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, 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:
We’ve been very busy packing orders placed during our Jeff Cooper’s Birthday sale, at Elk Creek Company. Thusfar, more than $14,000 worth of guns have sold. Please note that if congress passes their private party transfer ban scheme (“Universal Background Checks”), then I plan to put Elk Creek Company on hiatus for six months, awaiting price discovery on pre-1899 antique guns. I will also probably discontinue accepting credit cards, regardless. Paying $300 per month for a credit card merchant account is painful, especially when they also charge 2.5% of gross for the privilege of using plastic. Once I drop my credit card merchant account, I will only accept payment in cash, U.S. Postal Money orders, or silver. This will probably be my last big sale, before that change. The Jeff Cooper’s Birthday sale ends on May 21st, so get your order in soon.
This past week I did a garden water infrastructure project, split a good poke of firewood, and worked on some fences. I dropped three more small dead-standing fir trees in our north woodlot. The largest of these was only 14 inches, at the butt. I cut them into 5-foot lengths — the longest that our ATV trailer can safely handle. Our daughters have started limbing those, to prepare them for me to haul out of the woodlot. Next week: More of The Firewood Imperative. I won’t rest until I have plenty of firewood cut and stacked!
I took one of our sons with me on a gun show trip. That was a three-hour drive there, four hours at the show, and then a three-hour drive home. I did manage to find a few pre-1899 guns and a couple of complete AR uppers, so that made the trip worthwhile.
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had another beautiful sunny spring week. We are in a drought and it doesn’t look good for the summer for potential fires this year! I am NOT looking forward to a smoky summer!!! In the meantime, we are watering the gardens and the near meadow. The open meadow floods every year. This year so far, it has only flooded a little bit. Most of the snowpack on the south and east and west-facing mountains up to six thousand feet has already come off. Therefore, unless the peaks above six thousand feet have more snow than I think I see, then we won’t be flooding much this year, since there also doesn’t seem to be much rain in our future weather forecast. We shall see.
This week I planted another three, forty-foot rows of Yukon and Red potatoes and four, fifteen-foot rows of Russets. I have another two containers of seed potatoes left, so will be planting them down in the Annex garden. I planted another two rows of broccoli seeds and two rows of Copenhagen cabbage from my seedling starts.
I rototilled another section of the main garden to prep it for planting warm-weather crops. I pulled all of the broccoli stalks that I left to overwinter in their bed after the final harvest last fall, to see if any would survive through the winter and would be able to go to flower this coming summer to give me seeds. But they all died. Our winters are too harsh to overwinter Brassicas outside. But, a cabbage, may have survived? There is something in last year’s cabbage patch that is growing that looks a lot like it’s in the cabbage family, so I have rototilled around it to let it grow to see what it does. Sadly it’s all by it’s lonesome and I don’t know if it needs other flowering cabbages to cross-pollinate.
I am harvesting kale, spinach, beet, collard greens, and some broccoli from the greenhouse. We have been doing lots of smoothies with them.
I mowed the garden paths.
I’ve been working on the herb garden, weeding and planting herbs: basil, lovage, oregano, mints, lavender, sage, etc.
A neighbor to the north reported seeing two Sandhill cranes hanging around their part of the open meadow this past week… Exciting! So unusual! Maybe, these two like our area and will stick around?
I heard the common snipe this week. I like hearing that bird in our meadow each year. Unfortunately, I’m not hearing the night-calling birds as much this year, since I am making it a point to be in bed by nine-thirty to get the rest I need. I am waking up early but I’m busy in the house until later in the morning. Hence not hearing so many!
I did get back to listening to the book of Mark in Hebrew. I finished Mark and am at Luke chapter three. I am listening to the Hebrew version while reading along in English. I am also, reading the Hebrew, looking up words, and translating. It is fun and opens up new understandings of the Word.
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 want to hear from you.