April 12, 2022: a Green P(r)eppers stir-fry

There was a green prepper with grandkids
Who stir-fried green peppers through Covid
When asked for her views
On political news,
She said she preferred living off-grid.
 ---Alan

Alan loves green peppers. Especially on pizza. I prefer mine a bit riper, more in the orange to red stage. But in the Rocky Mountains, the growing season is barely long enough to get any peppers, much less succulent blood-red ones, so I settle for small yet tasty green ones. At the end of the season, I have a lot of them and end up canning and dehydrating them for winter. Canned green peppers are a treat in stir-fry in the winter and I took great pleasure this morning when I found a jar from 2019 hidden in the back of our coldroom.

Does having this jar mean I’m a prepper? I’ve had conversations recently with neighbors about the meaning of “prepping”. Most people assume that being a prepper involves a kind of paranoia about the future and our government’s lack of ability to keep us fed and safe. To them, prepping requires keeping a year’s worth of dehydrated food or MREs in barrels in your secret underground vault, along with plenty of guns and ammo. It means putting up huge steel gates and fences around your property so “they” can’t come and steal from you. I read lots of post-apocalyptic books that lean on this theme and quite a few of our (wonderful) neighbors practice this mindset in reality.

But can being a prepper have a different meaning? Something more positive and life-enhancing? How about the simple joy found in caring for your family? Without being paranoid or needing to carry a weapon at all times? How about the pleasure in sharing your bounty with others? How about just disliking shopping so much that you’d prefer to only have to go to a store once a month? Or, how about caring about quality of food over cost, which makes having a garden or buying in bulk sensible choices?

I strongly believe that paying the actual cost of quality, organic, non-GMO food rather than relying on the wheat/beef/dairy subsidies that prop up our cheap food industry is an important way to change the agricultural-industrial harm being done to the planet. It’s a cost I’ve always been willing to take on, although it means we have less cash for luxury items. I offset this expense by growing as much food as possible and storing it. And by buying bulk.

This is why Alan calls us Green P(r)eppers.

I haven’t been online much recently because high winds have made our internet unreliable. That’s now a thing of the past as we now have StarLink! Averaging about 50-200 mbps. (That’s about 50 times faster than before). Yahoo!

And we brought Pippin home from storage, so we can run it on her solar panels. With gas prices hovering at $5/gallon, running the generator is a pricey business.

Spring has sprung, and Alan and I have spent much of our days outside. I’ve got 2 small gardens about ready to plant. The greenhouse has salad stuff growing.

And the well is working! Looks like about 5 gallons/minute. The water is silty, so we have to purge it by running it a lot over the next week or so, then we’ll get it hooked up to the filter and plumbing and get it tested. Very exciting! A real shower is in our future.

Right now, the wind is blowing about 60 mph, with sleet coming down horizontally. Probably the last winter storm of the year. Wolf Creek Pass should get 8-10″. Maybe it will fill our cistern a bit more.