Learning Where You Live and other Things to Think About

Greetings from Ireland again, this is Disaster Cat here in Ireland, who after several weeks of putting up various garden and store bought produce (mostly in the freezer, a bit of canning as well) has been thinking about two problems she sees a lot with beginning preppers.  You also see these problems a lot in folks who have a vague idea that it's a good idea to store something for a rainy day, but are a bit fuzzy on what that means.  Finally, I've also seen bits and pieces of these issues as blind spots, even in those experienced in staying prepared, especially if they have lived in cities all their lives.

What are those issues?

Learning everything you can about where YOU live (geography, history, soil types, farm animals etc) and

Learning and practicing some form of gardening BEFORE you are forced to do so.

They are related to each other but not quite the same. As in all good practices there are going to be individual limits or practicalities on how far you can go.  I may be able to access harvest records from the year 1172 when the Annals of Inisfallen reported on the death of "most of the livestock of the men of Ireland."  Folks in North America are going to need to more on settlers' diaries or tree ring data for the same type of information.  Gardening can also be problematic if you are stuck in a student dormitory, in which case reading and perhaps working with a family friend or neighbor is going to be more of a help.

For most people, taking care of the first issue is going to be an on-going process that never stops.  If you like history and people, it can even be sort of fun and adventurous.  While finding out who married whom can be fun (the more so if you are still living near your family), much more important are things like: traditional farming techniques (both modern and ancient) for your area, types of usual climate (are droughts and floods more normal than not), what were the favourite fabrics used for clothing (wool, cotton, feathers, furs?) and of course what types of food preparation did people use with the typical foods that grow where you are?

I've made it a personal study to look at different forms of food preservation partly in response to my despair at the lack of good canning jars and equipment over here.  I'll save the long story for another post, but the discovery that there was good, historical reasons why North Americans and Aussies know what a Canning Pot is and the folks in Ireland and the British Isles do not, has a real historical basis.  Both North America and Australia had frontiers, just at the same time as the new technology came into use.  They were ripe and ready to try something new.  The early White Settlers also combined more traditional methods (both their own and Native American) in their food preservation but in a New Land, they were also ready to try New Food technology.

Meanwhile, back in the Mother Country, Country People were still living very close to the margin.  One-Third to One-half the population of Ireland died from famine and many people in England, Scotland and Wales were still subsistence farming for themselves or a landlord.  These people had ancient, tried and true ways to preserve their foods and they did not feel they could take the risk on new fangled ways to preserve food.  One that required the buying of glass jars, lids and big pots; who really knew if this would work anyway.  So they stuck to the older ways of smoking, drying, curing, salting, brineing, double-baking along with cheese and candy making.

So, I've done as much as I can to learn about how all these systems work, which ones were used more here in Ireland.  And then take a look at why this might be the case.  For example when we first moved here 15 years ago, I went nuts trying to find a "Meat Grinder." First I found out they were called Meat Mincers here so I wasted a couple of months looking for a non-existent item.  Then I learned the reason I still could not find them was because for several hundred years in Ireland, most people did not make their own sausages, the butcher did that.  The poor would trade part of their pig meat in exchange (or some of the sausages) the wealthy just sent in their animals for processing and paid for it.  Growing up in America, I saw susage makers and mincers everywhere, due to the huge German and Eastern European immigrations.  And, sure enough, today after a huge influx of folks from Poland and Eastern Europe, you can now find meat mincers all over the place at Polish Markets.  Some Irish foodie types are also learning to make them at home.

The sausage story is a great example of something that may not be traditional, but will still work perfectly where you live.  That's because there are social reasons, not agricultural ones, that prevented it being done in the past.  Often you find that in the distant past (in this case before Ireland became a full British Colony) people made things similar to sausages at home or within their extended familes.  But you have to go so far back to find it, there is little direct information of how it was done etc.

Other important things to look at where you live are traditional times for things like slaughtering animals (is there one?).  It has only been in the last couple of hundred years at that Europeans (and North Americans) have been able to grow enough feed surpluses to support all their animals through the Winter.  Every September or October, the majority of farm yard animals were slaughtered with only the best and strongest kept alive until Spring.  A lot of harvest festivals were really as much about the work of putting up animal flesh as they were bringing in the last of the wheat.  But while one (harvest) is still a familiar idea to most modern folks, a "blood-month" or slaughter month might be from Mars.  Yet, it's most likely that for a few years after a serious emergency that drove people back to a lot of home agriculture, this custom would need to come back.

How much better to have practiced making home-made ham, jerky, or pressure canned beef stew BEFORE you need to do it all in a few weeks time.  Do it when your life or even your dinner table do not depend on it.  There have been quite a number of times in our household where we were all thankful that there is a late night Take Out Chinese when Disaster Cat has gotten a little too adventurous in trying out some new technique or recipe.  If things were seriously bad, we would have to eat them anyway, and I will be talking about things like the importance of sauces, spices and dips in old fashioned food planning; but that again is another blog.

Your local library, book store and historical society can be your best sources of information on your, exact location.  The Internet is also extremely helpful, especially as more localities get information on line.  Right now, I'm reading two books: Early Irish Farming by Fergus Kelly and Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley.
While the first may not be of much use to anyone in North America other than as a history book, Lost Country Life, while based in the UK, is one of the best books I've ever seen for those pesky details you don't realize you need to know until its too late.  How long does an Ox cart take to go a mile?  What does a shepard's crook really look like and how are the variations of it used?  etc..

 

While I've concentrated on food and agriculture for this blog, the same learning curve should be applied to other household tasks, equipment and even social needs.  For example, in rural Wales, there's a huge tradition of group singing and choirs for entertainment. Planning to keep up morale by forming such a group post-TEOTWAWKI would work well.  But in the American mid-West, reviving quilting bees and corn husking parties might feel more familiar.  This might seem obvious, but the way modern people move around, it's very possible to live in an area and have no idea what the traditional social acitivities were.  If you delve into it, you will often find that some are just social-economic accidents, but many filled serious needs that make fun out of important tasks best done with neighbors than alone.

OK, so now that I've hopefully convinced you to learn about where you live.  A brief (I promise) word about the second topic, the one I call: Gardening when It Doesn't Count.  And yes, that is a word play on the popular book from Mother Earth News, Gardening When it Counts; I hope the editors understand my sense of humor.  Obviously, its important to have books on gardening and food preservation, the more so when times are difficult or worse.  However, all too many people I've run into have this idea that they can learn to do it "when we have to."

This theory is bolstered by Commercials on various radio shows and webcasts that offer "Security, A Garden Full of Seeds in a Can" etc.. Now I think these items are a good idea, and if I could afford one I would get one.  Their value is that the seeds are sealed in special ways for a longer shelf life.  But, sometimes the commercials give the impression that all a family needs to do is whip out the seeds after the bomb falls, stick them in the ground, and presto, in a few weeks they will have food.

Reality seldom works that way, and even if you are lucky to have it work the first year (our first garden went pretty well) it may not stay that way (our second harvest was pretty much a few hunks of garlic, a bunch of carrots and one lunch worth of fresh corn).  And while practicing when your lack of gardening skills does not really count won't insure a bountiful harvest when it does; it makes it a whole like likelier that you'll at least have a good chance at growing enough to scrape by.

Which gets us back to the question of knowing where you live vs. growing what you like.  In general, most gardening books give the good good advice of  "don't grow what your family does not like to eat." That's important because you don't want a surplus of food that is wasted.  But there is also the issue of learning how and what will grow in abundance where you are, vs. what your favorite foods are given a choice.

In the case of our family, this tension results in my spending a lot of energy trying to grow the foods we miss, like good tomatoes, beans, artichokes, etc. and tending to avoid some of the local produce we don't care for, like turnips.  Still we have experimented with some foods we are not crazy about but will eat that are traditional here like broad beans and dried peas.  That's because if a crisis occurs, we need to know to grow and use what is native or naturally likes our climate.  We will still do our best to grow tomatoes (which are fantastic for jazzing other food up) but would probably give up on the corn (unless the area becomes a bit warmer).  The artichokes were the surprise that shows why experimentation is a good idea, they love it here.  So do North American blue-berries.

So, play around and learn when it doesn't count.  You'll be glad you did and even you never need a serious survival garden, you'll enjoy eating and learning about your plants in the meantime.  City Dwellers can look at gardening in containers if they don't have a real lawn or yard.

And remember what I tell people when they are starting out and worried they are not doing enough in the way of "being prepared". That is: "Remember that most people will do nothing, therefore what ever you can do puts you ahead of the game."  Please don't let doom laden articles scare you into thinking all is lost before you ever start because you don't have have a five acre garden and farmstead already.

A good combination of Learning Where You Live, Gardening When It Does Not Count and the practices of Figuring Out What You Use Each Month and Buying an Extra One will take you far.  Like any other journey, there will be more steps than those three.  But they are the foundation stone for much of what comes after.  Even a month's supply of essentials is a month your family wins ahead.

I'll talk more about number three another time, but there are quite a number of sites out there with various tables and formulas to help figure out what a month's supply is.  But mostly, it's just looking at what you really use with a new set of eyes and thinking, "what will I do if the stores are closed and I need blank?"  If you can't make it from what you have, you'll probably want an extra one when the time comes.

So, that's a lot to chew on.  I think I need to get back to where I left off in the year 1172 and I have some more pumpkins to cook down and freeze.  I wish everyone good luck and fun as they start to explore their world.  I look forward to hearing from everyone on what they find and learning from it.

Yours on a cold, dark, Irish Night in Novemeber...

Disaster Cat