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:
I’ve been quite busy cataloging new inventory for my Elk Creek Company [2] side business. I also took a trip yesterday to attend a gun show. I only found one gun there that was suitable to add to my inventory: A scarce Ballard single-shot rifle with an octagonal barrel, chambered in .38 Long Colt [3].
On the way home, I dropped by to pick up a few antique guns from a friend who has an FFL. He very kindly takes delivery of pre-1899 guns sourced from Internet gun dealers and auction houses that mistakenly put antique guns in their FFL bound books “just to be safe.” They insist on those being sent only to fellow FFL holders. That idiotic practice really aggravates me. But thankfully, my FFL buddy handles this for me, free of charge. And, of course, he never logs them into his bound book. They don’t belong there any more than a BB gun does. (Since pre-1899 guns and blackpowder muzzleloading guns are not considered “firearms”, under Federal law [4].) I try to reciprocate by doing favors for him, like occasionally letting him have an appealing gun at my cost, or buying him a restaurant dinner.
It looks like we will have some late summer rains starting on Monday. That will relieve me from the monotony of moving the sprinklers around on our near pasture. (It measures about two acres.) I’ve managed to keep that green, all summer long.
This coming week, I plan to install a replacement drop pipe and stainless steel sandpoint into the casing of one of our two shallow backup wells. Both of those wells are less than 30 feet deep. This particular well will also get a new Pitcher-type Hitzer brass and cast iron hand pump [5] that I bought from Ready Made Resources [6].
I have been experimenting with making fermented pine needle sodapop.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had a very warm week with hight in the low nineties and lows of forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. This past week a few thunderstorms rolled through with very little to no rain in our neck of the woods. But in the whole region, lightning from these thunderstorms touched off a lot of new forest fires. At the end of the week the winds were right for the first time all summer, thus smoke from fires in the Redoubt wafted into our valley. Yuck! No fun. We are keeping our windows closed and are running our air purifier. It has been quite hazy with the sun giving us an orange glow. The smoke currently is not as thick as the smoke that we’ve experienced in 2015 and in some other years. Very thankfully, the firefighters were out in force, throwing everything they had at their disposal at them to put them out. We know of about four fires that they snuffed out very quickly. (Thankfully!)
This week, I harvested more broccoli from my broccoli plants that continue to produce small flowerets after each producing their first large one. They become very prolific as the season wears on. I blanched and froze them.
I dehydrated more celery.
I planted in the partially harvested celery row: Swiss Chard, Kale, and Beet seeds for greens for the fall and winter.
I harvested onion flowers that went to seed. I had planted these as bulbs last fall. These seeds I will plant this winter under the grow lights for next summer’s onion crop.
I harvested a large amount of zucchini. Miss Violet and I grated them and made eight loaves of Zucchini bread. We chopped them and froze five 1-gallon bags worth for future meals. We also bagged five quarts of shredded Zucchini and froze those for future zucchini breads. We are also fermenting 3/4 of a gallon’s worth of grated zucchini like sauerkraut.
After reading and publishing the piece about making fermented pine needle soda, Jim ordered glass fermenting bottles. This week Jim fermented one bottle’s worth of pine needles to try it. We liked it so much that Jim started another twelve bottles before going to the gun show. Additionally, I watched a few videos on how to make other natural sodas and I read about this in a fermenting book that we bought last year at Lehman’s in Ohio. This week, I started fermenting a ginger bug to make more sodas in the very near future. I’m also interested in making our own root beer soon.
My outdoor tomatoes were not producing at all. They were choked out by Morning glory type weeds, bindweed, polygonums, Lamb’s quarters, Amaranth, Chickweed, and more. I was overwhelmed by those weeds and never got to taking them out. But we are not huge tomato eaters anyway. Jim only likes them cooked in sauces, not raw, and my body doesn’t like tomato sauce/concentrated processed foods — too acidic. A side note, I have tomatoes growing nicely in the greenhouse and those I freeze whole if not eaten fresh. I compromise for Jim and I like to put a few at a time into meat pasta sauce so they are not seriously concentrated. I am saving non-hybrid seeds from the greenhouse tomatoes for next summer.
I brutally weedwhacked the weeds and tomatoes down to bare earth. I raked them and put them in the wheelbarrow and wheeled them to our burn pile. Then I put heavy black plastic over that section of the garden and the area nearby, where I had grown the garlic and onions. This was to kill all weeds and their seeds. There are just way too many weeds this year that are going to seed. Many of those weeds are edible and I like having some of them growing freely in my garden, but there comes a time when enough is enough! 😉 I was thinking as I was weed whacking (justifying to myself) that: “There is a time to sow and a time to uproot.”
A further note, as I weedwhacked the inundated three-fifteen foot rows with tomatoes somewhere in them, I saw only about three decent-sized green tomatoes explode out from the weedwhacker and very, very few babies. There was just no production of tomatoes and it is so late in the season that the culling was justified.
My potatoes are growing in the same area, this year as the tomatoes were, and are suffering under the same onslaught of weeds, though I have weed whacked in between their rows several times this summer. (I did not plant in this area last year because of the type of weeds in here.) I did not ever weedwhack between the tomato rows because there were too many weeds and I couldn’t see the tomatoes. So the potato rows are not as bad as the tomatoes, but I still am a little bit concerned about them. However, of the few potato plants that I have robbed this summer, the potatoes were huge and numerous and the bush part of the potatoes are still green. So maybe the weeds don’t affect them as badly? I hope not — because, that would be bad, since we are usually self-sufficient in potatoes each year. Usually by now, I have harvested them, but since they are still green, I’m letting them continue for a few more weeks.
I also put black plastic down in the Extension garden plot adjoining the Main garden. I didn’t plant it this year.
As soon as all of the crops are harvested, I will be putting down black plastic over the entire garden to kill off everything, this year.
I cleaned out the dairy sheep pen and shelter. From milking the three mamas, I’m getting a total of a half gallon from them each day. I’m loving it. I am preserving some of it by freezing and I am turning most of it into yogurt and yogurt cream cheese.
From the mineral buffet, [7] the mamas and their offspring devoured the iodine, Vitamin A, D, and E mixture, the Phosphorus, Copper, Boron, Potassium, and Salt. Those, I had to refill several times. They also ate a lot of the Calcium, Magnesium, Colbalt and Zinc. I had to reorder a bunch of the minerals.
After I replenish them, I’m curious if they’ll still be devouring them. At some point their systems are supposed to regulate and then they won’t need the minerals as much anymore. These girls of course are giving me milk once a day plus nursing their offspring the rest of the day, so the demand on their bodies is high. I give them as much hay as they want and about 1.5 pounds each of mixed grains and alfalfa pellets during each milking session. Plus, they have free choice access to dried kelp.
As a side note, my Meat and Fiber flock is no longer nursing nor being milked. They also have access to a Mineral buffet. Of all of these minerals in their shed, they also devoured the A, D, and E vitamin mix, once. But after the refill, they’ve barely touched it again. There is very little evidence of them eating any of the other minerals. They also have free access to kelp and a Selenium salt block. So, therefore, I’ve concluded that they are not lacking in any minerals, they are getting what they need from the hay, salt blocks, and kelp.
I am also all of the sheep a Molly’s Herbal [8] maintenance de-wormer every week and every six weeks I give them Molly’s three-day de-wormer. I started doing this about two months ago. I do believe it is working.
I sorta cleaned out the Hen house this week. I scraped out all of the hay and then became distracted and didn’t put new hay in. I never got back to them. It happens sometimes. Maybe early in the week, I’ll get it really good. I’ll have to rescrape and then put new hay in. But we have company coming, and I will need to be in the house, so…
On another note concerning chickens, the mama hen that Jim saw last week with some chicks, showed up at the hen house in the late afternoon, one day with her babes. I was able to catch her and put her into the inner coop isolation pen and then I caught her five babies. They are doing well together inside there. I will keep them in for another week or two and then allow them to go outside when the babes are bigger.
Also, as of Friday the eggs I was incubating are just barely beginning their hatching out process as I am writing this post on Friday morning. They should be emerging on Saturday and Sunday. By Friday evening one had hatched with nine more showing signs of emerging within the next twenty-four hours, thus far.
I also incubated a second batch of eggs that should begin hatching next week. In a few more weeks we will be butchering out a number of older hens and some younger roosters.
I am making a lot of sourdough bread. This week I added yogurt to the sourdough bread mix. It was very, very yummy.
For the past two weeks I have been enjoying a relatively new YouTube channel about subsistence living in Alaska, Holdfast Alaska [9]. Dennis, Amy and their daughter Lena do a really good job demonstrating real-life subsistence skills in their videos. They fish, hunt, garden, forage for berries and mushrooms and wild edibles and wild herbal medicinals. They demonstrate how to process and preserve their foods through canning, drying, smoking, and fermenting. They are walking their talk. I’ve gleaned a lot of information from them. Please check them out.
I swam every day this week. This is the first year that I have taken such advantage of our redneck swimming pool. I love this form of exercise. Temperature-wise, I think I will be able to swim for about another two weeks before it gets too cold. One afternoon as I was swimming in the pool, Jim came out to watch and talk with me. I so love swimming and I was lamenting to Jim the fact that cold weather was coming soon and that I wouldn’t be able to swim for much longer. I curiously asked Jim if wet suits really do help people stay warmer in cold water, since I had never worn one before. Jim trotted off and went searching in the JASBORR [10] and found a men’s medium wet suit and brought it out to me and asked me to try it on and try swimming with it. I was already wet so Jim had to help me “bounce” into it. “Hee, hee” ;-).. I did and it fits me. I swam around with it for about ten minutes. I had never put one on before. It did keep my core warmer. Jim had bought a few used wet suits years ago before we ever married. So I may continue swimming longer into the fall after all. I hope so.
I read more of 2 Kings this week.
This month is the month of Elul on the Hebrew Calendar it is the sixth month. It is the month of preparation for God’s Fall Moedim/Appointed Times. The Day of Blowing/Rosh Hashana, Ten days of Awe to the Day of Atonement/Yom Kippur, then five days later, the Feast of Tabernacles/Sukkot.
The month of Elul is the month preceding the seventh month or the New year. Elul is the month of spiritual preparation. It is a time of especially drawing closer to the Father. A tradition during this month is to blow the Shofar every day. I have been doing that. The sound of the Shofar is to awaken our spirits to pray, repent, read, God’s word and to generally draw closer to him. May you do likewise.
Jesus’ fasting for forty days in the wilderness included the month of Elul. And when he went into the synagogue afterwards, it was on Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. That day, he proclaimed the Jubilee and in doing so re-established the counting of the Jubilee cycles. See Luke 4:1-4:19, Isaiah 61:11-2a, Leviticus 25:9
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.