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BHM Newsletter
August 21, 2005
INSIDE BHM New IssueThe September/October issue has hit the newsstands and is now available on the web site.
We've posted several excellent articles including The care & feeding of solar batteries By Jeffrey R. Yago Making sausage By Linda Gabris Kinder goats: a small breed for milk and meat By Kathleen Sanderson Marlin 336: The other classic backwoods home deer rifle By Massad Ayoob and Put your garden to bed for the winter By Jackie Clay
At the bottom of the Newsletter notice we send you each month is a special link and code that allows you to change the email address to which we send the notices. It also lets you remove yourself from our Newsletter list should you ever desire to stop receiving it. If you do not change your address on our list when you change your email address, the notice we send you will be returned as undeliverable. If that happens, the email address will be deleted from our list. Also, it appears some subcribers do not check their email very often. Each month, we receive several dozen notices back that indicate the recipient's mailbox is full. If that happens two months in a row, we assume the person abandonded the account and we delete the address from the list. So please, check your email at least once a week (more often if your mailbox is usually full when you check it) and always save at least the last Newsletter Notice you receive so that if you change your email address, you can just click on the link to change it on our list and continue enjoying the BHM Newsletter. SELF-RELIANCE TIPS ICE Your PhonesAccidents and other medical emergencies happen. If you were the victim of an accident, how would paramedics, police, or other emergency or medical personnel know who they should contact? That's where ICE comes in. The ICE concept started in the United Kingdom and has begun spreading to the United States. ICE stands for "In Case of Emergency." Emergency responders are being trained to look for ICE listings in victim's cell phone contact directories to speed notification of the victim's spouse, parent, or other important contact. Most of us who carry cell phones have dozens, sometimes hundreds of names and numbers stored. In an emergency where we are injured or unconscious,, there would be no way for a paramedic to know which of those names is the one to contact. That's where ICE comes in. Simply create an entry named ICE, or several entries named ICE1, ICE 2, etc. with the numbers of those you want contacted, in the order you want them tried. For example, my ICE1 is my home number. My ICE2 is my wife's cell phone. ICE3 and ICE 4 are my son and daughter. If something were to happen to me, the paramedics can look for the ICE listings and in a matter of seconds be in contact with my family. ICE numbers can even be entered into the speed dial listings of your home phones or, if your home phones don't have number storage, simply write it on a piece of paper and tape it to your phones. Thanks and gratitude go out to East Anglian Ambulance Service paramedic Bob Brotchie who came up with the idea. Now stop reading this newsletter for a few minutes and go ICE your phones. RECIPES Harvest Soup 1 large onion peeled, quartered Preheat oven to 400°F. Place the onion, carrots, squash, potato, garlic, and thyme in a 9" x 13" x 2" baking dish. Drizzle the oil over then toss to coat. Cover with foil and bake covered for 20 minutes. Remove foil and bake 30 minutes more. Cool slightly, remove the garlic cloves and squeeze into a blender or large food processor. Add the rest of the cooked vegetables and 2 cups of the broth. Puree until smooth then transfer to a large stockpot. Pour remaining broth into the baking dish that was used. Scrape up any browned bits then pour into the stock pot Add the spinach, pesto, beans, salt and pepper, and set the pot over medium heat. Whisk in the yogurt and stir until soup in heated. Ladle into soup bowls and sprinkle shaved cheese over the top of each. Yields 6 servings. Zucchini Lasagna 2 large zucchini Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice the zucchini lengthwise into 1/4 " slices. Mix the flour with the salt and pepper. Dip both sides of each of the slices into the mixture. Heat the oil in a large, non-stick skillet. Fry the zucchini in batches over medium heat until golden, turning once. Drain on a platter covered with a paper towel. Set aside. Combine the ricotta, egg, oregano, and 1/2 of the Parmesan in a small bowl. Spread half of the spaghetti sauce in the bottom of a 12" x 8" x 2" baking pan. Top with half the zucchini slices, half the ricotta mixture and half the mozzarella. Repeat the layers. Sprinkle with the remaining Parmesan. Bake for 45 minutes or until bubbly. Let stand for about 10 minutes before serving. Yields 6 Servings Apple Harvest Pudding Cake 1 cup sugar Pre-heat oven to 350º. In a large bowl, combine the sugar and butter. Mix in the egg. In a second bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, allspice, cinnamon, and ginger. Add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture, along with the milk, and mix until moistened. While continuing to stir, fold in the banana, apples, raisins, coconut, and walnuts. Pour into greased and floured 9" x 13" glass dish and bake for 25 to 30 minutes While cake is baking, prepare the icing. Combine in a bowl: 1 cup powdered sugar
When the cake is done, allow to cool a bit. While still warm, spread the icing over the cake then cut into sixteen 2" squares. COMMENTARY
I'm so glad that Backwoods Home Magazine is located along the Pacific Northwest Coast. It may rain a lot here, but the temperature stays mainly in the 60s and 70s all year-round. My family and I just got back from 29 Palms in Southern California where my daughter, Annie, and her husband, Erik, live. Erik is in the U.S. Marine Corps there and he was actually out on a field maneuver during part of the time we were there while the temperature hovered just below 100 degrees. I'd drop dead working in that kind of heat. We lived at the motel swimming pool, swimming three to four hours a day. A couple of days the humidity went up, which made the swamp cooler in the motel room not work so great. When I got back to Oregon, I called Jeff Yago to discuss his solar energy article for next issue (it will be on hybrid and diesel cars) and he told me that the temperature in Gum Spring, Virginia, where he lives, is in the mid 90s with the humidity the same. Egad! He said he had to do a little work outside and had already gone through three sweat-soaked shirts by noon. A lot of you reading this are probably thinking I'm a real pansy for complaining about hot weather because you're probably going through a lot of hot weather yourself. I'll admit it--I'm a pansy when it comes to heat. But Annie and I did get a lot of work done on two upcoming anthologies--the 11th and 12 years--while enjoying the swamp cooler at her house. We should begin selling them in the next issue. We've gotten a lot of mail about our failure to come out with more print anthologies, so these two books will take the heat off us for a while. We'll begin work on the remaining three anthologies--the 13th, 14th, and 15th years--shortly after these two new ones get sent to the printer. --Dave Duffy HUMOR For those who might have missed this when it made the rounds.
BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible. SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves. ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard. SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end. CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a Cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on. MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato. SITCOMS: (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage). What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny. SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use. XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace. IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The J-Lo and Ben wedding (or not) was a prime example. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. 404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions. OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks. CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously farting while passing through a Cube Farm. LINKS The Internet Fraud Complaint Center
ScamBusters
National Fraud Information Center
FlimFlam Dot Com
BONUS ARTICLE
By Ben Crookshanks Ginseng has been exported from North America for almost 300 years. In 1714, a group of Mohawk Indians saw a drawing of an Asian ginseng plant made by Joseph Francoise Lafitau, a Jesuit priest. The Indians took Lafitau and showed him a similar plant growing not far from his cabin on the St. Lawrence River near present day Montreal. Lafitau gathered samples of the plant and sent them to Paris where botanists verified that this was indeed a species of ginseng closely related to the Asian variety. He dug a quantity of the plant and shipped the roots to an agent in China. That was the beginning of the North American ginseng trade. Since that time, tons of both wild and cultivated ginseng have been shipped to the Orient. John Jacob Astor, who made a vast fortune in the fur business, got his start dealing in ginseng. In the last half of the Ninteenth century, the United States exported nearly 17 million pounds of wild ginseng. Today, approximately 2 million pounds of cultivated and 100,000 pounds of wild ginseng are exported to the Orient each year. The price of a pound of wild ginseng peaked at something over $500 a few years ago. Then, when the Chinese took over the Hong Kong market, the price dropped to $250. This past year, the price climbed back up to $465. Cultivated ginseng is a good deal less valuable. This past year it brought, depending on the grade, $10-$25 a pound. Dealers can instantly tell cultivated from wild. Cultivated is usually bigger and will have a smooth texture, lacking the horizontal ridges found on the wild roots. Wild ginseng is practically extinct in China. Finding a wild ginseng plant in the Far East is comparable to hitting the lottery. There have been plants found which brought up to $10,000.
A little over a hundred years ago, a small group of German-American farmers in Wisconsin began growing ginseng. Despite being a slow and labor intensive undertaking the farmers were successful and today, 95 percent of the cultivated ginseng in this country comes from Marathon County, Wisconsin. Kentucky and West Virginia lead the nation in the production of wild ginseng. In good years, Kentucky ginseng diggers harvest over 20,000 pound of dried roots, West Virginia harvests slightly less. In the Appalachian mountains, the e in ginseng is pronounced as an a. A person who digs ginseng is called a “sanger” and digging ginseng is referred to as “sanging.” The tool used to dig is called a “sang hoe.” Today, the export of ginseng is regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. As a result, states have passed laws making it illegal to dig wild ginseng until late summer when the berries are mature, thus ensuring regeneration. Diggers are encouraged to bury the seeds after digging the roots. The Chinese prize wild American ginseng more highly than the cultivated variety. Wild ginseng is generally older and hasn’t been grown with fertilizers. Ginseng in a natural state grows very slowly and, according to herbalists, the older the root, the higher the content of active ingredients. American ginseng or Panaz quinquefolium, grows in rich, well-drained soil from Quebec south to Georgia and west to Minnesota and Nebraska. The name Panaz comes from the Greek word Pan-axoa meaning “all healing.” From the same word we get “panacea,” meaning cure-all. The word “ginseng” is a rendering of the Chinese “jin shin” meaning likeness of man. Ginseng roots grow in a variety of shapes, many times resembling a human form, hence the name.
The Chinese have believed in the healing properties of the ginseng root for the past 5,000 years. They claim it is an aphrodisiac, it tranquilizes, absorbs body poisons, soothes the throat and stomach, and makes the skin glow. Over the centuries, they have used it as a treatment for headaches, intestinal ailments, asthma, fevers, cough, and rheumatism. In his writings, Chinese Emperor Shen-ung claimed, among other attributes, ginseng had the power to prolong life. He is said to have died at the age of 123 in 2697 B.C. Until recently, nearly all of the ginseng produced in North America, both wild and cultivated, was exported to the Orient. Doctors in this country denied the plant had any medical benefits. Although the claims of the Chinese may be stretching things a bit, medical experts now admit there may be some therapeutic benefits in ginseng. Herbalists label ginseng an “adaptogen,” a substance which helps the body adjust to a normal state. Thus, it may calm an excited person but energize a tired one. Some herbalists believe medicinal properties of American and Asian ginseng are different. North American ginseng is supposed to affect the yin or passive energy, whereas Asian ginseng affects the yang or active energy. Scientifically, the two plants are essentially the same and thus any healing or therapeutic properties they have would be the same. So-called “Siberian” or “Russian” ginseng is not true ginseng. It lacks the active ingredients found in American and Asian varieties. At one time, the FDA classified ginseng as a food additive or an unapproved drug. On January 1, 1995, the federal Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act took effect, making ginseng a dietary supplement. The plant consists of a single straight stem with as many as six sets of compound leaves each at the end of a stalk or prong. This leaf has five pear-shaped leaflets with serrated edges. There are three large and two small leaflets. The umbrella shaped blossom grows up from the main stem and is a whitish-green color. The seeds are inside a berry which turns bright red when ripe. It takes the cold of at least two winters for the seeds to germinate. The seeds germinate on top of the ground and fight their way down into the soil. It requires between 65% and 90% shade and soil with a ph level of 5.5 to 6.0. Sunlight and acid from pine needles will kill it. Ginseng needs at least 2 degrees of slope and 5 to 7 degrees are even better. That makes the mountainous Appalachian hardwood forest a perfect environment for the growing of ginseng.
Landowners have been experimenting with producing woods-cultivated ginseng—in other words, growing it where it would naturally grow, using natural forest shade. They have found that the best fertilizer is a mulch of leaves, hay, and ground tobacco stalks. Woods-cultivated ginseng will sell for only slightly less than the wild. Cultivating ginseng will not make you rich. It takes from five to seven years to produce a root big enough to fool with. The plant is subject to blight and root rot. You have to have a good eye and cover a lot of ground to make any money digging wild ginseng. Apparently, to some people it stands out like a zebra in a field full of horses. I once knew a disabled coal miner who swore he could smell it. He was a BSer, but between digging ginseng and raising a garden, he was able to feed his family. I don’t have an eye for it. Every plant I have ever found, I stumbled onto by accident. In my lifetime, I doubt if I have dug more that $50 worth. Great care should be taken when digging ginseng. The root can be in many shapes and grow in any direction. The trick is to get the whole root out of the ground undamaged. Great care should also be taken when growing it. If something is valuable, somewhere out there there are worthless people who will steal it. A local paper reported the theft of a small patch of ginseng an elderly man was growing in his back yard. In the patch were several dozen plants that he had cared for for almost a decade. He had gone to the trouble of building a lattice-work for shade. One Sunday morning, while the old man was in church, a piece of human scum sneaked into his yard and dug up every plant.
OTHER STUFF Did a friend or relative tell you about this newsletter? The Backwoods Home Magazine newsletter is free and all you need is an email address so we can let you know when each issue is published and where it can be found. Even better, we sometimes have special offers and discounts that are available only to BHM Newsletter subscribers. Your email address will never be sold, rented, loaned, given, or otherwise provided to any third party. Just visit the BHM web site at www.backwoodshome.com and click on "Newsletter" in the navigation menu on the left side of any web page. Contact Info: Editor/Letters - Dave Duffy, editor@backwoodshome.com Advertising Manager - Evelyn Leach, evelyn@backwoodshome.com Web Site - Oliver Del Signore, webmaster@backwoodshome.com Backwoods Home Magazine
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