Editors’ Prepping Progress

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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:

The three of us had planned to tour Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons this past week,  But then we all came down with summer colds, the night before our planned departure.  🙁

Even with a cold, I was able to split some firewood.  I also handled all of the livestock chores for several days, since Lily’s cold was more severe than mine.  Oh, and I walked all of our fencelines, looking for spots where foliage might be contacting our electric fence, or where the hot wire had popped off of an insulator.  I really should get out and do that walk at least once a month, but often I get busy with other projects, and the interval between fenceline checks stretches to two months, or more.  Shame on me…

Now, over to Lily…

Avalanche Lily Reports:

Dear Readers,
A miserable thing, colds are! It knocked me down from Wednesday on.  But I treated it with steaming garlic cloves with Lugol’s Iodine, two doses of Ivermectin, High doses of C and Zinc, and kale, beet, celery, carrot, apple smoothies.  I seem to be doing quite well.

Anyhow, earlier in the week I was able to do a few things:

I washed and bleached more plastic pots. I have a very large number of planter pots and still have many more to wash.

I harvested the beets.
I weeded broccoli and cabbage plants that will grow through the fall.
I cleared out the soil and removed the third four-by-twelve bed in the greenhouse, laid down the wood chips and put pots that were planted outside in that place.
I planted lettuces, more kale, yellow beans, and French beans in bussing trays in the greenhouse. And of course Jim helped me move in giants pots of squash, tomatoes, and cantaloupe into the greenhouse.
I pruned my late-producing red raspberries’ spent canes and started in the yellows.
The forecast Friday night showed we were in danger of a frost, so I picked most of my green tomatoes and all of the large squash that I could see.  I also covered some of them with old bedsheets.  I am praying that is does not freeze, Saturday morning.  If it doesn’t freeze, then we will have about 11 more growing days until what appears will be a harder more widespread frost.
One early afternoon, as I was resting outside in the sun, trying to get a high natural vitamin D dose, I noticed a lot of activity in the grass nearby.  Red Dragonflies were in a mating frenzy in tight groups flying up and down less than two inches off the ground in large “flocks”.  There were over thirty mating pairs at any given time in this one particular spot in my garden.  I then went for a walk out in the meadow to see if there were any more groups of mating Red Dragonflies, and yes, there were.  I found larger groups and about five more groups of mating pairs bobbing up and down in the air about two to three inches off the ground.  How neat.  So the circle of life is continuing.
A Praise Report: The situation with Miss Eloise is good now!  Thank You for praying with us!  God is so good! He is a God who answers prayers!  Trust in Him!
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.