Artisanal day trip

I had to go pick the van up. With our family shrinking, and the monthly trips to Calgary no longer happening, my desire for a more winter-worthy minivan is no longer a pressing need. We decided to put some work into the Sienna. I took it in to get the catalytic converter replaced to fix the "check engine" light but it turned out that there was several thousand dollars of more urgent work that needed doing. Oh dear. They kept it for a week. We enjoyed a light little Corolla loaner. Then it was time to go retrieve the Sienna, and pay the bill. 

Fiona had been wanting to visit the east side of Kootenay Lake to see the artisans. The last time we had been there she was too young to remember. There was a Barefoot Running Clinic in the village to the east of us that morning, so we decided to go a meandering eastern route to Nelson to pick up the van. 

First we stopped for the running clinic. I had heard that the clinician had run more than 6000 barefoot kilometres on trails and was hoping for some tips on sole conditioning, so that I could begin to more effectively marry my two running loves: barefoot, and trails. So far I can only run real distances barefoot on roads. But alas the clinician had run "barefoot" on trails, not actually barefoot. As in, wearing minimalist shoes. To me, running barefoot means, well, like, not wearing shoes. I've begrudgingly accustomed myself to the marketing term "barefoot shoes," but I still think that "barefoot running" (as opposed to "barefoot-shoe running") should refer to skin-to-ground.

Ah well, the clinic was an excellent introduction to minimalist running and barefoot-style form. It seemed to be exactly what the majority of the participants wanted and needed. I didn't get anything much out of it, but it was nice to see so many enthusiastic runners, most of them newbies. 

After that Fiona and I grabbed some lunch and headed down the lake to catch the Osprey 2000. This is the big ferry. We're used to taking small ferries across Arrow Lake, the simple flat-deck ferries that carry a dozen or two vehicles and offer as amenities a couple of garbage cans and a collection of tourism brochures. The M.V. Osprey is a different animal entirely. It carries up to 80 vehicles, takes more than half an hour for the crossing, and has an observation deck, a lounge and a snack bar. Better still, as part of the mainland highway system, it's free!

It's on the way to Cranbrook, where we play in the Symphony, so I've taken the older kids on it several times in the past year or two. But Fiona hadn't been in ages and didn't remember it. She was entranced. The weather was lovely. We visited the snack bar for drinks. We stared out the big windows in the lounge, we let our hair be blown in the wind on the observation deck. 

Then when we got to the other side we drove 5 minutes to Crawford Bay. Here there are a collection of artisans with open workshops, gift shops and displays. The blacksmith wasn't working, but that was no big deal: we have one of those at home. We did spend a fair bit of time watching the lady enamelling glass onto copper, looked at the blown glass, perused the pottery studio, and spent a fair bit of time at the weaver's store and studio. 

Janet, the primary weaver, was out of the studio, which was too bad, because she's the elder sister of a very good friend I grew up with in Ontario. I've met her a few times and she's lovely. But the best part is that I have this memory of the mysterious Janet coming to visit my city in Ontario when I was maybe 13 or 14. She was living in the mountains of BC; she had a bunch of children, they gardened, they homeschooled, they lived in a log house off the beaten path, far from highways and airports, they lived in the forest, they baked their own bread, they hardly knew what TV was. It seemed so exotic! And now, except for the TV part, I'm living more or less the same life a mere 60 miles as the crow flies from her. 

Anyway, we stopped in at the broom-maker's before heading back to the ferry. Broom-making is such a quirky craft: definitely not something you see at every historic village or craft fair. We own a couple of their brooms already. I love watching the weaving and finishing process. 

We had time for ice cream and beach-combing before heading back. The pebble beach featured some lovely shades of weathered quartz that we don't see much on our stretch of lake. Naturally we brought a few pocketfuls of special stones back with us.

We made it to Nelson in the nick of time to retrieve the (expensive!) van. It was a great way to spend a day. As is typical, we don't often make the effort to be tourists in our own neck of the woods. Every summer we vow to delve more deeply into what our area has to offer: there is so much to see and do right out our back door. This day was a good start.

Back-a-century weekend

One hundred and fourteen years, to be exact. A homeschoolers field trip to the historically recreated Fort Steele was perfectly timed. Less than two weeks after Erin's exciting departure to Montreal, and four days after Noah and Sophie headed out on a week-long all-high-school cross-curricular out-trip, Fiona was presented with the option of joining our regional homeschool group for this weekend trip.

We stayed in the original barracks of the North-West Mounted Police, a huge long single-story cob-chinked building equipped with about four dozen wooden cots with straw tick mattresses. Across the quadrangle was the cook-house where we used this huge wood cook-stove to bake corn bread, cook soup and porridge and brew up cocoa and coffee. Meals were mostly done by families individually but in a very collaborative way. ("Extra pancakes, going fast!" and "Who brought extra salt?" and "Tons of rice pasta. Can anyone use it?") To clean up we hauled water in buckets, heated it on the wood stove and washed our enamels metal spoons, cups and bowls by hand in grand assembly-line style.

At 5 pm each evening the gates were locked and we were left with the village all to ourselves. The curator and a couple of other live-in staff remained overnight but basically it felt like our village. We were free to roam all over it, to open sheds, to check on the animals, to poke around the alleys, the stagecoaches, the cabins. The streets were empty, except for the fifty or so of us. We no longer felt like visitors. Those magical evening hours transported us in a way a daytime visit never would have.

We had evening bonfires. The kids set each other scavenger games. They played tag and cops & robbers. We watched the stars. Listened to trains. Shared each others' stories.

And in the daytimes the kids had workshops, with a variety of knowledgeable and passionate guides who never talked down to anyone and let the kids do lots of hands-on projects. They had a morning of leather-working, an afternoon in the blacksmith's shop shaping nails.  They hand-churned butter, and made jonnycakes using a recipe from Sam Steele's own notebook.

 

They even brought out the collection of kids' costumes for us at no charge and let the children find breeches and pinafores and bonnets. Fiona found a chambray smock and bonnet to go with her purple hoodie.

They learned to churn butter, and were put to work hand-washing laundry, scrubbing it on a laundry board, cranking it through a wringer and hanging it to dry.

There was cinnamon flavoured ice cream to be churned. (Who knew the ice cream churn would require both a churner and a "sitter"?)

And there was gold to be panned for. Flakes were added to each child's pan and I think they all found their flakes successfully. There is gold found naturally in the creeks to this day, but it's scanty compared to the 1860s. Only two pans had flakes of gold without being "salted" by our prospector-guide.

Fiona really really loves history now. Canadian history was on her learning plan anyway, and this has started the year off with a bang.

The Cheese Stands Alone

Our cheese is now a month old. It has been coated in fetching red cheese wax and has been sitting in a dark cool crawl space adjacent to our basement foundation for a month now. Probably it should be somewhere cooler, but so far it's free of mould. Perhaps we'll move it to the fridge.

It is a rather diminutive disc, considering that we started with a gallon of milk. The container it's in is a snug fit for a sandwich, if that gives you an idea of the scale. Even if small-scale cheese-making isn't an efficient use of time or resources, it has been fun and instructive to experience the process first-hand.

Outdoor shower

Look what we have! I LOVE outdoor showers. There's something about short bursts of warm water to lather or rinse in, accompanied by warm summer breezes, that leaves me ten times more refreshed than a shower in some sort of indoor stall.

Most of the kids think that my penchant for outdoor showers is fueled by latent exhibitionist tendencies, or else just plain weird. But hey, we have a very private property. And they do appreciate that when I return from a run 10k run in 27ºC weather I can shower before I enter the house!

We have owned a solar water-bag camping shower for a while. It helped get us through the prolonged power outage three years ago due to forest fires. But to use on a daily basis it's cumbersome. You have to lower it, fill it, leave it in the sun to warm, and then hoist it up into the air somehow to use. Lather, rinse, dry, repeat.

We had a lot of extra poly pipe lying around in bits, left over from the years when we hadn't figured out how to optimally maintain our water system in the winter. The extra poly pipe could be used in an emergency to get us household water in the event that a segment got frozen.

So I snailed a bunch of poly pipe together, bought some hose and faucet fittings and rigged the whole thing up to a cast-off showerhead. The poly pipe lies in the sun and heats the water up due to its dark colour. It holds a few gallons of water, easily enough for a couple of quick showers. It refills itself automatically from the tap as water is pulled out of the other end. And for really sunny days, there's a way to mix in some cold water directly from the tap to prevent scalding.

Alas it has been mostly overcast and thunder-showery today. I haven't yet been able to give the shower a real test run.

Huaraches

Here's another chapter in my minimalist footwear adventure story. I made these sandals in the traditional huarache style out of a bit of 4mm rubber outsole material purchased from a cobbler in the area. I traced my feet, cut the sole with scissors, punched three holes and added a leather boot lace. The materials cost about $15. I may have to replace the laces once a year (for $3), but the soles look like they'll last ages.

To lace them, I followed the directions at Invisible Shoe. The knot under the base of the toe has compressed to negligible thickness and I don't feel it at all. I find these really comfortable. I was never one to like flip-flops; the prong between my toes felt intrusive and tended to give me blisters. But I find the thin leather lace unnoticeable after the first minute or two of wearing these.

Each sandal weighs less than 80 gm (3oz.), which is less than a third of what even the lightest running shoe weighs. So they're very light, but the sole material seems to be very durable -- it's good Vibram stuff, sturdier than the softer rubber typical of running shoe soles.

I've been wearing these around for a few weeks, but only just started running in them. Last night I did part of my speedwork in them. On fast downhills the lace rubs a bit between my toes. I think that if I'd gone out and done 12 miles of steep trails on my first huarache run I might have got blisters there. But with a gradual approach I'm sure my feet will get used to that. No blisters last night, anyway!

They feel like almost nothing. I feel bits of gravel through the soles, so that I'm aware they're there, but there's no discomfort. They're so open and airy that perspiration dries as quickly as it's produced. So I don't feel the need for a suede or foam footbed on top of the sole material.

The only thing I didn't like was the sound. The thin soles are floppy enough that no matter how lightly I place my feet, when I'm running quickly the rubber tends to slap the asphalt. One of the things I love about barefoot running is its silence. But last week my barefoot stealth style allowed me to inadvertently startle both myself and a young bear by getting much closer than I normally am comfortable with before either of us noticed. So a little "slap, slap, slap" probably isn't a bad thing in the big picture.

I did half yesterday's speedwork in bare feet and half in my huaraches. I definitely prefer the feel of barefoot, but I can see the huaraches being useful for gravely surfaces where barefooting isn't yet comfortable for my still-somewhat-tender feet.

Earth oven

I spent some time this weekend learning how to build an earth oven. When we wrecked our old deck and built a new one in a slightly different orientation, we ended up with a vacant sunny spot 4 metres from the kitchen door that was just crying out for an outdoor oven. When I heard about a workshop to learn to build an earth oven, I signed up right away.

The earth oven begins with a foundation with a layer of fire bricks, upon which a dome of damp sand is constructed. This is the form upon which the oven is built. For this oven we built a dome 27" in diameter, which with 10" walls will end up being about 4 feet in diameter once completed. Shown in the first photo is the thermal layer (which is made from a 2:1 mixture of sand to clay, with just enough water) which has been applied over the sand form to a thickness of 3". This is the most exacting stage of the construction. The sand, covered in a couple of layers of wet newspaper, isn't exactly very strong. The sand/clay mix had to be applied with just the right amount and direction of pressure to get it to bond to itself but not put undue stress on the sand. The door was then cut away and everything left to set up a little overnight.

The next day we pulled some of the sand out to help speed up drying the oven and began adding the first of two insulating layers of cob. Cob is a mixture of sand, clay, straw and water. The straw adds tensile strength and also helps insulate the interior of the oven. We mixed ours on tarps with our feet.

Applying the cob was much less exacting than working the sand/clay mix onto the sand form the day before. We wetted down the outside of the thermal layer and applied clay "slip" (a clay-water mix) to help the cob adhere, and then we stuck it on and pressed it in. We tried for about 3" of thickness, and intentionally made the surface very lumpy, since there will be a whole other layer to go on in a day or two once this layer has partly dried.

The cob layer can be used to add sculptural qualities to the oven. I've seen illustrations of ovens that are in the shape of snails or phoenixes or dragons. This oven is to be a basic dome shape. Ultimately the main cob layer will be a total of about 6" thick.

Once the main cob layer has reached a 6" thickness and the whole oven has had a few weeks to dry thoroughly, a final smooth "plaster" layer of finer cob is applied. This cob is made with chopped straw or manure instead of the longer strands, so it is much smoother and easier to slather on artistically. We were able to practice a bit of this on another oven at a later stage of construction. The final plaster layer of cob can be smoothed on with a wooden trowel and as you can see at the top left of the photo it gives a nice smooth finished appearance to the oven. This layer can be made from coloured potters clay and washed sand if a different colour is desired. It can also be inlaid with ceramic tile. Because we don't live in the desert, earth ovens here need to be protected from the elements to some extent to last more than a few years. This one is tucked just inside a lean-to shed with its own supply of firewood.

Cob ovens like this are fired for an hour or two before baking. The door is left open during firing, as there is no chimney. There's a bit of smoke at the beginning of this burn. The oven above has been used weekly for the better part of a year, and you can see that there's a bit of soot that has collected above the door, but not much. Once the fire has burned down to just a few coals, the coals and ash are raked out into a metal pail, the firebrick cleaned off with damp rags on a stick, and a wooden door is placed in the opening. The interior of the oven will be somewhere around 600ºF and will gradually decrease over the next three or four hours to 300ºF. You could bake four pizzas and eight loaves of bread in that time (things bake very quickly in an oven like this), and then throw in a pot of beans to finish up.

Kiko Denzer's book is the bible of earth oven construction. I've owned the book for years and it's very comprehensive. The workshop we did followed the instructions almost to the letter. I think a person could probably do a decent job with nothing more than his book. Still, the process was very much demystified by some hands-on experience, and there's no substitute for squeezing getting your feet dirty mixing cob, or for holding it in your hands and learning when it feels just right.

On the way home from the workshop I stopped at a rock pile and picked out a few nice-looking rocks for the beginning of our own earth oven foundation. This might be a project for 2011. We bake a lot of pizza and bread in our house.

Building a gaming machine

Noah has always been the heaviest computer user amongst or kids. He's a self-made geek who has become a whiz at tinkering with software. Recently he's been straying into the realm of hardware, trouble-shooting connections and adding secondary drives.

But all the tweaking and upgrading of a five-year-old heavily-used computer hasn't been quite enough. The games the kids like to play demand high-end processing, lots of hard drive space and excellent graphics capabilities. The old motherboard and operating system weren't really up to the task, the hard drive had tanked, the computer was officially non-functional, and the patchwork approach of repairing and upgrading no longer seemed like it was the most sensible route. It was time for a new machine.

Noah spent a lot of time researching products, compatibility and pricing. Because some components could be salvaged from the old computer, he figured it would be most economical (and most fun) to build a machine himself. He managed to cobble together the components for a pretty awesome gaming machine for under a thousand bucks Canadian. And this morning the bits arrived. He and Chuck set to work putting it together. As I type he has the assembled tower whirring away installing Windows 7, flashing all its funky multi-coloured LEDs.

Carding jag

Thanks to a borrowed drum carder, this phase is going reasonably efficiently. But it still takes ages. We've spent hours at it over the past couple of days.

Hanging over our heads

The first colour, the first twenty per cent of our washed and carded fleece, hanging to dry above our heads at the apex of the living room ceiling. This is about 250 gm or half a pound. We have a spinning wheel we can borrow, provided we can self-teach (the owner has never used it).

We're still not sure what we're doing with all this wool, but it sure is looking pretty! More colours to come.

Granola

About 16 years ago I was busy at home when I got a surprise visit from an old medical school friend. She just dropped in and we had a brief though lovely visit. It was one of those moments, though, when I realized how much I'd changed in the small handful of years since medical school. No longer playing the role of fairly straight-laced urban medical school student, I had become something a lot closer to what I am today. To whit: she interrupted me barefoot, pregnant, and mixing up a big batch of home-made granola. How much more cliché could it get?

I'm not pregnant these days, and my feet prefer the comfort of cushioned footwear in the kitchen. But my granola-making has gone even more funky and back-to-the-land. It's not store-bought oat flakes I'm mixing up. It's local organic groats, spelt and Kamut that I've bought in bulk and flaked myself in my hand-cranked flaker, mixed with organic coconut, raw honey, unsprayed almonds and fruit grown on our own trees and dried in our own kitchen. This is the recipe I'm using today. Gosh, fresh flaked grains make a huge difference to the aroma of this stuff! I'm happily imagining many breakfasts to come.

Pantry joy

This is what keeps me going through two hundred pounds of pears, recurrent apple-picking sessions, the grinding of spelt and wheat, the hours of collating, sorting and hauling around bulk orders of nuts and grains. The pleasure of a pantry that looks like this. Glass jars, food sorted and ready and waiting, to last us the whole winter.

And see -- my Eschenfelder has arrived! We had fresh-flaked oats for breakfast. Deelish!

Pears done!

We finished with the last of the pears today. We spent the afternoon picking an awful lot of tart apples. Then we combined them in a 3:1 ratio with the pears. We filled the cider press five times just today, and a few more times over the past week or so. Our freezer is now filled with 75 litres of lovely fruit juice. We also have a few gallon jars and bags of dried pear slices.

There's plenty of opportunity for more apple juice in the weeks to come, but we may call it a year on the juice-pressing. It's been a big week.

Pear production

We're into day three of pear processing here. All six trays of the dehydrator have been loaded up yet again.

We pulled out our copy of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee to figure out how to handle the ripening. Ninety-five per cent of our pears are still not ripe, which is a blessing. If we can continue to ripen a steady trickle of 4 or 5 pounds a day, they'll be easy to deal with. For now we have a bag at room temperature with a few ripe ones to encourage "climacteric ripening" courtesy of ethylene gas. We also have two bags at cellar temperature and the remainder outside in a chest cooler which the bears have so far not discovered. This is working well so far.

Ap-pearant bounty

Today we cleaned a pear tree for a seasonal resident. It took four of us an hour and a half to pick about 200 pounds of pears. For the homeowners we're providing a service -- ridding their tree of fruit they can't use and which would attract bears and wasps. We get free fruit if we want, or fruit to donate to community groups.

Whatever shall we do with all these pears? People in this family are not fond enough of pears to justify doing much if any canning.

They need a few days to ripen off the tree. Then I suppose we'll start madly dehydrating them and pressing them to make cider. We did a few gallons of apple cider last week with the early apples. A combination of apple and pear will give a nice tart cider that we can donate to the preschool. But I'm still not sure how we'll use so many!

This is an amazing year for fruit in our area. The huckleberries were lush in the sub-alpine during August and the apple, pear and plum trees are so laden with fruit that their branches are breaking under the weight. And yet the bears have yet to descend from the mountains. Every morning I wake up and check the fruit trees first thing, and every morning they're still bending under the weight of their ripening fruit.

Our Gravenstein apple tree has normally been cleaned of still-small unripe apples by the end of August thanks to ursine visitors. This year the heavy branches are brushing the ground, the apples are so thick they almost seem to outnumber the leaves. And the fruit is juicy and almost maximally sweet.

Whoot! Wheat!

I thought I had missed out. I had tried to buy a share in the Kootenay Grain CSA but hadn't heard back from them last spring. But today at the Garlic Festival I found out they still have a few shares available. I couldn't get out my chequebook fast enough. I paid the better part of $200, but for that price I'll get 140 pounds of organically and locally grown hard spring and hard winter wheat, Red Fife wheat, spelt, khorasan (a.k.a. Kamut®), oats and small green lentils.

"Local" in this instance means the Creston Valley, the closest grain-growing land to us. It's about 100 miles as the crow flies, longer by road. But the grain will be travelling from Creston to Nelson by sailboat, so there is really no environmental cost to the transportation.

I've been following the evolution of this Grain CSA, the first in Canada, on the "Deconstructing Dinner" radio show / podcast for over a year. I'm thrilled to finally be a part of it.

Further adventures with fleece

The washing machine worked wonderfully! Of course I probably have another 4 loads to do, but so far so good. And my machine's not too dirty. I think I'll run a load of dog bedding through the washer and that'll be that.

Carded some of the washed fleece and it looks lovely, doesn't it?

Fleece adventures

Our neighbour sheep were shorn a this spring. A bag of fleece arrived last month. Today we've been washing the fleece and carding has begun. We tried doing a preliminary carding prior to washing on some of the fleece to see if that would help expedite the washing process. Just an experiment, as it was an approach suggested by a friend. Most of it we're just washing as-is knowing it'll all have to be thoroughly carded before spinning. It's not particularly dirty fleece, partly because Icelandic fleece is naturally low in lanolin.

We're using the washing machine as our wash vessel. I may live to regret this as I know a thorough cleaning will be required afterwards. But somehow the idea of lugging hot water to do multiple loads in an outdoor laundry sink doesn't strike me as any less work.

Historic dad-guy

It's Canada Day, and Silverton hosts a day-long community celebration. History and heritage are big. Chuck was asked to be one of the blacksmiths demonstrating at the living museum "Fingland Cabin." They used coal, which was new to him -- he normally uses charcoal (made in the shark hole) .


They made a lot of racket and attracted a fair number of onlookers, many of whom were fascinated by the whole painstaking process of turning cold steel into wrought creations. Fire, the clank of metal on metal and the hissing of a water bath hold a certain attraction for a segment of the population. Dad-guy included.

Christmas dinner

Our neighbours have (okay, had, until recently -- he's in the freezer now) a turkey named "Christmas Dinner." We were there when he was plucked and dressed but that's not what this post is about. Our Christmas Dinner was harvested on the ground beneath a tree.

There's a property in town owned by some non-residents that has two grand black walnut trees and a chestnut tree on it. We don't know who the people are who own the place, so we wait until they've had every reasonable chance to show up and harvest their nuts. And then we move in before the squirrels get every last one and take a bag of our own home to roast, peel and put in the freezer for use in a Christmas loaf.

Chestnuts really are the most beautiful things. And they're easier to catch than a turkey.

Rose hips

My mom is hosting a rose hip epidemic. She has a wild rose bush that has taken over a corner of her yard which produced a profusion of hips this year. I took my younger two down to help pick. We'd had a couple of hard frosts, even down in town, and the time was right. First we made a stop at our favourite chestnut tree in town and bagged enough chestnuts for a Christmas loaf. Then it was on to the rose hips. Wow ... blue sky, green and yellow leaves, bright orange-red rosehips, warm sun! Who could have asked for anything better.

We picked and picked. Fiona and Sophie kept throwing out guesses (and critiqueing each others' guesses) as to how much we had picked, estimating numbers of rose hips and overall weight. We had decided to go for five pounds, with a bit of a cushion to make sure.

When we got home, we naturally had to measure our harvest. We had almost exactly six pounds, so we were pretty pleased. But the girls also had to know how many we had picked. So we counted out a hundred, weighed them, and then divided that weight into the total to find that we had picked about 1040 rose hips.

We washed and cleaned them, simmered them in some water and then mashed them and pressed the juice from them. It was a lot of work, but I had a lot of help. For now the juice is in the fridge. In a couple of days we'll make jelly, likely by combining the rose hip juice with apple cider. It's extra yummy that way.

We all enjoy the 'something from nothing' aspect of wild harvesting. Rose hips are everywhere around here. A person could pick for days down by the lupine garden and not make a dent in the rose hips there.

It was an elderly Japanese man who moved to our town as a WWII internee who first introduced me to the wild rose pathway by the lupine garden and told me what a great tea hips make and what a great source of Vitamin C they are. I really wish that more people would make use of the natural bounty beneath their noses. There is certainly some sharing of local / traditional wisdom that happens in our town ... but we could sure use a lot more of it!