Eating the Apocalypse — by Cedar Sanderson

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Cedar Sanderson is a “raiding party member” that is my four friends who guest blog on rotating Mondays so I can have more time to write (yay.)*

Eating the Apocalypse — by Cedar Sanderson

I grew up  in a family convinced that the tribulation was coming, with persecutions and… anyway, we usually had enough food in the pantry to eat for a long time. Not well, for a child who hated beans (and my sister even more so, she once went two days without eating much of anything, refusing to touch the beans being served to her), but we wouldn’t have starved. We were pretty poor, especially right after Dad got out of the military and we moved to homestead in Alaska.
We would have been fine, I’m sure (hard to say from a nine-year-old point of view), but we also had the benefit of something Alaska does that I’m not sure other places do. Up there, roadkill is collected and turned over to the nearest local church, where it is processed and dispersed to families in need, and their denomination isn’t considered, although I believe that whether their “need’ is real is taken into account. The churches also are given meat by hunters who only wanted a trophy, but it’s illegal to waste the meat. And later in the year, there are the fish wheels when the salmon is running… You haven’t lived until you have stood at a picnic table covered in a half-inch of fish slime processing salmon for canning amid chattering church ladies.
Communities still take care of those who are in need, you see, until they hit limitations. Limitations like regulations that forbid them from using wild meat, donated fresh produce, or pretty much anything the government can think up to throw in their way. Or when the community in question is simply too large for those who are giving the services to tell any longer who is truly in need, and when they are taken advantage of, they are eroded until there is no will to give any longer. Or the limitation that the government (again!) provides with the EBT cards handed out willy-nilly, enabling those who are in need to rely on the dole. Until it goes away.
Which it will. The apocalypse may not come in the form my family thought it would, or on the heels of a ravening horde of zombies, and it certainly won’t involve a return to the Dark Ages, but it might get darker in some other directions. Electricity? Cell Service? The Internet? Not gone, but perhaps less reliable. Have you ever stopped to think about the hierarchy of needs in this lessened setting?
Shelter, clothing, those aren’t as much of a concern. There are plenty of houses, no matter what the media tries to say otherwise. Empty ones, too. Sure, they may not be ‘up to code’ anymore, but when you’re poor, you don’t care. I won’t get into heating… that’s another topic, another nightmare. So is sanitation, and one that isn’t thought about nearly enough. But today I’m thinking about food.
I have found it fascinating over the years to discover what I call poverty foods, which seem to have originated out of making do with what was at hand. Sure, I can talk about how to cook squirrel, but the first thing that came to mind was Shoo-fly Pie. I learned to make it for a teacher in highschool who was Pennsylvania Dutch and nostalgic for it. I’m guessing it originated when all the put-up fruit and veg had run out, and the only things left on hand were molasses for sweetening, and flour. It is definitely an acquired taste. Nowadays the poverty food we think of instantly is ramen. Which you can add all sorts of things to, but there isn’t much cheaper than the noodles. And these foods, like many of the High French cuisine recipes, are originally from the poorest families, but over time they became comfort foods.
I will occasionally ponder where our food comes from. I have a grapefruit on my desk while I’m writing, all the way to Ohio from Florida, which isn’t too bad, but much of our produce comes to us from Chile, Brazil, Mexico… if interstate and international commerce is interrupted, what then? While working with my Dad on maximizing his little farm in New Hampshire, I learned that on any given winter day, outside the short New England growing season, there were only two days worth of produce in the little state. Grants were being offered to farmers willing to put up high-tunnels and extend the growing season, but they weren’t easy to implement or get. Food would be in short supply should there be an interruption to the flow of traffic.
So what to do? I know that most folks have no real idea of what it would take to make it through a winter. In a land conscious of fats, sugars, glutens (don’t get me started!) and allergies, who knows what you need just to keep body and soul together? beans and rice, mostly, to the dismay of the nine-year old inside me. Together they supply the essential amino acids – which, by the way, are the ones your body doesn’t make on it’s own – and they can be stored dry for a very long time. Fortunately, spices can also be stored alongside them, sealed, dark, and dry, and that will alleviate some of the boredom.
Will it come to this? I hope not. I have no desire to be in the place of the person who discovered that rhubarb is edible. You see, rhubarb leaves are toxic (oxalic acid) but the stems can be delicious. It took some serious starvation and experimentation to discover that, but at least it wasn’t as bad as the people who tried Jimson Weed (short for Jamestown, and now you know why they tried it…) I have done Urban Foraging, although not for any need. Well, unless you count a burning desire to try real grape jelly.
While I was working in a city, I discovered on my lunch breaks that the local area was buried in wild grape vines. To the amusement of my co-workers, I brought in pounds of them after lunch in a sack. The jelly, by the way, was delicious. Learning how to can safely is another skill that might need to be rediscovered in the days to come. With indifferent electricity we retreat to a day where refrigerators and deep-freezes might not be an option. Canning originated with Napoleon’s need to keep an army in the field without worrying as much about food on hand, and in his time it was a boon to everyone, letting them keep food on hand that would ward off scurvy and rickets.
I doubt that I will be on hand to see it and much less that there will be the resources to study it, but it should be interesting to find out that the current correlation of the rise of modern medicine to the increase in allergies and autoimmune disorders holds true. I learned this year that scientists see a tie between our eradication of intestinal parasites in the modern nations and the rise of food allergies like peanut and gluten. What they believe is happening is that the immune system, so accustomed to warding off the invaders, is left to it’s own devices and turns on the body, confusing friend with foe. Actually, even the aftereffects of the ACA, forcing people to wait longer and longer before they can have medical treatment, may affect that trend. It’s a trade-off. Accept the cognitive effects on a body that must feed more than itself, or the effects of an immune system run amuck. Which is an interesting metaphor for our current political system, isn’t it now?

359 thoughts on “Eating the Apocalypse — by Cedar Sanderson”

  1. I do a lot of thinking about apocalyptic food supply. In part, that’s because I write a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff and you’re an idiot if you don’t think the struggle for food is one that will go on for a long, long time afterward.

    I’ve had a lot of people talk about how they figure that after an apocalypse, they figure game will dry up as everyone and their brother will be hunting. Unfortunately, hunting is a skill, and not one that everyone possess. Animals are smart in their environment. They’ve evolved to survive all manner of predators to some extent, and a bunch of city folks deciding that Armageddon is a fine time to take up the activity isn’t really going to change that.

    But those guys and gals who are good hunters…they’ll be wealthy, wealthy people.

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    1. Tom,

      I think you can pretty much forget about hunting as any kind of solution to an apocalyptic situation (unless you’re also postulating a 90% reduction in population as well). There are simply too many people and too little game. Do a quick google search on “Market Hunting”, and see what I mean. I’m not even talking about what happened to the buffalo or passenger pigeons either. I’m somewhat familiar with market hunting in Michigan, and it makes for some interesting reading. I think that if things go seriously South for us, small animals kept in the garage (chickens, rabbits, etc) will serve the individual better than relying on hunting.
      Waidmann

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        2. In this scenario, we will stop feeding cats because we will need to revert them to their original purpose. Preservation will always be a problem.

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            1. Our barn cats get fed– about as much as my house cats, but they’re also doing a lot more than the house cats.

              Makes for a healthier batch of mousers.

              More folks hunting might cut down on cat predators, though….

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              1. Re: mousers, been meaning to ask: how do you find a good mouser? Is it a breed thing, an environment thing, a question of training? We’ve wanted another shot at a family pet and (sadly) have use for a good mouser right now. I’d like to take in a shelter animal, but I don’t know if I’d have a decent chance of getting a hunter that way.

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                3. My dad swears by calicos or– if he can’t get that– a fluffy orange cat for mousing.

                  Our boys are tuxedo, which he says are more likely to be good house pets, but they’re also nice house animals, good with kids, and can mouse. (even if it’s just drooling them to death)

                  I’ve heard good things about Siamese for mice, and if you can find one that looks like a Maine Coon/Norwegan Forest cat, they’re good.

                  There are individual cats that can’t mouse, but most of them will at least go “Oooh! TOY!!!!”

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                4. Get a female from mouser stock. If you know someone who has barn cats who have recently had a litter, this is usually a good place to start. Females do seem to make a little better hunters than toms, but the main point is they tend to stay home and not go off tomcatting, so their mousing benefits you, not your neighbors in the next township.

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                  1. That would be a great idea (sincerely) if I knew anyone even kinda close with a barn. All my contacts for that are hundreds of miles away. :-/ I’ll just have to check the shelter for a calico once things have stabilized at the Oysterhaus.

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                    1. Depending on the shelter, if you say you’re looking for a good mouser, they may already have a range of cats in mind. (The “these were trapped wild” cats vs. dumped kittens.)

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              1. Even the well fed ones hunt, most of them. For fun, I suppose. At least the half wild pack two of my aunts kept in their old age did, in spite of getting plentiful food from aunts.

                They didn’t hoard in the sense of adopting cats, it started when the first two never got fixed and kept popping out kittens, and then after a while it kind of got out of hand and there was mostly unchecked breeding for nearly two decades with only occasional culling when the one aunt who was not off her head found the kittens early enough that she had the stomach to kill them, or the neighbor with a gun live trapped and then killed some of the adults, with the saner aunt’s permission… lots of cats. Lots and lots of cats which all stayed around because the aunts did keep feeding them (one aunt did have schizophrenia, and was attached to her pets, any time she found out about the trapping or killing kittens she got very distressed).

                But you never saw anything like a mouse, nor signs of ones, anywhere near that house. Or small birds.

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              2. Age matters.

                Feed the kittens, they’ll bring back a lot of dead animals for “mommy” in addition to what they live on. (we couldn’t feed the barn cats when I was a kid, but still had summers of “tokens” on the front door every day.)

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                1. We feed greebo — overfeed him, really — but we’re the only house in the neighborhood that didn’t get mice, when mice fled the fires. Instead, we got hecatombes to our glory, on the back door mat.

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                    1. Do puppies hunt to bring to the pack master? He’s territorial and thinks he’s a dire wolf. unfortunately he’s only 12 lbs. If the apocalypse comes we’ll get our meds as long as we can. Then we’ll eat what tastes good for our remaining time.

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      2. There is a lot of material out there on intensive growing, and it includes meat production from small stock. Rabbits, in theory, can produce enough meat for the family, albeit very lean (which is not a good thing, despite what current nutritionists say). But even then, you need to have an idea of what you’re doing… believe it or not, the wrong conditions, and rabbits won’t breed!

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        2. Current nutritionists are operating under the currently correct assumption that people are all but engulfed in fatty food.

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          1. Humans need some fat and carbs or else we get kwashiorkor and can’t utilize protein. Amazing how “nutritionists” seem to forget this minor detail. (I happened to be reviewing this as I was doing revisions today.)

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            1. Nutritionists seem to think everybody sits on their butt behind a desk all day, then goes home and flops on the couch, turns on the TV, cracks a beer, and hollers, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”

              Probably because those are the only type of people coming to them with weight problems. After all the people who actually work for a living and need the protein and fat in their diet aren’t normally coming to see a nutritionist.

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      3. Wild game are all very elusive critters, and will only become more so with increased hunting pressure.
        But consider with the current level of farm mechanization domestic livestock will almost immediately either die off or become free range as farmers are faced with the impossibility of maintaining their mega-farms when cut off from the energy, fertilizer, and processed feed resources to remain in operation.
        Feral hogs are already well known both as a pest and a reliable food source in most southern states. Add feral cattle to that mix as feed lot operators can no longer sustain their massive operations and either slaughter massive numbers of beefcows or turn them loose to fend for themselves. As Ringo pointed out in The Last Centurion there would be a period of a lot of cheap readily available meat followed by very hungry times.

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        1. One problem I’ve heard of with eating feral pigs is that some landowners will try to poison them, which doesn’t kill them soon enough, so your hunter kills tainted meat on the hoof and then eats the poison.

          I don’t know how ubiquitous a problem this is, but it’s something to be concerned with.

          On a different note, in these discussions of TEOTWAKI, I have to keep reminding myself that the apocalypse might not involve a Coronal Mass Ejection or a Stirling-esque Change, so both guns and cars are likely to continue to operate. Which means that there will be a lot of people escaping the cities who wouldn’t in those other scenarios.

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          2. There are multiple problems with that. 1) Most city dwellers (poor) have no idea what “raw” food looks like; 2) how hard food will be hunted at first _in_ cities (stores, reserves, etc.); How few can/will walk any distance.

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            1. Don’t underestimate human kindness.

              There WILL be little old ladies who take on a flock, and know what end of a frying pan to hold.

              Although you may want to fear their resulting tribe….

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            2. Y’all are overlooking the obvious: In cities, after the Apocalypse, people will just get Chinese delivered. Sure, the absence of phone lines will cause some difficulty, but the folk who manage those Chinese delivery restaurants will figure a work-around.

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        2. For beef, the “mega farms” buy their animals from ranchers every year.

          If things went south, it’d suck, but most of the cows my folks manage would survive…although any forest ranger that tried to keep them off the range might not.

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      4. Hm. That brings to mind: I have never looked at this, but it might be interesting to see if any of the smaller animals sold in pet stores – the ones which are easy to keep alive, and which breed fast – might make good eating. Guinea pigs? Well, almost all of the rodents could be eaten, and they breed, and at least rats eat pretty much anything so feeding them would not be that big a problem, but which would make best meals?

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          1. Yes, I think I saw that somewhere.

            And even those rats might not be that bad an idea. I wouldn’t want to try something caught from a sewer, but a nice, plumb and healthy white one raised in a clean cage, well, why not, at least if the alternative was months more of rice and beans. :)

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            1. And btw, as far as pet cats and short term problems feeding them are concerned, especially if you live somewhere where putting them out to hunt for themselves is not something you want to do – mice breed really fast, so maybe one might consider buying a few breeding pairs of those, and/or rats, if things start to look hairy. And they also eat almost anything, so at least for a while moldy bread and so on might keep your mice population happy.

              Hey, people who keep snakes do exactly that, after all.

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            1. I’m not even allowed to hunt wild rabbits. I suggested raising some for meat one time and was treated like I was a werewolf or something by the boys (wife just doesn’t like rabbit). I can imagine trying to do that with guinea pig.

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              1. Sadly, a good friend wanted to raise meat rabbits – and got derailed by his teenage daughter, who couldn’t stand the idea of the cute widdle bunny rabbits being slaughtered. Even though she’s a great shot and a good deer and dove hunter. So there are two female rabbits out in the back yard, eating and being sullen, and not much else going on with ’em.

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                1. My next door neighbor’s daughter made pets out of _everything_. There were two turkey hens who’d flap over the fence and crouch down for me to pet them. The black bantum with the white crest who’d perch on your hand like a falcon . . . and baby goats, who could possibly kill and eat a baby goat?

                  Heh. And out of control cat and dog breeding. Let’s not mention the semi-feral peafowl . . . come the apocalypse the neighborhood will eat well for a few weeks.

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                  1. baby goats, who could possibly kill and eat a baby goat.

                    >>raises hand<<

                    Although I'd prefer to let it grow up. More meat that way.

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        2. From memory, there’s a REASON rabbits were listed as “rodent” in some of mom’s old books.

          What the rabbits won’t eat, the pigs will, or the goats/sheep/cows….

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          1. I love old cookbooks. However, some of them have recipe for possum. Now, I claim to eat anything that doesn’t wiggle except jello, but possum is really ewwww.
            One of the Foxfire books has a transcript of one woman talking about how when she was a child her mom would save the possum head for her as a treat. We must never go back to that.

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            1. supposedly down south the possums would get in the persimmons, and live in the trees eating them. That is when I have to think they were eating them. Where I grew up the most reliable way to find possums (well other than driving down the road looking for roadkill) was to go find a dead cow, a nice ripe one, take a stick and beat on its ribcage, and half a dozen possums would more than likely run out. See they would eat a hole into the inside of it, then live in there (with all the excretions that intails) while they ate their way out. Yumm!

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          2. According to the guides in Colonial Williamsburg, the colonists viewed the primary purpose of gardens as a lure to entice rabbits, deer, possums and raccoons within easy shooting range.

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            1. Alaskan still do. I mean, who doesn’t make sure there’s a good backstop/berm behind the garden, and then plant the snow peas (moose love snow peas) in direct line of fire from the kitchen window?

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          1. Probably not much different from ‘roo. Roo is quite gamy but you need to eat it quickly while it’s still warm, or it gets tough to chew. Flavor’s a bit like deer. It’s VERY lean, which is why it gets tough. I think, personally, that it’s better as a jerky meat.

            The little things seem kinda dumb, honestly. We were driving down the highway one night and we spot one, in the middle of the road, and slow down. The silly thing stares at us, and doesn’t move. When Rhys starts to move forward, it jumps in front of the van. And stays there for five minutes before moving on.

            I think that’s why I see so many of them dead by the side of the road.

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            2. We drove from Alice to Darwin in late July (aka “winter”) and it was carnage on the roads.

              We were warned simply *not* to drive in the outback at night.

              And yeah, I wasn’t horribly impressed with the taste of Roo. It was wasn’t *bad*, it just wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way for. Croc was kinda tasty though.

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  2. One of the reasons the government got into the “helping poor people” business in the first place was the absolute collapse of the safety net provided by churches, fraternal organizations and charitable foundations in the face of the Great Depression. That’s something to be considered when you think about what Armageddon, however it is caused, will bring.

    Something else…if you think our civilization isn’t very fragile, just imagine what would happen if somebody turned off the power for just the 11 Western States, and it stayed off for more than 90 days. How likely is that to happen? I don’t know, but I DO know how easily a few committed people could do it. There is no real defense, as the electric grid is currently organized.

    And as for hunting, it’s pretty obvious what all those guys and gals who’ve never hunted before will hunt. There’ll be plenty of long pig around.

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    1. The government was in, meddling, from day one in the Great Depression. Remember that FDR campaigned on the argument that Hoover was a socialist and with promises to balance the budget.

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    2. if somebody turned off the power for just the 11 Western States, and it stayed off for more than 90 days

      Apposite this:
      http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778

      If that link doesn’t work, just Google the title of the article and click on their link. Synopsis: California power station was targeted and taken offline by a group of unknown assailants armed with rifles.

      “Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night”

      They utility was able to route around this particular station, but it took 27 days (per the article) to get the station back online.

      Now imagine multiple, simultaneous strikes against similarly unguarded stations…

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      1. Also imagine the degree of coordination necessary to pull off those strikes, and the chances of its going completely unnoticed. One station is much easier than a whole bunch.

        (That’s the flaw in V for Vendetta. V had effectively unlimited and undetectable resources.)

        not that it’s impossible. but it would require some massive work.

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        1. I don’t think it is quite as hard as you think. Maybe not the whole of the west but I figure you could put a hurt on large subpopulations (e.g. Southern California, Solicon Valley or Las Vegas) without too much difficulty. Of course you probably wouldn’t just take out the electricity, you’d also sabotage the water and the gas pipes too…

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          1. The more you sabotage, the more people you need, the more equipment you need, the more planning you need. Remember this all has to be coordinated; the hijackers got four planes on 9/11, and we’ll never know which target they had for that one. The more possibilities for things to get out, to go wrong, to recruit someone who’s an undercover cop, or runs when the pressure’s too high, or just starts the infighting that makes it impossible to go.

            As I said, not impossible, but difficulty. Especially since it’s secret. Remember that the Nazis knew the Allies planned something for Normandy. (Good thing, too. This way, when the attack went off, they thought it was the distraction.)

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        2. Massive coordination, yes. The problem is that thanks to the internet you don’t need lots of deliberate coordination if you can just put the idea in the heads of a few people.

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          1. Good heavens, that sounds like a formula for disaster. Any set of incompetent buffoons can take it and run with it, and when they fail, security gets ramped up and the police start hunting hard for perpetrators. And you left tracks all all over the internet!

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              1. You notice that although they had all the forces of the federal government behind them, they were caught, if not punished.

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            2. And I don’t give more detail than us spending at least one day a week on ship dreaming up new ways to attack– and ways to defeat it?

              And that folks were PREPARING FOR THEM?!?

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            3. Well, I will tell this one… they started making a rule that only official defenses could be used in security drills after several teams of special forces were defeated in their attack on a Navy vessel. And that was purely passive kinds of resistance, not “beat them to death with a shoe” level.

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            4. A little while after 9/11, a friend of mine said “If I were a terrorist, I would…” and laid out a plan that would: a) be scarily easy to implement, and b) cause a whole lot of loss of life and property damage where the attack was carried out. I’ve never mentioned the details of what he said anywhere online (and neither has he), and I’ve only mentioned it verbally to a few people — people who I knew were in the business of brainstorming attack ideas and how to defeat them.

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              1. One of the problems of replacing my Navy support network with an online one is that I can’t do those weekly brainstorms anymore.

                I LOVE that kind of stuff, but… well, yeah, not enough to kill my guys.

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                    2. nods

                      Calibration. That’s the trick. Because the universe consists of hard vacuum. All the matter in it doesn’t rise to the dignity of rounding error.

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              2. There are a lot of technically inclined Sons of Mary who would have no problems thinking up some way to cause massive and expensive disruptions: essentially they just have to stop busting their @$$ to keep tings working.

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              3. I may have mentioned here before how I terrified 90% of my CERT class. See, one of the training units is on terrorism. The instructor asked “So what possible terrorist targets do we have here in Podunkville?” Most of the class kind of shrugged. Me, I told him “Well, that depends on what they’re trying to accomplish. If they want a big, flashy attention getter, nothing. If they want to terrorize the populace and cause a lot of civilian casualties, we have several.” Everyone looked at me funny. Then I explained how I would go about it if I were that hypothetical terrorist. It took about 30 seconds. I’m not 100% sure the plan would work, but it was plausible enough, simple enough, and horrific enough that most of the classroom was looking at me as if I’d grown a second head. I may not be the best sheepdog, but it seems I’m canine enough to scare the sheep.

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            5. I used to work at the Airport.. Before and after 9/11.
              They are good at making it LOOK like they are doing something.
              Reality is another thing.
              No, I do not give details online.

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              1. Speaking of that, here id one of the reasons I think they’re stupid: It took them YEARS to plan that job. With a dozen reasonably intelligent people who could nonetheless be convinced to do the job, I could have planned and instituted it in 6 months (possibly less, depending on flight schedules).

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                    1. I think it falls under the same heading as Anarchy. Those who don’t like it and don’t do it are actually better at it than those who practice it, and if it came to cases would be far more dangerous in the end.

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        1. I saw the initial report back a year ago, but the bloggers reported it as “could be interesting but have not heard more” at the time and let it drop. I think Borepatch and a few others reported it.

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        2. It was in the news when it first happened, but few paid attention. The WSJ article added information that was not previously public, but the attack itself if not all the new details was in the news when it happened.

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    4. One of the reasons the government got into the “helping poor people” business in the first place was the absolute collapse of the safety net provided by churches, fraternal organizations and charitable foundations in the face of the Great Depression. That’s something to be considered when you think about what Armageddon, however it is caused, will bring.

      You got it backwards mate.

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  3. And then there’s gardening. It takes a lot more than poking a few seeds in the ground. Which I am slowly learning, and slowly expanding my garden. And if the Apocalypse includes water shortages, even the canny gardeners are going to have trouble putting food on the table.

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    1. Yes, but it’s a wonderful hobby. And rain barrels are a good place to start, just watch your local Gov’t regulations, because believe it or not, there are places where it’s illegal to capture rainwater.

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      1. They can be a bit hard to set up on a large enough scale. Mission priests giving their “give us money” sermons recount how they only managed to get rain barrels for one set of schools in Africa, they’re working on the others.

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            1. No, not at all cheap or easy to come by in most of Africa. And, plastic barrels do well in North American climates – most of them – but when you’re in the extremely strong sunlight and extended heat of most of Africa, plastic barrels don’t do so well. They warp, for a start…

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              2. We help a mission that tries to take care of church schools in Africa. A hundred dollar bicycle has an import tariff of $2500.00. Everything that comes in, is taxed. One of the problems in Malawi is water so the collector would be a great idea. A 65.00 UA protected rain collector would cost ???? in fees just to get it in.

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                1. How polite we are. “taxed” – because if you say flat out that you’re paying bribes, you’re running afoul of US laws that restrict heir nationals from paying any bribes, kickbacks, or baksheesh overseas.

                  And so we pay “taxes”, “import fees”, “brokerage and commission costs”, and the rest of the world fleeces us for the extra middleman to hide the official and unofficial corruption, while our own government tries to say that this is the normal amount of ‘fee’ and ‘taxes’ and ‘regulations’ and ‘duties’, so we shouldn’t complain when they tack on more on the US side of import/export… and so many people grow up blind to the naked fist of power, and how truly bad it is out there.

                  Oh, pardon me. That is a soapbox under my feet, isn’t it? How did that darned thing get there… excuse me, off to have a cuppa and calm down.

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            2. Plastic drum/barrel + Africa = container for brewing beer (and a near infinite appetite for same. A 100 or 10 million barrels). Not for water for crops. Sorry, real world meets idealism.

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              1. Human beans are nothing if not consistent: “why would I do what I need to in order to survive and thrive when I have a means of soaking my brain in ethanol/THC/opium? Feed my children? That’s just crazy talk.”

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                1. worse. I’ve read with my own eye an article about a situation where a man’s expenditure on beer sufficed to preclude the one time purchase of a mosquito net.

                  His daughter died of malaria.

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          2. Piffle — all your water belongs to California. You Coloradans ought be grateful that you’re allowed to keep any of it. Employing rain barrels is just greedy, forcing California schoolchildren to go without water. Why do you Coloradans hate California schoolchildren?

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            2. Because odds are good they’ll grow up to vote for bread, circuses and further infringement of rights? And I’m not from Colorado, I just fake it really well.

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                1. You’re one of the good ones. I got here as fast as I could too. I knew I should come here at eight, but mom and dad refused to send me over in a big packing box. EVEN when I forged a US passport they wouldn’t let me come. (No, I’m not joking. It wasn’t a very good forgery. But I was nine and all I had was crayons.)

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    3. Gardening is a scary thing to do in an apocalyptic environment for one simple reason: It’s very easily detectable. When the neighbors, who didn’t prepare as well as you did, see off growing in your backyard they’re going to want to take it. At that point you’re stuck with either doing what you have to do to protect your food or letting them steal it.

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      1. *grumbles* That’s why we gave up trying to grow a vegetable garden in the Philippines. There’s enough lazy, thieving gits that liked to steal our produce, because vegetables are expensive when you’d rather spend your money on booze – and that’s not even counting the homeless kids who liked to gather recyclables to sell.

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          1. That didn’t stop people, and we had a few dogs poisoned with meat coated with Ajinomoto (mono-sodium glutamate) so we gave up. My mother rather misses the fresh tomatoes, so sometimes I ponder buying her a hanging planter, because ever since the floods happened we’ve not been able to plant anything anyway – millipedes eat the shoots. But I broached the idea and she said that I shouldn’t bother, given that it’s likely someone will just steal the whole thing. And the fences we’ve put up have rusted from the flood, and we can’t afford to replace them any more.

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          1. Probably same reason as in Portugal — the law would come down ON YOU. Plus guns are controlled, and your gun is probably illegal. You’ll only use it in life or death situation.

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    4. Been doing it, on and off, most of my life. And mostly off, because most of the times I get pretty much nothing from what I planted. Since I don’t own any patch of land myself, when I get the urge I rent one of these small patches you can rent from the city (mostly on old fields which have been enclosed by houses, but are not yet build on) and the dirt on those is rarely very good for anything except maybe potatoes. Unless I can collect enough horseshit. I have rarely had the money to buy enough fertilizer, but there is a stable near where I live. :)

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  4. Pingback: Food Thoughts | Cedar Writes

  5. Yeah, I’ve had a garden for a few years, although I haven’t been able to do it for the last couple. It’s just a small plot in my back yard. But everything I ate out of it I ate fresh. But when the corn is ripe, ALL the corn is ripe, and while it’s delicious to gorge on corn on the cob that is ten minutes from the stalk to the pot, that’s certainly not something you could live on, so I’ve been curious about what kinds of foods can be grown AND saved.

    As for canning, along the back edge of my property, the blackberries annually try to mount an offensive over the retaining wall. One year I decided to pick as many as I could, and tallied up 53.5 POUNDS of blackberries over the course of a month or so. I made a LOT of jam, which is still quite good after a few years (I know one isn’t supposed to keep it THAT long, but it’s fine so far). I may have saved money on the fruit, but I spent a heck of a lot of money on jars and sugar.

    Somewhere I have a book I got from this amazing publisher/mail order bookseller, Lindsay Books, called “Five Acres and Independence” which supposedly goes into how to manage a homestead with minimal reliance on the outside world. I bought so many books from them that I haven’t read most of them (Lots of books on machining, fringe science, and reprints of 100-year-old science books. It’s been a decade or more since I last ordered, I should look into them again. (oops, just did, they retired, but even their “We’re closed for good” page at http://www.lindsaybks.com/ should give you a hint of what the place was like).

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    1. 5 Acres and Independence is a good one, my Dad had that in his library of gardening and farming books while I was growing up. Eliot Coleman’s books, and Square Foot Gardening, are also great places to start. You can grow a surprising amount of food in very little space. I live on a town lot of about 1/10 of an acre right now, with house as part of that! and yet, my mother and I had a serious conversation about whether I could grow enough food here to become self-sustaining. In theory, yes, but I don’t have time for the intensive gardening and animal care that would entail (not to mention that she’d forgotten I’m allergic to rabbit dander. I can eat the meat just fine, though).

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        1. Who would you recommend for Central Northern Texas? We aren’t desert, but we are dry. Just about every year we have some sort of water restriction to fight drought.

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          1. I would try Solomon to start with, he pulls from and combines resources from the SW states and Utah for his information. In Oregon the big issue is that it rains a lot in the winter and spring but is pretty dry afterwards so evaporation control is important. A lot of that is controlled by killing the weeds and cultivating the ground to powder. This of course is death in a wind erosion places like the Columbia plateau, and there they will leave stubble in the field to allow soil moisture to accumulate during a fallow year. But Solomon also lists his resources so you can either find them online or buy them from Alibris.
            Also, he advocates wide spacing on plants and foliar feeding. In Oregon I have had fantastic luck growing melons and eggplants with just 5 gallons on a plant per week, and even better when the ground dries out from not doing broadcast watering the weeding is a whole lot easier.
            Can you tell that I am really excited about gardening?

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      2. This was bit of a craze here some years back:

        http://www.ehow.com/how_5178193_grow-potatoes-barrel.html

        so I have talked with a few people who have done it. They said it works fairly well, if you remember to add the new soil and water regularly, the big problem was getting rid of all that soil after the the potatoes had been dug out since that family did it on their balcony in an apartment house. Probably works better if you have a yard. ;)

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    2. My family did a lot of canning and freezing of the produce from the garden when i was younger. Just about anything can be saved, but some things survive the process in better shape than others.

      Corn, for instance, if cut off the cob raw, then put in the freezer in plastic bags, is almost as good as fresh.

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        1. At least, only if you plan to use it to partially replace the flour in a recipe to reduce the carbs.

          But yes, if you’re just going to eat it normally, anything but fresh zucchini is shudder-worthy.

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              1. Now I HAVE to try this next year. At least I should be able to keep zuccini alive.

                Poking around indicates that it’s pretty good for vitamin C, has a little A, and very little B12, but that’s great for an additive.

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                    1. I have brown thumb. Robert, otoh is like grandma (my grandma.) Get a seed from a fruit that has been refrigerated for weeks, put it in some garden dirt. Look at it every day. Voila, tree. even if totally unsuited to climate. He’d have a mango tree right now, but Pixie (Best cat evah! but hater of plants, and also it was getting Robert’s attention) ate it.

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                    2. My grandmother grew an avacado tree.

                      In north-east California.

                      In her dining room corner, next to the china.

                      That is… so far beyond what should be possible, I don’t have words.

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                    4. Oy.

                      Get him some Christmas Cactus or something, he’ll make a killing selling them actually blooming at Christmas. (Alright, it’s not a high falutin thing, but it’s damn impressive to the “kills Aloe plants” folks.)

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                    1. We no longer grow the zucchini-borg-entity that nearly ate our yard. Almost as bad as squash, kudzu, and mint.

                      Took a whole truckload to the local co-op. No idea what they did with it. I’m just glad it’s gone. *chuckle*

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                    2. *SULK* We TRIED to grow zucchini. And squash. And loofah (which is edible when harvested young). We FAILED. Every. Single. Time.

                      But the ONE time we didn’t intend to plant anything, it was tomato seeds flicked aside from an afternoon snack. It turned into this groundcovering vine of awesome that was defeated only when a typhoon caused a knee-deep flood and drowned it. Never been able to grow a tomato in that yard since.

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                    3. My tomatoes get defeated by the local deer population, unless they are protected.

                      Speaking of deer, I think they are having a hard time finding food around here right now, with the hard crust on the snow. They have been coming right up to the house lately to eat the branches I went out and trimmed off the bushes a couple weeks ago (I had let them get way overgrown, and one day when it warmed up, I went on a trimming frenzy). I can’t decide if I should get a bag of corn to put out up on the hillside away from the house, or leave them alone, so they don’t come to expect the feed.

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                    6. Venison is good eatin’. My husband’s grandfather in his later years when he wasn’t very mobile (on O2) planted corn in his front yard, so that, he could hunt deer while sitting on his front porch.

                      I think that the world is changing. I wonder what things will be like in 20 or 30 years. We have a great nephew who’s about 6 weeks old now.

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                    9. They HATE me. (Sobs.)
                      Actually in this house, it’s the fact that we have maybe one inch of dirt over rock. NOTHING grows. It’s like Death’s garden. In the last house we just had NO sun. Robert managed to grow strawberries, but nothing else (except lawn) grew.

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              2. Oooh, also maganese and calcium, and apparently more of the B complex.

                Quite healthy, and I bet drying takes a bit off of the flavor. (not that I dislike it, but it would taste odd in some dishes)

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                  2. Also, his response to the declaration that I’d be trying to grow some this summer was met with “– and it’s zucchini!” (in a happy way)

                    Apparently I married right.

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                    3. Yes. That’s how they get away with the weird. (My own honey has a good deal of the elf. Okay, the back story: When I first saw his 12th grade school picture, I got a soft spot (before I met him) because he looked like the dark haired, pale skinned elf-prince in one of my favorite books of fairytales. :-P So, you’re not the only one to go poaching in the hill…)

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                    5. My husband hates green vegetables. He’ll eat corn and carrots. He likes corn. He will sometimes eat salad. He likes olives and mushrooms.

                      We have a large propane grill on the patio. Have you ever cooked in/on a fireplace?

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                    6. A pit-type fireplace, or a Franklin stove type, or a ranch house fireplace? For fun, only a little, and yes respectively.

                      Does he hate leafy greens, or are say zuccini included?

                      Dried corn is fairly inexpensive and easy. Dried carrots are flavor and nutrients if added, nice variety. Probably have to slice, dry and chop yourself, though.

                      Look into one of those cute little “grow your own mushroom” things, and a little camp stoves instead of the grill– uses less propane. (ours is a single burner that screws on to the tank)

                      I don’t remember where you live, but north central cali has some olive farms.

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                    7. It’s a ranch house fireplace. we’ve used it for heat when we had a power out. For more long term needs we have a generator that runs on gasoline. It’ll power some essential items.

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                    8. Find the most solid dutch oven possible, learn to season it, and figure out how to heat the room with one end while you cook on the other.

                      Remember you can pull off those lid thingies when it’s warm, so the fire hits the pan instead of the stove.

                      Other than that, it’s a really big “test and retest” thing.

                      …

                      Kind of like the horrible stove we have in our rental place now, actually.

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                    9. There is a trick to it. I am not good at it. Lot of it is boiling things covered, roasting in closed pans, and some roasting open but you have to be right on it and the coals have to be right. This is why I have propane and plan on getting that lovely kerosene stove for when the propane gives out.

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                    11. Agreed. Cast iron is the only way to go. I’ve cooked on coals, open flame, and on a cast iron potbelly stove. Takes some getting used to, but all that is is practice.

                      I still miss making po’boy stew on that potbelly stove. The smell would permeate the whole house. Could probably raise the dead, just to sneak a taste from the kettle. *grin*

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                    12. If you get a little camp stove, I would recommend a white gas one, instead of propane. You can burn gasoline in it if you don’t have white gas (actually I practically always use unleaded, because it is cheaper and I don’t have to go to Wal-Mart or somewhere to get fuel). Also works better at high elevations, don’t get butane if you plan on ever using it up high, it does not perform well at elevation.

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          2. Oh, sliced. blanched, and frozen has its place, too. It’s a nice substitute for fresh when it’s been so long since you’ve seen anything outside the door green and growing that even zucchini starts tasting of nostalgia for summer…

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        2. Why would you want to can zucchini? Around here the stuff grows like a weed and nefarious neighbors run around at night leaving armloads of the stuff in unlocked cars and garages.

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          2. I grew up thinking that wasting any grown veggies or fruits was near to a sin. Seeing windfall apples makes me edgy, because they should be picked up and processed into something edible.
            I freeze grated zuccini, it and pureed pumpkin makes a good soup base

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      2. The place my parents bought when I was four had several apple trees, and for several years after we moved to that house my mother religiously used all of the apples we got from those trees. Lots of apple sauce and juice. The sauce seems to keep pretty well if you don’t get mold, juice less so. A couple of times I remember a few of the bottles exploding in the basement some time during the next winter.

        And after eating and drinking lots of those as a kid it took me several years after I moved from home before I started to use apple sauce voluntarily. I still don’t particularly like apple juice.

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        1. Maybe because it’s hideously sweet?

          Sorry, personal preference thing. I can’t stand milk, apple juice, etc. (But cheese and cider are lovely.)

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          2. I put my meds in applesauce, because I take too many at one time to swallow with water. I find plain applesauce not sweet enough to cover the taste of my meds. I therefore eat mango-peach applesauce.

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              1. you are probably younger, thinner, more agile, have more energy, and are healthier than I am.

                I really like sweet things. I also love carbs and veggies, I am of East European stock. My skin is pale the better to catch vitamin D. I put weight on easily, I presume, the better to deal with famine. I’m a type II diabetic–insulin resistant. I think that I’d die within a couple of years without my meds. But you never know I might live. But I don’t think so. I’m 52 and I feel 72. In addition to diabetes, I have osteoarthritis, high cholesterol, depression, bursitis and a bulging disk in my lower back.

                Excuse me for BMW’ing.

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          3. I would guess that the jars that exploded were not overly sweet. Personally I love homemade cider, as far as the boughten apple juice goes, yeah it is to sweet.

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              1. No, apple juice should be acid enough to avoid botulism, and botulism does not usually generate gasses. Exploding fruit is usually indication of active yeast generating CO2. We used to make our own Rootbeer and when we bottled too soon with to much sugar remaining, instead of being fizzy the bottles would start exploding. One of my old co-workers had a story about how they had gone out to eat and left a sitter with the kids and the sitter called up distraught and panicked because, “the back room is exploding!” It was their home-made rootbeer.
                It would be best with applesauce to process the jars covered in at least an inch of water for at least 10 minutes at a hard boil to kill all yeast. Non-acid fruit (and veggies and meats) needs higher temperature, and should be processed in a pressure cooker, use the instructions in the Ball Blue Canning Book.
                Sorry. I can.

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              2. With alcohol of the accidenatlly-brewed kind, exploding is more often CO2 buildup. See, yeastie beasties convert sugar to alcohol ata 1:1 ratio, with carbon dioxide as a byproduct. High C02 pressure is why champagne explodes out of the bottle when disturbed… and if you tightly seal a less-sturdy bottle of mead with some active champagne yeast in it, it will lose containment.

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        2. They didn’t make it into cider? If it was cold enough in winter they could have used freeze distillation to make applejack too… ifn they didn’t mind a little wood alchohol blindness risk.

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          1. Chris, may I be a distillation geek here for a minute? Wood alcohol, methanol, is from destructive distillation of wood, and is a concern if you are trying to distill grapa out of stems and pomace of pressed grapes – or someone has been adulterating the hooch. However, what you get in freeze distillation are the fusel oils, the aldehydes and ketones, and other low temperature distillates that normally get boiled off in the first slice of the distillation process before the alcohol starts boiling off. Traditionally when you are running a still you toss out the first cup of distillate because that is the stuff that gives you the headaches that make you look for the Makita drill to let the pain out.

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            1. Thanks for the education on fusel oils. There is a lot of literature out there about the dangers of methanol in traditional applejack production methods. IANAC.

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    3. Wow, sorry to hear about Lindsay. I’ve got several of their books myself — lots of off-the-wall stuff (e.g., making your own electronic vacuum tubes from scratch) as well as stuff of a more practical bent.

      I hope the authors (at least the ones who are still around) decide to self-pub their books. It was definitely a unique mix and it would be a shame for that corpus of knowledge to become unavailable.

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      1. Well, they do give a link page that includes someone selling their back stock, as well as a few authors selling their own stuff. (Still wanna build the Gingery smelter).

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    4. Yeah, jam and such aren’t ‘supposed’ to keep for years, but one of the things we hoarded to take to the Philippines from France were several types of jam and honey. Along with canned goods. That was early 2000s.

      Fast forward to 2009, and Typhoon Ketsana decided to dump so much water on us that three dams needed to open, and we end up with Manila underwater. Because we had gotten groceries the day before, we had fresh bread. Because we were paying attention and minding the floodwaters, we noticed when the floodwaters, which normally don’t go much further than thigh-high at street level, began climbing fast enough to have us decide to start moving things to the second floor. One of the things we did was move that pile of canned goods and jams upstairs, along with utensils and plates and sources of drink. The groceries that needed no cooking and those canned goods and jarred jams and honey were our main source of food for the four days we were trapped up there.

      We managed to save most of our books, which we spent most of the day and night bringing upstairs, but that only applied to anything that was stored in the house proper, not the storehouse, sadly. But I still remember planning how to evacuate to the rooftop if we had to, and what if that wasn’t enough? I had inflated swimming vests for the children, but my mother is old and can’t swim. I remember the fear and trying to emotionally prepare myself for the worst because if the water climbed high enough to sink the house, we’d lose family members. There were people in our neighborhood who did die – a couple drowned from the undertow, and some of the older folk couldn’t take the stress and had strokes or heart attacks. My daughter’s tutor was trapped in a pedestrian overpass for those four days and she recalls watching people disappear under the raging rivers that were our streets, cars being shoved and swept away willy-nilly.

      I still can’t sleep well whenever there’s a typhoon or cyclone, or sleep at all.

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    5. 53.5 POUNDS of blackberries over the course of a month or so. I made a LOT of jam, which is still quite good after a few years

      I suddenly remembered running across a German couple when I was visiting a wild blackberry tangle I’d found outside the West German suburb we lived in (after living in the East side) and they said they were going to make wine out of the berries they were getting. Now I haven’t the foggiest of how to make fruit wines, but it sounded delicious!

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      1. Considering I brew beer (Which is odd, because I don’t drink very much) I imagine the process is similar to ordinary wine-making. Extract the juice/sugars, boil to purify, add necessary adjuncts, cool, pitch the appropriate yeast, seal up in a sterilized jug with a fermentation lock, let ferment, transfer to sterilized bottles, and let age.

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        1. I have a friend who makes it, and from what I recall he doesn’t extract the juice, he use the whole fruit in the first fermentation step, and then strains from there. It has been a few years since I was around when he was making it, but I can verify that blackberry wine is indeed delicious.

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  6. Shoo-fly Pie is a modern, new-fangled invention of souls spoiled rotten by the advent of modern sailing ships. In the Good Old Days, we used honey, and liked it. (And weren’t exploiting slaves miserably in the process.)

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    2. I like shoo-fly pie. I think it is the trick of dumping baking soda into boiling water to make the soda water so fun to do. Almost as fun as dumping mentos into cola, and far less messy.

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      1. Is there such a thing as molasses pie? My hubby has been known to eat on rare occasions molasses and peanut butter.

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          1. I don’t know. Since his pancreas stopped working, he can’t absorb things as well through his intestines. He wears two vitamin D patches because he can’t absorb enough of it through his intestines. He can’t get it from the sun because he to work before dawn and finishes well after dark. E.G. 0700-1900 or 2000.

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        2. There is a Louisiana Peanut Pie, but I’ve never made it and it uses corn syrup and brown sugar, not molasses. But there are a number of molasses pie recipes around.

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        3. My kids practically live on peanut butter with honey mixed in– it’s the same price as normal PB at the commissary, and if mom didn’t put a foot down they’d eat it straight from the jar for every meal.

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  7. I live in an area that averages 11 inches of rain per year, so gardening is an expensive hobby, not a survival skill.

    And I’m dead within a couple of years without metformin, which I can’t legally stockpile in large quantities.

    (shrug) I am a big advocate of continued high-tech civilization.

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    1. I’ve got an idea for a high-tech hunting-and-gathering society. . . no story yet, alas.

      no, not on earth. I’m not a barbarian. On terraformed extrasolar planets.

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      1. Do a “Tunnel in the Sky” scenario. You have a terraformed planet resort that caters to those seeking to “get back to nature” (as long as they have enough credits/$$/whatever). And something goes wrong with the transport system and strands the people there. Add space aliens, natural disaster (weather control system crashes too, for ex) as you will, stir, bake in a 36 bit processor for a few weeks and serve. ;)

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          1. Shhhh, don’t give my muse any more ideas! I’ve got an unplanned novel breathing down my neck as it is, along with a couple of short stories, and all while I need to get this non-fic revised/rewritten.

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      1. Alcohol is effective, especially if you haven’t had any meds to give any relief for a long time.

        And I’ve fairly recently found out that juicing grapes almost inevitably makes wine, although quality may suck. Don’t think you’ll care if the pain is bad.

        From watching my mom, I know that a lestening after some time of the really bad pain is a huge emotional boost. Even if you are still in agony, a slightly lesser agony helps.

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        1. Well, yeah, that’s why the old term for grape juice was “new wine.” There was no way to keep it from fermenting.

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          1. Digressing further, this is why I go nuts when folks try to compare any other commonly used drug to alcohol. For bloody sake, it happens even if you don’t want it!

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          2. Go easy on new wine. It was a treat for us kids between grape-stomping and “turning” but listen, seriously, it gives you the runs something awful. (Sugar alcohols, I think.)

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  8. Yea my family are still believe that the apocalypse is right around the corner. You can only live that way for a decade or two (in my case) and you are tired of the warnings. I just do the best I can day to day.

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    1. I’ve reached that point myself. I had some nice plans, but lately realized that I don’t have time to really attempt them. If I’d started 20 years ago, maybe. Now, I just prepare for blizzards, hurricanes, etc.

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        1. Yes. The Apocalypse could come anytime in the next century–or never. Hurricanes, ice storms and flooding? It’s a good year when you only have to deal with one of them. Anyone within a hundred miles of the Gulf or Atlantic coast who isn’t prepared for two weeks of no power or water is willfully blind. Or living hand to mouth.

          Anything beyond that is insurance against _very_ rare disasters. Or contrivences. This Great Recovery we’re in, if it worsens, won’t qualify as a natural disaster.

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  10. I hear squab is good. Easy keeping as far as food goes too. Been thinking of getting a couple just for eggs but I can’t even keep finches here. Part of the rental agreement. Cats only.

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  11. During the depression the government plowed crops underground, killed small rancher’s cattle and buried the remains (my grandfather’s for example) to create food scarcity, then bought from the big farmers and ranchers at a high price (scarcity) and gave away commodities to ‘help the economy’ Naturally, they had to stop the church and community from competing, for the good of the economy as well. Part of the reason why it took so long to recover. I grew up in New Mexico, 12 inches of rain a year, we irrigated. Spent my summer/fall working the fields, green beans, carrots, corn, tomatoes. Dad had forty acres in milo. Truck farming was very popular in Oklahoma. In Arkansas they raise chickens like a thousand to an acre. Nope, if things get dicy and we kick that farm agent out of the state, we’ll do fine in the long run.

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    2. My first glimmer of how evil leftists are was when, in high school history class, I realized that one of FDR’s first acts in response to a severe economic crisis with massive unemployment was to make FOOD more expensive.

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        1. I think it was more a way to endear himself with agricultural interests (it worked, to this day it’s politically impossible to end crop subsidies) and make the poor desperate enough that they’d willingly become serfs of the alphabet soup agencies.

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  13. Couple years back a tornado wall swept through north Alabama and took out the main power lines from the nuke plant into a metropolitan area of around a quarter million folks. No power for 5-8 days most places, upwards of two weeks for those on the fringe of the grid. Saving grace was that it was spring so no extremes in temperature and the utility outfit had sufficient generators and fuel to keep the water reservoirs pumped up, though we were told to conserve. Made do with what was in the fridge and freezer before that all spoiled then with canned goods. Heated soup over a propane torch. Kept informed by radio and cell phone though that was intermittent at best. Had a small inverter in my truck sufficient to charge the radios and laptop, but was starting to worry about gas until the power returned. Biggest damage other than that caused by the storm was massive loss of frozen food once the fridges and freezers kicked off.
    Since then have added a camp stove and stock of propane to my stash, a month’s supply of freeze dried camping meals, weather radio with built in crank generator, and numerous flashlights and lanterns along with the batteries to support them. Have also acquired an inverter with sufficient power to operate fridge or freezer for brief periods fed from the truck battery. Running either for a few minutes several times a day should keep things frozen as long as the gas holds out, and in bad weather the first thing I do is make sure I have a full tank and a spare can or two.

    Long term apocalypse I wish you all the best, but without my meds I’m toast.

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  14. oh yeah I remember an article by Hugh Howey that mentioned a series of ebooks that taught survival skills in the form of zombie thrillers.

    Sorry on the road to land of no wifi. having trouble finding it.

    Also anybody watch survival castle on NatGeo? Fun stuff.

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  15. I find it odd that people start to half-joke about Armageddon whenever the subject of keeping a large food supply comes up. I consider it only prudent to keep at least several months worth of food stored away, since there are so many, many different ways that a food shortage can hit a single household without anything bad happening on a grand scale.

    Shortly after getting married, my wife and I set a goal of having a year’s worth of food storage within ten years. We met that goal within three. It isn’t all that expensive, or hard to do, and it doesn’t take up nearly as much space as most people assume. I lost my job in 2009 and it took me ten months to get a new (full time) one. (there were two different part-time paying jobs in that period of time, neither one really earned to enough to cover expenses) I can’t tell you how much it eased my mind to know that I could feed my family for an entire year at that time.

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    1. If you don’t mind my asking, what does your supply consist of?

      I often let my own stock get down to almost nothing before I go grocery shopping again, and I don’t have any long-term supplies. I’d like to change that, but I’m not sure what to get, how often it would need to be used and replaced, or even what questions I should be asking. Any recommendations would be welcome.

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      1. I’ll tell you what I told my sis-in-law a few years ago: when you go to the store to buy dinner buy double of anything that doesn’t require refrigeration.
        Say you’re having spaghetti and salad: buy two jars of sauce and two boxes of noodles. You know you’ll eat that. Then the next time you want to have spaghetti, you buy two meals worth and eat the one you have on your shelf. Pretty soon you have stuff you eat stored, and when you lose your job (most likely reason to eat food storage in my experience) or whatever you really don’t want to change your diet on top of everything else.
        Now I regularly turn dry beans into dinner, but I don’t recommend you store things if you don’t regularly eat them: you won’t know how to cook them so you like them and you’ll be risking intestinal upsets from an upheaval in diet. (And, if you’ve got kids and spouse, rebellion.)

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        1. Sounds like good advice. Unfortunately just about everything I eat requires refrigeration:-(. I’ll have to look into incorporating some non-perishable foodstuffs into my diet.

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          1. Yep, what my darling man calls “emergency food supplies,’ I call “the pantry.” What he calls “rotating the stock” I call “hmm. I think I’ll eyeball the pantry and see what I feel like making tonight” followed by “Going to the store, time to make a list.. what do I need to get to fill up the shelf? Can o’ navy beans, can o’ black beans, four cans of diced tomatoes…”

            What he calls “adding more variety to the available supplies” I call “Oooh! Sale on tins of fire-roasted tomatoes! I grabbed twelve; this is going to make the best addition to chili and sauce…”

            I have lived through flood, forest fire, earthquake, and volcano. (Near misses by tornado that caused no disruption don’t count.) I believe in a well-stocked pantry, and a good couple camp stoves that’ll do for lots of cooking. I have also once been in the horror that is a house with urban-raised women when the toilet paper ran out. You can bet my pantry is well-stocked, as a result of that traumatic experience.

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            1. “I have also once been in the horror that is a house with urban-raised women when the toilet paper ran out. “

              What was the total killed and wounded?

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              1. After the Apocalypse, toilet paper will be worth more than gold.

                “I remember the Roll Warrior . . .”

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                  1. Perhaps I should begin stockpiling now. Even though they’ll look funny at me when I’m at the pharmacy.

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                    3. And they’re not perishable, and they’re lightweight so put them on the barely-reachable top shelf next to the TP. You will be a hero.

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                    5. I had a minor surgery on my leg a couple of years back, and for nearly couple of months it stayed open in one spot, and leaked interstitial fluid. Lots of fluid. The only way I could go outside during those weeks without ending with a soaking wet sock and boot (was a very cold winter, so that would have been bad) was by taping a pad over that spot. Or sometimes a couple of pads. Nothing you could get from the pharmacy worked for more than a few minutes, but the pads meant for heavy use did keep my foot dry long enough that I could do my shopping and other necessary stuff. :D

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                  2. My husband was a little surprised, when first we were affianced and shopping together, at “You already have, what, five packs of those in the closet already?”

                    “And I shall NEVER RUN OUT.”

                    What, you mean there are people out there who don’t also have at least three bottles of ibuprofin, two unopened boxes of thera-flu, and half a crate of extra first aid supplies? By definition, these are things you need the most when you least are able to go get them!

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                    2. And I’m willing to state boldly that the women know know how are the most adamant about it not happening again, without even asking you if you agree first.

                      Mothers can wax on happily about the eco-virtues of cloth diapers only because they aren’t the ones having to waddle around with it between their legs.

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                    4. “Mothers can wax on happily about the eco-virtues of cloth diapers only because they aren’t the ones having to waddle around with it between their legs.”

                      Actually what I usually here mothers waxing on happily about with cloth diapers is how much easier it is to potty train children when they are using cloth instead of disposable.

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            2. I get such surprise whenever a visitor sees my pantry. Fortunately, hubby sees the point as there’s been several occasions where the @#*$ carbon tax has drained our finances and there’s a fortnight or a month where we don’t have money for food. I smile and say we’ll be okay on just buying milk eggs and bread.

              …Hm, I’ll have to check our supply of TP. Thanks for the reminder!

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          2. What kind of stuff do you eat?

            If we have an idea of what you like, we can suggest other things you like that will be store-able.

            Well, unless you go on my husband’s “potatoes and slab of meat” diet that he cooked for himself when he was in Texas.

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              1. I think dried potatoes are about the most awesome thing ever; the only reason I buy fresh is because I like to quarter/eight them, flip them in garlic-and-olive oil, and then bake them. Heaven!

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                2. Potatoes store quite well in a relatively cool, dark place. Putting them in a bucket in the spare bedroom they will last for a few months. If you have a basement and it is dry, that is even better. Just when you go to get potatoes make sure that if there is one going bad you toss it out, otherwise it will spread to the ones next to it.

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                  1. Also you can quarter/eight potatoes and can them. I love canned potatoes because they take almost no time to cook, they are basically already cooked from the canning process. So dump them out of the jar into the frying pan, season and brown, you are ready to go.

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                    1. Right, I always wondered what sort of idiots insisted on making basements on the west side. I used to work for a company over there whose office was an old house. Surveying supplies were stored in the basement, where a sump pump ran at least nine months out of the year. Every few months it would kick off for some reason, and if it had been raining in the last day or two (usually it had) somebody would have to put on at least knee high if not hip boots to wade to the pump (installed at the opposite side of the basement from the stairs) to restart it.

                      More than one guy went wandering down there in the dark (light switch of course was at the bottom of the stairs) in the morning, only to go over their Romeos on the bottom step. When the air turned blue coming out of the basement the rest of us immediately knew the pump quit working again. ;)

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            2. Ground turkey, mixed veggies, asparagus tips, fajita veggies, Basa (fish), Romaine salad, eggs and protein shakes. That’s about it. Oh, and an apple a day:-). That’s the current menu anyway, but it’s fairly representative. I’m trying to get back below 200#, so I’m avoiding all carbs (I just wish my co-workers would stop bringing snacks to work…chocolate is my Kryptonite:-P).

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              1. How do you feel about canned tuna, canned salmon, canned chicken/beef/pork? Canned tomatoes (diced), canned tomatoes with green chilis, and canned mushrooms?

                We have a two-pronged approach to the pantry. The first is to recognize that we are currently trying (more trying than succeeding, but the trying is iterative, and gets us a lot closer to the goal) to keep a low-carb household. The second is to realize that in the aftermath of major problems, you have a lot of heavy manual labor to do. And heavy manual labor needs lots of carbs to fuel, so cheap carbs that can be quickly prepared in camp conditions for the win.

                Blizzards may require starting by shoveling off the roof in the middle of the blizzard, so it won’t collapse under the snow load, and will definitely require a lot of cold, wet, heavy lifting and shoveling afterward. Volcanic ashfall is much the same, but a lot wetter if it’s not winter, as you try to use the garden hose as a pressure washer to keep it from drying out, rising up, and cutting your lungs to bits. Forest fires require a lot of cut-work in a hurry to clear any overlooked or sentimental fire hazards near the home, followed by wetting the roof to keep the house from heating up / igniting from falling cinders. (At least as long as the water pressure holds out). Followed by washing everything. Ceilings, walls, floors, carpets, curtains, all your clothes, furniture, appliances… and that’s not counting all the axe and chainsaw work to cut and clear deadfall, or the shoveling gravel to fill in the road where the post-fire flash floods wash it out…

                And then there’s flood. First, start by soaking the interior in sprayed bleach-water. Then, cut all the drywall above the waterline, and demolish from there down. Then, days on end of shoveling sewage-contaminate river mud and debris, in the unrelenting humidity and stench and mosquitoes… I despise floods. I’ll take volcanic ashfall over flood, and that’s saying something.

                What are you preparing for? If it’s inability to get to the store, or shortfall in paycheck, a nice flax meal and tuna casserole is a great low-filling way to make a problem no longer a problem. Flood? Oh, don’t worry about losing weight. That’s the least of your problems!

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                1. How do you feel about canned tuna, canned salmon, canned chicken/beef/pork? Canned tomatoes (diced), canned tomatoes with green chilis, and canned mushrooms?

                  Canned chicken or beef is fine. I can tolerate canned tuna. Hate salmon and mushrooms. The rest of your list sounds good.

                  Frankly I’d just forgotten about canned foodstuffs. I don’t have many, and I think I had a subconscious aversion to them due to the water weight, but since my main concern would be power failures due to storms, that wouldn’t likely be an issue. Guess I should start stocking up!:-).

                  On a related note, how reliable are the “use by” dates on cans? I never notice such because I so rarely buy canned goods…

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                  1. For out-and-out emergencies, I would go for dried veggies, dried mushrooms, and jerky. You can make a reasonably edible stew from those ingredients, plus some bullion, spices, and a thickener. Not perfect, but it will get you through real shortages.

                    After I move this spring, I’m going to be hitting up http://www.bulkfoods.com

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                    1. That’s a neat site, I’ll have to bookmark it. Though the home page is featuring Valentine’s candies, which is that *last* thing I need to buy in bulk (or at all!).

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                    2. Yeah, they’ve kind of disappointed me. Used to be, their site was a clunky place with little organization, but they had nutrition information for every product, and some cooking instructions available for some. Now, they only have a picture and a brief description, though the site is a little better organized (though it’s still not great).

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                    3. I was wondering where they’d hidden the nutrition info. Also whether their products are vacuum packed or not, and what the expiration dates are.:-/

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                    4. Vacuum packed? No. You’d have to make your own arrangements for that. Expiration dates would vary by product, I guess.

                      Packaging is meh, but the quality of the products I have tried has been good.

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                  2. jabrwok,

                    I’m going to recommend my husband’s blog, here: the whole series of articles is on the sidebar, so just look under emergency preparations.

                    http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2011/12/emergency-preparations-part-3-get-real.html

                    because if I typed it up in comments, Sarah would either kill me, make fun of my “wall o’ text”, or demand I retype it as a proper guest post…

                    but to answer your specific question above, canned food generally starts to lose nutritional value about 3.5 year in, and is generally considered inedible after 10 years, assuming proper storage in a cool, dry place.

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                    2. Thanks Dorothy, I’ll check that out. And I apologize for enticing you into putting that bait out there. Looks like our esteemed hostess has taken you up on it:-P

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              2. You can make jerky out of turkey, there’s dried veggies, canned/bottled/pickled asparagus, powdered egg at Walmart and you could add that to your protein shakes.

                Or perhaps have one day a week you eat something else? There’s got to be a “low carb survival” site somewhere.

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              3. You can get canned or pickled asparagus, although it admittedly tastes considerably different than fresh. Eggs will keep much longer at room temperature than commonly believed, obviously not a long term storage item, but if you have eggs in the fridge I would go ahead and leave them in there (cool, dark place) and eat them at meals, I have took them camping without refrigeration and they keep fine for a week as long as it isn’t to hot outside. Protein shakes you can buy the powder to mix them, I haven’t checked into them in quite a few years, but in high school I used to drink them while I was doing body building, and at that time I used to buy them in cans like your three pound coffee cans. Salad you’re kinda outta luck unless you grow your own. Turkey and fish you can go with canned, dried or salted are so different they would constitute a serious change in diet.

                Oh, and apples? Make sure and get a type that is a keeper, for example Kings will last all winter stored in cool, dark place. Fujis are I believe a good keeper also (as soon as my tree ever has enough to keep I’ll be able to say for sure) and there are many other good keepers.

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                1. I already buy protein powder (Dymatize Elite Whey Protein, chocolate mint flavor) in 10 pound boxes, so that’s not a problem. Apples are Braeburns or Honeycrisps, whichever’s available. I don’t know how long they last because I only buy six or so at a time and eat them all in as many days:-).

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        2. Note: dried kidney beans need to be boiled sufficiently to get rid of some kind of toxin.

          We narrowly avoided getting sick from that….

          I LOVE kidney beans, but am now branching out into things like small black beans and such.

          Oh, and helpful note for brown rice, you can soak them for a day or so and it’s got a much more…rice texture.

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          1. Beans and grains (seeds of all kinds, really) should be soaked for several hours before cooking. And when you do cook those beans, do it with a strip of kombu (a thick, sheet-like seaweed) or with epazote to make them more easily digestible, give ’em a little actual flavor and make the nutrients a lot more bioavailable.

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      2. We keep a mix of short term (less than 2 years) and long term (20+ years) food storage.

        Long term food storage consists of basic dry staples: Grains, Beans, Pasta, Sugar, Salt, Non-fat Powdered Milk, etc.

        Short term food storage consists of canned fruits and vegetables, cooking oils, honey, sauces, baking soda, spices, etc.

        Most of our dry/long term storage we keep stacked in 5 gallon buckets in the odd-shaped space under our stairs, and the short term food storage is on shelving in the utility room next to the stairs.

        When we started, we figured out how much we would need of the long term food storage for a year and set a goal for how much we wanted to increase our storage each month. The short term storage we built up by buying a few more items of whatever was on the shopping list each week. We found that spending an additional $40-$60 each month for food storage got us a years supply by the end of three years.

        A couple of links that you may find helpful are below:
        http://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng#1
        http://www.provident-living-today.com/Bulk-Food-Storage.html

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        1. There is a good list to start from here:

          http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/survival-food-storage-walmart/

          Not expensive or hard, and puts you miles ahead. There is a ton of common sense info on the site linked.

          The LDS sites are full of good info.

          I take a tiered approach, with stuff we eat all the time in the pantry and freezer, just more of it. Then the shelf of ‘shelf stable’ meals and warehouse for extra pantry stuff. Last comes bulk items, rice, beans, flour, sugar, yeast, baking soda, veg oil, dry milk, etc. I don’t stock a lot of cans be cause they rust here, and we don’t eat much from cans. Doesn’t have to be TEOTWAWKI for the bulk to be useful, just takes hungry neighbors after the ordinary disaster.

          Don’t leave out water, couple of gallons per adult per day. Some way to get more water is good too, like filters.

          Grab and go bags are almost a religious item, with whole divergent schools of thought, dogma, and doctrine. A go bag is a great place for 3 days of dehydrated or shelf stable (purchased) meals, generically referred to in the prepper community as “Mountain House” after the largest brand name.

          There is a large and growing subculture of preppers, survivalists, the liberty and patriot movements, and more that are fringier. (totally a word.) Lots of ordinary folks getting ready for hard times ahead….

          zuk

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          1. You can rotate the water supply by dating them, and putting the oldest one in your car.

            Also cuts down on impulse “I’m dying of thirst, I’ll buy a soda” purchases.

            Note: my kids go through our supply CRAZY fast. I usually buy the ones with the pull-out tab for easy pouring, and keep two in the van.

            Um….

            They’re currently frozen solid, though.

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          2. Oh, and again with the car: buy a cheap plastic folder box and put survival stuff in it. I have it because… Well, I was trained in Nevada, and I have kids. I’m always prepared to spend at least three days in the car at max capacity without people being utterly miserable.

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        2. There is an interesting book called Apocalypse Chow which is a cookbook by Jon and Robin Robertson, who went through Hurricane Bonnie and apparently decided there had to be a better way of coping. they list out items for what they call a “five day wine-box” because it is enough food to feed 2-4 people for five days and it fits in a box that bottled wine came in. It is a vegetarian cookbook because the Robertsons are veggies. But as an aside, it is a pretty good primer on how to cook out of cans and not get the same boring things again and again.

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          1. *shock*

            Now I need to look at vegetarian sites– just realized that stocking stuff that would keep them up will add extra punch to the already meat loving stuff I do stock.

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            1. Jerky and pemmican (the genuine article, not the grain/fruit heavy camping abomination) are also easy to make and keep, more or less, forever. Not a lot of variety in dried meat and rendered fat, but it’s nutrient dense and long-lasting. And the jerky, at least, can go into stews, soups and other dishes.

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    2. Well, we call our storage food “xxx of the Armageddon” So we have Cookies of Armageddon for instance. The alternate is apocalypse. “Robert, go to the apocalypse shelf and see the dates on the Tuna cans. They might need to cycle.”

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      1. Ooh, I like that. When my darling man does agree taht it’s called “The Pantry”, I start checking for how many feet the shelves have and if it’s mobile, because I swear it’s said in the same intonations as “The Luggage.” Now if I find out the shelves were made from sapient pearwood, I shall start to worry….

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    3. I’m notorious in our family for being a bargain hunter, so I came at it from the opposite direction– rather than folks thinking that I’m a crazy stockpiler, it’s that I’m an irrational over-buyer.

      Same justifcation, though; I point out that if they decide to stop paying my husband for some reason, or he gets fired, or Seattle has another cut-off-from-everywhere flood, we’ve got enough food for ourselves and the neighbors. (….although the neighbor-neighbors are Mormon, so I’m pretty sure they already have their own stores, but we’re all soft-heads so we’d be helping unprepared folks. Probably cursing ourselves for idiots, too.)

      My mom bought us a cute little rocket stove, too. :)

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      1. It is a tenet of the LDS church for its members to hold a year’s supply of essentials. Since that can be difficult, the church has its own stockpiles to help out the folks. In fact a lot of the on line prepper food and tool companies are Mormon based or at least associated with them.
        Spent my summers in Ogden as a young kid. We stayed with my great aunt who married into the church. Lots of cousins who belong, many of whom used to make a Colorado bear run on a fairly regular basis, so firmly believed in stockpiling the essentials. Of course that was many a year ago so things may have changed a bit.

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        1. Not sure if things have changed or our neighbors are just a good fit, but they’re crazy awesome for just chatting on theology stuff– in the “find out” mode rather than the “challenge” mode– and recognizing common enemies.

          Also, I’m having major angst on if I should encourage their eldest to try to convert folks, or focus more on the “God is Good, but don’t try to pull my kids away” thing.

          Right now, balancing on the “honor thy father and mother” point for why she shouldn’t try to persuade my kids. (Honestly, I find it adorable, and think Mormon is better than “you are all my meat”ism.)

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          1. I’ll have to give points for being determined: when the main bridge over the creek to my house was out, and we only had a walking bridge, a couple of Mormons were the only ones who had the tenacity to walk the 600 ft driveway to the house.

            Yet they were also not pushy when I explained that, while I have no problem with religion, I generally have a problem with religious leaders, because I always find we have major differences which would be irreconcilable.

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  16. I’ve been thinking about this lately related to the “work” thing about Obamacare and some article by a “professor of Leisure studies” that said that, without the need to work people will naturally turn to improving the human condition.

    Sorry if you were drinking something and just ruined your keyboard.

    I have chickens. They eat more than they lay eggs. It’s a negative sum thing for sure. I have a garden, but it’s hard in the desert and stuff is constantly stressed for lack of water (because I have to water it, and I forget or don’t water deeply enough) so bugs and disease wrecks most and it’s too cold at night and too hot during the day for good tomatoes, which sometimes do well (if there are some warm nights) but sometimes do nothing at all.

    It would be impossible to live here without civilization trucking in everything we need and electricity pumping water from deep wells. It wouldn’t be simply a case of changing life styles and doing the work (and I have a realistic understanding of the work, having grown up on a farm). By impossible I mean impossible.

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    2. “It would be impossible to live here without civilization trucking in everything we need and electricity pumping water from deep wells.”

      Yes, there is a reason nobody, or hardly anybody, lived there before modern civilization spread out and began developing the deserts.

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      1. When things get bad enough, the vegans will be the tastiest sources of long pork.

        Don’t look at me that way. We are all descended from people who did it, and you can’t really predict what you’re capable of before you get pushed to the extremes.

        Besides, you’ll almost certainly have to shoot the grasshoppers coming for your pantry if you don’t want to starve. Let them be useful for something more than fertilizer.

        Personally, the lack of my medications will probably take me out before we get to that place.

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        1. Dude, the story I wrote a little while back is about a pack of “grasshoppers” trying to loot the supplies of a prepper vet after The End. Things end . . . messy.;-)

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        2. I figure there’s a REASON the man-eater Wendigo was a monster, and why the more stable a society is the more likely they are to forgive survival cannibalism.

          When things get really ugly? Expect even emergency cannibalism to be a death sentence.

          Just too likely to be a threat. (Heck, look at the Donner folks– the main thing I remember is that one of the guys was followed by rumors that he was NOT in absolute desperation, and the ones that didn’t make it had been healthy enough when the other survivors last saw them.)

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  18. Pingback: Things Heard: e289v1 | Stones Cry Out
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  21. Someone up thread asked about survival manuals in the form of novels. Well, they are a staple of the post apocalyptic genre. Much like the obligatory first novel about libertarianism is in some circles….

    Some are better than others, and some have developed into really readable writers.

    A Distant Eden – a classic of the manual in novel form (very thinly disguised, even the author acknowledges that.

    Alas Babylon – atomic age, so a very early and well written intro to the form.

    The Enemies Trilogy by Matthew Bracken- book one is a manual in novel form, with lots of exposition and info dumps, but the characters start to get interesting. In book two the characters have taken on life, and are easy to read with only an occasional jarring note. Book three is a novel, straight up, and well written. I found myself getting furious at the author for how he was breaking my beloved USA. Well worth any struggle with book 1, and 2, to get to book three.

    Directive 51, Daybreak Zero, The last President- by John Barnes. More political and less practical. In the first one, I was constantly amazed that none of the characters seemed to be worried about food. Kind of jarring.

    Ringo’s new zombie series looks at it from the “lets just get a sailboat and leave” perspective. It is starting to get political in the second book, and the third will probably be lots of politics. His Posleen war series has some interesting ideas.

    (Just realized that the last couple are just apocalypse and not really manuals, but they do have some interesting survival ideas.)

    BTW, I really liked Pixy Noir, thanks Cedar! Not what I’ve been reading lately and a nice break from all the doom and gloom :-)

    zuk

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    1. Ringo’s The Last Centurion has a lot of good background on farming and other survival techniques. And it’s a great read.
      Lucifer’s Hammer by Niven and Pournelle.
      One Second After by Forstchen.
      Then of course there’s the whole Foxfire collection for how things really got done in old timey days.

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    2. Farnam’s Freehold…. Well, I’ve always wanted to try the Ammonium tri-iodide thing. (I’ve read that it’s so sensitive, when mixed on blotter paper, a mouse walking across it will set it off. Sounds like a good way to deal with nice.)

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  22. From my own observations in the third world, a collapse will likely be of a slow motion sort which takes decades to happen.
    -Infastructure sort of rots away, roads go longer without repair, power outages become more frequent, ect. Maintenence on existing infastructure takes the place of needed expansion. People adapt by installing standby gensets.
    -Petty crime is pretty much ignored, unless large fines can be accrued. People turn to privately guarded and gated communities.
    -Regulation increases to such a level that corruption becomes an expected part of life. People begin to have contempt for the government.
    -Food and other goods continue to be avalable, just at a higher cost and a lower quality.
    -Jobs get squeezed out by regulations and taxes. People adapt by working off the books for cash under the table.

    And so it goes. Some things that are seen as a normal part of life by one generation, for instance, an extra car for the kids, will be a rare thing by the next.

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    1. Scary how many of those things are at this moment well on their way to fruition in certain areas of the United States. And full blown just the way things are in many other countries.

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  24. I have brown thumb. Robert, otoh is like grandma (my grandma.) Get a seed from a fruit that has been refrigerated for weeks, put it in some garden dirt. Look at it every day. Voila, tree. even if totally unsuited to climate.

    Breaking out of the nesting!

    I’m not sure what thumb I have because it seems selective. Bulbs and orchids I can grow juuuuust fine (they’re the type that if you ignore they propagate better, for some reason) but attempts to plant veggies… *sigh*; never mind my attempts to plant roses and other ornamentals. Black mold ate them all!

    I am JEALOUS of the ability to grow tree from seed. Dad could. Nobody else in the family could. Mom’s the kind that kills aloe and cacti. I’m tempted to try anyway, with a cherry pit. Well, try again. (I know, unsuited to the climate, but if the thing sprouts, it may undo my gray or brown thumb.)

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  26. OT, but I am reading Vulcans Kittens and have to ask, why are they using the Boise airport? Spokane is much closer to Pierce, and even Missoula is not much more than half as far as Boise would be.

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