its been awhile since anything was posted here, anybody had any new thoughts?

Yeah, but nowt to do with this section or thread now you ask

there's always one smart arse.

lonewolf wrote:

How i'm not surprised one bit how this thread goes after Sketts gets her claws on it.

Ssshhhtt

this kind of attitude is why I left SZ in the first place.

I was just joking, I didn't mean to piss you off and I don't think Sketts meant so either.

lonewolf wrote:

lonewolf wrote:
I respectfully disagree.

novum wrote:

Get no argument from me on that one

Yea. Exactly what ^they^ said.

Smart-assery and forums go hand in hand, no reason to take it personally. Just verbally bitchslap back and that's done.

I don't mind kidding about on the main forums, but i'm kind of serious about survival which is why i'm a staff member on 2 survival forums.

Speaking of survival, I have been eating quite a lot of home grown or wild food this year... All it took is bit of effort and I got to say its worth it. I picked heck of a lot of mushrooms, about 35 kilograms in two days, that's as they were, they get so much lighter when dried. If I stay in town, next year I'll be doing gardening again. This spring I was way too busy or tired to get onto it. Finland is a good place to be on that regard btw, the access to land is so easy, a knowledgeable person could live on fishing and gathering things quite easily. Add in a decent garden and some appletrees for a good measure.

I've been also thinking of making a garden to our summer cottage, that'll be a tough job to do as there's gazillion stones and trees in there. Its ironic in a way, there's so many completely remote places here which would be prime spot for some doomsday prepper type, but that sort of thing isn't all that popular around here.

I dunno what kind of survival things you're into, but I have been considering ways of starting to produce part of my food myself. It would ease my life so much that I could get food without constant need of paying €uropean monopoly money for it. Right now I have pile of homegrown (damn good! I might add!) potatoes and apples in the fridge, enough for few days I think and there's more of that waiting to be picked.

yes, we grow a lot of our own fruit and veg, presently eating our own home grown apples, foraging in the rural lanes around where we live.
we still have a good weekly local market where we buy all of our meat, we haven't eaten supermarket meat for over 15 years now.
I can get eggs from an old guy half a mile up the road who keeps a few chickens, 80p for 6 free range eggs.
one thing we have trouble getting is good fresh fish, we are right in the middle of the English countryside as far away from the sea as you can get here and fish at the local fish merchants is too expensive, fish costs more that steak here.

lonewolf wrote:

Well to be fair, you're opening post on this thread didn't exactly give this much away





That's fair enough...explains a bit too...but still, I never knew this

Finland is so much easier place regarding the fish.... There's plenty of fish here, although it is very expensive to buy but rather easy to go catch. Also its easy to get locally grown food and start a garden, the problem is the short summer. In a true survival sense, here you should gather quite a supply of things to not starve during winter. The good thing is that the terrain is very hilly in many places which makes building hillside cellar a very interesting option.

Speaking of which, that would be one of the things I would like to have at the summer house, the property is on a steep hillside facing a lake. Having a large hillside cellar would make the fridge completely obsolete. In Finland the ground stays very cold through summer so a well made cellar is pretty much like sitting in a fridge and it stays like that all year.

I presume there are cellars like that in England too? I recall seeing some in Ireland... Anyway, its interesting how dependant people seem to be on the electricity when keeping food cold is not that much of a rocket science if there's place to dig a cellar outside.

Britain being an island fish is generally available in coastal regions, in the middle of the countryside not so much, I was brought up in Plymouth on the south west coast and we virtually lived on fish but we are so far from the sea where I now live its expensive.
as for cellars these only exist if you live in an old Victorian house, most people now live in new properties that not only don't have cellars they are all electric and don't have chimneys!

I remember that when I was a child, my friend's grandfather had the whole back-garden laid out with growing fruit and vegetables. Every autumn he harvested those items that could be stored and put them on trays in their old wooden shed; and they would have apples, potatoes and onions all winter through. In knee-deep snow, we'd be allowed to go into the shed and pick ourselves an apple off one of the trays/pallets.

Now, I don't think that's "the rosy glow of hindsight". I remember that pretty clearly (and so does my friend!); but, today, I can't find a way to store apples or potatoes (bought from the supermarket, I'm sorry to admit) without them going off in a very few days. How come?

commercially grown fruit and veg is vastly inferior to home grown and dosent even taste the same.
a lot of it is picked unripe due to the vast distances it has to travel to get to the supermarkets, its probably unedible by the time it gets there.