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:
The summer activities are still in full swing. We’ve been busy doctoring sheep, pulling weeds, rototilling, harvesting, and preserving. Most recently, we’ve been harvesting Transparent Apples.
For the past few days I’ve been packing orders for Elk Creek Company [2]. It looks like our big sale on hand-selected investment grade guns will be a success. Those sale prices will end in just one week.
Today, my neighbor with a back-hoe tractor will be over to remove four old fir tree stumps that are in the way of expanding our near-house pasture. That pasture is just over the size of two football fields. We’ll drag those stumps to a nearby slash pile to burn this fall.
I’ve already begun discing that field with our Plotmaster [3]. I’m speading Dolomite prills over each portion that I disc and roto-tilling that in. And once the stumps are gone, I can disc an even larger area. I’ll seed it all with a mix of Mustard (Sinapis alba), Fall Barley, Field Peas, and Kale as green manure winter cover crops. Then, late next Spring I’ll turn those under and re-seed it with a pasture grass seed blend.
We haven’t had any luck in seeding our pastures that are closer to the Unnamed River, because they are full of invasive Canary Grass. That grass makes poor forage. But it is a dominant and flood-tolerant species that chokes out just about all other grasses.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather has been fairly mild with temps only as high as eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit and lows of forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit.
This week we have been super busy with ranch work. While Jim is working on discing and rototilling the meadow, I have been harvesting Transparent Apples, washing them and grating them and dehydrating them to make our own apple bars. Some of them were made with walnuts, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, others just cinnamon, and others just plain. I also dehydrated apple pancakes. These are pureed raw apples with the cinnamon, walnut, honey, nutmeg and cloves, then dehydrated as pancakes. I also made freezer applesauce. I do not can applesauce because I cannot get it up to canning temperature without having volcanic explosions of super heated sauce bubbling up, exploding and and hitting me while stirring it to keep it from burning. Anyway, super heated food is mostly devoid of nutrients.
This week, I did a lot of house cleaning, cooking, cleaning, weeding of the garden. The Winter Garden seeds are germinating this week, Yes!
We scrubbed bussing totes and clear trays for planting the green house winter garden. We still need to fill many of them with compost and plant them.
I further cleaned out the greenhouse. I topped off half of the fifty gallon plastic Olive Import barrels in the green house with water. They are used as thermal mass to help maintain temperatures above freezing in the greenhouse. They only help hold a five to ten degree warmer difference in the greenhouse compared with the outside air temperature. But that makes a difference in the early fall.
Well, we just found out our sheep now have a very high parasite load of which will be treated very shortly as soon as the meds arrive.
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.