Squirreling Away

We woke up yesterday morning under fire. It didn’t quite sound like hail hitting the metal roof above our heads; it was too inconsistent for that. The bangs and pings were too heavy to be rain or buckshot scatter (I heard the latter hit the roof many times when I was caretaking a North Dakota pheasant hunting farm and the hunters were shooting too close to the house.). I stepped out on the porch to have a look.

Bang! Again it hit the tin roof. A fat, grey squirrel. He had us in his crosshairs. Actually, he didn’t care that the house was in his way as he carried on his business 30 feet above the roof, firmly perched on the limb of a pine. He was picking green cones as fast as he could and throwing them down to the ground below. Our roof just happened to be in the way, but since it has a fairly steep slope to it, the cones were eventually dropping to the ground.

Clang! Every two to ten seconds, depending on the bounty in front of him, he continued to toss them, his back to the house, throwing the cones underhand behind him, looking not unlike myself when I’m pulling out the dead stalks from last year in preparation for tilling the garden in the spring. Unbelievably human-like.

Ouch! One stuck me on my right cheek as I stood on the porch watching. Back inside,  I rubbed the sore spot on my cheek as we joked over coffee about going out and gathering them all up before he came down the tree. No worries. We left him to his work, undisturbed. By the end of the day, there wasn’t a pine cone anywhere.

Later that day, as I started canning vegetables from the garden, it occurred to me that I was acting just like the squirrel by squirreling away the summer’s bounty before winter hits. I have felt the irrepressible need to gather and save, canning and freezing, as much produce as possible, remembering the strong desire last winter for crunchy pickles and blueberry pie, before I had a garden and had missed berry-picking because of my job as a teacher.

This year, living a full and meaningful life is my number one job. That means gathering as much as I can from the land and water, leaving little to waste. I’ve been berry-picking several times this summer, collecting Tundra blueberries, Arctic blackberries, Low-bush Cranberries, and Salmonberries. The bounty is truly more than one can imagine. I’ll go back out at least one more time for Crans and Blacks. The Salmons are done and the Blues are on their way out, starting to turn to mush from the few nights of frost we have had. However, the frost only makes the Crans and Blacks sweeter, so I’m on a mission!

I also gathered Fireweed flowers this year, enough to make over 60 half-pints of jelly, Gregg’s favorite. That was some definite work, but the reward is so great – being able to share it with others. It’s so remarkable to me that it is so simple to make the jelly – just flowers, water, sugar, pectin, and a tad lemon juice. When the Fireweed came into full bloom this year, I was still waiting for my canning jars to arrive from Target. That turned into an all out fiasco as they do not pack things well for shipping and several cases of jars that I received had one broken. What a mess! However, they sent me dozens of free jars, so I can’t complain. What I did have to do was pick the Fireweed when it was ready, though. So, I went ahead and made the Fireweed Tea – flowers steeped in boiling water and then strained through a cloth. I froze the tea until my jars came in, which actually made the canning part go very smooth, as smooth as it can go when only making five half-pints at a time. For some reason, I’ve never been able to increase the batch size on Fireweed Jelly and be successful. It just doesn’t set up and I end up with Fireweed Syrup, which does make a pretty bangin’ cocktail! So, about 14 batches later, I had the jelly all canned.

While I was waiting for the Fireweed to come in to season, big, yellow dandelion fields were plentiful and I learned that dandelion oil can be used to treat eczema, psoriasis, and just nasty, ole dry skin. I simply dried the flowers, filled quart jars 2/3 full with flowers and then filled them with olive oil. I put the jars out on the grill side table, where they could get plenty of sun, for a month. After I strained the oil through a cloth, it was ready to use. Gregg battles a patch of irritated exzema on the outside of his right leg, between his knee and ankle. He’s been putting my dandelion oil on it morning and night for a couple of months now, and it’s actually getting better!

Meanwhile, our raspberries, started just four years ago with only four stalks, have spread over a six by 20 foot space and produced about a gallon of berries this year, up from a scant handful just last year. We have eaten, shared and frozen those. I like to freeze all berries, those that are not eaten fresh, because freezing them breaks down their cell walls, making them juicier (and I think, sweeter). They are better to make jams and sauces with, and make beautiful baked goods when used frozen. Be sure to toss them in flour first before adding them to your batter – this keeps them from sinking to the bottom of the muffin or cake.

We have four rhubarb plants, multiplied from two last year. However, the stalks are small, not quite as big around as a pencil and much more green than red. However, even with that lean harvest, I managed to freeze two quart bags of chopped rhubarb, which will be delicious in a winter fruit crisp, when Vitamins C and D are hard to come by. I spied some wild rhubarb this spring up on the tundra. I’ll be sure to forage some of that next year, as well.

The garden is a different story. The wild land around us puts my tended garden to shame. The challenge is the cold soil, permafrost not being more than a foot or so down.

My cabbage plants, both in the garden and the greenhouse, never produced heads, but there were lots of bright green leaves that canned perfectly, looking more like spinach than cabbage, but I figure that means there are more vitamins and minerals in them and so will taste especially good sautéed in bacon fat and topped with some of that sweet and spicy Thai Chili Sauce that I canned today.

The radishes just bolted in the garden, never producing an actual radish worth eating.  The mustard greens did much the same thing, only producing enough greens for one meal. Green beans apparently don’t like the cold soil and the plants never got more than a foot high and I think I harvested three beans, total, off of a dozen plants. My beets look like they are only going to give me greens, as well.

On the flip side, my peas absolutely love the cold ground and long hours of sunshine that make up a Bering Sea summer! I’ll be planting a lot more of those next year. Those sweet green peas bear no resemblance to either canned or frozen peas from the store. I put them in everything from omelets to rice, and even made a bacon and pea salad that was to-die-for! Not enough to can, but next year…

The kale is enjoying it’s garden spot, too, though slow growing and I think I planted it a bit too late – best to get it started indoors next year! But, it will provide a nice, late fall salad when we start craving fresh produce after that first snowfall.

The greenhouse is another story all together. However, even thought I started my seeds indoors in March, they didn’t get sufficient sunshine and heat to really do much before they moved into the greenhouse, which didn’t happen until mid-June since Gregg just built it this year. Currently, as of the second week of September, I have two grape-sized green tomatoes (they are not grape tomatoes), hard as melons but doing their best. The rest of the fifty-some tomato plants have set flowers but aren’t going to have enough time to see them through to fruit. We probably have about two weeks left until we consistently freeze every night. We’ve nurtured the babies through a week or so of early frost last week by burning several homemade, bees wax container candles overnight to keep it at about 35 inside the greenhouse, barely avoiding the frost. My cukes are in the same situation. The Walla Walla onions didn’t get bigger than my thumbnail, but the green beans in the greenhouse are doing well. I’ve had enough for a couple of meals so far, but not enough to can. I’ll be planting more of those next year, too. The peppers, green and jalapeno, didn’t get seeds in the ground until July – waiting for soil to arrive (I’ll get to that in a minute), so they aren’t even going to get big enough to make flowers. I should get a dozen and a half carrots – they actually did well planted three to a 1.75 liter whiskey bottle that I cut the top off of and drilled holes in for drainage. We have plenty of those, so I used a half dozen to see how the carrots would do, knowing they wouldn’t grow in the cold garden soil.

Potting soil seems like a pretty easy thing to get in the summer. Not here. Not in Unalakleet, on the Bering Sea coast where everything has to be flown in or barged in on the few barges that land on our beach each summer. We don’t have a dock for barges, so they just beach themselves at low tide, unload, and wait for high tide to move back out into the ocean again. Air cargo is fairly reliable, depending on weather (rain, snow, fog, ice, and wind – there are a lot of year-round variables). However, it is not unusual for items to be shipped, let’s say from Amazon, and get to the Anchorage airport where they sit for up to 10 days before being loaded and sent on out to Unalakleet. I have had my shipments from Amazon and Target simply get lost at least a dozen times in the past year. I’ve had at least that many shipments get damaged in transit and automatically sent back to the retailer. I’ve had at least that many again arrive damaged. It’s a crapshoot, but the alternative to paying $9 for a 20 pound bag of potting soil from Target is to pay $60 for that same bag at our local AC store. It’s not a difficult choice. Nonetheless, when I ordered 10 bags and it took six weeks for them to get here, my greenhouse planting took quite a hit this year. The good news is that I’m all set for soil next spring! So, even if the greenhouse and garden didn’t provide much this year, I’ve learned an incredible amount by trial and error. Meanwhile, it looks like we’ll be eating meat and berries this winter. Oh well, it’s good enough for the bears!

So, I think about that squirrel yesterday morning, loading up his pantry for winter, and I smile as I stir my Lemon Ginger Marmalade made from leftover lemons and ginger from the Unalakleet River Lodge. Since they are only about a quarter of a mile through the woods from us, when they close down for the year, which happened last week, they give us all of their leftover fresh produce. That’s the only time of the year that there is ever a fresh lemon in this cabin. I have two left and I think those will become a pound cake tomorrow. It also provided us with the makings for canned asparagus, brussel sprouts, and Sprout Kraut, so our pantry isn’t too bare.

Thankfully, I have a wonderfully adept mountain man, slash husband, who takes care of the meat end of things. This week, we are going fishing for salmon and maybe even set a trot line for burbot. I’ll smoke and can the salmon and pickle the burbot (much like pickled herring). Then, he leaves Saturday to go moose hunting. That will fill our freezer for the winter. We’ll grind some up into hamburger and sausage, cut out roasts, ribs, steaks, and stew meat, and send some of the meat to Alaska Sausage in Anchorage and have them make up some Jalapeno Hot Dogs (the size of bratwurst) – the most delicious thing ever on a cold, January night.

Yep, we’re all busy squirreling away for the winter. I’m glad to see the industrious, little squirrel hard at work like the rest of us. That makes me smile, knowing the chances are good that I’ll see him next spring, a little thinner perhaps, unlike myself. (grin)