To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles [1], but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those –or excerpts thereof — in this column, in the Odds ‘n Sods Column, and in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
With the help of Miss Eloise, I rebuilt a bull-ravaged fence garden fence. I also took a trip into town and bought a couple of heavy-duty tube gates. Hopefully, I’ll get those installed in the next few days.
Also with the help of Miss Eloise, I got 10 more Elk Creek Company orders shipped. Our big sale ended yesterday, with our inventory substantially depleted. I’ve left a few items at the sale prices. Those are mostly shootable replica cap and ball revolvers. I’m hoping to get a few more guns cataloged in the coming week.
I dropped two small fir trees that were looking stressed, and cut them up into stove rounds. Starting this coming week, I’ll have to get busy cutting up dead-fallen trees and a few dead-standing trees. Most of those are Tamaracks (a.k.a. Western Larch.)
Now, over to Lily…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Well, this week, I rototilled two plots of the Annex gardens and spread manure that was in one section of them. It took an hour to do each section. That was with one pass through that barely broke up the sod. I will have to rototil each section about three more times to get the soil properly loosened for planting. It’s a lot of work.
I spread manure around all of my grape vines and five more fruit trees in the orchard.
I transplanted into the herb garden, some Lovage that I had started by seed in the Indoor Bathroom Greenhouse. In the Herb garden, I also planted garlic cloves and Oregano seeds. I have noticed, that Thyme, Dill, and parsley are growing back from last year’s planting, also, Calendula, and celery are regrowing. Yeah, I like it when things grow of themselves year after year.
On that topic, garlic, will grow back year after year, if you allow some of them to go to flower and seed and self seed. I have had a bed of self seeding garlic that I dug up last year to move it. This year I wanted to do it again, but in the herb garden. Now the garlic has a permanent place in the herb garden. But I will also plant other seasonal beds each year, too. Garlic that grows of itself eventually crowds itself and appear to have smaller bulbs. But that might just mean that it just needs more fertilizer. We shall see what happens by next summer, a year from now.
I planted nettle seeds along a damp area on the edge of the Meadow, for some future wild edibles around the ranch and around our local area. Actually, I do a lot of this type of thing, gather seeds from wild edibles and plant them about, but prefer not to talk about it it too much in the blog, for OPSEC…
The various squashes and cucumbers seedlings planted in the Indoor bathroom greenhouse are germinating very well.
We celebrated a family member’s birthday this week which included lots of telephone visits with friends and loved ones.
Some very sweet friends came and spent an afternoon with us to do camp-building skills. Miss Eloise and Miss Violet built and practiced their fire-building skills and built a Wickiup shelter, a teepee against a tree. It was super fun just to be out in the woods doing stuff with them and comparing notes on all kinds of items and looking through their emergency bags, etc. It’s always fun to see what others feel is important for them to carry. The only items that I came away with from perusing their bags, was to add to my bag, a few candles, some small Sterno fuel cans, wire snippers, work gloves, and cotton balls. (I had had cotton balls in there in the past, but somehow they were not added back in recently.)
I also went back through my emergency food in my backpack and pulled out the foods and supplements that I can no longer eat or take and passed them onto Miss Eloise: oatmeal, barley, tuna, chocolate, white sugar, and some older nuts (The nuts and the supplements were rancid and very old so were thrown out) I only kept teas, some seasonings, Himalayan salt, dehydrated meat bars, and Larabars. I will add more dehydrated foods, soon.
I have listened in Hebrew to the first five chapters of the book of Mark while reading the English version in E-Sword.
At the end of the week and weekend, our family took a very rare trip together.
May you all have a very blessed and safe week.
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
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As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We still want to hear from you.