Just a quick note - huge areas of corn have been affected by the dry weather in the mid-west this year. Our whole food system is based on there being plentiful corn. Meat, dairy, poultry, and ethanol for a gasoline additive all depend on the abundance and cheapness of corn.
What the ultimate effects of the drought will be, I don't know, but I can't imagine food becoming cheaper, or gas for that matter either. It seems like once food prices go up, they are sticky, and they tend to stay up as long as the businesses can keep them up.
Just sayin'.........as an old friend said once, after looking at the results of my hay stacking efforts 'Well, it looks like h--- now, but it'll look better in a snow drift'. And so it is with our efforts to fill the pantry during the harvest. It may not seem like much now, but you will be glad you did later on.
Here is an animated drought map for the last 12 weeks.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Post Script:
Friday, March 2, 2012
On Your Mark, Get Set......... Plant!
When the weather is cold, and the snow is deep, the seed companies send out the catalogs. I'm always glad to see them. I don't mind the winter cold so much, but the yard looks dreary is generally improved by a good snow. Even though the early pitch to gardeners is probably mostly motivated by trying to beat out the competition on getting the first order of the sun deprived gardeners of the country, it is still a nice service to all of us.
Gardening is a funny pass time. It doesn't beckon and call you out, or even invite you to think much about the coming season until it finally gets warm. It's hard to get excited about getting the early, cool weather seeds in the ground when the weather hasn't even gotten to the cool stage yet. It seems much better to tackle an indoor project, or just goof around with a game or YouTube when the temperature is low and the wind is blowing. And after last night's storm, I know I will be inside for a while - you do have to be able to see the ground before you can do much digging.
So, on a snowy day what is there to do? Well, a couple of weeks ago when it was still dry, but we were getting ready to take down a dead tree, I thought it might be time to stop using the rototiller for a lawn/garden ornament and took it, the lawn mower and the weed whip down to a small engine repair place to be repaired. He was able to get to work on them right away, and will have them back to me in plenty of time to put them to work. Also, the tree removal people gave us a 50% off price on removing a dead locust tree because they needed the work and it was not too busy. You know that the first nice weekend in April there will be the start of the tidal wave of garden interest. The stores will be packed, the small engine guys will be over loaded and the tree trimmers will be more expensive.
We got the tree down, many of the branches converted to firewood, and the trunk loaded and transported to a friend that has a sawmill.
Early spring is a good time to start your gardening. As soon as the soil is thawed you can start to plant your early season crops - peas, carrots, beets, potatoes, onions, chard, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, kale, turnips. We are talking seeds - don't rush out to buy the early plants from the green house because they will get killed as we are still in frost season.
Another thing that I like about early spring is you don't have to do it all..... later in the year it is so much work. Work, work work...dig, plant, water, weed. Now it is cool. You can get a bag or two of steer manure from Home Depot or Wal-Mart or from the steer (if there are any in your neighborhood), spread it out on the row you are going to work on and do a little digging- you want to break up the soil and mix in the manure, then break up the clods with the rake until you have a nice seed bed, then plant the seeds, cover them to the appropriate depth and call it a day. You don't even have to water. It is kind of surprising later in the season, when it gets warm, how much you got done. The cool weather crops will be very happy, and they will grow well for you. Don't expect any peas if you plant them on June 1.
There is a lot of work to be done in the spring. Digging in the garden, especially early in the spring often reminds me of a story that Grandma told me. She probably told it only once or twice but since spending the years that we spent on the farm, it made a huge impression on me. The story is pretty short - It was that my Grandpa always used to go out early in the spring to get the ditches in shape. His ditches weren't leveled by laser, there was no concrete lining or steel head gates. They ran along the highest part of a field, and were usually sod. He would go along each spring and shape the sod, clean out the sand and silt, and shovel smaller lateral ditches to further divide the water to the rows. Grandma said that he put a file in his back pocket and would go out and shovel all day. That's the story, but this is how it plays in my mind....
I imagine that the shovel was kept almost as sharp as a bread knife - you can't cut sod with a dull shovel. So I see him out there, all alone, the grass just coming up, wind blowing a little. It's cold if you are standing around, but he isn't. The shovel flashes regularly in the sun. His arms are corded with muscle. His hat is pulled down around his ears. He works steadily, hour after hour, a break at noon, more shoveling in the afternoon until about 4 p.m. Then he comes in and forks hay to the cows, milks 3 or 4 cows, feeds the chickens, chops and saws some wood for the stove and then comes in for dinner. He sits down and Grandma and Harlan, little children then, climb onto his lap. He eats his supper in the warm kitchen with his sweet little family. He is so tired, but happy with his work and his life. They put the kids to bed, maybe they read from the Bible. They might have a radio....I don't know. But soon it is morning again, the sun up just a little earlier, milk, feed stock, take the shovel and head back to the ditches. And all without an iPod..........
I guess that is about it. Back to taxes..... Some of you have told me that you wanted a reminder of when to get your gardens started. Now is the time. Start small, make it easy. It should be a happy hobby that gives you some peace, some exercise, and some good food.
Gardening is a funny pass time. It doesn't beckon and call you out, or even invite you to think much about the coming season until it finally gets warm. It's hard to get excited about getting the early, cool weather seeds in the ground when the weather hasn't even gotten to the cool stage yet. It seems much better to tackle an indoor project, or just goof around with a game or YouTube when the temperature is low and the wind is blowing. And after last night's storm, I know I will be inside for a while - you do have to be able to see the ground before you can do much digging.
So, on a snowy day what is there to do? Well, a couple of weeks ago when it was still dry, but we were getting ready to take down a dead tree, I thought it might be time to stop using the rototiller for a lawn/garden ornament and took it, the lawn mower and the weed whip down to a small engine repair place to be repaired. He was able to get to work on them right away, and will have them back to me in plenty of time to put them to work. Also, the tree removal people gave us a 50% off price on removing a dead locust tree because they needed the work and it was not too busy. You know that the first nice weekend in April there will be the start of the tidal wave of garden interest. The stores will be packed, the small engine guys will be over loaded and the tree trimmers will be more expensive.We got the tree down, many of the branches converted to firewood, and the trunk loaded and transported to a friend that has a sawmill.
Another thing that I like about early spring is you don't have to do it all..... later in the year it is so much work. Work, work work...dig, plant, water, weed. Now it is cool. You can get a bag or two of steer manure from Home Depot or Wal-Mart or from the steer (if there are any in your neighborhood), spread it out on the row you are going to work on and do a little digging- you want to break up the soil and mix in the manure, then break up the clods with the rake until you have a nice seed bed, then plant the seeds, cover them to the appropriate depth and call it a day. You don't even have to water. It is kind of surprising later in the season, when it gets warm, how much you got done. The cool weather crops will be very happy, and they will grow well for you. Don't expect any peas if you plant them on June 1.There is a lot of work to be done in the spring. Digging in the garden, especially early in the spring often reminds me of a story that Grandma told me. She probably told it only once or twice but since spending the years that we spent on the farm, it made a huge impression on me. The story is pretty short - It was that my Grandpa always used to go out early in the spring to get the ditches in shape. His ditches weren't leveled by laser, there was no concrete lining or steel head gates. They ran along the highest part of a field, and were usually sod. He would go along each spring and shape the sod, clean out the sand and silt, and shovel smaller lateral ditches to further divide the water to the rows. Grandma said that he put a file in his back pocket and would go out and shovel all day. That's the story, but this is how it plays in my mind....
I imagine that the shovel was kept almost as sharp as a bread knife - you can't cut sod with a dull shovel. So I see him out there, all alone, the grass just coming up, wind blowing a little. It's cold if you are standing around, but he isn't. The shovel flashes regularly in the sun. His arms are corded with muscle. His hat is pulled down around his ears. He works steadily, hour after hour, a break at noon, more shoveling in the afternoon until about 4 p.m. Then he comes in and forks hay to the cows, milks 3 or 4 cows, feeds the chickens, chops and saws some wood for the stove and then comes in for dinner. He sits down and Grandma and Harlan, little children then, climb onto his lap. He eats his supper in the warm kitchen with his sweet little family. He is so tired, but happy with his work and his life. They put the kids to bed, maybe they read from the Bible. They might have a radio....I don't know. But soon it is morning again, the sun up just a little earlier, milk, feed stock, take the shovel and head back to the ditches. And all without an iPod..........
I guess that is about it. Back to taxes..... Some of you have told me that you wanted a reminder of when to get your gardens started. Now is the time. Start small, make it easy. It should be a happy hobby that gives you some peace, some exercise, and some good food.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Chili in a Bottle
Note: This post sat in the 'draft' bin for a long time. Usually when a post sits in draft this long I delete it and move on, but this has quite a few links that I put in to try to explain just when and why you might want to use pressure canning, and when and why you might want to use hot water bath canning, and even why canning works to preserve food. Being a geek, I find an interesting tie between processing food and early experiments in germ theory that were first done several hundred years ago. Your mileage may vary if you are not scientifically inclined, or you might just enjoy a quiet browse through some new material.
After whipping up a batch of chili for a family reunion that we couldn't attend I was wondering what to do with it all. Annie isn't a big chili fan, and I would be eating it in my lunch until the end of the month. Finally I thought - bottle it, and blog on it. The idea to do another blog on bottling came when I was chatting with one of my daughters about her anticipated garden. She said that she might even try canning. The more I thought about this, the more I thought that it is entirely too shrouded in mystery, because for the most part, it isn't that hard.
Being one of those people that often has to tell you how the watch is made, when all you wanted was the time, I thought a little background was maybe in order. I will make it brief, and you can make it as detailed as you would like.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovered that there are forms of life so small that they couldn't be seen by the naked eye. He made the first microscope, and it's lens was a droplet of water. Later he made better lenses out of glass - grinding his own.
Louis Pasteur - go down to germ theory and you can read about Pasteur's experiments with broth. Basically, those experiments allowed people to see what causes food spoilage, and to come up with a simple way to preserve food. We have all been brought up knowing about microbes and how they grow and travel, and what they can do, but this was big stuff. To be able to take a nutrient broth and show that it wouldn't spoil if all the microbes in it had been killed through boiling, and that no new microbes could enter due to the design of the glassware was amazing stuff. But enough theory, time to get practical.
Canning food is nothing more killing any germ or spore in the food, and sealing it so that no germ or spore can recontaminate it. What you are canning is important - some things are harder for microbes to grow in than others, and consequently do not have to be processed as long or at as high a temperature. Let's make a list:
Easiest to hardest to preserve:
Bottles: they have to be clean: hand or machine wash. It is good if they are also warm - 175 to 200 deg F. If you put hot food or liquid into a cold jar, the thermal shock can break the glass.
Lids- These also have to be clean. It is good if they are new, but not absolutely necessary. I always use new lids when I am pressure canning just because it takes to long to process, and I just don't want a problem. For jams - the easiest - I often reuse lids, especially if they are decorative.
It is good to soak the lids in boiling water. The world won't stop if you just hold new lids under a hot tap for 30 seconds, but if you are reusing lids, you should probably keep them in boiling water. This has more to do with softening the rubber seal than it does with sanitation.
Food: For water bath - non pressure canning the food must be acid- sour. This is because botulism spores can survive and grow in the absence of air and in a non-acid environment. Pressure canning kills the spores, and makes it safe to can non acid foods.
So there you go. If you have questions, put them in the comments section and I'll give you an answer, and even try to make it right. :)
After whipping up a batch of chili for a family reunion that we couldn't attend I was wondering what to do with it all. Annie isn't a big chili fan, and I would be eating it in my lunch until the end of the month. Finally I thought - bottle it, and blog on it. The idea to do another blog on bottling came when I was chatting with one of my daughters about her anticipated garden. She said that she might even try canning. The more I thought about this, the more I thought that it is entirely too shrouded in mystery, because for the most part, it isn't that hard.
Being one of those people that often has to tell you how the watch is made, when all you wanted was the time, I thought a little background was maybe in order. I will make it brief, and you can make it as detailed as you would like.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovered that there are forms of life so small that they couldn't be seen by the naked eye. He made the first microscope, and it's lens was a droplet of water. Later he made better lenses out of glass - grinding his own.
Louis Pasteur - go down to germ theory and you can read about Pasteur's experiments with broth. Basically, those experiments allowed people to see what causes food spoilage, and to come up with a simple way to preserve food. We have all been brought up knowing about microbes and how they grow and travel, and what they can do, but this was big stuff. To be able to take a nutrient broth and show that it wouldn't spoil if all the microbes in it had been killed through boiling, and that no new microbes could enter due to the design of the glassware was amazing stuff. But enough theory, time to get practical.
Canning food is nothing more killing any germ or spore in the food, and sealing it so that no germ or spore can recontaminate it. What you are canning is important - some things are harder for microbes to grow in than others, and consequently do not have to be processed as long or at as high a temperature. Let's make a list:
Easiest to hardest to preserve:
- Jams, jellies, kim chi, sour kraut and pickles are the easiest to preserve, and in some cases actually don't need any processing - they can be put into clean jars, hot from the kettle. This is a 'hot pack'. They are acidic (sour) and/or have a high sugar or salt content. It was common practice in my Grandma's kitchen to seal jams and jellies with liquid paraffin to keep out the dust. It's possible that a little mold might grow on the top of a jar of jam if you didn't do anything to prevent it, but it is unlikely that it would be anything that you couldn't scrape off - it wouldn't penetrate deeply into the jam.
- Fruit, fruit juice, salsa, spaghetti sauce, tomatoes and tomato juice etc. - these are all sour, but don't have a high sugar/salt content. Botulism microbes and/or spores can not live in an acid environment, and so these things generally can be canned successfully with water bath processing. Note: some varieties of tomatoes are 'low acid' and can allow growth of botulism. Typically, at our house we add 1 tablespoon of either lemon juice (to fruits and fruit juices or tomatoes) or 1 tablespoon of vinegar to tomatoes. We usually don't use vinegar with fruits - you could as far as canning safety is concerned, but it has a stronger flavor than lemon juice.
- Soups, meat, pinto beans - anything not acid - these things all need to have pressure processing. Pressure processing raises the temperature to above the point of normal boiling any elevation. Some pressure canners have different weight sets that allow you to pick from a variety of settings. Ours only allows 15 psi of pressure. I guess you could fiddle with the stove's heat controls to keep the pressure below 15 psi, but I don't know why you would want to. Complete directions for pressure canning are beyond the scope of the bullet point, and probably beyond my level of expertise. Here is what I do: I put about 1-1/2" of water in the bottom of the canner, add the jars (these should be at least room temperature, or hotter -preferably very hot.), put the lid on, turn the burner temperature control to just below 'HI', and let it go. When the pressure gets to 15 lbs (this is about 250 deg F), the weight will begin to rock and release steam. I turn the burner down to about half-way to HI and let it cook for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes I turn the heat off and let it cool naturally. It usually takes about 4 hours for the pressure to dissipate. I usually wait until 12 hours or so has past before removing the lid. This allows the pressure and temperature in the bottles to equalize with the ambient temperature and pressure and keeps the bottles from leaking around the seal, or worse, breaking.
Bottles: they have to be clean: hand or machine wash. It is good if they are also warm - 175 to 200 deg F. If you put hot food or liquid into a cold jar, the thermal shock can break the glass.
Lids- These also have to be clean. It is good if they are new, but not absolutely necessary. I always use new lids when I am pressure canning just because it takes to long to process, and I just don't want a problem. For jams - the easiest - I often reuse lids, especially if they are decorative.
It is good to soak the lids in boiling water. The world won't stop if you just hold new lids under a hot tap for 30 seconds, but if you are reusing lids, you should probably keep them in boiling water. This has more to do with softening the rubber seal than it does with sanitation.
Food: For water bath - non pressure canning the food must be acid- sour. This is because botulism spores can survive and grow in the absence of air and in a non-acid environment. Pressure canning kills the spores, and makes it safe to can non acid foods.
So there you go. If you have questions, put them in the comments section and I'll give you an answer, and even try to make it right. :)
Friday, February 17, 2012
Ward Christmas Party Chicken Slaughter
(This was actually written about December 20, 2011, so if it seems a little dated, it is.)
Got your attention? It's not exactly bait and switch title, but close. There was a chicken massacre before the Ward Christmas party, but I don't know where or when it actually took place, a chicken gulag somewhere. I use a little more care when I volunteer offhandedly to help with Ward parties. I spoke at the wrong time to the wrong person (R.S. President) and before I knew it (seriously - in 3 minutes she had talked to the Bishop and changed the menu from the traditional ham to dutch oven chicken - it was official) , I was in charge of the meat for the Ward Christmas party - about 200 people.
I know there was a chicken massacre because Annie and I bought 29 trays of drumsticks, thighs and breasts in preparation. We actually kind of lost count of the number until we went to the dump. It got to be a blur. Three trays (styrofoam) filled a dutch oven, so that makes 9-2/3 ovens packed with chicken.
Unfortunately, I only have two ovens of any size, and since it was pretty bitterly cold I thought it best to cook them inside - ahead of time- rather than outside on the day of the party like you might do in the summer. We did this once before, maybe 25 years ago - and it worked out well. I just borrowed a bunch of ovens and stacked them.
In cold weather, and especially if there is wind, it is a lot harder to get the chicken done to falling-off-the-bone tender. If you'll pardon the expression, I chickened out. The sequence went like this: I packed one dutch oven with chicken parts, cooked it, put a new dutch oven in the big oven. Put the hot one outside to cool, deboned the chicken, made gravy from the juice, packed meat and gravy in a 1 gallon ziplock and repacked the oven with raw chicken, put the new hot one outside.......lather-rinse-repeat. It took a couple of days to get them all done, and then it was time to thaw the bags of chicken and gravy. But, you can feed a big family or small army with dutch ovens. The more the merrier. In the end we fed the ward and there was some left over.
It was a long introduction, but what I really wanted to post about was the left-overs. We had two big dutch ovens, and three of our biggest Farberware kettles full of de-boned chicken when the party started. When it ended, there was probably almost 2 gallons of chicken still in one kettle. I tried to get everyone to take some home, but they were surprisingly reluctant and in the end we took it home. In addition to the cooked chicken, there was the bones. 29 trays of chicken will create a bunch of bones - our turkey roaster was crammed-jammed full of them. I could barely get the lid on. The first boiling gave us about 8 quarts of rich broth. What to do with all of this good food?! Our freezer is pretty well full, and needs to be defrosted anyway, so freezing it would probably work, but it is a lot of work.
Last night I brought in two of the kettles and stuffed 7 quarts full of chicken and broth, and after about an hour of gentle heating in hot water, I pressure canned them. I'm not sure how much there will be in the end. I'm sure that there is another 7 quarts that will be ready to go tonight, and then I will boil the bones one more time, and I think I will get at least one more 7 quart batch.
I guess that the reason for this post is to illustrate that food is available for storage when you least expect it. Since we had the ward dinner and ended up with the left-over chicken and all the bones and broth, we found that a friend in our ward has a contact at one of the local grocery stores and gets ripe-to-over-ripe fruits and vegetables on a routine basis. Sometimes she calls us at about 8 pm - you are not really thinking about food storage at that time of night. We go over and she has a wide variety if produce in anywhere from good-but-ripe, to cut-out-the-bruise to hmmmm-this-should-go-on-the-garden condition. It's not likely that you will be able to get access to the cast-off's of your local store, but the point is that you don't have to buy everything at full price. When corn is 10-for-$1, it's time to bottle/freeze corn. Do the strawberries look a little ripe? You might be able to strike a deal, especially at a stand or smaller store.
Note: In the end we had 18 quarts of chicken and broth.
Got your attention? It's not exactly bait and switch title, but close. There was a chicken massacre before the Ward Christmas party, but I don't know where or when it actually took place, a chicken gulag somewhere. I use a little more care when I volunteer offhandedly to help with Ward parties. I spoke at the wrong time to the wrong person (R.S. President) and before I knew it (seriously - in 3 minutes she had talked to the Bishop and changed the menu from the traditional ham to dutch oven chicken - it was official) , I was in charge of the meat for the Ward Christmas party - about 200 people.
I know there was a chicken massacre because Annie and I bought 29 trays of drumsticks, thighs and breasts in preparation. We actually kind of lost count of the number until we went to the dump. It got to be a blur. Three trays (styrofoam) filled a dutch oven, so that makes 9-2/3 ovens packed with chicken.
Unfortunately, I only have two ovens of any size, and since it was pretty bitterly cold I thought it best to cook them inside - ahead of time- rather than outside on the day of the party like you might do in the summer. We did this once before, maybe 25 years ago - and it worked out well. I just borrowed a bunch of ovens and stacked them.
In cold weather, and especially if there is wind, it is a lot harder to get the chicken done to falling-off-the-bone tender. If you'll pardon the expression, I chickened out. The sequence went like this: I packed one dutch oven with chicken parts, cooked it, put a new dutch oven in the big oven. Put the hot one outside to cool, deboned the chicken, made gravy from the juice, packed meat and gravy in a 1 gallon ziplock and repacked the oven with raw chicken, put the new hot one outside.......lather-rinse-repeat. It took a couple of days to get them all done, and then it was time to thaw the bags of chicken and gravy. But, you can feed a big family or small army with dutch ovens. The more the merrier. In the end we fed the ward and there was some left over.
It was a long introduction, but what I really wanted to post about was the left-overs. We had two big dutch ovens, and three of our biggest Farberware kettles full of de-boned chicken when the party started. When it ended, there was probably almost 2 gallons of chicken still in one kettle. I tried to get everyone to take some home, but they were surprisingly reluctant and in the end we took it home. In addition to the cooked chicken, there was the bones. 29 trays of chicken will create a bunch of bones - our turkey roaster was crammed-jammed full of them. I could barely get the lid on. The first boiling gave us about 8 quarts of rich broth. What to do with all of this good food?! Our freezer is pretty well full, and needs to be defrosted anyway, so freezing it would probably work, but it is a lot of work.
Last night I brought in two of the kettles and stuffed 7 quarts full of chicken and broth, and after about an hour of gentle heating in hot water, I pressure canned them. I'm not sure how much there will be in the end. I'm sure that there is another 7 quarts that will be ready to go tonight, and then I will boil the bones one more time, and I think I will get at least one more 7 quart batch.
I guess that the reason for this post is to illustrate that food is available for storage when you least expect it. Since we had the ward dinner and ended up with the left-over chicken and all the bones and broth, we found that a friend in our ward has a contact at one of the local grocery stores and gets ripe-to-over-ripe fruits and vegetables on a routine basis. Sometimes she calls us at about 8 pm - you are not really thinking about food storage at that time of night. We go over and she has a wide variety if produce in anywhere from good-but-ripe, to cut-out-the-bruise to hmmmm-this-should-go-on-the-garden condition. It's not likely that you will be able to get access to the cast-off's of your local store, but the point is that you don't have to buy everything at full price. When corn is 10-for-$1, it's time to bottle/freeze corn. Do the strawberries look a little ripe? You might be able to strike a deal, especially at a stand or smaller store.
Note: In the end we had 18 quarts of chicken and broth.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Get Your Peanunt Butter While It's Cheap........
Bad harvest, poor crop. Major brands are planning on raising prices next month - November 2011. FYI.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Leave Your Troubles Behind.....
Our Hometeachers came by tonight and gave us a nice lesson on the Church Welfare system, and how able the Church is to respond and help in so many areas in the world when there is an earthquake or a hurricane or other natural disaster. This line of conversation led to various points about personal preparedness and no matter where you live, you can find yourself in a situation where you will not be able to buy what you need.
We talked about hurricanes and tornadoes and the possibility of an earthquake along the Wasatch Front. We have had a tornado, but it was a little one and it's damage was not widespread. If an earthquake struck the cities up north, even Sweet Haven might find itself without power, communications, natural gas, and possibly resupply of food and fuel.
We talked about an epic trip that S2 and D2 took one day on their bikes. We were slated to pick Annie up at the airport sometime in the early evening. These two kids were pretty restless and wanted to go on a bike trip, so I told them to take off, and I would pick them up along the way. I had chores and projects - I don't remember exactly what, but I didn't get on the road until they had about a 5 hour start. We drove and drove in the old Ford Van and I kept thinking I would see them over the next hill, but that was not happening and I was getting worried that something had happened to them. Finally about 43 or so miles from Sweet Haven we caught up with them. They hadn't taken much in the way of supplies - if you read this S2 or D2, please fill in any detail that my old brain has forgotten. I think they took some water, but used it up, and didn't take any food. They were expecting me to pick them up much sooner than the 5 hours it took me to get on the road. I was amazed at how far they had traveled. I think D2 was 9 or 10, and S2 would have been 13 or 14.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I was surprised to find a good friend show up at my doorstep, on his bike with little more than a book pack and light jacket. He had biked down from Moo U. to Flatirons U - about 60 miles when he decided that he just couldn't go back to his apartment. He really couldn't. As he approached his apartment, coming back from class, he saw several police cars and police men, and they were packing his roommates into the cars and they were in handcuffs. Lief continued right on by the scene and just headed out of town. It seems that one of the roommates had a marijuana plant in the window of his room, and a meter reader saw it and turned them in. Lief didn't know what was going on at the time, but he knew he didn't want to get hauled off in the confusion and so he just disappeared. I doubt that the police spent any time looking for him, but a lone guy, riding a bike is much less conspicuous than a guy in a car with a color, make, model and license plate. So he just continued on down and stayed the weekend with me. On Sunday I rode about half way back with him, and when he got back to Moo U. everything had been sorted out, and he was in not trouble.
I didn't start this post with the idea of singing the praises of the bicycle, but that must be a little on my mind as these stories came easily to mind. We see quite a few long distance bicyclers on the roads going to and from Sweet Haven. Some of them have panniers and packs, some of them are hooked to trailers. None of them are moving very fast. But they have all come a long distance - we know this because Sweet Haven is near the edge of no-where, and many miles from any city of even modest size. Sweet Haven is not in a well watered, verdant, fruitful landscape. The topography varies from reasonably productive, irrigated farms nearby, to juniper covered desert hills, to parched sandy flats, to empty, seemingly endless greasewood covered plains. And still they manage to come. Carrying water, food, shelter, dodging cars, semi-trucks and buses, the crawl along the roads at a few miles per hour. When night comes, they might be in a town, but they might be on the road and just pull off into the scrub and make a quiet camp. You will never see them, not at all the same as if they were driving.
I guess that I don't have a real conclusion to this other than I am frequently surprised how far you can go, and how much you can carry on a bike. If you had to go from the airport in SLC to Sweet Haven on foot it might take you two weeks. On even an bargain basement bike, a thrift store special, and weather permitting, you would stand a good chance of making it in two days, at the most in three. All with no gas, no electricity, with nothing more than a tire pump, a patch kit, a couple of gallons of water, and maybe a jar of peanut butter and a couple of loaves of bread.
If you have airless, flat free tires your bike repairs are decreased by 95% - just my opinion. You can drive over broken glass, sharp rocks, and puncture weed without a qualm. Try 'em, you will love 'em. We recently and somewhat reluctantly retired our old Yard Sale/DI Specials and are now riding about Sweet Haven on regular tube, and worried about the bumper crop of puncture weed that is everywhere. So far we haven't had a flat, but I know that it is just a matter of time. And after following the adventures of our Intrepid S2, who bikes 7 miles each way to work and home, except when he has to walk 25 blocks in the rain because of a flat tire....well I think I am going to be ordering some new airless tires and then we can ride without worry.
We talked about hurricanes and tornadoes and the possibility of an earthquake along the Wasatch Front. We have had a tornado, but it was a little one and it's damage was not widespread. If an earthquake struck the cities up north, even Sweet Haven might find itself without power, communications, natural gas, and possibly resupply of food and fuel.
We talked about an epic trip that S2 and D2 took one day on their bikes. We were slated to pick Annie up at the airport sometime in the early evening. These two kids were pretty restless and wanted to go on a bike trip, so I told them to take off, and I would pick them up along the way. I had chores and projects - I don't remember exactly what, but I didn't get on the road until they had about a 5 hour start. We drove and drove in the old Ford Van and I kept thinking I would see them over the next hill, but that was not happening and I was getting worried that something had happened to them. Finally about 43 or so miles from Sweet Haven we caught up with them. They hadn't taken much in the way of supplies - if you read this S2 or D2, please fill in any detail that my old brain has forgotten. I think they took some water, but used it up, and didn't take any food. They were expecting me to pick them up much sooner than the 5 hours it took me to get on the road. I was amazed at how far they had traveled. I think D2 was 9 or 10, and S2 would have been 13 or 14.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I was surprised to find a good friend show up at my doorstep, on his bike with little more than a book pack and light jacket. He had biked down from Moo U. to Flatirons U - about 60 miles when he decided that he just couldn't go back to his apartment. He really couldn't. As he approached his apartment, coming back from class, he saw several police cars and police men, and they were packing his roommates into the cars and they were in handcuffs. Lief continued right on by the scene and just headed out of town. It seems that one of the roommates had a marijuana plant in the window of his room, and a meter reader saw it and turned them in. Lief didn't know what was going on at the time, but he knew he didn't want to get hauled off in the confusion and so he just disappeared. I doubt that the police spent any time looking for him, but a lone guy, riding a bike is much less conspicuous than a guy in a car with a color, make, model and license plate. So he just continued on down and stayed the weekend with me. On Sunday I rode about half way back with him, and when he got back to Moo U. everything had been sorted out, and he was in not trouble.
I didn't start this post with the idea of singing the praises of the bicycle, but that must be a little on my mind as these stories came easily to mind. We see quite a few long distance bicyclers on the roads going to and from Sweet Haven. Some of them have panniers and packs, some of them are hooked to trailers. None of them are moving very fast. But they have all come a long distance - we know this because Sweet Haven is near the edge of no-where, and many miles from any city of even modest size. Sweet Haven is not in a well watered, verdant, fruitful landscape. The topography varies from reasonably productive, irrigated farms nearby, to juniper covered desert hills, to parched sandy flats, to empty, seemingly endless greasewood covered plains. And still they manage to come. Carrying water, food, shelter, dodging cars, semi-trucks and buses, the crawl along the roads at a few miles per hour. When night comes, they might be in a town, but they might be on the road and just pull off into the scrub and make a quiet camp. You will never see them, not at all the same as if they were driving.
I guess that I don't have a real conclusion to this other than I am frequently surprised how far you can go, and how much you can carry on a bike. If you had to go from the airport in SLC to Sweet Haven on foot it might take you two weeks. On even an bargain basement bike, a thrift store special, and weather permitting, you would stand a good chance of making it in two days, at the most in three. All with no gas, no electricity, with nothing more than a tire pump, a patch kit, a couple of gallons of water, and maybe a jar of peanut butter and a couple of loaves of bread.
If you have airless, flat free tires your bike repairs are decreased by 95% - just my opinion. You can drive over broken glass, sharp rocks, and puncture weed without a qualm. Try 'em, you will love 'em. We recently and somewhat reluctantly retired our old Yard Sale/DI Specials and are now riding about Sweet Haven on regular tube, and worried about the bumper crop of puncture weed that is everywhere. So far we haven't had a flat, but I know that it is just a matter of time. And after following the adventures of our Intrepid S2, who bikes 7 miles each way to work and home, except when he has to walk 25 blocks in the rain because of a flat tire....well I think I am going to be ordering some new airless tires and then we can ride without worry.
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