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Kooxe'edaa (Tlingit paintbrushes). Very good tutorial on brush making from porcupine quills and stiff guard hair. It's truly a labor of love to harvest that stuff from a rancid hide. Also instruction for making the traditional paints. The project appears in each of the three books on Tlingit...

Tinders of choice here probably have paper birch leading the way. It can be subdivided easily into paper thin sheets. The suberin wax of the bark layers is a good quality in the rain, fires up anyway. The deal is to pick little strands from a dozen trees so your handiwork doesn't show, it...

I sold several hundred started grape vine cuttings over several years. Don't hear much about them, I still have the original big and vigorous vines. Since grapes are such an unusual crop here at 53N in the mountains, I have no difficulty finding pickers/users willing to barter for all sorts of...

Welcome, Chad. I'm not far south of you, 53N, in a mountain village on the mainland. This is a great site to reveal what to do when opportunities are restricted in a compact and densely populated district.

We get lots of power failures, summer and winter, possibly once a month and there's no knowing how long it will last. Light: Whatever, the kits need to be scattered all over the house, every bathroom and the kitchen. The bathrooms are the easiest to find in the pitch black and there's nothing...

Decades back, most fruit juices in North America were put up in steel cans, possibly 48oz and so forth. Your 3" nail trimmer isn't going to open one of those. A camp hatchet would do the job if you could control a couple of nicks in the lid. Otherwise, a stab and a twist with a Bowie clone...

We're not done yet with the cold. House is warm, full of food & drink. It is -20C in my deep freezer downstairs. It is -30C outside my window. My old cat, Rumpuss, was rescued from outdoor conditons like this last year.

Thankyou very much, Sara. Those places could be 1-2 km from my house. It's a fact that any day of-5C is well worth wasting in a long walk in the woods. Question: Do you carry any food/snacks and drink? Any simple navigation aids? Fire making supplies?

Had the fuel tank filled for the oil-fired central heating furnace last week. Shopping for all sorts of good quality food and drink. Very appealing, considering how poor my appetite actually is. I can see +21C on a thermometer counter-height, in the kitchen. The grocery store bakery is such...

Dried fruit of just about any kind: peaches, pears, apples, cherries, and Roma tomatoes in particular. Dried apple peels are my all-day snack.

I suspect that horseradish has been cultivated for so long (like garlic, olives and grapes) that I felt a named origin might some day have value.

I have Polish horseradish growing outside my back lane fence. Free for all, dig up as much as you like, it will not die. Just the smallest little glob on good roast beef is a singular taste found in nothing else.

I think of the intense salmon harvesting done every year here in the Pacific Northwest by the resident First Nations people. They are settled. They have their tribal resource territories. There's a defined Heiltsuk fireplace of charcoal, dated to be 14,500yBP. I'll guess they have been at...

electric blanket with widely variable heating. You would have woken up to a drippy surprise with +1C and our big dump of snow is sinking fast. Just handfuls in my trees.

Not here today, my son. 18" powder overnight so little chance of building a debris shelter. It soaks up all sound, the village doesn't make a sound. The container trains from the Rupert superport on the coast are only 2 blocks from me. If I don't see them move, no sound. I've slept on a...

The beginning apple cider step is destroying a lot of sugar which could be concentrated into sugar syrup. The sugar acids will get you nowhere in a hurry. You need to conserve all the sugars that you can so that they can be run through your metabolism, not some "yeasty-beasty."

Look for estate sales. You don't know who collects what until you see it. I bought a very good set of 7 wood carving knives, twice removed, from an estate sale. I was 3 days away from joining the blade smith's wood carving class when he died. Years later, a carver on the Gulf Coast had a set...

The situation is vastly different in western Canada where I've lived for some 65/75 years. The quantities of foraged fruit and meat are astounding annual concerns. It looks like the First Nations are making a commercial business of it but all they do is ensure that there's enough food for the...

Be careful what you call a "carb." Cellulose in wood is a classic "carb" which you cannot digest, no matter how hard your guts try. Kelp seaweed is mostly gelatinous carbs but they go through you faster than a racing pigeon. Lichens have exoskeletons made of many kinds of mixed carbohydrates...

Anything I prepare on a stove-top element, I sit there and do something, anything, and wait. If I have to leave the kitchen for any reason, I shut it off. There's every chance that I'll get distracted by something else and then I'm asking for trouble. The oven can stay on for hours: smoking BBQ...