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:
Although it was partly cool and rainy weather, we had another busy summer week: On four days, I did some more firewood cutting and splitting.
With Lily’s help, I drained, scrubbed, re-filled, and chlorinated our Redneck Pool.
I helped an elderly neighbor clear and cut up another fallen tree, into firewood.
We replaced the eight deep cycle 6-volt batteries in our Bad Boy Buggy electric UATV. With the exception of some faded and worn seats, that vehicle is back in great shape. We get a lot of use out of it, with our various chores here at the Rawles Ranch. Most notably we use it for hauling when we go out to cut firewood.
On the rainy days of the week, I did some more organizing in the shop, and replaced the handles on two of our splitting mauls. I generally prefer American-made hickory handles [2].
I’m a bit concerned that we are getting too much rain this summer. We buy most of our grass hay from a friend who lives about 20 miles away. I’m concerned that he won’t have 10 consecutive dry days for cutting, tedding, and baling his hay fields this year. I’m praying that things go well. We’ve contracted for 25 tons.
Yesterday, I slaughtered and butchered a four-month old ram lamb. Several more young rams from the same flock are scheduled to meet their destiny, over the next few weeks. There will be more details on the butchering and lamb meat preserving in Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had unusually cloudy and cool weather this week, temperatures only up into the sixties Fahrenheit for highs and night time lows of about forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit — too cold for swimming. One of these days, I’ll get in. Because of the rain that is supposed to come but hasn’t yet, Jim and I took down the tent in the meadow and moved back into our bedroom for sleeping.
Update: We had rain overnight on Sunday into Monday and received a half an inch thus far. More is on the way for Monday night and through Tuesday night. It is very needed. But if course not right during haying season.
Surprisingly for this time of the year, the mosquito population has dropped significantly and we have been able to sleep safely in our room without the tent for the past four nights. That may change once the warm weather returns after the expected rains on Monday and Tuesday this week. Once the rains stop again, we plan to sleep out again in the tent. We need to build an elevated platform for the tent so we can be out even if it is raining. In time we’ll get that done.
This week I weeded more of the potatoes and the newly planted crops which are now coming up. Additionally I weed-whacked and raked the last available bed in the Main Garden and rototilled it. At the time of writing this it needs to be rototilled one more time and then I will be planting crops there that can over winter, since we are pretty late in the gardening season, maybe, depending on what the nascent El Niño does for us.
We went for a six mile hike up in the National Forest and checked out the Service Berry growth process. They will need a few more weeks. Then we also looked for Huckleberries and found some red and others starting to turn purple at the lower elevations. Many were still green and some bushes weren’t growing any. We picked about a cup and a half’s worth thus far for the start of the season.
This year there appears to be a huge crop of Thimble Berries. They will be ready for picking in a couple of weeks. I do believe I will concentrate on getting a sizeable harvest of them this year.
I have a few red raspberries in our main garden that are blushing pink at the time of writing this column. They’re coming…
This week we, all three of us, went canoeing on a local lake and collected Cattail Rhizomes and planted them on the banks of a slough that runs through one of our far pastures. We canoed up a creek that flows into the local lake and found some ripe elderberries. I was shocked. It’s so early up here for them. I guess we have a lot of micro-climates. My own elderberries in our orchard won’t be ripe until late August and into September. Anyway, I picked about a cup and a half’s worth of them, also, and froze them.
I plan to make Elderberry honey syrup later this week. It is interesting, because I put some elderberry syrup in my drinking water on most mornings. I only have two pints left from last year. I go through a pint every two to three weeks. I was getting concerned that it would run out before my own were ready for harvesting since I enjoy it so much and feel that it really helps my body to stay healthy if I have some regularly. And lo, and behold, I found some ripe ones in this very remote creek that will help bridge the gap between running out and the next harvest. I do think the Father in heaven is looking out for me in this respect.
I did some fishing. Not to be negative or anything, but, I rarely ever catch any when I fish. It is a frustrating endeavor, rife with mostly untangling and fiddling with monofilament line and tackle trying to avoid being hooked by or snagging objects with the hooks — all of which I don’t enjoy. But I will keep working on it. Jim and Miss Violet don’t fish much. This time they just watched me and enjoyed themselves out on the lake. I have fished our river once in awhile over the years, but I have only caught two Brookies in all those years. Truthfully, I usually have only fished once or twice a year on our river and usually that was with the grandsons. Mostly because there are so many other things to be doing around here.
We received an order of sixteen pounds of dark sweet Bing cherries, which, Miss Violet and I washed, pitted, froze or dehydrated. Most of them we dehydrated.
I harvested half the Garlic Scapes chopped and froze most, but also dehydrated some. The other half have yet to grow. They are two different kinds of garlic. So I’m awaiting for them.
I started to clean out the greenhouse. I emptied a number of the trays that I had greens growing through the winter that had gone past. Three of the pots had Miner’s lettuce. I put them under two different frost-free water spigots. Hopefully next year they will regrow under those spigots.
I have other trays that have Kale and Pac Choi that have gone to seed. They need a few more weeks to mature, but then I will be harvesting the seeds and planting them later this summer for next winter.
Speaking of seeds, I have two rows of carrots and a row of Parsnips that were planted last summer that over wintered and are now flowering and going to seed. I have harvested and saved carrot and parsnip seed and onion seeds in the past and am very happy to do it again this year. It is a good thing to leave some produce in the ground over the winter to get seeds the next year Onions, carrots, celery, kale, beets and many other veggies will produce their seeds the next growing season.
I also harvested Sage, Parsley, Tarragon, and Lamb’s Quarters and dehydrated them at the same time that I did the Garlic Scapes.
I cracked, beat, and froze five dozen eggs in packages of six each. Most will go to the dog and cats this winter. Our birds usually produce a few eggs a day through the deepest winter, for fresh eating.
I cleaned the Dairy sheep pen several times.
I’m still milking and helping to feed by holding down the mothers for the two bummers. The first bummer, from the meat and fiber flock, is now weaned.
We butchered a ram lamb from the Meat and Fiber flock, on Monday. The choice parts went to us. We cut one small roast, four jars of stew meat, and two jars of chopped with our new cleaver, to burger meat. We ate the backstrap for dinner, boned out and then boiled the legs for broth and froze that. The ribs and the semi-deboned neck were roasted for the pup. All the other meat was chopped for the dog, cooked and then mixed with the cooked and chopped liver and heart. In all it was four quart jars and seven pint jars of meat that we froze. We saved the hide and Jim collected the brains for tanning the hide. Both which we have in the freezer, for now.
This is a good start to refilling our freezers. After all these years of always having two freezers full of meat, we are now, except for this latest butchering and Azure Standard-bought Salmon, basically out of meat. Actually, instead of refilling the freezers, I want to dehydrate a good portion of our meat this year, especially when we butcher our yearling bull calf this summer. When I was reading the book that I mentioned last week about Native Americans before Glacier National Park, it was mentioned that a family was well stocked for the winter if they had six to eight, fifty or sixty pound bags full of dried buffalo, deer, and fish meats. (Three to four hundred pounds worth dried!) That is a lot of meat. It usually meant three to five bison harvested plus as many deer and fish as they could get… Dehydrated meat is far more nutritious and shelf stable. Canned meat in glass jars can break and there is far less nutrition in highly-heated foods. Frozen meat depends on continuous electricity or propane… All that being said, I prefer frozen meat. But this year I want to try to shift more to dehydrated. One can also carry more dehydrated meat than jarred or frozen…
I will dehydrate some of the lamb meat, in the near future.
The cleanliness and orderliness of our home had gotten out of control during the past week and half. On Friday, I tackled, the laundry, the vacuuming and floor washing, dusting, washing windows and mirrors, the dishes, refrigerator, stove top, (The oven is another story to be gotten back to at a later date.), kitchen counters, refilled some seasoning jars, put away a ton of books that had “found their way off the shelves, again”, put away the tent, washed much of the bedding that had been used out in the tent, cleaned bathrooms and generally put the porch and house back in order. Whew, that is a job! But it feels good to have a clean and orderly house again. When it is clean and all surfaces are empty, I feel as though I can get on the food preservation and cooking chores.
I have been studying a paperback book titled Bushcraft: A Serious Guide to Survival and Camping, by Richard Graves. The cover blurb says: “You can survive in the wilderness with only a knife and this book!” Jim bought and first read it when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. It had been one of the first books in Jim’s Survivalist journey — along with Bradford Angier’s books. I have eyed it on the bookshelf on occasion over the years and just grabbed it this week to take a gander. I think the highlight for me with this book is how it teaching of how to tell time and find directions using stars and the sun. This information has been very valuable to me. I also am enjoying learning about making string and rope, lashings for making furniture, traps, snares, travel gear, etc. It also includes plants and animals for food. It probably can be found in used book stores or online.
This week I also sat down and read half of the book, “Snow Walker”, by Farley Mowat. This book is a compilation of stories of the individuals, of the Native North peoples’ life experiences in that harsh land of northern Canada, from before white people came and all that happened after they came: the Fur trapping trades, the decimation of the snow foxes and caribou by the trappers (feeding themselves and their sled dogs), and the diseases that they brought that decimated the native populations, namely, Tuberculosis in the north. The stories are very fascinating and sad, too. It’s a good read.
During our Saturday Bible study we finished studying the Book of Ezekiel. During the past five months or so we went through Ezekiel twice to get a really good understanding of all that was being said, and compared it to Revelation and several of the minor prophets.
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.