International edible gardening

I have not even been out yet - and saw this picture, before we put up the salvaged picket fence



There is weasel and flora and the dog crate that the hen is using for a nest box right now.

This is how we used to make our living in the remote places - harvesting wild gourmet foods. This is morel mushrooms in Alaska - often we had to carry guns for different reasons, which is a pain, mine weight 13 pounds which adds a lot to the 40 - 60 pounds you are carrying already. Here we are although I am taking the picture, my gun is laying down. Always dogs in a picture that I take. Also never trails, just bushwhacking for the 10 to 30 miles you cover in a typical day. fording streams, climbing mountains...... We were fit. I could go into the woods, wander about 20 miles with no trail and come out within a couple hundred yards of where I started. Out there you have to be really good at navigating - no roads - no one to help you - and then no GPS.

 

In case any of you are mushroom hunters here is a picture of sub Arctic morel mushrooms - we would pick 100 pounds a day on an exceptional pick like this one - so I am showing some exceptional ones - the red Swiss Army knife has a 3 inch blade to give a size. (very few serious mushroom hunters would ever find one this size in their life) And these are very dense and heavy. We picked brown, gray, yellow, and green morels.

 

So finished the cabin garden it has: 8 dahlias, 20 gladiolus, 15 bananas, 2 paper trees, 15 gingers, 1 loquat tree, 2 palm trees, 1 fig from cuttings, and some odds and ends. The leaves piled on are 6 inches to a foot deep, and dense leaves too - as mulch and weed block (Ha, this dirt is what was scraped off the road side and it about 100% weed seed and root filled)



here it is as a mess, and over twice that many bags of leaves were used.

 

And here is my pogy bread recipe:



great stuff

 

I presume you got a good price for the mushrooms or it wouldn't have been worth the trek. When I first saw the picture I thought they were oysters.

 

""I presume you got a good price for the mushrooms""

The mushroom pricing is a long story in its self - a long one; we did this 4 years. Think of remote places and a gold rush in a pretty much lawless environment. The one magazine article we appeared in was called "Guns, Money, and Mushrooms." I was always drawn to the wild places and craziness and those are there in the mushroom world.

The working very remote and drying is the very best, this is drying. The mushroom baskets (4 in picture) hold 14 pounds, those spread out is at least 6 more baskets - probably 160 pounds of morels there. The last spread out ones, top of the row, are on a drying frame - we carried rolled screen and made the drier with local wood and plastic sheets. Typically 4 frames - where they went at night with fire to heat air - an extremely complex process and means someone does not sleep at night. 17 hour days being a typical work day when on mushrooms. Mushroom drying can never go backwards - drying the surface and then rehydrating at night or covered for rain and they turn dark and the price plummets. Mushroom price is all about grade. Dried morel then - #1 about $60, #3 about $25. It takes about 10 pounds fresh to get a pound dried. Grade is all important.

Take Matsutaki mushrooms; say a #1 grade is worth $17 a pound sold to the buyer fresh (almost no market for dried Matsutaki) (buyers fallow the mushroom picking and transport them nightly to a local airport where they are flown out to facilities in cities - mostly Vancouver and Seattle and Portland) A #2 would be worth about $8, a #3 about $2 and lower grades almost nothing. (those would be very good prices, the price changes daily as other places come on or slow down)



You can see my wife and mushroom partner there.

A long time ago..............

Today I plant some flowers and build boxes for them.

 

And a slice of pogy bread - it looks much better in real life, with all the milo grains and fish, golden yellow..... The chickens will dance about when their breakfast comes, and I will have to stand by and keep the dogs back or they will be snout down with the birds.

 

I was netting a couple pogies for the brim and thought how I also feed my chickens whole fish - the dogs too, they will eat them live and flopping. Watch how the chickens just swallow the fish down! Bigger pogies they tear apart, amazing. (this is last October just after I got back from London)

Right now the pogies are so small they go through the net and I will only get a couple tiny ones a cast - but the brim in the pond are crazy for them, and I am sure will be a real growth food for them. %100 protein. We will eat the brim when they get big and I will catch more mid sized ones from the tiny pond on the school playing fields and restock as needed. The school pond is overpopulated so only has midsized fish - but a great size for growing, and too big for my bass to eat.

I have the bass to slow them breeding themselves in my pond because if they are not heavily predated on the young they overstock and all are stunted.. Brim, like many fish, release hormones that stop growth when too many are present. So you end up the same amount of pounds of brim - but just masses of tiny ones unless the population is managed. Brim are totally delicious!

Not very interesting video below - I did not know about the anti-shake mode, and never played these till now so still have tons to learn about making a video. Please post your videos here! At least say something. And see how lush the forest here is. Full of thorny vines, but pretty, and not too hard to move through.

 

I think it's an interesting video! It's good to see Flora, Jack and the chickens. They really do go wild for those pogies!

 

Colne, the stark contrast in your habitat and the challenges that you encounter in bringing cultivation to harvest and ultimately to the table is fascinating. Compared with mine on such a small scale, I have few competitors,
Jenny
thanks for the video - the chooks look really bonny. Bet they taste good roasted...

 

Hi Jenny, and Fern. I just did a quick walk and videoed it again. I cut out the chicken part as being overdone but the chicks now all run out squeaking as, chicks do, with the whole flock to greet me - for their fish breakfast.

I am planting caladiums, I bought 16 bulbs for half price ($7), and realized I had best come in and check out their wet tolerance. The banana groves around the pond - and a couple tiny glades I am clearing of undergrowth, have wet soil during late winter and spring from our rains and that was where they were going. I also got another 3 dahlias - 2 for the cottage banana grove, one for the pond terrace. Today mostly rained with lightning and thunder last night into today - another couple inches. It seems they can handle wet ground wile leafed out but during the dormant winter they will rot. So good thing I stopped, means I need to make yet another set of boxes to keep them off the water. This place has some obstacles to overcome when planting non-natives.

 

Hi jenny, my neighbor has just told me I can have the crabs from his traps, I think he said there were 8. When he empties his traps he keeps the crabs in a cage off his dock. He lives at the end of the road (he represents all the traffic other than the postman on my road) with two big black Labs who my dogs go wild barking at every time we walk down there even though they have known each other for years. So I may video that if my wife gets back from Yoga early enough. (she drives a forty foot truck for work - then yoga after a couple times a week.) Should be good fun just to see my dogs in full bad behavior. I cannot get them to not bark because Flora dog is brain damaged (really) and cannot remember that she knows them and has for years, the others join in as part of the pack. Life for Flora is like the opposite of Ground Hog Day.

But I have been making some caladium boxes from some old lumber dragged out of the woods - and came back to have some lunch - a peanut butter, and the marmalade from my kumquat tree, sandwich. Excellent, lightly toasted.

 

We can't get our heads round that combi Colne. I like both - but not on the same slice of bread. Got a lot of respect for good bread - make my own - haven't eaten shop bought bread for 6 years,
Jenny

 

Jenny, tell me how you make your best bread. Do you hand knead or machine? How selective are you with flour types and quality? Yeasts? I used to make yeast breads years ago but my wife is not much of a bread eater really so eventually quit - but I was pretty good at it. Also I always was the camp cook and bannock bread was a staple, although it is risen with baking powder rather than yeast. I would make it because it is so easy to bring ingredients for - flour. For a meal for 3 I would use either a pound of pasta or a pound of rice or a pound of flour. My bannock was always well received (with margarine) - but one is hungry living and working outside. Food is a totally different thing when one has to take on 3000 to 4000 calories a day. Very different from my struggle to not over eat now. I spent a lot of my life doing really hard work - often for long hours, and would eat two large plates of food, a big dessert, and a 12 pack of beer every evening. I do miss that.

Do you have an extremely simple pie crust? I am looking for one. Currently I buy frozen crusts because I cannot be bothered with the old way of cold fat, flour, and the whole process of rolling. I am going to start making crumb crusts because they are so simple but not really for baking.

 

My indispensable beast of burden is a Panasonic bread maker Colne.
This is an interesting thread - if you have an hours or so to spare!!
Jenny

http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/threads/bread-making.14287/page-8

or this one - on Bread making machines:
http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/threads/bread-making-machines.45803/page-9#post-593998