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:
To make the daily sheep milking chore easier for Lily, I constructed a cleated 12-inch-wide wooden ramp at the end of our milking stand. With that now in place, the ewes can just walk up the ramp to get to their grain.
We did some huckleberry picking and hiking, early in the week.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had a very pleasant summer week here at the ranch with two days of very light showers and a few rumbles of thunder here and there. Nothing to write home about, though.
This week, I retired my two meat and fiber flock sheep from their milking duties, since they were drying off. I started separating my dairy flock ewes from their lambs at night and milking them in the morning. I am milking all three, but I am only going heavy on milking the ewe with the single lamb. The ewe with the twins and the ewe with a single who is fostering the bummer twins, I am only taking some milk, just to train them for milking. It’s been a little bit of a rodeo but by day four, the ewes and their lambs are getting used to their new nightly and morning routines.
This week I raked out both flocks’ pen/shed and runs. Now that they’ve been cleaned out to bare ground, it is easier to keep them clean.
The hen house has been cleaned out.
The summer garden harvest season has begun in earnest.
I harvested a third of the celery from the garden. I washed, and chopped up the stalks. The stalks were frozen and the leaves were dehydrated. I got two gallons of frozen stems and three quarts of dehydrated leaves.
I harvested some cauliflower, too few and too small to preserve, so we ate them for a couple of dinners.
I harvested, washed, chopped, and froze three gallons of zuchs.
I picked two gallons of red and gold raspberries and turned them into two gallons of canned raspberry juice. The Red Razzes are winding down. The golds will have another round in a couple of weeks. There are only a couple of unripe black Razzes left on the black raspberry canes.
Jim and I went Huck picking up in the National Forest. Together, we picked a gallon’s worth, which I froze. We rode our electric bikes up there and additionally did some hiking and exploring. It was a very enjoyable time. I love being in the forest. We also picked Oregon grapes that I made into a jam. We picked some of the last of the Serviceberries at our elevation. They are now drying up on the bushes, 🙁 sadness. They are a favorite of mine.
I harvested our garlic. I cut the stalks off them and put them in a laundry mesh bag and hung them from a shelf in the Great room to continue drying out.
I harvested the Einkorn that I planted for an experiment. It is drying out on the livingroom floor. I need to finish cutting the heads off the stems and figure out how to thresh the hulls. I kinda dropped the ball on this, for now, and went on to all the other harvesting projects.
I finished weeding two rows of onions. I have yet to weed the third row. I need to weed and thin the three rows of carrots.
Earlier in the week, while rotating the hose in the orchard, I noticed that our Transparent apples were beginning to turn yellow. This is a couple of weeks earlier than the usual. A few days later, I went down to look at them again and found a broken branch with a bunch of apples on the ground. I quickly returned to the house to get a large steel pail and went back down and harvested them. I made six quarts of freezer apple sauce with them. The rest of the apples on the tree need a few more days to ripen.
At the end of the week, our neighbor and I went Huckleberry picking in a place that she found, recently. It’s a gem of a spot. We plan to return there, soon.
The three of us usually take turns and/or work together making food for the cats and the dog. This week, Miss Violet did a batch and I did a batch. We bought four large packages of ground beef and four large packages of chicken thighs. Jim made two batches of rice. Miss Violet baked the chicken and deboned it and mixed it with rice and put it in jars. Jim capped them and put them in the freezer. The next day, I cooked up the four packages of ground beef. Jim made another batch of rice. I mixed the beef and rice together and canned them up and put them in the freezer.
I went swimming and kickboarding in our pool four times this week, Jim and Miss Violet went in a couple of times. If it hadn’t turned coolish and rainy, I would have swum every day.
I finished reading 2 Samuel and began reading Kings. I decided not to back up to Joshua, after all, since I was on a roll reading about King David and his Mighty Men’s exploits. 😉 I enjoy looking at my Holman’s Bible Atlas while reading about the towns and wilderness areas of Israel in David’s day
Our friend Don Lewis from over at Rural Revolution “Called Fall” [2] this week. It’s the earliest he has ever “Called” it. I whole-heartedly agree. In fact it felt fall-ish here in mid-July. I was wondering if he would be calling for fall early this year and was waiting for it. And so he did, this week. We had a lot of fogs in July which are so unusual for this time of the year, usually they are a very late August, but mostly late September and October phenomenon for our location. Some weather folks on the internet are watching the La Niña cycle and it looks as if it might be strong and thus give us a very hard winter this year. I have followed MBGC for about five years, since he was in high school and he is quite spot on with his weather predictions. It looks like it is going to be a really bad winter East of the Rockies. Here is this young man’s early forecast [3]. Please prepare for a hard winter everywhere in the northern hemisphere this year.
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.