Wivart Yer Opinel You Aven't Got An 'Ope In 'Ell'!

Showed a vegan friend my blog: Loved the bad puns (even donated one of his own - above). winced at the guns, remained tolerant at the meat eating, hunting 'n' fishing, then brightened considerably on sight of the Opinel.
Takes all sorts
Bushwacker
PS Check out Marc Armand's illustrations

Bird Hunting From The Sofa

Bowman 2

"You will discover that to be a good shot is not the half of what it takes to make a tolerable bird slayer."
Maurice Thompson, The Witchery of Archery, 1879

Playing this game's lot like the guilty pleasure of buying delicious junk food, the 'twofers' can really make your day!
Bushwacker
PS on the site where I found the game a fella gave one of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard in a while.
'Don't take life so seriously mate, no one gets out alive anyway'

Coast, Post, Bed.

Well I made it to the coast to see my mate Jonah off. Few tribulations but i got there in the end!

Little S, (well now not so ‘little S’ anymore , in fact she’s now all grown up ‘Miss S About Town’) came to my rescue and looked after the little guys for the night.
Jonah’s party was a lot of fun and I got to catch up with Cousin L and Mrs L who also live there. Hastings is a kind of land that time forgot, a decaying seaside town with the worst rail and road links in the south east of England. As the crow flies you’re only sixty miles from London but it can take two hours or more to drive there and the trains are appalling, the ‘fast one’ is an hour and a half and for the slow one you have to book a week off work and notify your next of kin.

After a night on the tiles myself and Sir Hiss fortified ourselves with a breakfast of Whelks and bacon sarnies (sandwiches) and drove back to town in Sir Hiss’ Prius.
Nice motor if you’ve not had a ride in one, worth checking it out, lacks the romance of a truck, but for the city they are the future.

The first archery lesson went well.
OK none on the A5 piece of paper, but none off the straw either!

If you’re interested in lightweight camping, tarp life or building your own shelter Mungo has been trolling trough the Equipped to Survive site and picked out the most promising designs. I get the feeling a little bushcraft origami is on the agenda for tomorrow.

I’ve added Life Uncomplicated to my blog roll, if you like the sort of stuff I write about you’ll probably like him too.

Thanks for reading
I’m off to bed like a bushwacker with a sore head

Bushwacker

Something For The Weekend Sir?

If I can sort out my child care problems I’m going away on Saturday to wave bon voyage to a friend who is starting his yacht master qualification. First stop Hawaii. Arragghh!

On Sunday Archery class is FINALLY in session! There is an historic precedent to archery class’s being held on a Sunday. Apparently a medieval law is still on the statue books which insists that every able bodied man should be practicing his archery skills in his local park every Sunday afternoon. The looks you’d get wouldn’t be the half of it!

In the meantime I thought I’d do a round up of some of the blogs I’ve been reading.

Othmar Vohringer of Outdoors with Othmar Vohringer
There’s a well worn saying ‘The more you know the less you carry’ and the bushcraft and hunting communities are full of people (yours truly emphatically included) who talk a good fight about simplicity, but somehow lose those good intentions when the latest gadget is dangled in front of their eyes. Here Othmar takes a wry look at the fads of today and the traditions of yesterday.

Rex BKA (Bloggingly Known As) The Editor of the Deer Camp Blog
Rex was one of the first people to write to me offing encouragement for my blog and he has dine a great deal to encourage other bloggers.
Well known in american deer hunting circles, his blog started as the newsletter for a hunting club (with its own land!!) and has grown to cover his interest in Hunting deer and squirrel, adventure pursuits, archaeology, habitat management, ghost stories, interviews with mythical beasts and collecting tall tales for use around the campfire. Legend.

Jeremiah Quinn
I’ve recently given Jeremiah Quinn a mention for his writing about urban fly fishing but since then I’ve been reading a little more of his site. He has a house near lake Como in Italy and has written this piece as an introduction to the area for visitors.
‘Porcocania’ starts as a letter about how to work the heating and where the shops are, written to a friend or family member he’s lent his house to. It becomes a brilliant travel guide to the region with lots of hilarious anecdotes about the people, food and culture he encountered during a year living in Italy. If you’ve ever lived in a small community you’ll recognize the characters and customs that give an area its ‘local colour’. Here he explains the Italian concept of Furbo.

‘Furbo implies styling something out that could be disastrous if you didn’t present it the right way. This has something to do with the Italian notion of keeping up appearances. My ultimate example of this is Columbus, the man the Italians like to call Cristoforo Colombo. Many people assume that Columbus’ mission was to prove the world was spherical. Obviously, there is no money in that, and it was already in any case generally accepted by navigators and traders to be so. Also, America was known to be there as the Vikings had documented its discovery 500 years earlier. No, Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India, so that he could get pepper more quickly back to Spain, so that they could set up a new and undisputed trade route and get rich. OK, so the key words are India and pepper. Columbus goes off on his long voyage, doesn’t find India and can’t find pepper. Goes back to Spain, terrible voyage, bad weather, scurvy, lands in Spain. What does he say? Couldn’t find India, didn’t get any pepper? No, this:
‘Found the West Indies, here’s a chilli pepper’. Now that, my friends, is the definition of furbo.’ By Jeremiah Quinn

Bound to be a much better use of your valuable reading time than the Sunday papers or my ramblings.
Bushwacker

Our Tomato Plants Have Withered!!

Not really enough to make a chutney, so apart from fried green tomatos, any ideas?
Bushwacker

Can You Tell What It is Yet?

Of Course it’s a root burl. Or to be more precise a burl that has separated from its parent tree and then rooted. Before it could put up any shoots along came your pal the bushwacker and snaffled it.

Burls are a great example of the adage ‘it’s the exception that proves the rule’ if you took any woodwork classes at school you may remember being told that wood ‘always’ grows in strait fibers that form the woods grain, then along came a burl to disprove that generalisation. Burls do have grain but it’s not straight, in fact its usually in interconnecting spirals. If you get the first stages of curing right they form an incredibly hard and stable piece of timber. They are dense, hard to carve, but very beautiful. Because of the random super tight grain they are far less likely to split, even if they get wet. I’ve been an avid Burl collector for a few years but most of my collection are pretty small. They become handles for fire steels and brushes. Occasionally I find some larger specimens and this one came along just as I was thinking about Mungo’s request for a Kuksa.

Most european bushcrafters have a fascination for the Sammi or Laplanders of Finland.They live in some of the most beautiful and challenging terrain europe has to offer, and are masters of cold weather living. They have developed some equipment that has been ‘field tested’ over generations. The Puukko knife and the Kuksa (or wooden cup) are icons of european bushcraft. Both use burls from the birch tree in their construction.The clever thing about a wooden cup is that however cold the weather it wont stick to your lips, and is a fair insulator, keeping hot drinks and soups warmer for longer.

For a really good kuksa tutorial see Jon’s Bushcraft.

American Finn’s blog has some very good pictures of Puukkos and kuksas
Kellam Knives have kuksas and Puukkos
Bearclaws are the only people I’ve seen selling proper hand carved Burl Kuksas, not cheap but look totally authentic.
Thanks for reading
Bushwacker

Blog Roll – Oct 07

The start of my archery classes has been postponed for a week so I thought that as my blog roll has been expanding recently I’d do a round up of who has been added, and why they deserve a read.

Living Primitively
If you’ve every thought about putting your bushcraft and hunting skills to the test Torjus’s site is a must. He’s living in the back country hunting and fishing for food and doing some cool projects.

Jeremiah Quinn - The Fly Guy On The Fly
As recommended by the UrbanFlyFisher a nice site with some cool pix. he describes himself 'Writer, director, washed up boxer and incompetent, but passionate fly fisherman'.
I’m a big fan of urban fishing and fly fishing will be next on the bushwackers learning agenda after archery.

Decado's Bushcraft
A relatively new blog with a bushcraft-meets-ultra light hiking theme (so far).
Best of all he said nice things about me, making him one of the good guys!

Jon’s bushcraft site
Jon’s site has the best tutorials of any of the bushcraft sites I’ve seen.
A very good artisan, and by the looks of things a very good explainer too.

Wayland the professional Viking of Raven Lore
His cooking stove has cult following on some bushcraft sites, you can see why.
Great photography and some serious craft skills.
Wayland makes a living being a Viking! Well played Wayland!

Enjoy
Bushwacker.

Rooting Around I Found This

When Going Nuts, First Take A Leek.

Been a while hasn’t it? I’ve been ‘up north’ with The Northern Monkey and on my return the lair of the Bushwackers has suffered from water ingress, so I’ve had to dedicate the last few days to plumbing.

The chestnuts are now on form at more northerly latitudes, and I promised I’d post a recipe for my pal The Northern Monkey.

If you’re fortunate enough to be picking your chestnuts off the ground (as opposed to buying them) early picking really seems to help processing, as the dew makes the skins are a little more flexible.And of course your beating the competition to the last nights crop.

When I started using the SharpMaker on everything in the house with a blade, I noticed that I habitually started the sharpening stroke a little way down the blade and this has given my F1 a very slight (1mm) curve with a steeper blade angle on the 5mm nearest the handle. And I’ve started to see this as a lucky accident. The slight curve made the ideal ‘nicker’ for opening the skins and then peeling them off.

Once you get inside the nut you get to the pith which when fresh and damp is much easier to scrape off. If your roasting your chestnuts the pith isn’t really a problem as it crisps up inside the shell and falls off. When you buy pickled or dried chestnuts from the deli they are perfectly pithless, just beautiful ‘brain like’ orbs of, well, yummy-ness.
I’ve always wanted my gathered chestnuts to look like that too. This year I’ve gotten a bit closer.

As I was peeling, I put them into salted cold water, then blanched them in boiling salted water, before plunging them into cold water. Quite a few more ended up skinless this year. It was all pretty time consuming; a carrier bag three quarters full took four hours to go from park to freezer.

Despite this success I had no joy at all remembering that, while my thumb nail is the ideal peeling tool, its my nail-bed that pays the price for the next few days. Ouch!

For the next batch:
I have a boning knife (somewhere?) that has an exaggerated curve at the start of the blade, I’m interested to know how it works out. Also I’ve just learned that the tannin rich skins were extensively used in traditional hide tanning, either dried or fresh. Which will be handy as TNM has a source of unprocessed deer hides. Sadly the skins off the first lot are already in the compost heap.
If any of you have any pointers on how to get a skinless finish they’d be much appreciated.


Marrons du Gallois or to you and me ‘Welsh Chestnuts’

Your going to need:
Leeks (easy to grow or buy)
Cream (Organic unpasteurised is best)
Splash of white wine (maybe a Chardonnay)
Hand picked-hand processed-artisan chestnuts (or failing that ones from the shop).
Shallots (onions wont really do it)
Pancetta (or ‘dry cure’ bacon pieces not the factory farmed watery stuff )
Garlic

Fry the bacon in its own fat until its got some colour leaving the bacon fat in the pan set the bacon aside.
Slice the shallots and garlic as thinly as you can and add them to the pan, reducing the heat to a flicker. Put a lid on the pan and sweat them to a syrupy mush.
While that’s happening you can thinly slice the leeks LENGTHWAYS so the slices look almost like spaghetti.
When the shallots and garlic are really slimy in go the chestnuts, bacon, and the wine.
Turn up the heat to evaporate the alcohol, and reduce by about ten percent.
Pour in the cream and as it starts to reduce add the leeks.
Its important to time the last bit so the cream reduces enough while the leeks are still a vibrant colour. Better under cooked than over cooked for the leeks.

Serve with
Pie crust: (to guarantee a perfectly cooked crust with no nasty stodgy bits, I cook the crust separately – just roll it out put it on a baking tray and stick it in the oven)
Pasta: I vote for papadeli!
Mashed potatoes: or better still mashed potatoes with forest mushrooms stirred into them!

If you’ve got any left add milk and water, wiz the whole lot up in a food processor to make a great soup.
Hope you're all well, thanks for reading
Bushwacker

Mother! Behave Yourself!!

Just in case you didn’t believe me when I told you about the foraging septuagenarian matriarchs!
As I was taking this picture I got into conversation with one of the park guys who told me he blamed the current crop of wildfood TV show’s.
“They only show cooking, people don’t know when they’re ripe and they just try and pull ‘em down. It’s a problem for us”.
Keep ‘em peeled
Bushwacker

Shh Keep 'em Under Your Hat

They've arrived! Ripe and ready to gather!
I picked (picked up?) this crop yesterday.
Had a few for tea, after last nights running club.
More details and Recipes in my next post
(I didn’t have a camera with me and there’s something in the park I want to show you)
Bushwacker

Is That A Survival Kit In Your Pocket?

Viridari was kind enough to post a comment on my last post so i visited his site
where i saw this - great isn't it!

Reading a few of his other posts i found out about the Every Day Carry Forum.
A site where guys boast about who has the smallest......
Not something you hear everyday!
Bushwacker

A Round Toit

I’ve just added a bushcraft blog by lad called Leon to my blog roll.
If you’ve ever fancied learning some bushcraft skills but not gotten round to it YET his enthusiasm and experiences may give you some impetus.
Careful with those sharps now!
Bushwacker.

Round toit

Those New Chestnuts

Like the our pal the American Bushman I’m noticing the shift in the seasons; London was decidedly nippy today, and the prelude to last nights fitness training was a drum roll of chattering teeth as we gathered at the park gate.
I’m not sure where it went (I’ve even been having salad for breakfast!) but I’d certainly let things slide in the last week. The regime of running, sit ups, burpees, star jumps and press ups seemed almost as tortuous as the first time I attended. I sweated like a carthorse and my legs felt like I had tree trunks tied to them. Having struggled and slithered across the wet grass praying for the strength to continue or at least a merciful end to the torment.

Having survived I started to think of myself as a rather heroic figure. Back at home; as I lay panting and moaning on the front room floor, I was quickly disabused of even this crumb of comfort. Mrs SBW delivered a ‘motivational’ lecture about the ads she seen on TV where tubby fellas of a certain age are putting their health at risk by eating and drinking to their harts content. She succinctly pointed out that it was my harts (fat) content that means it’s not a choice. I will be going back, rain or shine, like it or not.
As Carl the PTI keeps pointing out “there’s plenty of time to think about it later, just do it”.

The park is the site of an ancient hunting ground and although we’re denied the chance to shoot (or even trap) the squirrels or stalk the deer there are still some foraging opportunities to be had. I’ve only ever had chestnuts and puffball mushrooms, but my foraging days have only just begun there must be more edible species for a re-wilded bushwacker to find. The chestnuts are getting a little riper but the first sightings of the granny migration that signals their ripeness are still a little way off.
It would seem I’m not the only person visiting the park hoping to invoke the aid of the gods, I saw this offing left at the foot of one of the bigger chestnuts trees.

The history of the site as a place of worship is at least as old as the roman invasion/settlement of Brittan. Discovered in 1902 the park has the remains of the mosaic floor of a roman shrine, supposedly dedicated to Diana the Huntress an imported deity the Romans took to their harts.

The area is steeped in history; first as a hunting ground and later as a pleasure park for the royals. Just as the invasion/settlement of Virginia was getting under way Le Notre (the gardener to Louis XIV) was commissioned by king Charles II to design the layout of the park we see today. The avenues of Sweet Chestnuts were planted from Spanish seed and some of them are now 400 years old.

I was more than a little off in my tree-size-estimate this fella is 24.5 feet around the trunk!
More trunk reduction for the bushwacker to follow – thanks for reading everbody
Bushwacker

Life After 50

Pablo has asked what I’ll happen when I reach my goal.

Been thinking about this myself; when it started I thought the project would last a couple of years. But as anyone who’s met Mrs SBW will tell you there is no end to her DIY ambitions and they are a major drain on my resources.
This year’s program is largely about fitness and archery practice, with some field craft and collecting and cooking wildfoods along the way.
Before I go after Mr Elk here are a few things I NEED so they’ll be ‘just a little bit’ of kit collecting! To insure I make it back in one piece I’m going to be attending and reviewing some survival, tracking and bushcraft schools.
Once Mr Elk is safely in our freezer, (with his antlers out of harms way on my wall) there are some other hunting and fishing challenges. Cutthroat Trout in Colorado, Upland Pheasants in South Dakota, Sanglier (wild boar) in France. Red Stag with a rifle in Scotland, and with a bow in New Zealand, Bronze Whaler Sharks from the shore in Namibia, and most exotic of all Shotguns for Pigeons in the wilds of Essex and Kent.

I may even find time to make Mungo that Kuksa
Bushwacker.

Bushwacker at 50!

Wow fifty posts already!!
Some of you I know personally, some of you I’ve gotten to know as you’ve posted comments – please keep writing ‘em! If there’s anything you think I should include, learn or investigate, on my journey from Fat Boy to Elk Hunter let me know.

Thanks for reading everybody – I really appreciate it
Bushwacker.

Running, Eggs, And Posts I Re-Read

Last night I had a glimpse of the future, a bit like Scrooge seeing the Ghost of Running Club yet To Be….. And re-read some of my favorite blog posts

This morning I’ve just had the perfect poached egg for my breakfast, it smiled at me from the plate, sitting next to some toast and a pile of smoked salmon – a boy needs his Omega 3’s!

The holy grail of poached eggs: add just two drops of vinegar to a shallow pan of gently boiling water, put some spin on the water creating a vortex. As soon as you crack the egg and slowly add it to the centre of the spinning water, you can see the egg white coalesce into the perfect form.

Towards the end of our run I moved briefly from pound, pound, pant, pant wheeze to that fluid movement where the amount of effort drops considerably, but the amount of forward motion rises. Steps that had crashed against the ground now have a lighter touch, the jarring of my spine gave way to a glimpse of the serenity of motion I’d forgotten I could have.

Two of my favorite ‘good eggs’ of the bloggersphere

Pablo has a very handy list of REASONS, (proper valid reasons honey), for buying ESSENTIAL kit from Ebay.

The Hobo Stripper separates the person from their behaviour, and spends her post remembering angels with dirty faces.

Bushwacker.
PS
Sorry I didn’t explain that very well at all
How to spin water:
Carefully stir the boiling water with a spoon, until it is ‘spinning’
SBW

Deer Hunter Ed

The Buck Hunter Blog have just posted a link to Fresh Tracts an outdoors school with a deer hunting course. There are a few people doing a deer stalking certificate in the UK. The way UK law works there are only certain weapons considered suitable for deer hunting and the bow isn’t one of them. I’m not sure if I’ll take the course here or fly out to take their course. Either way one of them’s going to get my money sooner or later!
Bushwacker.

That Old Chestnut.

I’m eating one of the last apples from our tree, as I recover from the mornings exertions. Outside its still sunny but the season is starting to change, apples over, blackberries still good, chestnuts about to begin.

On the sofa my legs are aching, and I wanna go back to bed, but the goal is in sight.
Finally I feel I’m on the road to fitness, I’ve attended Military Fitness three times this week!!!! Twice to the running club, and once at the military fitness class.

Trying to keep my head up as I ran I saw that the chestnuts are in abundance, and will be starting to fall in a week or two. I really love collecting them with Bushwacker Jnr, and eating them with pork. I’m not so keen on peeling them, but its a small price to pay for the satisfaction that wildfood brings.

In the park some of the chestnut trees are literally hundreds of years old, as I ran (OK speed-waddled), I made a note to dig out the big tape measure and try to find out just how old they actually are. Some of them look at least ten feet (3m) around the trunk.

The best sign that the worthwhile nuts are falling is to watch out for the migrating herds of - Chinese Grannies! Seriously, the nuts that fall first aren’t really worth the effort, but as soon as the big fellas start to drop there’ll be septuagenarians matriarchs using broom handles and plastic bags as yokes, harvesting the parks bounty.

While we were collecting last year we’d often meet a few dog walking toffs who know the nuts are edible but are surprised that anyone would bother, they are encouraging in that patronising yet indulgent way toffs often have.

The nuts are never as big as the Spanish imports but some how they taste a little sweeter.
I’ll let you know how I get on.


Bushwacker.

Safe Drinking Water - From The Toilet!

You wouldn’t want to, but if you HAD to, you could now drink from a water source that had fecal matter floating in it!
The water purification revolution moves on a pace with a new invention by Michael Pritchard of Ipswich (UK). Inspired by seeing disaster relief teams unable to provide safe drinking water after the 2004 tsunami and again in the aftermath of Katrina, Pritchard set to work. At £190 ($380) it’s not cheap, yet, but prices are expected to fall as demand grows.
Up until now even the best filter has only removed bacteria 200 nanometres long from water. Viruses are typically only 25 nanometres long and would pass through the filter. Pritchard’s invention, which filters right down to 15 nanometres means instant access to safe water whatever the circumstances. Amazingly one filter is said to be good for 4,000 liters.
For the full story


Bushwacker