Set in the winter of 1880 to 1881, The Long Winter is a fairly grim book in the Little House on the Prairie series. It really did seem at one point as if the folks huddled in the North Dakotan town of De Smet might not make it. But they did, and sixty years later, Laura Ingalls wrote down what she remembered of a time when she was just fourteen. But the Indian…
Th man who wandered into town to warn the settlers of what would happen did not, it seems, exist. Perhaps it was nature, birds not stopping off at the lake but just flying south as fast as they could, that prompted Charles Ingalls to bring his family into their town house and away from their homestead. But he did and they all survived.
I mention this only as Charles Ingalls, as well as his libertarian daughter, are great heroes of mine. At the weekend, my Aunt Lucy who has lived in the hills above Wrexham for decades and so knows this area well, and I had a chat about various matters. Playing the Indian who did not really exist, she warned me that winter would begin this week and would be along and cold one. With sea temperatures plunging as a result of all that man made global warming, I would not be surprised.
Since that call it has been cold and very wet but with a few breaks allowing me to find more old wooden boxes and logs in the various barns here at the Welsh hovel to chop and split with my axe so adding to my, already, vast log pile. Today, I brought enough kindling and logs in to run the stove for a couple of days. In that area we are ready. Charles Ingalls would be proud of me.
But he’d be less proud of my efforts in the garden. Crab apples were finally picked today and the crop is my largest ever and will be turned into jelly in the next few days. But my cooking apples wait, wrapped in paper, to be turned into jars of mush for crumbles and to go with my breakfast Greek yoghurt. Or to become a few jars of chutney. The edible apples have been stored in my apple rack.
Another weekend job as is tying up my garlic which are now dried and cleaned. In the garden there are still more and more golden raspberries waiting to be harvested, frozen and stored in a freezer bursting with frozen fruit and ice cream. I reckon we can also pick and store a few more bags of blackberries which we can forage this weekend.
There are beetroot waiting to be stored in sand, a few carrots and potatoes to store the same way if we don’t just eat them as we go along. The peppers and chillies are coming along well and should be ready for picking and drying in a few weeks. The marrows and squashes need picking this week and will store in the larder for at least three months. Ditto the onions.
The tomatoes are ripening in batches and I need to start canning them in batches for winter sauces. If there is time I may be able to store some dried herbs of various sorts. The winter potatoes seem ahead of schedule but will not be ready to pick and store for a month or so. Right now, there are spring onions to flash freeze.
I may be too late to plant some chard for Christmas but if I can weed the old pea patch I really should try planting this week while the leeks I planted in the summer need thinning if they are to be perfect for Christmas. There is still time to pick bunches of lavender to dry in time to make Christmas lavender bags for Santa to put in various stockings. The smell the drying lavender will make in the kitchen will be very pleasant.
There is stacks of rhubarb to store on its own for crumbles and to turn into rhubarb and ginger jam.
I think that is it. It is a long list and Charles Ingalls would be ahead of me. But then, apart from on Plum Creek when the whole family got malaria, he never got sick as I have done. And he did not have a website to write. After the garden is sorted I can start the Autumn weeding and reordering of the strawberry patches and the final preparation of one small barn for the next phase of this homestead development: chickens!