tis the season

For dandelions that is. For most folks, dandelions are the most pesky of weeds, hard to pull up and they are fucking everywhere(this is true, I picked enough flowers within 40 feet of the back porch. And lets face it, they really do suck when they are crowding your garden. BUT! they also serve the greater good. Dandelions can be put into salads, used for herbal remedies, made into a tea, the roots dried as a coffee substitute, and in this particular case, they make everyones favorite wine.

For price of chicken scratch(15 loons) I was able to make a little over 2 gallons of wine. This should give me ten bottles of wine after all the sediment is left over. A buck fifty a bottle eh? NOT BAD. I would say from start to finish I probably put in about 2 hours of work, but it was enjoyable work, and it would have either been that or twidling my thumbs wathing the evening roll past me....and I prefer to do things.

I used the second recipe off of this interwebs site here except that I doubled it and added some cloves when I tossed in the orange peelings.

This is also only the start. Hopefully this year will yield more saskatoon and apple wine and hopefully will see me try a sand cherry wine for the first time. But these will have to wait. Maybe by the time fruit season rolls around I can get good and sauced for the pickins off of this dandy goodness.

the trails

Well I was bored a couple days ago so I went out for a little hike by myself out to Wascana trails. I did not really see anything that interesting but it was really nice just to be out there. Here are some pics of the wonders of the natural world from that happening. Also while I was there I had to check out the water levels to see if I could get a paddle in there just once more. I have read the flow charts for the Wascana in the past and noticed that once or twice a year during the summer, the levels peaked again, obviously due to a hard rain. This had always intrigued me. On a side note I really wish I was into paddling when they drained the whole fucking lake to deepen it. That would have been something else.

Anyway, with all this darned rain we have had, the river has actually swelled almost to spring levels. So today we went out to do a run on the trails. A perfect day for such an adventure. Not to hot, not to cold, just right and tons of fun. Oh and no one even ended up in the water this time.

The city

Ya know I always envision myself living rustically at the side of a lazy river in a two hundred square foot log cabin built by myself. Accompanying me would be my cat, a wood stove and a whole lot of records and books. Gardening would become a full time job, as would hunting and fishing.
But today I got to thinking about the advantages of the city when it comes to gardening. Don't get me wrong, I'm never giving up my pipe dream, but today I witnessed the building of a garden by a good friend of mine out in the town of Lumsden where the building of a fence was a necessary aspect of the plan. Wild animals needed to be kept out of his garden. I have thought about all the advantages of city gardening in the past but today brought them to particular attention.

-Extended growing season. A city is always just a couple degrees warmer than the surrounding area due to all the heat given off by man made creations.

-Less birds to eat your seeds or your berries.

-No deer or rabbits to nibble your precious plants.

-Free compost and mulch everywhere, people are always throwing away grass clippings and bags full of leaves.

-And in my case there are no predators to alleviate me of my hens.

The only real downside is that space is obviously at a premium and that it is hard to get full sunshine on your garden because houses are frequently in the way.

While I may curse living here when the neighbours are tossing fists at three thirty in the morning, I have no problem getting dirty 4 feet from my back step.

Playing with a chain saw

..... is the best thing ever

Rustic Undertakings on the importance of preparedness

I am not sure where to begin about this weekends adventures but here it goes. The plan(which really was only a 3 minute conversation at the local watering hole) was to head up to Battleford and canoe down to Borden. The venture was supposed to take three days. As you will find out in the subsequent paragraphs, sometimes plans do not always work out, but they almost always have great endings and they most certainly always produce great stories.

I would like to start off by saying that the weather liar was only forecasting between one and five millimeters for the area, and the five was the worst of the forecasts, oh and it was not supposed to come at us until Sunday.

So we made the trip up to the Battleford, two canoes strapped to the ladder rack on my new 430 dollar Ford Ranger and one to the top of Tanners beater which was scheduled to become a cube as soon as we got back on Monday when his new truck was supposed to come in. The ride went off without a hitch, we slept the night at Tanner's dad's place and woke up the next morning with visions of a weekend full of fun and manliness.


We launched on an overcast morning but the temperature was still nice and the rain was nowhere to be seen. Hooks in the river we trolled down the mighty North Saskatchewan, glimpsing Moose crossing the water and seeing no other humans whatsoever. The valley was mind blowingly beautiful and was just as secluded as the rivers far up North in the Shield. It was a perfect day really. We discovered a couple old rustic hunting shacks along the river, one made of cotton wood logs chinked with mud from the surrounding area, and definitely still in use. I spotted a patch of wild onions which were completely foreign to me so we dug up a bunch of those which were absolutely tantalizing.

We caught some fish.... and then it started sprinkling. -"You guys did bring rain gear, eh?"
-"Nah but we'll be fine, we have garbage bags, its a Lutz family tradition." replied the two brothers on the excursion.

We headed to shore eventually that evening to make camp... And then it started raining.

We somehow managed to get a fire going, luckily someone had the foresight to bring a torch, while somehow neglecting rain gear.... And then it started pouring.

We got out the sausages and cleaned up a fish that we ended up cooking over the fire as if it were some sort of hot dog, which actually turned out to be an essential method of cooking fish.... and then the torrent of rain began.

We headed to the designated party tent where some beverages were shared.... and then the hurricane ensued.



The tent housing the brothers who were already very soaked managed to collapse in the middle of the night. The poles actually broke the wind was so fierce. It was a cold wet and miserable night. I woke up in the morning with the realization that we needed to get somewhere warm so we could dry our bones and not catch hypothermia in the middle of bloody nowhere. We packed up camp and headed downstream to battle the storm.

I'm not sure if I have ever feared for mine or my fellow paddlers safety quite like I did this morning. The wind was so crazy that the water was actually white capping..... ON A RIVER. The less experienced members of the party were having a very difficult time guiding the boat down the river without being turned around, and being broadside to the angry waves was not a place you wanted to be. That's how boats turn over, and how people get really awfully cold really awfully fast. It was actually getting scary when Tanner's partner had her fill and started to loose it (which is 100 percent excusable in this situation, things were getting pretty real) we quickly headed for the shore. As we put in on the side, a roof appeared just over a grove a trees. There was a cabin! Only once have I been happier to see people, the other time is for another story. We hastily climbed up the stairs to the cabin and knocked on the wooden door pleading for entry.

A dazed and confused man with appropriate long hair hiding an appropriate red neck answered our calls of help. It was obvious we had awoken his hangover, but he quickly shied us in. Kyle is his name, and Kyle is the most helpful and nicest man I know. As fast as we could take off our wet outer layers Kyle whipped up a fire in the wood stove and we were soon comfortable once again, hypothermia had failed us. I was sitting around making small talk with the other fellow there, Rick, when I asked him what he did in the Battleford. At this point he mentioned he was a mechanic. At this, Tanner's ears perked up, he was still in his wet outer clothing and so was still standing in the porch. He poked his head in, mentioned that his cousin was a mechanic in the area and began to introduce himself. When he got to introducing himself to Rick he looked at him and realized that Rick was in fact his cousin whom he had not seen for five years and that Lisa on the couch was also a long lost relative. I'm not making this up, the dude has no other relatives in the entire area and we happen to get rescued by a long lost cousin. Rick and Kyle helped us out a great deal, using their 4x4 to get our gear up to the top of the hill and inviting us back for some warm weather canoeing.

As I said. Sometimes plans don't work out... but they always end in great stories.

Bees!

I had the opportunity to stretch out a bee suit yesterday and inspect my first hive. I have made acquaintances with an elderly man that is willing to apprentice me in apiculture. He brought home a hive to his house in the city so we could unwrap it and so the wonderful insects could pollinate all the neighbour's gardens. I would kill a small child for a neighbour with a bee hive.

Recently, bee keepers have taken to overwintering their bees in Canada due to the problems with bees in America. The overwintering requires only a small amount of insulation around the outside of the hive. So we unwrapped the protection and inside the hive was covered in bees, pollen, honey and new brood. It was oh so exciting to basically pick up 600 bees in your hand and not be stung. No pictures this time but hopefully if all goes well I will bee out and about at the apiary lots this summer.

Now all I have on my mind is making mead. GOOOD GLORIOUS MEAD!

If your bored you should google the peril of the bee these days. For some reason honey bees are not surviving at rates they once did, but no one knows why.
possibly aliens? maybe the fell into mel's hole

Another one!

I was reading that sometimes you have to trick chickens into laying and laying in the right spot at that by using a fake egg. So while working in the valley two days ago I happened upon an egg shaped rock. Placed in the nest box, the rock yeilded an egg not even a day later. I hope this means there is lots more to come as one egg every week really is not that exciting.

a treat!

Well lookie what i got here. This is neat. I need some more before I can make a feast so I have not eaten it yet but im darned sure it will be the tastiest egg to ever go down inside my belly.

Fishing Season

The spawn is over and the soft water fishing season is greeting us this weekend. I have never been much for fishing down south here but I believe that I have neglected to realize how good the fishing can actually be down here. Come to think of it I have caught one of the largest fish of my life no more than 60 minutes from home. Anyway. This summer will be dedicated to learning all the fishing spots and secrets in the southern part of the province with emphasis on the Fishing Lakes(the Qu'appelle Valley chain) and of course Last Mountain Lake. A fishing licence by the way costs a measly thirty dollars and can be had at all Canadian Tire stores as well as a lot of gas stations and of course all tackle shops. A very petty investment indeed when you consider the cost of a fillet of walleye. Not only will the fish make delicious treats but after I have taken out the fillets the rest of the slimey creature can go to my chickens as well as to my garden. This fruit of the sea is supposedly one of the best fertilizers, especially for certain plants like corn and peppers. Bring on the bounty!

Three Sisters Gardening

I came across this on the ol' interwebs today. It is a Native American trick for companion planting beans, corn and squash. The squash shades the ground and keeps away animals because of the vines, the corn provides a vertical for the pole beans to grow up and the beans provide nitrogen for the squash and corn.

I will have to give this a try because other than my peppers and tomatoes, the three sisters are the only thing left that I have to plant.

Here is a how to link http://www.ehow.com/how_5094575_do-three-sisters-gardening.html

Rustic undertakings is currently listening to the Talking Heads

They have arrived

Like that title says. They have arrived, courtesy of a cat carrier, all the way from the flourishing metropolis of Ogema, Saskatchewan. Me and my associate Andrew drove out this afternoon to pick up the girls, stopping in briefly at Pangman Saskatchewan for some greasy mid afternoon breakfast. Pangman is a town of 260 individuals West of Weyburn. The diner served breakfast all day... which ruled. The breakfast however did not rule. The bacon was crispy, the hash browns uncooked and the eggs greasy. But it was still breakfast. Onto Ogema we went where we met with Anna, who has been involved with poultry her entire life and was very interested in our attempt to bring hens to the city.

So we put them in the kennel where they were very well mannered for the entire trip. The mannerisms stopped however when they were introduced to Wolfgang the cat. They became very agitated and noisy which was slightly unnerving because the neighbours are still unaware of what is going on and I would prefer to keep it that way. I am very interested to see how this pans out. I can not see it ending to terrible because if I have to get rid of them I can just eat them. But without further adieu, here are some pictures of the girls and the coop they will be enjoying.

Finally

I am finally going to do it. Something that has been scratching at the back of my mind for a couple of years now is finally going to become reality. The proverbial egg has hatched. . I am going to raise a couple of hens. Last summer I was very close to doing this but around the same period of time one of my neighbours had called the bylaw officer on me for an unkempt pile of lumber as well as someone called to have my car towed after it had been parked in the same space for more than a day(which is total horseshit, "oh I'm sorry if you had to walk an extra 10 feet to get to your house you lazy good for nothing ungulate"). So I felt that I was being watched a little to closely by one or more of my neighbours and decided at the time that it would be a bad idea to bring more rain upon my head.

Anyway enough ranting about the past, I am three quarter of the way done building a chicken coop for two Salmon Faverolle hens. The Faverolle is a quiet French multi purpose breed meaning they will supply me with eggs all summer long and in the fall I shall have a delicious feast. A harvest feast if you will. I am perfectly aware of the illegalities of what I am about to do but I feel that food is a human right and as long as my two girls are not affecting anyone negatively than i see no issue. If the bylaw officer comes by I have full plans to make this an issue with the city and media and will petition the bureaucrats to see things my way. There are many many cities throughout North America that allow backyard chickens, including some very big cities. Saskatoon is currently reviewing their bylaw against laying hens and hopefully the law there is upturned as this may set progressive decision making in motion for the rest of the province.

I will post more tomorrow when the coop is finished and my two girls are contempt in their new home.

For interested parties- I learned much about the subject of backyard chickens from this lovely site- www.backyardchickens.com as well this is where i found the idea for my coop tractor.

rusticundertakings is currently listening to Neil Young- Live and Unplugged.

Homemade medicine

Well I went and managed to get a bung leg the other day playing one of those European sports. I feel really fucking useless right now. I was hoping that Sunday I would be able to plant a few things in the garden, such as the almighty carrot and the humble beet, but no such luck. Instead I went out back to my stick pile, then over to the wood pile, back inside I picked up my buck knife and I started to give it hell.

So without further adieu I present to you the crutch I made. It certainly helped for the time being but now that my family has brought me over a pair of crutches I am going to have to retire the stick to some lonely corner of my house.

Bison

Ok so this is the bison horn i found burried in the side of the Wascana. The pen is there to give you an idea of how large this thing is. This has to easily be the coolest thing I have ever found. I would really like to figure out how old this thing actually is, but I don't know how that would happen.

Urban Survival

AND GOD SAID, LET THERE BE RAIN. Right? That is how it goes right? Don't quiz me on scripture, I have been to church twice and am not exactly known as a man of the faith. However, if God so chooses he can rain down on me any day, as long as it is between the hours of 7 pm and 7 am so that I don't miss work. Any who, onto the picture, I scavenged this behemoth from the Lumsden dump, attached a nozzle and did some repair work with liquid fiberglass, which hopefully will stay repaired.... the last attempt, with caulking, failed miserably. I have diverted about a quarter of the watershed of my roof down into the cauldron and fitted the top with a screen to keep out the leaves and other junk. Being raised a couple feet off the ground allows for the water pressure to increase and hopefully with the odd rain this summer i will never have to use the actual tap to feed my thirsty plants. Move over appocolypse, make way for giant rain barrel.

Punk Rock

I got coaxed into putting on a punk rock show in July. Come check it out!
www.myspace.com/subsistance
www.myspace.com/failedstatessk
www.myspace.com/experimentsqc

Last Kick at the Can

So I had my last kick at the Wascana the previous Sunday, April the 18Th to be exact. That means I had a window of opportunity this year of 16 days, 4 of which I managed to get out for a paddle. I suppose the water was open a couple days before my first trip and would have been doable a couple days after my last but all in all the river is still only open for maybe three weeks. On Sunday you could tell that she was starting to dwindle. Paddles started to drag ground and rocks started jumping out at every corner, one of which I managed to not avoid and ended up rolling the canoe. To top it off it happened on the same corner I rolled it last time.... fuck. I'm not sure what it is about that bend but it really has it out for me, two totally different situations not ten feet apart put me in the drink this spring.

So while it is bye bye to the Wascana until next year, it is hello to the Qu'appelle for the rest of the summer thanks to directed runoff from the Lake Diefenbaker reservoir and hopefully it is howdy dowdy do to some Northern rivers this summer, but who knows what will end up happening.

Until next time, stay rustic, start planting your onions, peas and spinach and go listen to the Highwaymen.

ice jams on the wascana

fun fun fun. all gone now though. a few days after this picture was taken i was in the area again. The jam was gone but the force behind the jam was so strong that there was giant chunks of ice pushed 15 feet up the river banks that would have easily weighed 3000 pounds

dipping the paddle

The trip down the creek can be divided into two parts. From Regina to Wascana trails and from Wascana trails to the valley at Lumsden where the creek meets the river that calls. Or if you are more ambitious you could just do an over nighter and consume the whole trip at once. This was the original plan but what with the constraints of our everyday lives we were forced to call it in at a day trip and decided to do the second leg of the tour instead of doing it all(maybe we lucked out and avoided some Deliverance type shit by doing so). This is for certain the faster leg of the tour, outside Regina the country is still very flat and the creek does not flow very hard at points. The second leg has a larger grade and is also joined by another creek of sizable girth at which point the river really starts to move. Once this creek, whose name escapes me, is passed, no more ice jams occurred on the river due to the extra flow as they had all been swept down towards the climax. This might seem like a blessing but the ice jams are actually a very fun element of danger. Dodging floating ice bergs that easily outweigh a large car entertains an element of danger that gets your heart pumping and the adrenalin rushing ever so slightly. If you are looking for adventure within the confines of your own homegrown roots this is the trip you need to take.

We tend to take the Wascana for granted living in Regina and see the lake often as a feeble attempt to pretend the location of Regina actually made sense, and that our forefathers did not simply get lazy and set up camp when their feet got tired. The Wascana however becomes very beautiful the further out of the city you get. Large thirty feet banks sometimes loom above the canoe as beavers slap their tails in fear of my giant blue craft. Situated in a typical valley formed by the receding glaciers of long ago, it is, like all other valleys of this sort, immensely gorgeous. Trees constantly flank the river and waterfowl are always being scared up as often as the deer are numerous. The Wascana really is a special place and the best way to explore it is by boat. Come to think of it there really is not a lot of things that I would rather be doing in the first week of April(last year there was still a substantial amount of snow on the ground).

The mighty Wascana

Monday March 29th i went for a walk down Elphinstone to where the creek crosses the road. There was still thick ice across the whole surface. Tuesday the 30th I went for a walk to the river. No more ice. This was my Friday April the 2.