Harvest and process
Meat, crops, canning, the cellar
Plus hunting, trapping, fishing, seasons, and weather for Dearborn County. Read Food safety first.
Keep and cut
Food safety that keeps you alive
Botulism, temperature, and the rules you do not get to skip when the power is out.
6 min read
Deer: field to package
The main wild meat around Dillsboro. Cool it fast, keep it clean, cut it simple.
10 min read
Chicken: kill, scald, eviscerate
A calm, repeatable 15 minutes per bird. Do it the same way every time.
8 min read
Rabbit: the 5-minute harvest
Cervical dislocation or a sharp blow, then a clean pelt and a fryer.
6 min read
Hog or goat on the farm
A cool-weather job for three people. Scald a hog, skin a goat. Don’t invent this alone the first time.
8 min read
Salt, smoke, and lard
How pork and venison kept through an Indiana winter before freezers.
7 min read
Canning: water bath vs pressure
Jars are how a July garden becomes a January kitchen. The canner type is not a suggestion.
8 min read
Cellar, dry, ferment
The three ways food lives here without a jar or a freezer.
7 min read
What to pick, week by week
A Dearborn County harvest order so food doesn’t rot in the row.
5 min read
Hunt, trap, fish, and weather
Hunting these hills
Deer, turkey, squirrel, and rabbit on Dearborn County ground — how they move, where they bed, and how not to waste a shot.
10 min read
Fishing Laughery and the Ohio
Creek smallmouth, pond bluegill, and river cats — what bites when, and how to keep the meat.
8 min read
Trapping without a cartridge
Protein that works while you sleep. Raccoon, possum, muskrat, and beaver on this ground — cage, deadfall, and water sets you can build from scrap.
11 min read
Weather that runs this county
Flood, ice, tornadoes, and the fronts that move deer and fish. Read the sky before you leave the porch.
7 min read
A year of seasons on this ground
Month by month: what to hunt, trap, fish, plant, pick, and watch the sky for around Dillsboro.
8 min read
No hospital
The first ten minutes
Airway, bleeding, shock, choking, and CPR — what you do before anything else when there is no ambulance.
9 min read
Wounds, infection, and teeth
Clean water does more than thread. How to wash, when to close, and how to tell a cut from a killer.
10 min read
Breaks, burns, and cold injury
Splint it as it lies. Cool a burn with water, not grease. Frozen fingers get thawed once.
8 min read
Fever, gut, heat, and cold
Most homestead deaths after the first week are water, fever, heat stroke, or a chest that nobody watched.
10 min read
The medicine chest
What to put in a Dillsboro kitchen box now, while the drugstore still opens.
7 min read