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:
We feel like we’ve made a lot of progress in the past week. We took delivery of two “Nucs” and set up two beehives (with supers), inside our orchard fence. To get ready for that, I only had to buy one new brooder box and one galvanized hive roof. We had everything else we needed on hand, all left over from when we had kept bees several years ago. Everything that we needed was in one large stack of boxes, in our garage. This included plenty of extra supers and frames, our three bee suits, a pair of smokers, smoker pellets, and tools. Sometimes, being well-organized pays off.
Our little bull calf — just a few weeks old — unexpectedly came down with bloody scours. So we dosed him with CORID for five consecutive days.
I’ve been keeping busy with cutting and splitting firewood. Our #2 Daughter handles most of the stacking. I’ve also been cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood for an aging neighbor.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We have had a very cool spring week here at the ranch, mostly cloudy with rain showers. Thankfully, we have not gone below freezing, but the temperatures have ranged from thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit for lows to up to just 64 degrees Fahrenheit for highs. The Great Blue Herons are hanging around again in our meadows, along with the Canada geese. The meadows are flooded at this time of the year, making them a great hangout spot for waterfowl. Depending on the time of the day, we hear the calls of the Common snipe, Soras, Red-winged blackbirds, Swamp sparrows, Canada geese, Night hawks, etc.
We had our six month dentist appointments this week. We did some shopping while in town. Mostly we buy that which we can’t grow or that we have run out of: Pistachios, cashews, apples, lemons, oranges, avocados, broccoli, Asparagus. Our asparagus crop for this season is just starting to grow.
Miss Violet and I renewed our fishing licenses this week. We are quite lax about the timing of renewing them.
We have another batch of eggs in the incubator, with an expected hatching date of June 28th.
We are in the midst of dosing our little bull calf with CORID and will be on day five on the day this is posted. We hope it heals him from his ailment. He is very alert and active and vigorously nursing as of the writing of this post. His stools have firmed up, but still have some blood on them. I do believe he is on the mend. Thank God.
Mostly this week has been about maintaining what we have. I cleaned the hen house. This week I hosed down it’s interior and scraped it out and wiped the floor down with towels. It is much cleaner in there than it has been in a long time. I mucked out the cow stalls.
I did the usual milking of the ewe, with yogurt-making, yogurt cream cheese making and butter making. I am freezing most of the butter for future consumption.
I made a Greens Cream Soup again this week. Look for the improved recipe in Monday’s Recipe of the Week.
I didn’t do anything in the garden or greenhouse, except watering plants in the greenhouse.
I did some of the usual house cleaning, laundry, sweeping, vacuuming, floor washing, organizing, cooking. I vacuumed and scrubbed a track of a sliding glass window that had dirt in the track from spilled potted plants and goop that dripped into the track from an aloe plant on the shelf next to the window. That needed to be done for a long, long time.
I am very excited to have honey bees once again. This week, I did a lot of research, reading a book from Dadant and watching a lot of YouTube videos on how to successfully raise and overwinter bees, in our northern region. We had not successfully overwintered our bees in previous attempts. For two years in a row we attempted to raise two nucs. I don’t remember well, if we bought nucs two years in a row, but I do remember that we had one colony survive the winter only to perish by late in the next fall, at the end of November, from moisture and wasps.
It turns out that the Langstroth hives, though functional in the summer, are not the best hives for overwintering the bees, particularly in the north. Their walls are too thin, the open bottoms and tops are not weather resistant enough. They are not insulated well enough and they are not deep enough in general with a continuity of the base frames. Meaning they do not emulate what a natural wild beehive is and what bees naturally prefer. So we have started already, and will be modifying our hives for now and hopefully in the future will be creating new hives for new hive splits in the coming years that the bees naturally prefer. I will be continuing to research this in the coming weeks.
I wrote out chapters 10, 11 and parts of 12 this week in the book of Matthew. I listened to the first five chapters of Matthew in Hebrew.
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.