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:
I’ve been quite busy with slash hauling, all through the past week. In addition to the limbs from the deadstanding trees that I’ve recently harvested, I’m also cleaning up deadfallen limbs and lopping off the dozens of little firs and pines that were snow-squashed in the past two winters, and now growing at or near horizontal. There is virtually no chance that these squashed volunteers will ever grow up straight and tall. And, since they are a significant wildfire “laddering” risk, it is best that they get cut and hauled out to one of our pasture burn piles, to be touched off after the fall rains begin. Typically, I burn slash in mid-October, just before the opening of deer and elk season.
My cross-fencing project was nearly stalled by the aforementioned slash hauling. I also had the distractions of some calf dehorning, and helping Lily plant a few sapling trees that we bought in 8-gallon pots. The only progress that I made on the cross fence was moving and positioning some small boulders, as resting stones for the open and closed positions of the new gates. These stones are typically about 18″ in diameter, and carefully chosen to have at least one flat side. Two or more flat sides is better, and two flat sides plus a naturally-occurring notch gets bonus points, in my book. They are too heavy to lift by hand, so I simply roll them onto a cedar slab stone boat that I built 15 years ago. I can drag this stoneboat with any of our ATVs. I also bought another 8-foot tube gate for the far end of the cross fence. I like to have a gate located once every 400 feet (or less), for the sake of efficient cattle pasture rotation and to allow vehicle access for various tasks. And, of course, we like to have plenty of gates to facilitate horseback trail riding, bicycling, hiking, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing.
There is always a list of pending projects here at the Rawles Ranch. The list gets shorter in winter and longer in the summer. But these activities are almost always fun, and almost invariably they are great exercise. Who needs to buy a gym membership when you get to drive T-posts, wrestle around tree stumps, dig postholes, split firewood, and lift 90-pound potted trees? Fun, fun! Now, over to Lily…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather has been fairly warm and clear with two of the briefest showers this past week. The end of the week, the temperatures began to climb, once again. The smoke returned to our valley at the end of the week. Ick.
I helped Jim plant the trees, not him helping me. He bought them for me. 🙂 I also helped him just a little with hauling the branches to the burn piles. The girls and I helped Jim hang a gate. Jim also has done a lot more around the ranch than he writes about. He likes to just give you the highlights.
In the greenhouse, I planted seven trays worth of fall crops: pak choi, beets, spinach, cucumbers, parsley, cilantro. and Swiss chard.
In the Main garden, I rototilled a section yet again, and planted Yellow beans and French Beans, turnips, and lettuces.
We did some stock-up shopping this week.
We bought some salmon that I canned, and a dozen 2-pound containers of blueberries that Miss Violet and I washed and froze.
I suggest that you all do some more food stocking since the supply chains are being broken on purpose, and there will be another hard lockdown coming very soon.
I dehydrated zuchs, flavoring two trays of them with Italian seasoning, two trays with Pizza seasoning, and all of the rest just with salt.
I picked and froze four gallons worth of red raspberries. As I’ve been harvesting raspberries, I have begun trimming some of the spent fruiting canes. We have such large raspberry patches that it takes me many days to get them all cleaned up each year.
I put down a lot of compost in the strawberry patch that I weed-whacked and rototilled down it’s center last week. So far on one side I cut all of the grass down to the ground around the strawberry plants with garden scissors and then heavily spread compost around the plants. The few runners that I found I have put in water to grow their roots longer before planting them in the middle row. I still need to clean up the other side and another raised bed of strawberries and heavily compost them.
Jim assisted me in dehorning the latest calf this week. Jim does the hard work of catching a very strong calf, and laying across it while it struggles mightily to get away while holding it’s head still for me to cut away the fur from around the horn bud and to apply the dehorning paste and to duct tape his horn buds so that the paste doesn’t get on any other area of the calf’s face or on another animal, his mother, and causing them damage. It is extremely caustic stuff. In the process of this particular rodeo, Jim’s ear got bonked really hard by the calf throwing it’s head around, and a good scrape down the arm from a sharp hoof. Jim is my real cowboy! Since the calf is too young to be castrated, (only one of his two “buddies” have descended out of his stomach, we will need to wait longer to do this job), we decided to let all the mothers and their calves and one heifer out of the corrals for a few days to graze the meadow. “Sh.” the bull will remain in his pen until this fall when we will breed back two of our cows.
Miss Eloise and I, harvested her potato and wheat patch this week, since we let the cows out of the corrals and they break into her garden to eat the potato bushes and any potato they can get. Even though we have shored up the fencing, it is only made of eight-foot light gauge cattle panelling that the cows can easily lift up and go under. She got a very small amount of wheat, which we will save for seed for next summer. Now there is nothing in there for us to worry about.
I spend a lot of time giving water to living things: the cows, chickens, horses, greenhouse, gardens, orchard, planter pots, and certain young trees. Some get their water through an open hose put in their trough, at the base of a tree or through sprinklers rotated around every few hours. Others get watered by me spraying them by hand, and yet others are watered by me dumping a full three-gallon bucket of water on them nearly every day.
Horsey Friend and her husband came over for a visit and a meal with us this week. It was a wonderful time of fellowship.
A critter story: So then we’ve been letting the chickens out of their chicken tractors each day to free range around the meadow. At night most of them find their way into to their respective tractors. However there is a trio of birds, two roosters and a hen, the ones that a friend gave us in early spring. They had given us seven birds each of them a different type of bird, three of them were eaten by that predator. The fourth bird likes to divide her time between her family of three birds that she was raised with, and Miss Violet’s flock, because she is the same breed as they are… Birds of a feather do like to flock together. Very interesting to say the least in the light of “racism”. Regardless of whom she hangs out with during the day, she always goes back to the tractor of her own accord at night.
Anyhow, this trio of birds like to roost and will not go into the tractor on their own. They have their own little bird family, since they grew up together. They like to be away from the other birds doing their own thing during the day. At night they want to roost on the tube panel fencing near the barn. The fencing is not high enough to protect them from predators. They insist on going there every night. So I have been having to go out after dark to get them and bring them back to the chicken tractor that I want them to stay in at night, for their protection.
One of our roosters, STR. has given me the runaround. The first night that I tried to get him, for his own protection, mind you. He is a “stupid” bird. (It wasn’t dark enough, yet.) Every time I approached him, he’d kept jump off the fence and racing around with me trying to chase him back to the tractor. We ran back and forth between the barn and the meadow about four times. Who is being stupid now? 😉 Nah, I enjoy the fun of a chase once in a while. Each time he returned to the fence and flew up onto it he would crow in victory. When I realized he crowed each time that he flew up there, I laughed. Finally, I waited until it was really dark when he couldn’t see me. I grabbed him from off the fence, he squawked, as though I was killing him and then bit me between the thumb and index finger. Ow, that hurt! I grabbed his neck and then tucked him under my arm and marched him to the tractor.
Now, for the past four nights, I have to wait until dark every night when he cannot really see me, grab him and his two other buddies off the fence and march them back to the tractor. At least they’re consistent where they would like to roost at night. The funny thing is, is that all the rest of the birds will put themselves to bed in the tractors at night and all we have to do is lock them in. These birds do not seem to have the roosting concept in their brains, therefore, they would be in serious danger if not locked up. If STR, M and Sn, would roost up high in a tree instead of on the barn fence, I would let them be, but they don’t.
By the way, we don’t normally name birds unless they have standout personalities. ;-0. The two roosters came to us already having names so we retained their names. And if they didn’t have names we would have named them, because they are full of personality.
I’ve been swimming and bike riding several times this week for exercise.
I listened to a bit of the book of Isaiah this week. I’ve been too tired for Hebrew lately. It takes a lot of concentration…
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.