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’m still in California, where my brother, sister, and I are working together to clear out our late mother’s suburban home, to prepare it for sale.
As we’ve been working our way through the house, we have seen much evidence that our mom was a dedicated prepper. She was a widow with a limited budget, so her preps were by necessity on a modest scale. She was of the “Howard J. Ruff School” of 1970s-style preparedness. The key portions of her preps included 400 pounds of stored wheat, a wheat grinder, a water filter, numerous canned goods, a water bath canner, several 5-gallon buckets of rice, more than a dozen cases of NeoLife long-term storage foods, dozens of 2-liter bottles of chlorinated water, kerosene lamps and lanterns, 10 gallons of kerosene, two charcoal barbeques and several bags of charcoal briquettes, a solar oven, more than 50 pounds of assorted candles, a down sleeping bag, two rolls of Visqueen, two 30-watt PV panels, a Trace inverter, a compact 12 VDC refrigerator, a gun vault that was built in 1985 by Hall’s Safes, two Baygen radios, four Baygen flashlights, a half-dozen standard flashlights, a “Russian Pumper” flashlight, and a Sony ICF-7600 multiband radio. That was an admirable level of preparedness for a woman living alone, widowed at the age of 54. Even after she qualified for Social Security, her income after the death of my father never exceeded $30,000 a year. She had 20% of her liquid net worth in precious metals–mostly silver–and all stored in her home vault. Thankfully, she lived in a house that was sheltered from all but very gradual tax rate increases by California’s Proposition 13. Otherwise, she might have been gradually bankrupted by property taxes.
My mother died peacefully at home with two of her children at her bedside. She owned her home without a mortgage. She had no debts, whatsoever. She never had to utilize any of her preps. I suppose that is every prepper’s fondest dream.
Now, over to Lily…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
This week was beautifully sunny in the fifties and sixties, except for some rain mid week and on Friday.
Not much prepping was done this past week, because the girls and I all caught what seems to be teh common cold. It started with Miss Violet, last Wednesday, Miss Eloise caught it on Friday night, and I came down with it during the night on Sunday. We fought the cold aggressively just in case…We ate super good meals of Borsht and chicken soups, lots of green and fruit smoothies, zinc, Vitamin D, High levels of Lipid C. (I preferred to lay out in the sun up to four hours/day for my D Vitamin than to take the man-made supplement). We breathed steam with garlic and iodine, and sometimes, eucalyptus and tea tree essential oils. Enola Gay at the Paratus Familia blog had an onion syrup recipe that I made which had raw onion, raw garlic, raw honey, a squeezed lemon and apple cider vinegar steeped together for eight hours. I also added ginger and turmeric powders to it. Some folks also add hot peppers. — but not me, I don’t like too much Scoville heat. It was very potent to take. I took several spoonfuls, but then liked it so much that I began to drink it several times a day. I also did some gentle bike riding and hiking around the ranch breathing very deeply.
I did dehydrate a quart-full of onions.
I spent quite a bit of time surfing the web and found these two channels that you will learn much from and get enjoyment from. The first is “Rain Country Homestead” and the second is “Just a Few Acres Farm” Pete is a very interesting fellow that changed careers in mid-life and became a meat farmer. He loves his cows. His interactions with them are very similar to how I interact with my cows. I spent quite a few hours watching both of these folks to glean information.
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.