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, 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:
On Friday, I had a little unexpected cleanup in our cool food storage room. I discovered a mess when I went down there to get a 10-pound sack of sugar, for mixing hummingbird food. On a 2 ft. x 4 ft. shelf marked “Sweeteners”, I discovered that a 1/2-gallon mason jar full of honey had shattered. This created a huge sticky mess. Thankfully, the honey mess was all contained on one shelf. I felt like W.C. Fields, in the movie It’s A Gift. (“Closed, On Account of Molasses.” See the still photo, above.) It took me a full hour to clean up. I first carefully scooped up the molasses with a large putty knife. That went into a plastic bin, to feed our bees. The broken jar and lid went in the trash, a cardboard jar box and the paper towels that I used to clean the bottoms of the many other containers on the shelf (full of honey, molasses, maple syrup, coconut sugar, et cetera) went into the burn barrel. Thankfully, I had a spare particle board shelf board. (The sticky one went right onto one of our slash piles, to burn next fall.)
Next, I had to tote all of the other jars and jugs from that shelf into their house in laundry baskets, to properly wash their bottoms. Then, return trips to the shop. Those round trips consumed almost another hour. What a mess! And all that rigamarole was for just one broken jar. I’m glad that I have all of our rivet shelves screwed to the room’s plywood walls, and bungee cord retainer straps on the fronts of nearly every shelf. God forbid that we ever have a major earthquake here.
This week, we did some more berry picking, gathering Huckleberries, Service Berries, and a few Thimble Berries.
I got back to my firewood cutting yesterday. I am now nearly done cross-cutting, splitting, and stacking this year’s self-imposed quota. Yes, we have lots of tarped firewood in reserve, but I like to be sure that I cut, split, and safely stacked under cover enough for a full year, every year. And for the first time this year, I’m adding a separate tarped pile near out outdoor firepit/barbeque area, so that I don’t have to filch any from our household woodshed/piles.
Today, I began construction of our “just-in-case” outhouse for the Rawles Ranch. The goal is to have a fully functional outhouse just in case of a grid-down collapse, and failure of our backup power system and/or our well pump. It will measure 4 feet x 4 feet x 8 feet tall in the front and 6-feet-6″ tall in the back. I built it on 6×6 treated skids and it already has some massive eye bolts at its base for towing it from place-to place, if need be. It is presently 175 feet away from our house (downhill, downstream, and downwind), tucked into the edge of the woods. I’ll provide more details on that project in this column, next week.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Continue reading“Editors’ Prepping Progress”
