The Editors’ Preps for the Week

To be prepared for a crisis, every prepper must establish goals and make long-term and short-term plans. Steadily, we work on meeting our prepping goals. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors share their planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, property improvements, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We also welcome you to share your planned activities for increasing personal preparedness in the coming week. (Leave a Comment with your project details.) Let’s keep busy and be ready!

JWR

Dear SurvivalBlog Readers, and שש 🙂

It was a beautiful week weather-wise here in the Northern American Redoubt. We accomplished many projects this week.

Building Infrastructure and Maintenance

Jim finally completed the plumbing and electrical projects this week.

Jim also dropped a few more small dead-standing Larches, cut them into five foot lengths, and stacked them.

On a lovely sunny and warm afternoon, Lily scrubbed our porch decks (“Swabbin’ the decks, Matey!”) with diluted bleach water and a scrub brush. (The whole time she worked on them she was thinking of the American pioneer women scrubbing their puncheon floors with water, sand, and brushes). It’s amazing how a few years of dirt and mold build up in the Trex. They’re looking bright shiny and clean now.

In the Garden

This week in the garden, Lily weeded nearly everything. She spent at least ten hours at the job. She weed-whacked the garden paths and planted Red-leaf lettuce, White onions, Walking Onion bulbs and planted more garlic cloves in her garlic bed.

She put more compost around squash plants that seemed to be growing too slowly, and sprinkled Epsom salts around her Potato plants to increase the Magnesium content levels in the nascent potatoes.

Lily is re-reading a classic book on seed-saving titled: Seed To Seed. She has saved seeds in the past from Marigolds, Zucchini, Winter Squashes, peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, pumpkins, and lettuces. However, this year she will be the first time she is going to try to save seeds from carrots, onions and broccoli. We missed harvesting some carrots and onions last fall. They survived their overwintering in the garden and began growing again this spring (We actually harvested a few of them this spring and are currently eating them. Aside from their outer skins, being bit mushy, the insides are perfectly fine for eating). We decided to leave them in their spots in the garden and just till around them. They are about to flower. We’ll let them continue their life cycle and will harvest the seeds this coming fall.

In the Greenhouse

Lily decided to push the growing season envelope (once again), and planted more butternut squash seeds in large pots. She also planted more broccoli and Oregano. She did harvest our first three Broccoli Flowerets which were planted at the end of April in the greenhouse. They were very tasty.

She transplanted green peppers into the beds, and also into a large pot.

The Zucchini squash are flowering.

In the Kitchen

This week Lily went through two cupboards which hold our baking and spice ingredients. She washed the cupboards, discarded old, expired ingredients and containers, consolidated the few multiple containers of certain spices, made a list of spices to buy and to grow, and generally made everything more visible and accessible. This is a job that she tends to do about twice a year.

Outdoor Activities

At the beginning of the week, we went and checked out the local lake temperatures, and found them to still be on the cool side for some of our liking. However, Youngest Child, who is an intrepid swimmer, took the dive and swam for about fifteen minutes. What a brave and hardy child!

Plans for the Coming Week

We’re camping this weekend with some very good friends somewhere in the great National Forest in our home region. Lord willing, we’ll be doing all the usual camping activities of cooking over the fire, tenting, swimming, boating, fishing, hiking.

We’ll be celebrating our Nations Independence Day, The Fourth of July, by attending a local town’s parade in the morning and in the afternoon traveling to a friend’s home to spend the afternoon and evening celebrating with their family.

The rest of the week, we’ll be back in the garden and doing the usual ranch activities.

We do need to wage war around the ranch on the thistles, Knapweed, and daisies.

The Orchard still needs to be weed-whacked, and the Chicken coop needs cleaning. (Priorities!)

We still need to wrap up our firewood cutting and hauling. That will probably take another five weeks, as time permits.

We still need to develop and prepare another future garden bed in another area of the ranch.

Please tell your children this week why we’re celebrating the Fourth of July, our Nation’s Independence Day.  Read to them the Declaration of Independence, out loud to them, and discuss the points made therein with them. We suggest that you have your children memorize it.

We pray that you’ll all have a blessed and safe Independence Day Celebration and a productive week in prepping. Please let us know what you have done this week and what you plan to do during this coming week.  – Avalanche Lily Rawles

HJL

Gardening

While it is still plenty warm at the Latimer Homestead, we are grateful it is not as hot as it was two weeks ago. We are still focused on the garden and animals primarily and have a few other projects going on as well.

In the garden, we continue to work to manage weeds and pests. The NOLO grasshopper bait was scattered outside the perimeter of the gardens to capture the grasshoppers and organic sprays have been used to greatly diminish the squash bugs and other beetles targeting our cucurbita plants. We also sprinkled Plantskydd small animal deterrent (that includes fox urine pellets) outside the perimeter and it seems to be keeping the rabbits and small critters at bay so far.

We began transplanting and repositioning some tomato plants as we began to stake some of the tomatoes and will continue to work on this in the coming week, with dozens of tomato plants to be staked. We also have some trellis lines to run on the peas that are in need of taller support. We had some harvesting to do this week, with peas, lettuce, and radishes, and this will hopefully continue and increase throughout the summer. It looks like we should have a good bunch of zucchini ready to harvest and prepare for meals next week. It’s probably time for some fertilizing in the garden this week, too. We pulled soil up on some of the potatoes and onions, but we have more potatoes and onions needing this same treatment in the week ahead.

Security/Video Surveillance and Shop Organization.

Hugh will continue to work on security cameras and shop organization.

Home Maintenance.

This week we did some plumbing work and various home repairs. There are several other projects in the works also.