little wood stove from the tinder, kindling, and log boxes lined up by the back door.  While it caught, I moved the all important coffee pot onto the propane stove, and bundled up to walk back through the woods, to the power shed, about 450 feet above and behind the cabin.  It was snowing lightly under a hazy, quarter moon.  On the way, I emptied the chamber pot into the outhouse.

I am not a morning person, so I hate having to face the cold and yank the generator pre-dawn, before coffee.  But December delivers miserly amounts of solar and wind power, so we supplement with two hours of generator to provide interior phone, lights, and Internet.   At the shed, I checked the voltage meter's record when the power conked out.  Hmmm, it is higher than I would wish at these temperatures. I hope the batteries aren't dying.  I tugged futily on the generator rope five times before it roared to life. Pleeeeeease connect!  My glasses fogged up from the exertion.

Motion detector lights illuminated the snowy path as I return past the woodshed,

food shed and outhouse to the cabin.  The buildings look pretty - the steep angled roofs and the log or green painted walls.  I spied animal tracks,  sharply outlined by shadow, mostly hares and voles diving below the insulation of snow covered bushes.  I reflect on the hungry black mink I saw yesterday, bounding through snow to close the distance to a gray hare twice its size. On the back porch, I grab an armload of logs, and step inside, smiling at the orange fire and the welcome scent of coffee, which I sweeten with dried milk and honey from our bees, and scoot under an alpaca blanket to read the Internet news and emails.   I always check weather first, which determines tasks I can or should do that day. Today is supposed to be clear and in the teens, followed by a deepening cold snap that I don't look forward to:-2F and then -22F.  Those will be days for indoor projects.  

Obviously the number of logs we burn depends on the external (and internal)

temperature.  In the teens, we use about 15 logs per day to warm the two room cabin.  At 0 F, the number doubles and at -15F triples. This number of logs heats a two room cabin to the 50s and low 60s.  As you can imagine, my most important winter task is to haul plastic sled loads of aged, dry birch wood that my husband has felled, chopped, cut, aged and stacked during the prior two years, from the roofed wood corral to the back porch, and then, on a daily basis, fill the interior bins with bigger and smaller wood.  Let's just say that I never postpone this chore.

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.

Kitchen Skin and Hair Care

The only thing that Laura Mercier and I have in common is our first name (although the lovely CEO was my next-door neighbor when I lived in a high rise in Houston,TX). I have never been one to purchase expensive cosmetics and have been appalled by the prices paid by friends and relatives for teeny, tiny tubes of La Mer creams and lotions.  So, with these disclosures, I promise never to offer cosmetic advice!  However, I love to have really clean hair and skin.  I revel in  the way my face feels after a professional facial.  So I am delighted to recreate that clean, smooth result with common kitchen ingredients (1- 3, that require less than 2 minutes to assemble and cost less than $12).  Below are 14 recipes.

Readers:  why NOT compare a home made application on one  side of your face and your favorite purchased item on the other, or alternate two procedures, for a week each? See what you think. 

Refrigeration Alternatives Off-Grid

I love icy cold fruit juice and white wine.  How can we accomplish this at our off-grid cabin?

How do we store cheese and other dairy products, as well as fruits and vegetables? 

We rely on a mix of powered and natural methods that vary somewhat according to the season.  Each is highlighted below.  Non-powered methods include a cold-hole, canning, and drying foods, as well as the simple expedient of utilizing freezing temperatures, snow, and shade. Powered methods include a propane powered refrigerator and solar/wind powered electric freezers.  Some of these approaches can work for anybody, anywhere.     

Year Round:

Many years ago, we dug outside our food shed a “cold hole” that functions as a refrigerator.  It is not as big as a basement or even a root cellar, but it functions the same way.  It is the depth and size of two vertically dropped, welded, food grade 55 gallon drums. Over this hangs a beam from which dangles a metal cable on a winch.  When we lift aside the double layered wood and polystyrene lid, we attach the cable to a sturdy eyelet on the top of a set of five, layered lucite shelves that fit within the double depth of the canisters.  Each shelf can support 8 - quart jars of food, or a net bag of vegetables, or several packages  of dairy products.  The temperature varies from top to bottom of the hole, at different times of year, but it is always above freezing and below 52 degrees, so functional for refrigeration.  I have been very pleased by its reliablility for storing potatoes and unopened cheese all winter, for example.  It is not convenient for everyday use, but excellent for long term storage and occasional retrievals.

Utility Usage: Off Grid Alaska vs. India and South America

Because we live in Bush Alaska with limited power and few modern conveniences, most Americans of our acquaintance think our lifestyle difficult or at least odd. But after reflecting on our past five winter visits to India and South America, we have concluded that our modest carbon/utility footprint is not that much different than homes we visited in India, Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru (some affluent and others very modest). Many readers have read that the average U.S. Household produces about 3 times the carbon of European homes and 10 times those of India. The examples below may indicate how they do that, and how readers can live well with lower utility bills and expectations.

PLUMBING:

We rely on an outhouse and interior chamber pot, which is certainly more primitive than all but one home we stayed in (on an island in Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia). In fact, that part of the world is “decorated” with identical colorful metal outhouses, gifts of the government. But even in Peruvian urban areas, with populations of 500,000 to 12 million, each bathroom with flush toilets instructs users not to put ANY paper down the toilet, but to deposit the noisome tissues in an adjacent trash can. In this way, presumably, old sewage systems can accommodate burgeoning populations.  (I did not encounter this in Ecuador or Chile.)  Each wash area usually has a much used cloth towel hanging on a nail for use by one and all.  

Throughout India, one needs to carry one's own toilet paper into most public facilities or pay a person kneeling outside. Inside, some offer western style toilets, usually with a bidet wand instead of toilet paper, but many offer instead a tiled floor, with an oblong hole surrounded by textured foot markings and a bucket of water nearby for rinsing the hole and floor (no flushing mechanism). Increasing numbers of U.S. homes and restaurants are starting to install low water toilets, particularly in water starved and high cost areas.  To encourage such proactivity, my parents' suburb in San Francisco publishes and distributes a “wall of shame” list naming “water hog” property owners. 

 As a side note, Indians who have visited the U.S. are startled by the lack of privacy in our public stalls. I can see their point! Our “peekaboo” panels are indeed much less private than the floor to ceiling walls and doors common throughout India, but found only in the better restaurants and clubs in the U.S.