!! Alexandra Malecki made it to PEP2! Follow my family SKIP to homestead!

Congratulations on getting to PEP 2. That's an awesome accomplishment!

Maybe staff would be cool with a thread about PEP 3 including family help, without requesting the certification?

Hello Joylynn, thank you for your reply!! It means a lot to get feedback that what I'm posting matters.

Funny you should mention doing PEP3 as a family made me wonder if I could just post what I do on a day to day basis similar to the BEL. Would it matter if I posted here or in a BB? If I post here then it's more of a narrative, a story. I'm curious what you think? It's my SKIP story in a way for someone to get to know me and my family.

What I would do is post it in PEP in the associated sub forum ( I think that the wrong word...), BUT in a separate thread than the official BB. With a disclaimer at the top of each thread so new folk see you are not seeking the BB credit for the family stuff.

Just an idea to run by your fellow staff.

Yes, I see. Thanks for the suggestion!  I'm unsure what I'm going to do just yet but working with the SKIP team makes sense.

Yes, what you've done is awesome Alex!  I'd say posting family work to your own thread or to the subforum for the aspect (PEP Gardening, for instance) and being clear that it is a family thing should be ok.  As long as 100 other people don't do it too.

I can understand what you mean about involving your family. The way SKIP is set up is for individuals to prove their worth, but as you say you come as a package too. IF PEP3 isn't feasible, you could always pick and choose which aspects you want to do as a family and do them together. You wouldn't get certified, but would have a lot of fun and develop together. By logging the adventures on a project thread, you can still point to the evidence for future Otis' consideration.

Forgive my ignorance, but do you put talllow butter on your body or cook with it? Maybe start a new thread telling your secrets!

Yes, I absolutely agree that you have to push your family back to do BBs on your own. Thats part of why I got so involved with SkIP scouts this summer. I wanted to work with them. Teach them. Involve them!

Nancy Reading wrote:I can understand what you mean about involving your family. The way SKIP is set up is for individuals to prove their worth, but as you say you come as a package too. IF PEP3 isn't feasible, you could always pick and choose which aspects you want to do as a family and do them together. You wouldn't get certified, but would have a lot of fun and develop together. By logging the adventures on a project thread, you can still point to the evidence for future Otis' consideration.

At this time, I plan to just post about things that my family and I are doing regardless of whether it's a BB or not. I'm not looking to get anything more certified so I don't think it makes sense to post in the SKIP forum. I thought that I could just post about my family and I on this thread, similar to the BEL. I made it to PEP2 and I don't have an Otis. I think I need to pivot and market myself in a different way. My hope is to show Otis's that I'm a real* person with a real* family. *With personalities, values, priorities, etc. I wonder if an Otis would be interested in these factors as equally important as the fact that I can follow instructions and do hard things.  I think about how Paul puts himself out there so that other people know who he is and can then decide to pass or stick around. I'm thinking that I have to give this a try because it would be good for me to get out of my comfort zone and market myself.

Nancy Reading wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but do you put talllow butter on your body or cook with it? :rolling: Maybe start a new thread telling your secrets!

I use it for cooking and to make a whipped tallow butter. There was already a thread on tallow, so I just added to it, take a look: Tallow Thread

I'm currently in the process of making pemmican; my first attempt. It's basically tallow, meat powder, and other flavors (berries/nuts) for long-term preservation. I'll add to that thread when I've finished making it!

Almost exactly a year ago, I picked up deer roadkill. I don't have a meat grinder so I stuffed my freezer with the (unground) grind meat to figure out what to do with it at a later time. I've been so preoccupied over the last year with getting to PEP2 that I wasn't able to give attention to this unfinished (and unexpected) project. I decided that I wanted to make pemmican with it. So I dulled about half of my knives to cut all of the meat against the grain, marinaded it using this recipe, specifically option 3, and then dehydrated it at 160degF. The venison is so tasty and this is the last of it. I hope to find more roadkill soon!




A few days ago, I used a paper towel to clean up tallow from a mold. I tried to make pucks of tallow but the tallow didn’t harden enough to separate cleanly from the mold. This experiment was a lot to clean up. I love using these oil clothes as firestarter and I hope to have a wood heated home in the near future to make use of the firestarters I've been saving because I can't just throw it away.



I have now preserved 29 jars of applesauce and 7 jars of dried apples. I can fill 4 quart jars of sauce per batch and it takes 3 trays of dried apples to fill one jar. Then I need to immediately hide the jars or else it disappears into bellies! After 3 weeks of apple processing, the kids and I can tag-team this and get a batch done within 75mins, including the cleanup, but not including the simmering/tending of the sauce or flipping the apple slices drying.






Due to the added energy demands of datacenters, our energy utility/city council opted to increase our energy rates on Mon-Fri 5-9p. This has caused me to do as much of my cooking earlier in the day and turn off unnecessary appliances by 5p. I was just talking to my friend about how I wish I had a solar dehydrator. In the winter, I don't mind using the oven to also warm my house but it also seems ridiculous that I'm using an oven instead of the sun.
--I plan to build a solar dehydrator in 2026. I'm not sure where or whether it could be designed to be moved since I don't plan to stay at this house. I would like a way to dehydrate a huge volume of food without using electricity.

This summer, I traveled so frequently, that I wasn't able to ferment as much food as I'd like. I found myself spending so much $$$ for kimchi and kraut at the store because I just wasn't home to monitor the crock. I find that if the cabbage is overfermented and mushy, no one enjoys eating it. So, 3 weeks ago I finally got back to my fermentations! The first batch was a caraway kraut. Now that this batch is bottled, I currently have all of my apple scraps from all of the processing to make vinegar. I froze the rest of the apple scraps because I have enough for ~6 batches in this 5qt open crock.

I'm thinking we might want to have a subforum (if that's the right word for it) in SKIP for folks that have achieved PEP2 to have their own BEL-like threads to advertise themselves.  Then Otises can find a concise list of the advanced candidates and deep dive into their situation if they want.  We can direct the Otises to that forum, as well as the leaderboard and list of skippers and peppers

Last year, my good friend Ally took a willow basketry class and gifted me the first willow basket that she made!! I still think she was crazy to give it to me!! I love the basket so much that I wore the handle out and replaced it with a recycled leather handle. It's just so cute:



Now that I have extra time for projects, I'm getting really excited about harvesting willow to make more baskets and maybe even a willow backpack! There's a really great willow patch with first year growth by her house that we've harvested from a few times and I look forward to going back again soon to harvest and hang!



I've been scouting a few spots around town to find some contrasting colors to add to the baskets and my kids alternate who'd going to tag along to help harvest:



Just prior to Paul's latest youtube live call - link to patreon early access, I decided that it was time to remount my hand-planed hooks to hang all of my baskets:



I previously didn't plan to re-mount those coat hooks to the walls because I wasn't planning on sticking around this house much longer. Now I'll need to patch the holes - which isn't a big deal. However, given that I can't control the future and I suspect that we'll be here for a while, it was a gift to myself to make my baskets accessible.

Yesterday, we met my sister out for a hike and I was impressed that she was willing to sample some wild fare: watercress. What a delightful, pungent flavor. It's obviously in the nasturtium family and related to brassicas with that sulphuric flavor.



I'm just going to call this limited post good before I get distracted by placing basketry book holds in at the library....

There are several basketry and willow collection/management BBs in PEM :)

Thanks for sharing your journey! I look forward to hearing whether the otis portion of the program works out or not, though the knowledge is valuable regardless.

Wow, Mike! I really like how you emphasized traditional/ancestral skills. Two things come to mind:
1) I was just reading about how the rubber tree changed the course of history. I recall when I was in school/visited the Ford museum in FL, I didn't fully appreciate the impact of this in terms of our recent human evolution. Last night, it occurred to me that only a mere 4 generations removed from my son, there didn't exist cars (or at least it was a rare sight). Only four generations ago, we depended on horse and buggies to get around. It's rather quite sad to reflect on how much knowledge has been lost in only 4 generations.
2) The art of willow basketry has also been lost due to the discovery and manufacturing of plastics. With the anticipation of exhausting fossil fuels, I wonder if humans as a species will be able to adapt back to our sustainable ways with so much knowledge lost. edited to add: it's not just knowledge but a re-adaptation to inconvenience and discomfort.

Lina -- thank you! I had hoped to share more about my better half and my kids on this thread but I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. A few days ago my husband and I were discussing what our next steps are because we had anticipated a certain outcome that hasn't come to fruition. One thing he mentioned that really struck me was that, we need to still make a change to our living situation in the city or else my "skills will stagnate". I'm not sure what our next steps are but I plan to capture it here.

Alexandra Malecki wrote:
Lina -- thank you! I had hoped to share more about my better half and my kids on this thread but I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. A few days ago my husband and I were discussing what our next steps are because we had anticipated a certain outcome that hasn't come to fruition.  

Hey, maybe the Otis thing will still work out! I imagine most senior homesteaders are not regularly checking the pep2 page, perhaps they simply haven’t noticed. And if not- something else will come up!