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:
I got all of this year’s wood cut and hauled it to the vicinity of our woodshed’s “dance floor”. Most of it was Red Fir and Western Larch (a.k.a. locally as “tamarack”) in 5-foot lengths. All that I need to do now is some crosscutting to stove-length, and some splitting. Because I mainly cut discarded tree tops from a recent USFS timber sale, only about 20% of the rounds will need to be split.
I added several antique guns to the Elk Creek Company online store. One of them is a quite nice and very scarce Charles Playfair & Company (of Aberdeen, Scotland) 12 Gauge Ejector Shotgun made in 1896. It went back to the factory in 1970 for a new set of nitro-proofed fluid steel barrels with 2-3/4″ chambers. So now it is the best of both worlds: A federally-exempt antique gun, but safe to shoot modern 2-3/4″ shotgun shells.
Now, Lily’s report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather is hot during the day in the low nineties early in the week climbing to a Hundred by Sunday and relatively cool at night in the mid-fifties.
We received an order from Azure this week of plums, cherries, apples, cashews, Manuka honey, and Einkorn. So, I washed most of the apples and put them in the refrigerator for fresh eating. Some, I cut up to blend to make dehydrated raw apple nut pancakes. These I put in our Vitamix blender. I blended the apples with pecans, walnuts, and cashews. I added Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Cloves, and salt, and a bit of water. I blended that up and then poured out the mixture onto silicon trays and put them into our Excalibur dehydrator overnight. They are super yummy. I ate a bunch and froze the rest, though they would be okay for a time in regular dry storage. Whatever apples could not fit in the refrigerator are in a large bowl in the kitchen and are designated to be eaten first.
Miss Violet helped wash the plums, core them, and freeze them. My plum tree suffered from some serious winter damage from the negative 28 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures that we experienced last January. The tree should most likely recover in the next two years if it is not subjected to such extremes this next winter. This was the reason why I ordered plums this year, because I am not getting any from my tree. 🙁
I bagged the fifty pounds of raw cashews into nine one-gallon-size Ziplock bags. Two were put into the freezers in the house while the rest were put in buckets and brought out to our dark cold storage room.
Cherries were washed. A lot of them were moldy and given to the chickens. Most were left in the fridge and we are rapidly eating them. I do not yet have a sweet cherry tree producing sweet cherries, only a sour cherry tree. Its fruiting looks to be a lot less this year than in previous years.
I continued with some deep cleaning of the house. As I was putting some laundry away in my lingerie drawer, I discovered a “large” pile (approximately four ounces) of Einkorn wheat berries in a cloth face mask that was being stored there. I laughed, because of the long journey the mouse was taking to get them there…
I quickly looked at my clothes to see if there were any mouse poops or pee stains and didn’t see any. Good! It had been only probably the past two weeks of mouse work. Recently, I had been putting Einkorn into our Country Living grain mill hopper without a lid on it and leaving it there, open for a few days or so, and grinding the wheat whenever I wanted some flour. I have been a bit cautious about it wondering if I am risking it, because I know we have mice around. Each day I look at the wheat in the grinder hopper carefully to see if has been disturbed by any critter. I hadn’t noticed any disturbance, so I assumed that the mice couldn’t get up into it. It is located next to our Excalibur dehydrator. Plus the cats are in the Great Room most nights “on watch”? So I laughed because I surmised and imagined that the mouse is climbing up onto the top of the dehydrator and is leaning out and over from the dehydrator, putting their paws on the edge of the hopper and reaching in and gabbing wheat berries with its mouth, not climbing into the hopper, I hope, and then marching them all the way across the the kitchen counter, onto the floor and down through our Pantry hallway all the way to our bedroom and up into the drawer of my armoire. Kinda cute image in my mind, and such a long journey fraught with cat danger! Hah! But I’m not happy about mice in our house, usually. It is a funny image to me.
There is no other source of wheatberries that they can get at, in the house. So it has to be from my wheat grinder hopper, or it could be from the wheat berries that fall on the floor and the counter itself by the wheat grinder? Well, since that was happening, I asked Jim to make a lid for the Grinder hopper, which he did the very same day. He made it from two stacked panels if 3/8″ plywood, glued together. The smaller panel is a friction fit inside the wheat grinder’s hopper.
I then cleaned out my lingerie drawer, culled some clothing items, put some others in totes and put them out in the shop storage, (I don’t need to have so many clothes that I am mostly not wearing stored in my drawers. I’m really trying to minimize what I have, at least in the house. I have about five large totes with extra clothes in the shop if I want or need them or for someone else around my size, if needed. I put the rest into plastic gallon ziplock bags and put them back into the drawers. I then sorted through all t-shirts, shorts, pants and jammies. I hung up my jammies. I only have one winter flannel night gown and one pair of winter flannel pants, and three summer jammies. I am leaving the jammie drawer empty. Last summer I sorted through wool and cotton sweaters and put them in plastic bags to protect them from the moths. So those are already “permanently” sorted.
I began seriously picking red raspberries and freezing them this week.
I went Huckleberry and Service Berry picking twice.: Once with our neighbor friend and her children and their visiting family and another time just with Jim. Thusfar, I have three quarters of a gallon of each.
We swam in our Redneck pool a few times this week in between working outside. It was so refreshing and definitely cheered me up to be able to keep cool and still work outside and to live in my bathing suit as I did so much of my summers when I was a kid. I swam after dark once just before bed with the moon rising over our mountains. Lovely!
So, two weeks ago, I bought two bags of organic potatoes to eat when the grandsons were here. They did not taste that great. On Wednesday, I was just about to peel some of the last of last year’s potatoes to put in a roast. They looked awful, so I decided to check on a volunteer potato plant growing in the compost pile to see if I could rob some decent-sized potatoes. I pulled out three huge ones and two littles. Then I checked my rows of potatoes. They are not yet flowering and I pulled out three littles. So, I’ll have to wait a couple of more weeks to rob from those. But knowing that I now have potatoes growing, I will no longer have to buy any more bland-tasting store-bought potatoes. I quickly dug three trenches in the third section of the Main garden and planted those last year’s potatoes. It’s almost the last of them. I have some more that can be planted soon, too. These I will harvest in late fall.
By the way, the robbed potatoes were extremely yummy and fresh in my roast. I’m eating it as I write this paragraph. Jim is visiting a consulting client and Miss Violet isn’t ready to eat right now. I’m hungry! We alternate between sitting down as a family and doing our own thing for dinner sometimes. Anyhow it’s nice to know that this past year we actually made it from one harvest season to the other with only buying two five pound bags of potatoes, and I really didn’t have to do that. May it repeat this year, also!
I restarted tomato seedlings and transplanted them into large pots in the greenhouse.
I emptied out trays of lettuces, arugula, and pac choi that went to seed.
I chopped and froze garlic scapes.
Cleaned Hen house.
I pulled some Knapweed around the meadow and the house.
My tooth socket is slowly healing. It hurt for several days! Yes, I “suffered” because I refuse both the over-the-counter and prescribed pain meds. I don’t trust pharmakaiea any longer. The less medication that I ingest then the healthier I feel I will be. It would have to be severe pain for me to accept them. Not annoying pain, as a tooth extraction. But I did concentrate on eating a lot of Cherries. Cherries have natural pain-killing properties in them. I did a lot of salt water rinses, cold packs, and gently pulling coconut oil, and colloidal silver. Now as of Tuesday, I am regularly irrigating the socket after meals and snacks, and whenever I taste something ick…
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.