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:
Enjoying some unseasonably warm and dry October weather, I’ve been catching up on projects around the ranch.
With the help of a neighbor who is a retired building contractor, we now have one of the two planned storage rooms for our shop nearly complete. I hope to have the second room done by late October or perhaps early November. I’ll then work on the shelving and wiring retrofit projects in a piecemeal fashion, all through the winter. So, as of early 2023, I will finally be able to say: “Everything in its place and a place for every thing.” It has taken me nearly 50 years of prepping — including 16 years at this ranch — to reach this point.
Now, over to Lily…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
As Jim said, we are having gorgeous unseasonally beautiful weather.
I have been very busy helping Miss Violet work towards her future career goals, which has been occupying a lot of my time as of late.
I have mostly been maintaining that which we have: feeding and watering the chickens, sheep, cows, horses, dog, cats, and the gardens that are still growing despite the light frosts we had a few weeks ago. I have broccoli, cabbages, and winter squashes and late raspberries still growing outside. I’ve been cooking and deep cleaning and organizing the house and kitchen, doing laundry, vacuuming, and washing floors, etc. Ya know the drill.
I planted more seeds in the greenhouse this week of kale, Swiss Chard, lettuce, and Pac Choi. I now have multiple containers of each type of greens at various stages of growth, growing in the greenhouse that will hopefully take us through the winter.
Also, in the greenhouse, I still have celery, various types of Zucchinis, tomatoes, Hungarian peppers, and cucumbers growing that we are harvesting, bunching onions, potatoes, and lots of herbs.
I dehydrated two quarts worth of broccoli in our dehydrator this week. I harvested and we ate our one and only cauliflower this week. It was tasty!
We had the Number 1 son, his wife, and their sons here for the weekend last weekend. We enjoyed all of their company very much. We had the boys try out our Zipline for the first time. They had a blast.
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.