Washing Clothes in a Fishing Basket

      Every parent with young children understands the need of pre-rinsing clothes soiled with messy food spills, ground in mud from sand boxes, and the dreaded dirtied cloth diapers.  

    I encountered all the above regularly while living on our remote homestead with five young children.   My greatest challenge while living without modern plumbing  or electricity was keeping up with dirty clothes.  

    Washing clothes involved carrying buckets of water from the river and heating the water on the top of a wood stove.  A sturdy wooden pole was used to poke the clothes while moving them continuously back and forth like a washing machine inside a large metal wash tub.

Then rinsing them by endlessly twisting and wringing out most of the water before hanging them on the clothesline to dry.

    To help speed up the process of getting the dirt from the heavily soiled clothing, I would take the clothes to the river and rinse much of the dirt out in a cold river-water rinse.

      You can imagine how long and tedious a day of washing clothes for a family of seven could be.  

     Finding a shortcut seemed impossible until I discovered the use of a fishing basket to help in the pre-washing of our clothes.  The two inch wide wire mesh worked perfectly to hold the clothes loosely inside the basket while allowing the dirt to rinse out into the river.

    To speed up the process even more I found that hanging the fish basket full of soiled clothes over the side of our boat while taking a sixteen mile boat ride to McGrath worked even better! You can imagine how many clothes could be well rinsed on a sixteen mile boat trip one way on the winding Takotna River.  The dirty cloth diapers even looked practically clean by the time we returned from our shopping adventure.

     It may not seem like a great blessing to the average modern living family, but to a mother living in an unmodernized wilderness setting it was a priceless discovery.  Anything that could make life a little easier felt like part of a huge load had been lifted off my shoulders.

      If you ever get off the grid for even a short while, you may want to consider taking a fish basket along.  It works great for keeping food items and drinks  cold as well.  You can sink them into the cold river water.

     This basket full of Bush living tips should keep your imagination floating until next month when I share another secret homesteading survival technique I stumbled on out in the wild.