To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both 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 the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
It was a fairly quiet week here at the Rawles Ranch. Beginning on Monday, we’ve had some rain showers. Our pastures are greening up, and the ones near the river are under more than a foot of water. (The Unnamed River comes out of its banks nearly every spring snowmelt season.)
I slaughtered and butchered a “spare” three-year-old ram, for mutton. He was a big boy, weighing perhaps 220 pounds. Lily helped with the butchering. That yielded about 70 pounds of usable meat and fat for tallow. The choice cuts of meat were set aside for human consumption. But more than half is in “Dog”-designated one-gallon freezer bags.
We also had a bull calf born to our senior cow, this week. Lily will fill you in on that, in her part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Seriously, where did this week go?
The weather was springlike with low temperatures as low as 29* Fahrenheit with a couple of frosts and a high temperature of 67*Fahrenheit on Thursday. The various swallows have returned this past week as well as the vultures. I saw our first bumble bee and wasp of the year this week, and (yikes!) a mosquito. This is the earliest in the springtime that we’ve ever seen a mosquito.
For a couple of days, our on-ranch wild turkey flock more than doubled when neighboring flocks joined our overwintering less than a dozen to have a mating jamboree in our near meadow and horse arena for about four days. Very neat to see the Toms vie for dominance with each other and then breed the females. At one point four Toms were all sparring with each other at the same time, making a real ruckus. The other two flocks moved on at the end of the week. Now all is quiet and back to our original group. These hens will soon move off to the woods to settle down on clutches of eggs. I hope and pray that they are very successful this summer.
Our new matriarch cow birthed a bull calf this week. This is her first birth with us on our ranch. She surprised me by being unusually accepting of me coming in to inspect and handle the calf and to mingle with her in the stall with the calf. I’m glad. My previous cows would seriously warn us off when we got too close to their calves.
Last fall, I ordered a dozen spiles to have on hand for tapping trees for their sap. This week, for the first time ever, I started to tap the few birch trees that we have growing here. I intend to boil the sap down next week and possibly make vinegar with it.
I did a lot of cleaning this week, laundry, floors, bathrooms, etc.
We are celebrating Passover on Sunday with our Bible Study group.
I helped Jim get the Dairy Ram separated from his little flock and led him to the barn. I went to the house while Jim dispatched him. Then I went back out and helped Jim hoist it up on a gambrel. We used the quick and easy ATV winch method with the cable tossed up over a barn roof beam. Then I went and reunited the butchered ram’s dairy flock ewes with the other dairy flock of ewes and our other ram. Now they are all together in one pen. That makes the daily chores a whole lot easier.
Jim did all of the gutting and skinning and first major quartering. We put the fleece in the freezer for a future tanning project. Then I helped Jim butcher the rest of the ram into meat cuts in the house. That day felt like a real homesteading day. ;-). Even though we are homesteading every day, some days feel more so like it and they are more satisfying.
We have been eating salads of Dandelion greens, Miner’s lettuce, Sheep sorrel, Mache, homegrown Arugula, and broccoli sprouts. It feels good to know that most of what we are eating is homegrown. We still have a lot of potatoes left and of course our own beef and chicken, etc. Actually the only store-bought, lately, are avocados, sheep yogurt, and oranges.
I finished digging out one plot of the garden, taking out all of the canary grass roots and other weeds and their roots, put composted manure on it, some natural fertilizer and Magnesium salts, mixed it all into the soil and planted three hundred yellow onion bulbs. Then Jim and I and Miss Violet worked on another section, turning the soil and sifting through it to remove more canary grass roots and other weeds. I harvested more dandelion roots and dried them, roasted them, and chopped them up for dandelion root tea. I tried my own dandelion root tea and enjoyed it very much. I will keep going after them this summer.
I cleaned out the hen house twice this week.
Of interesting note, we ate the last of our homegrown apples in March. I have one onion left from our crop from last summer. We ate the last of our winter squash in December. We still have frozen Zuchs, celery, raspberries, and onion greens (some from two years ago), garlic scapes, frozen beet greens, frozen cubes of basil, two gallons of tomatoes, and a gallon of huckleberies. Of course, we have a lot of frozen store-bought items, too. But those don’t count in this “round-up”. I’m just telling what is left that we grew or foraged, plant -wise. I am trying to eat through our stores to create more room for this summer’s harvest.
I wrote out chapters 4-to-6 in Matthew.
Chag Sameach Pasach! Happy Passover, Unleavened Bread and First Fruits.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
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.