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:
I did some more firewood cutting this week. I’ve also started gang-cutting the woodpiles. I got all of the Tamarack (Western Larch) cut to cookstove length, split, and stacked in the woodshed. Next, I’ll be working on gang-cutting the “assorted fir” pile. That will all be cut to the longer heating stove length.
There have been a lot of Elk Creek Company antique gun orders in the last month. I mailed out three orders just this past week. Today, I’m starting a special 10-day sale on all our percussion guns. Most of these are revolvers for which cartridge conversion cylinders are readily available. This includes a group of five minty Ruger Old Army revolvers that I’ve not yet photographed. Many of those are “Pre-Warning.” I also have special pricing on all of our blackpowder hunting rifles. Most of those are .50 caliber rifles in the quite practical Hawken configuration. Take a look at our Percussion category!
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had rain showers earlier in the week and then sunshine for the rest of the week with temperatures as high as seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. A truly beautiful week. Our land is greening up. the trees are juuust beginning to leaf out. Strawberries, Violets, Trilliums, Orchids, Oregon grape, Kinnicknick, are all flowering throughout our forests.
The Balsam poplars/Black Cottonwods in our lower meadows are sending out their leaves, just in the past three days. They smell so wonderful. My matriarch kitty came into the house one day. I scooped her up to give her a hug and a kiss on her forehead. I could smell the Balsam in her fur. She smelled so pretty. I whispered to her, “I know where you’ve been recently. You’ve been way out in the meadows. You smell so good.” This kitty is a very pretty, long furred, and petite kitty. She is a real love bug.
This week I had finally worked down the frozen food in our electric chest freezer down to a bare minimum and had transferred much of its frozen foods to the propane freezers, so that I could defrost it and scrub it out. That which was left I fit easily into our two coolers. I think I have only cleaned that one out two other times in eight years. We unplugged it and I defrosted the thick ice on it’s right side. I gently chopped the ice with a heavy metal chisel. Within fifteen minutes all of the ice was off and it was warm enough to scrub it down and wipe it dry. Then I immediately plugged it back in and reloaded the frozen fruit from the coolers back into it. Ideally, I’d like to work down the meat in the other freezers, so that we can put all of our produce in them and retire the electric chest freezer. Since we have some meat on the hoof, I’d like to butcher smaller batches of our meat animals a bit more frequently, so that we use less freezer space.
I finally cleaned out the cow shed again, after another month of not doing so, since the birth of the calf. I’m getting ready to begin milking the cow, very soon.
I cleaned out the hen house two times.
I’m still milking one ewe. She is getting used to the routine. When I bring them in at night from their corral, she separates herself from the flock and stays in the back stall where I milk her. I give her, her mostly afalfa and grain and guide her into the back corner between the milking stand and the corner. I gave up on the milking stand because I had to lift her up onto it, and though she is not extremely heavy, I didn’t enjoy putting out that energy and effort. It is so much easier to just put her in that corner. I made more yogurt and butter this week.
I studied up on the idea of clabbered milk and might give it a try. But I am not sure when.
I have added a few things in my diet in the past two weeks, birch water, sheep yogurt and yogurt cheese (trying them raw instead of scalding the milk), recently-fermented pickles, more olive oil dressings, more einkorn pastries, etc, and suddenly, my guts went on strike all week which affects my heart rhythm, the vaso-gastro nerve get stimulated by gas pressure which stimulates the vaso-cardio nerve. So I have had to back off everything for a few days to get my gut back in order. I guess that I will slowly reintroduce these things — or at least go much slower with less volume. My system is so sensitive. After two days of backing off these specific foods my body is nearly back in order. So this slowed me down some this week.
In the garden, Jim and I rototilled another section of the manure into the gardens and I wheelbarrowed in some compost to two beds that our friend did not put manure in, because it was too close to my planted onions. I didn’t want his tractor to accidently run over those two beds.
I’ve almost finished writing out Chapter 8 of Matthew. I read many different chapters in Isaiah this week.
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.