Susan opened some cans of green beans and corn to dehydrate them. By dehydrating them we'll save storage space and we won't have to protect them from freezing. When wood is your only heat source you can't leave the cabin empty for very long in the winter. Otherwise it can get cold enoug inside to freeze canned food. The cans don't keep well in the root cellar because of the humidity (they rust) so it works out best just to dehydrate them.

This is an old stump down by the shack. I've been seeing some bear sign lately and this is one example of it. They shred rotten stumps looking for bugs to eat. This stump is about two-feet in diameter. There have been a lot of bear and mountain lion problems in this end of the county this year. One explanatiton by the Fish and Game Dept. is that the wolves have driven the deer and elk down into the lowlands and populated areas so the bears and big cats have followed their food source. Also, it's the time of year when the male Mountain Lions have been kicked out of the clan and are just beginning to exist on their own. They are refining their hunting techniques and roaming in search of a territory of their own at the same time.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

I washed the dishes this morning. When I finished them I started pulling traps to move them to a new area. When I was getting ready to set them up in new areas a neighbor dropped in for about an hour. Afterwards I finished making my sets with the traps and had lunch. After lunch we took a siesta because it was just too hot to do anything outside. Later on I took the goat out for about 90 minutes so he could get something different to eat and we could work on teaching him to lead without fighting the collar. He seems to be learning okay. At this point he’s kind of like an independent child. He doesn’t want you bossing him around but he doesn’t want you to get very far away either.

Susan boiled up a big batch of red beans in the solar cooker. When they were finished she used some of them to make chili for supper tonight. (Again, using the solar cooker.) She also made cornbread using the corn she ground on the 18th. She’ll use the rest of the beans to make a pig pot of chili for canning. Our youngest got home from work and ran his generator so I ran the water pump and pumped water out of the main tank into the two garden tanks to make room in the main water tank for the water in the last barrel in the pickup. Now all the barrels in the truck are empty. And the two garden tanks are full as is the main tank. Susan had watered the fruit trees and berry bushes with buckets this morning so both garden tanks needed to be refilled.

I got one of my articles back with a request to cut it down by 650 words and take more pictures. I think after the modifications they’ll take it. They are interested in it because they paid the postage to send it back. I included a SASE with the submission but they didn’t use it. If there was little interest they’d have just stuffed it into the SASE I included. So, I guess I’ll have something to do tomorrow for sure.