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 [1], 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:
Our lives got a lot more complicated last Sunday when we began caring for two bummer lambs. (Pictured above is my cousin (twice removed) Martha Rawles, with three bummer lambs, circa 1948.) Lily will give you most of the details on the lambing. But I would like to relate just one of our experiences, from Friday:
We had one of our ewes penned in a corner of the west sheep corral, using an 8-foot heavy wire mesh cattle panel, to form a triangular pen. The ewe was already in there with her own lamb. Lily got in with her, and I handed the two bummer lambs over the fence to her, to try to encourage some foster milking. When I also handed her a pan of alfalfa pellets to keep the foster mama ewe occupied, the other sheep in the main part of the pen got jealous, and three of them vigorously stuck their heads through the panel, trying to get at the delectable pellets. Lily was sitting butt on the ground with legs outstretched. Their heads were pushing on Lily’s back, and meanwhile mama ewe had her flank against Lily’s face and was straddling Lily’s outstretched legs. Lily was doing her best to get the two bummer lambs to latch on to the foster mom’s teats. This was quite the chaotic rodeo, all in a small space. It reminded me of the old Army rejoinder: “What a Goat Rope!” Needless to say, Lily is quite the Trooper! One could see that she was enjoying every minute of the process and didn’t care a lick about being stepped on and pushed around. A wife like her is a keeper.
I’m still deep in firewood cutting season. Our still-at-home daughter has been helping me with the wood stacking. She has also been dragging limbs out to a slash pile. We’ll burn that this coming fall.
Today, I’m attending a gun show in Post Falls, Idaho, but I won’t have tables there. I’m just walking the show, looking for pre-1899 cartridge guns, to replenish my Elk Creek Company inventory.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had a beautiful sun-shining week, with a high temperature of 83 degrees and lows of about 48 degrees Fahrenheit, with a couple of brief showers,
This was an extremely busy week with my last three Dairy ewes all giving birth within a 36-hour timeframe. Two sets of twins and another single. In total, we have five ewe lambs and one little ram lamb. Sadly, one of my ewes, when we bought her, we were told that she had a dead teat. I was okay with that since she came with a daughter who was old enough to be bred. I thought that we could get another lamb from her and then retire her. She birthed twin beautiful ewes. When we bought her in December, I never thought to check her udder then, or at all before these births. I figured if she had raised this one ewe lamb last summer on one teat then she would be fine to do it again. I have some experience with one of my own meat/wool breed sheep that has twins this year with only one teat, and they are thriving. I discovered this about a month ago, when I went to try and milk her, about the same time that I started milking the one Ewe that lost her lamb, something I had not ever done before with them. So I wasn’t too concerned if this dairy ewe had only one teat.
Well, on the lambing day, earlier in the evening when I was doing chores, I looked in on this ewe, she was the last of the four ewes to go into labor. I watched her and told her it was now her turn to birth. She kinda licked the air, so I suspected she was starting to labor. I continued with the chores. While I was doing them, she birthed the first lamb. I came back by the sheep pen and saw her licking her newborn. It was small, so I expected twins. But I had to finish caring for the other animals, so I didn’t stay to watch. I’ve seen a lot of births, both ours and on videos. So I didn’t have the need to see these, and I needed to care for the animals before I could relax and take all the time that I would need to care for her and the babies afterwards.
When I was done with the chores, I went back to her and she had two babies on the ground and was licking them vigorously. I thought all was good. I went to the house to inform Jim. He was getting ready for bed. I told him that I would be outside helping the babies to latch on. I dressed for it: The weather was warmish for this time of the year and we now have all the biting bugs out.
I went back out to the west sheep pen. The babies were looking quite cleaned off, were standing on their wobbly feet, looking for the teats. I reached over to squirt out the first drops, in order to make sure there wasn’t a plug. I encountered a very hard and rubbery teat. I reached for the second teat and encountered the same thing. My heart dropped. I had the flashlight, I kept looking at them, squeezing them and looking at the teat orifice to see if anything would come out. Just some cheesy-looking stuff came out. I thought that If I could get that stuff out that her milk would flow.
One of my other meat/fiber ewes that I milk, keeps getting fat and calcium crystals stuck in her teats, and I have to force them out. When I filter the milk, they have already dissolved and nothing stays on the filter paper, so I know that it is not mastitis. I have tried looking it up to see why she gets them but haven’t yet come across the reason for them. So, with this experience in the back of my mind, I worked on the teats just in case, for quite a while. But they are super rubbery, dead in the upper teat and into the milk channel inside her udder. Then I went back to the house in a bit of a panic, I needed to get colostrum in these babies, immediately, and we didn’t have any sheep colostrum on hand, but I did have 2 quarts of cow colostrum frozen. I had set that aside, for emergencies. It came from my Matriarch cow, “A”, that we sold last summer.
I got on the computer and did a bit of research as to the amount of colostrum they would need and saw that one could use cow colostrum for sheep, but not the cow milk. I took out one of the colostrum bags from the chest freezer and began thawing it in warm water in the kitchen sink. One of the other ewes had birthed that morning, so I grabbed a mason jar and lid and woke Jim up to tell him about our problem and to get his take on it, and to get his help. It was now after midnight.
Jim kindly got up out of bed, got dressed, and came back out with me. I had already jugged up the other mom, who had birthed that morning. She was confined in a 6’x 6′ shelter with her lamb, so that they could bond undisturbed by the rest of the flock. So I climbed into her jug and started to milk her out. She was a first-time mama and her udder and teats are beautifully soft and supple in contrast to those of my Meat/Fiber sheep ewes and compared to my other mama ewe’s rubbery udder and teats. She gave me about eight ounces. But her milk had already turned white. (Colostrum is of course yellow, thick, and sticky.) But I figured there must still be some colostrum mixed in, since it had only been 12 hours since that ewe gave birth.
I took the milk back into the house, collected a sheep-sized rubber nipple and a storebought water bottle that I opened and poured the water out. I filtered the milk, mixed it with the cow colostrum, warmed it up, and went back out. (The next morning, Jim found a Perrier water bottle from his container stockpile that is a better size and much more sturdy plastic than the generic plastic water bottle.) I introduced the bottle to one of the babies and she drank from it immediately, then I gave it to the other baby and she did the same.
Jim and I then got all the sheep settled for the night and went back to the house. I was up again at 4:30 AM. I warmed up four more ounces of the sheep milk and some cow colostrum, brought it out to the babies and fed it to them and immediately milked my other jugged ewe. Since this ewe has only one lamb, and had just birthed her, I figured that I could take milk from her and she will automatically produce more because there is that demand on her. Then I went and milked my lambless meat/fiber ewe. I realized that her milk was now going to have to go to those babies.
So I have been spending the rest of the week milking both flocks for these bummer babies. I’ve been milking that one dairy ewe, and three of my meat/fiber sheep, twice a day. Jim bought a container of sheep/goat colostrum powder in town. I’ve been adding to the sheep milk this week. So I have four meat and fiber sheep and one Dairy sheep, whose milk is good to share with these babies. Of the other two dairy sheep moms, one has a 12-day-old lamb and she is rather on the wilder side and I haven’t gotten to training her yet, and the other is also a first time birther and she had extremely tiny twins — scary tiny — so I’m not going to take any milk from her. They are five days old and are now finally looking as though they are gaining weight and strength.
On Thursday, I had let all the sheep out to graze in our meadow by the house for an hour. On getting them back into the sheep pen, I asked Jim to help me get the ewe with the single lamb that I have been milking into the Jug. We got her in and her baby. I had just fed the other two and they were still hungry, though they each had consumed seven ounces. Jim had been talking about trying to get this mama to foster these babies, so I asked him to hand me one of them. The mom thought it was her own baby and let them nurse. The babies were so excited to actually nurse and get something for their effort. Thursday night we let this ewe and her ewelamb stay out with the rest of the flock. I was kinda hoping that maybe the bummed babies would try to nurse from her on their own. But from all appearances the next morning, it had not occurred. So Friday afternoon, we jugged this mama back up and put the babies in with her and you already read the story from Jim’s weekly entry. WE are now leaving the two babies in with this Mama and her single and I will be feeding her, the mama a lot of good foods and making sure she has plenty of water. I will continue feeding the lambs other sheep milk for a while longer just to make sure and will continue to help them on the mama some more until I see a complete acceptance and bonding between them. Poor real mama is very unhappy to have the fence separating her from her babies, even though she can nose them anytime she wishes and can lie down next them and have a bit of contact through the wire. I’m hoping that in a few days, maybe they can all be together again. We shall see. If not, Mama might have a date with the butcher much sooner than we wanted. I’m quite sad about it. I really love these Dairy sheep. They are so sweet and so friendly.
I wrote this next paragraph before we jugged up the babies with the other Mama on Friday:
I have to say that their own mom is so attentive to them. She lets them nurse on her, her even though nothing comes out. I keep checking just in case. When I feed her babies she is right there with them, overseeing the whole feeding. It’s like she understands what is happening. Her udder is bagging up a lot and I’m hoping that she doesn’t get an infection or get sick and that her body will just absorb the milk with no issues. If not, sadly, we will have to put her down. The plan had been to let her breed once more and then later, before next winter, she would be butchered anyway. On the second day, Jim and I tried to stick a sterilized blunt-tip basketball inflation needle up into her teats, to use it like a cannula to see if I could clear her teat and drain her udder, but I encountered a hard, rubbery wall just an inch up from the opening. I gently tried to “stab’ our way through the tissue, and it just didn’t work. The mama put up with me until I pushed really hard. But nothing was giving way. So the scar tissue has definitely taken over her teats and into her udder. So sad. On Friday, I saw one of the babies try nursing from her again. It gave me hope, so I tried to extract milk once again. But again, I got nothing.
So, it has been a very busy, partly sleepless week. At the end of the week, I am stretching the bottle feeding times to five-hour intervals and giving them seven ounces at each feeding, because I do not do well on so little sleep. I have caught a few cat naps during the day, a few times. So, soon, I hope to get back to my regular sleep schedule. I slept seven hours by the end of the week, which is about my normal sleep time. The babies were okay. So for the next two or so weeks, we will feed them four times a day, then we will go down to two times a day for about a month. Then we will slowly start to wean them.
At the end of the week, the incubated eggs began to hatch on Thursday. So, 14 have hatched at the time of writing this on Friday.
For the past few years I have been looking for other ways to have natural alternatives for “dish soap” without buying from the grocery stores. This week I came across a video short that showed someone making a dish soap from orange peels, baking soda, and water. So I gave it a try. I had Jim and Miss Violet save their orange peelings in half-gallon Mason jars. I poured in about a cup and a half of baking soda and then filled the jar with water. I have three jars, now, two quarts and a half gallon, “marinating” in our pantry. I tried some that had soaked for a few days, and yes, it works.
There are very few bubbles, but the mixture of baking soda and orange peels definitely cuts the grease and leaves jars and dishes shiny clean. So, since we love oranges and eat them most days and have a large supply of baking soda, I believe we have found our dish detergent for the foreseeable future. To be honest, even though it works well by itself, I like adding some dish soap to it to give it some bubbles. But if and when the day comes that we cannot access dish soap, I have an acceptable alternative. It’s even better than Dr. Bronner’s or bar dish soaps.
There are also wild plants that have the chemical saponin in them that grow around here that I will collect once they are blooming to make dish soap and shampoo, this summer. I’m looking forward to trying them. I will let you know of the outcome after we experiment with them.
I mowed the paths in the main garden. I began mowing a poor section of the meadow that has all dandelions to get the nutrients back in the soil. Dandelions bring up the nutrients, mowing them down and letting them decompose releases the nutrients back into the topsoil.
I’ve been reading up on bees. I bought a book, titled: “Following the Wild Bees — The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting, [2] by Thomas D. Seeley. It is an excellent book.
I also ordered and received from Horizontal Hives company [3] three more Bee books: “Raising Honeybee Queens” by Gilles Fert, “Keeping Bees with a Smile” by Fedor Lazutin with Leo Sharashkin, and ” The Lives of Bees, the Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild”, by Thomas Seeley. I’m looking forward to reading these books in the next weeks, my summer reading.
I wrote out some of Chapter 12 this week. But I was more interested in just reading scripture this week. I read First John several times and spent a lot of time meditating on it.
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.