Editors’ Prepping Progress

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:

My injured fingers are healing well, so I’m back to some light work around the ranch.  I’ve been insulating our shop. I think that I should be back to splitting wood in another few days.

Some good news: Atria Books has renewed the contract for my second and third novels — Survivors and Founders. This means that the full Patriots novel series will remain in print, most likely for another five years, or longer.

Now, for Lily’s part of our report…

Avalanche Lily Reports:

Dear Readers,
We had some gorgeous weather this week in the eighties and later in the week, low nineties.

At the end of last week we had an unexpected lightning storm roll through the northern Redoubt that touched off at least forty new forest fires, in a swath from eastern Washingon, across North Idaho, and into northwest Montana.  I thought we were going to be lucky this year and escape the summer with no forest fire smoke.  No such luck, sadly.  The end of the week saw lots of haze and gradually building smoke.  We are closing up the house and running our HEPA air filters.

The summer raspberry season has come to an end.  I’m hoping for a long Indian summer so that the primocanes of some of my red and yellow raspberries will produce their fall crops.

I’ve been washing more pots and filling up more trays and pots with our composted cow manure to plant for the fall crops. I planted more pots with organic fingerling potatoes that I recently bought that were putting out sprouts from their eyes.  We shall see if they will grow this late in the season.  If they do, these potatoes will be used as seed potatoes to grow more potatoes next summer.

I dug up some horehound that grew in Miss Violet’s “Flower Garden” of last summer, and transferred them to pots in the greenhouse.  The rest of the flowers in her flower garden did not come up this summer. They were mostly annuals, anyways.

I harvested a bushel of Transparent apples from a very young tree.

I harvested the last two rows of potatoes.  They were Reds and Golds.  They were beautiful! They grew well in this section of the Annex garden.  I didn’t weigh them, but I am guessing, I dug around a hundred and fifty pounds worth.  Not so bad for a Shmittah year. Next year, Lord willing, I will again, grow around seven hundred pounds like in previous years.  I will be sorting these potatoes out and saving most of them to plant next summer, since there is no guarantee that the store-bought potatoes, even though they are organic, will be viable….

I went through the two large totes that held all of my seeds.  The seeds were in various containers, plastic bags, brown paper bags, glass mason jars.  I sorted through them, organized them, and transferred many of them into brown seed envelopes that I had bought from Amazon, years ago.  I also discarded some seeds, wildflowers that are not natural to this area and or are posionous to my animals that I will never plant such as Morning Glories and Snapdragons, etc. Others I  gave them to the chickens, squash, etc.   and or put some outside our fence-line, old flax seed. Some other older squash seeds looked so much healthier than more recent seeds, that I decided to keep those even though they are over five years old.  Hopefully some of them will be viable?  I transferred many of the small envelope seed packets into a labeled giant brown envelope and returned the giant envelope to the totes.  I was able to reduce my glass jar and plastic bags use to a better level, so that I have less weight in the tote and less plastic and I have a better handle of what we have for seeds. It was a big job and took a couple of days to complete.

The month-old chicks growing super well and are now loose in the Hen house and the other hens are accepting them nicely.

In the Middle of the week, the next batch of hen’s eggs that were incubating began to hatch.  Because I put more eggs in for a few days after starting a batch, we are still in the midst of hatching out babies through the weekend.  Thus far we have eighteen baby chicks.  I find it very exciting to watch these babies hatch, to know from their egg color who their mothers were and to see from the color of the babies which father they had.  It’s very interesting to me.  I’m hoping to do one more batch of eggs this coming week, before the cold weather sets in.

There is talk of a major stock market crash during the next month and a half.  During the next month and a half we are ending the seven year Shmittah Cycle and beginning the next seven-year Shmittah cycle.  Historically, it has been observed that we have market crashes of some type every seven years. Some notable crashes during the Fall Biblical Feasts have been the stock market crashes of 1929 and 2008.  There was also a smaller crash in 2015.

Starting this past Saturday night at the New moon we entered the biblical month of Elul.  The month of the Elul is the Jewish preparation month (it is Jewish tradition, not a biblical commandment) of thirty days of repenting and counting to Rosh Hashana, the Day of Blowing, The day of Trumpets in the Biblical Feasts of the Bible.

– 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.