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:
This week was all about firewood. It is exhausting but rewarding work. When I first bought the ranch, half of it was a great big tangle of trees, with lots of deadfall, dead-standing trees of all descriptions, and lots of “cripples” and “leaners.” The property is now much less of a fire hazard, and it certainly looks better, overall. It is not fully “parked out” as some folks like to do, but it is thinned a bit and I’ve gradually eliminated most of the ground clutter. Most importantly, I’ve removed the dreaded “ladder fuels”. And now, after nearly 16 years of yearly firewood cutting here at the ranch, I’ve finally caught up with felling all of the dead-standing trees. I can now walk through our timber groves, and give them a nod. I thank God for his wonderful providence.
As I was driving home from a shopping trip on Friday, I received some potentially very bad news on the radio, later confirmed with this news link: FBI seized top secret documents at Trump’s home; Espionage Act cited [2]. Since, by law, the President — as Commander in Chief of the armed forces – -is the final arbiter of classification status — and can downgrade or declassify any document at will — the key question is: Did he do so for those documents while he was still in office as President? Here is a key quote from that article:
“Agents were revealed to have collected a set of documents labeled “classified/TS/SCI documents,” a reference to top secret and sensitive compartmented material.”
Please pray for a just resolution to this situation!
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
This week we had hot and sunny weather temperatures in the high eighties and low nineties.
Finally, this week we had success in hatching out 20 chicks from a batch of 32 eggs saved from our egg-laying chickens that were incubated in our electric incubator. I believe the success this time was because I collected the eggs during the heat of the afternoon before they had a chance to cool down and they were very clean.
We keep a mixed flock. At this time we have Barred rocks, Jersey Giants, Stars, Delawares, Ameraucanas, Leghorns, and some Rangers.
We have a bit more than half a dozen roosters.
I have been sitting above the chick stock tank looking at the chicks and telling them who their mamas and daddies are. I cannot wait to see what the crosses are going to look like when they grow up. I can see a few are pure to their kind. I have a pure Americauna, and a few pure Giants. I can see that I have one Delaware and Broiler mix. I have seen a few that are Broiler/Giant mix and Americauna/Giant mix. There may be one Barred Rock/Broiler mix. The ones that have the Broiler daddies have much beefier legs and larger feet. Anyhow, it is fun to see what I might have in the future. I am very interested in increasing the size of some of these birds through the hybrid vigor of crossing them with the broilers.
Jim and I dehorned the two calves with dehorning paste and also banded our little bull calf.
I have been harvesting raspberries and freezing them. We have been eating a lot of our frozen foods in order to make room for this year’s produce. I also invited two sets of neighbors this week to come and pick as much as they wanted, but I still have so many berries left!
I harvested most of my garlic last week. I left about a dozen in the ground to go to flower to produce garlic seeds. This week I selected the bulbs that I will plant this fall for next year’s garlic crop.
I have been weeding and watering everything.
I have washed and bleached more bussing trays this week and have filled them with more composted soil. We plan to plant them very soon.
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.