by Pete Thorsen
My plan was to work up the garden soil and then water it as needed and I expected wild plants to grow again right away. I thought maybe we could then burn it off again and maybe the two burnings would help reduce the amount of weeds that would grow after we planted. I hoped so anyway.
Chapter 20
Beth has decided to stay! At least through the summer it sounds like. I feel happy with her decision but I don’t really know why because I was getting along just fine alone for all those years. She told me her big plans for a large garden located at one of the out camps that has a windmill. She seems confident that her garden will be a good producer. I am not so sure, but some of her enthusiasm is maybe rubbing off on me.
I am putting my full effort into her project. It certainly would be nice to have garden vegetables again. For me it has been quite some time since I had any. I do eat many wild plants that I forage for, but they just do not compare to the domestic vegetables that we all grew up eating.
Beth’s garden plans seem pretty complete and it is very obvious that she spent some time thinking and planning. She must have decided to stay or at least seriously considered it for some time before she told me. Beth must have looked over all the other camps, along with this main camp, and weighed the options before making the decision that she came up with. I do hope it works out well for us.
Her garden plans seem well thought out, and I could see right away that burning off the area first would be a good idea. The weather even helped us out on that score by staying dry long enough for us to do the burn then having the light rain as soon as we were done burning. Even Mother Nature seems enthused by Beth’s plan.
We are back at the main camp today and there is still light rain falling. Hard to tell just how much actual rain we will get. Just guessing I would say we have already got maybe a half inch or so since it started. The moisture will be a big help by softening the soil before we start digging up the ground for the garden. I was surprised at the large size that Beth staked out for the garden. It was way bigger than I expected that’s for sure. She must have a large supply of seeds that she brought with her to plant a garden that big.
The next morning we again left to go to the garden camp. Again we brought along extra gear that we would need there. This time we stayed at the garden camp for well over a week or so, I lose track of the days. We started digging the garden and had to wet down the ground a few times to ease that process. We would flood the area in the evening and let it soak in overnight, then we would work on it during the day.
When Beth asked about whether there were javelina in this area I told her yes. The windmill had been placed in a lower area, likely because water was closer to the surface there. Javelina often traveled in the lower areas where there was more foliage. So yes, we could expect javelina in our garden. This caused even more work for us.
Some places in the area ranchers had used sheep fencing with one or two strands of barb wire on top. So our next project was to find and pull this sheep fencing and install it around our new garden. The garden ground by this time was all dug and turned and raked to Beth’s specifications and was now just waiting for warmer weather and then to be planted. So we still had time for this fencing job.
What is commonly called sheep fencing is actually just woven wire fencing. It has varying size square openings with roughly about six by six openings at the top and smaller openings as you go down. It should certainly keep the javelina out of the garden when it is installed.
We located a fence about a mile or two from the garden with the desired fencing, and though it was quite a job we removed enough of the woven wire to completely surround our new garden plot. There was a gate right handy at the garden camp and we installed that in our garden fence so we would have easy access to our garden. We also put a single strand of barb wire on the posts above the woven wire fencing.
Stupid me said that deer could easily jump over the fence that was now about four and half feet high. So next we had to gather wood poles that we attached to the steel posts with wire and then attached two more strands of barbwire to these raised posts. The resulting fence was now well over six feet high and we had even ran the top wire above the gate so deer could not jump over the gate either. Beth had no problem with the wire over the gate but I had to duck slightly to pass under it. At my insistence this was smooth wire with no barbs to poke me in the head. About a month later I raised this wire another six inches and then I had no problems forgetting to duck.
Time passed and we spent a lot of it at the garden camp. We planted the garden in due time, which I helped with but only with Beth’s careful instructions, and under her watchful eye. I could easily understand the need for extreme care. Beth used most of her supply of garden seeds in our huge garden. If something happened there would be no way to restock these seeds if the garden did not do well.
We made many improvements and changes as the summer wore on. We killed and ate all the rabbits and squirrels in the area right around the garden. We added heavy rocks around the bottom of the fence to prevent (or at least hamper) anything from digging under the fence.
We put up more poles in the garden to attach shade fabric so much of the garden was at least partially shaded. And we watered and we watered. We had no soaker hoses so instead we dug a trench system so we could flood the garden with water very easily. This seemed to work very well.
I built a small, three-sided enclosure with a floor that water could easily drain through next to the big water tank. A short piece of garden hose with a simple shut off on the end made us a great shower. The tank was tall enough so the hose was just looped over the top, and once a siphon was started we could just use the hose shut off to stop and start the water flow from then on. The water in the tank was relatively warm from the sun and the shower was a hit with both Beth and myself.
Once, a deer tried to jump over the high fence and got tangled up in the barb wire. In the process it ripped out one pole and tore some of the fencing down. It made quite a racket during the night when it happened and woke us both up. I ended up killing the deer and the next morning I transported the deer to the main camp where I cut it up and made jerky from all the meat in the smoke house. Nothing went to waste. While I was gone doing that Beth repaired the fence and tied strips of cloth to the upper fence wires so any other deer would notice the high fence wires and not even try jumping over. We had no more problems with deer after that episode.
The garden was a lot of work. I did not mind hoeing down all the weeds that sprang up between the rows of vegetables but Beth was on her knees in the rows just about everyday pulling the weeds that were too close to the desirable plants to hoe them off and had to be carefully pulled. It was a tough job, but never did Beth complain or ask me for help doing it. While I did help often in gardening my heart was not in it, and Beth did at least two or three times as much garden work as I did. I stayed busy doing other things and I still traveled around to all the other camps like I had always done. For the most part Beth stayed the whole spring and summer at the garden camp.
And her hard work paid off big time. The garden ended up producing way more than I ever thought it possibly could. This led to more work of course.
First, Beth lamented how she would not be able to able to can the produce. She mentioned this just after the first sprouts came up. I told her that I had found several pressure cookers in different sizes. She then asked about canning jars and lids and, while I did find a few, there were hardly any that I remembered finding. Beth then mentioned that at the last place they often reused any jars that had screw on lids for canning. Jars for everything from pickles, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and jelly. Basically any clean jar with a screw on lid could be used.
I had never thrown away any jar. I had no plans to use them for canning but they were not making any more and they could be used for storing many things. So I made several trips bringing her jars and pressure cookers. She had also seen the solar dehydrators that I had made to dry the fruit back at the main
camp and she asked me to make two or three for use at the garden camp if I could find the supplies to do so. That was not a problem and I made three of them for her to use when the garden started to produce.
I also spent time building an outdoor wood-fired cooking grill using natural rocks and local clay. There were plenty of both everywhere. With a few helpful suggestions from Beth the grill I made worked out very well for doing the canning when the time came. After I had built the grill I spent several days gathering wood from the area so there would be plenty on hand.
Wood gathering might not be a big deal for those living in a woods up north, but here in the high desert it was more problematic. There were mesquite trees and scattered juniper trees, but gathering any quantity of firewood required lengthy walks. I used one of the carts to gather the wood and bring it back to camp until I had a large pile.
Beth’s arm healed fully and she regained all of her strength. She soon started practicing with her bow again and I was not surprised with her high level of accuracy. There is no doubt that she is a remarkable woman in many ways.
The summer progressed and we reaped the harvest of our hard work in the garden. I tried to help Beth with the canning and drying of the bountiful harvest but I have to admit that mostly I just stayed out of her way when she was working.
We ended the summer with many jars of different sizes and shapes full of the garden produce. We also enjoyed eating fresh vegetables that we picked almost daily.
I freely told Beth how impressed I was with her expertise and very hard work in the garden.
Chapter 21
I was very pleased with how the garden came out. It was a lot of work to be sure but the effort was well worth it. I found Tony very funny with his attempts at helping with the garden and, later, the canning of its produce. He was obviously very sincere in his wish to help but he was just not cut out for that work. He was a hard worker for sure, but just not in the garden.
Tony did most of the work putting up the garden fence and he did a masterful job building the outdoor grill that was a great help during the canning season. He also promptly built the dehydrators as soon as I asked for them. When there was a lull in the work he gathered an enormous amount of firewood to use in the outdoor grill. The shower he built was a blessing indeed, especially after working in the garden or canning over a wood fire all day. I cannot say enough about the shower.
He still did his wandering when time permitted to visit all his other camps. On his returns he always brought back fresh meat to share. My arm healed totally and I never even gave it a second thought anymore. Tony continued to shave all summer at least once or twice a week and I did trim up his hair on several occasions also. Without all the hair he was a very good looking man.
The garden finally wound down and I have saved a large quantity of seeds for future use. I ended the season with at least twice as many seeds as when I had started. With the end of the garden, both Tony and I moved back to the main camp for the bulk of our time. We did go out and visit the other camps but now the fruit trees in the community were starting to produce, and that required attention with the picking, peeling/cutting, and drying of the fruit.
We also ate plenty of the fresh fruit off the trees. I had never realized just how many fruit trees there were scattered around in the community. Then, on a few days, Tony took me on treks out to visit scattered, abandoned homes well away from the community where he knew there were additional fruit trees growing. We always returned from those outings both carrying heavy packs that were full of additional fruit to be dried.
At about this same time the mesquite pods were getting ripe also. Tony had always picked some of them to make syrup, but this year we picked much, much more. Tony said we had way too much for syrup but he had never realized what he had in one of his storage houses.
He had stored several hand meat grinders that he never used for grinding meat. The scrap meat pieces from making strips of jerky he had just placed in the smokehouse on a metal window screen and jerked the scraps along with all the cut strips. So he never used the meat grinders and still never wasted any of the meat. Mixed in with the many different meat grinders he found was one that had big, mostly-flat plates that were made to grind grain into flour.
I showed him how we could make flour from the mesquite pods. First we ran the ripe, mostly-dry pods through a regular hand meat grinder. For this I picked out from the choices he had the meat grinder with the coarsest grind. The pods looked and felt dry, but running through the meat grinder you could see that they still contained a lot of moisture. The beans inside these pods were still relatively soft (once dry these beans get very, very hard). Because of the moisture and still soft beans, the pods could be ground up just like meat in the grinder. Once ran through the meat grinder we put the grindings into the dehydrators to fully dry.
Once completely dry (and they dried very fast after the grinding) the grindings could then be run through the hand grain mill, which produced mesquite flour. The key here was that the grindings had to be very dry or else it would gum up the grain mill in no time. We now had flour!
Mesquite flour is flour and can be used like regular flour but the mesquite has pluses and minuses to using it. It contains a lot of sugars and normally needs no additional sugar added when used. But mesquite flour does not like to cook all the way through and was very seldom used by itself for that reason in the before times. But you can make thin cakes, cookies, pancakes or most anything that is flat and thin. I have never been able to make satisfactory bread with it because it always remains doughy inside while outside burns.
While not perfect the mesquite flour was a great addition to our food stores, and anyone who has ever seen mesquite trees knows that each tree produces an amazing amount of pods, even in very dry years. The flour has a very unique taste that most find pleasing.
As fall approached Tony and I had considerable fruits and vegetables stored for our use over winter. Our supply of jerky was just about gone but for now we made up for that with fresh kills of rabbits and quail along with many doves. Often times we harvested these birds and animals with just a thrown rock. I knew as soon as cooler weather arrived we would again kill one or two of the free ranging cattle in the area and maybe a deer or two as well, to turn into jerky that could be stored for a long time.
The jerky we made was not the very spicy kind that a person could once buy at every gas station or grocery store in the before times. The jerky we made was just meat dipped in very salty brine with a small amount of a couple other spices added for enhanced flavoring. This somewhat bland jerky (by past standards) served several purposes. It stretched our supply of spices (which we could not replenish), it still tasted fine alone, and it was not too spicy when added to the pot when making soup or stew.
Our food stocks for the foreseeable future seemed secure with everything we now had stored. At Tony’s insistence we packed up about half of our food stores and scattered them out at all the other camps. Most of this food was hidden and all of it was stored in rodent and insect proof containers. The canned food in glass jars we were extra careful with. Even though the winters were quite mild here those glass jars had to be protected from freezing. So some of the jars were buried at other camps in sealed pails or in plastic totes. Some were put in a couple of the mine camps towards the back of the mines where it would never freeze. I could see Tony’s point of having food in different spots so we would never lose it all too any single event, whether a man-made or natural event. It was the classic case of not having all your eggs in one basket.
Tony is a great guy in so many ways, and knowledgeable on many things, but he knows nothing about some things. So sometimes a girl just has to act to the best interest of all parties involved.
Tony and I were sitting out on the little patio he had made next to my motorhome one evening. We were just watching as the stars were coming out and the moon was just starting to rise in the east. We often did this whether at the main camp or away at one of the out
camps. We usually sat in a companionable silence just relaxing in each other’s company. This night I turned to him and started to speak.
“We are really setup quite well for the winter ahead.”
“Yes we are. Your garden was a big part of that.”
“We seem to make a pretty good team.”
“Yes we do.”
“So when are you fixing to ask me to marry you?”
When I said this I turned to look at him. It took a moment for what I said to sink in to his male brain. When it finally did the expression on his face was indeed priceless. Then he started to say something a couple times but nothing escaped his lips. Even with my help he still did not seem to know what he was supposed to do. So I decided some more assistance from me was still needed.
“One thing you could start with would be to get up and come over here and give me a kiss. Then maybe you could figure out what you should say after that.”
He actually looked scared for a moment. But like I said, he was a smart guy in many ways, and this time he was smart enough to get up and come over to me and give me that kiss. As I fully expected this led to many more. Eventually he did finally ask me to marry him. I knew he would, but he just needed a little help to get going.
The End
A Girl’s
Gotta Survive
Pete Thorsen
Originally Released
on Kindle April 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher/author, except that brief selections may be quoted or copied for non-profit use without permission, provided that full credit is given. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely accidental.
