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 helped Lily again this week with the sheep milking and and feeding our last little bummer lamb that still needs care. We now bottle-feed him just four times a day. He is a handsome little fellow with very distinctive markings. He waits by our back door for his feedings.
I packed and mailed a few more Elk Creek Company orders this week. Every time that we run a sale like the one ending toniggt, we get a burst of orders.
I got some more organizing done in our shop. Now that there are nice bright lights up, it is a lot more pleasant to work there. I still have one more set of rivet shelves to put up in the shop. That one is four feet deep, eight feet wide, and and seven feet tall. That is where I plan to store my chainsaws, extra chains, and spare parts. I also need to find a clever way to store all of my spare oak and hickory tool handles on that set of shelves. There are handles for everything from hammers to picks, axes, splitting mauls, and mattocks, and all the way up to the longest post hole digger and rake handles. I suppose that I’ll find some scrap large-diameter PVC pipe or duct material or some open-ended crates, to keep all of the handles tidy, organized, and easily accessible. As a dedicated prepper, I keep a lot of spare handles on hand. I suspect that our grandchildren or even our great grandchildren might eventually use most of them. To quote Clint Eastwood: “There’s nothing like a nice piece of hickory.”
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Happy Tuesday to you all. We had more clouds and showers since Saturday and much cooler temperatures, highs in the sixties.
Since this is the first day of our new weekly format of putting the blog up once a week on Tuesdays and I just put up prepping Progress on Saturday, we have a short week to report, but I still did a lot.
School’s out for the summer! Yippeee! We are expecting a visit with our four Grandsons, ages 11, 9, 7, and almost 4, this week starting tomorrow, so I spent time preparing a lot of food for them.
I also weeded all of the potato mounds in the Main garden and weed whacked between the rows and the unplanted the patches of garden that were full of weeds. Jim rototilled the next day and we planted many of the seedlings from the greenhouse.
My thumb is slowly healing so I had to keep it covered. It actually hurts more now than in the beginning because the scab that is forming keeps getting pulled. “Ow”. 🙁
I cleaned the Dairy sheep pen. I rake it out about every two days.
Mama hen has bonded super well with the ten chicks that hatched in the incubator last week. This year I’m not having the usual hatching success that I had in previous years, The chicks are weaker and some are not making it out of the shells. This last time, one of the incubators got the top knocked off and I didn’t see it for a day. so the temperature cooled down to low and it killed the unbon chicks. None hatched and I let that incubator go for extra days just in case someone had survived the temp drop. Nope. None hatched in that group. I put forty eggs in each incubator so with the group that had ten survive is only a twenty-five percent success rate. That is really poor. I’ve been incubating eggs for years so it’s not that I don’t know what I am doing. I don’t know the reason for the main poor hatching rate.. We feed them grains from the Wood’s family grain elevator just north of Sandpoint. We buy their barley, oats, wheat, peas, and sunflower seeds. And I give them Hen grit from the Co-op sore in Ponderay. Soooo? Maybe I need to change up our flock’s genetics.
I harvested Lamb’s quarters and ran a batch through the dehydrator. I made Lamb’s Quarter Fritters — similar to my Dandelion Blossom Fritters.
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.