Category: Self-Sufficiency

Tea for Two Hundred, This Year and Next- Part 3, by Sarah Latimer

Selecting Plants for Tea and Tea Flavoring Actual tea of the green and black variety is camellia sinensis. The tender new leaves of this plant are picked for tea. Drying and Storing Tea Ingredients Tea and tea flavorings require that we overcome the same obstacles faced in safely preserving nutrients, flavor, texture, and general health benefits of any food. The culprits are oxygen, sunlight, moisture, heat, and unwanted consumers, like insects and mice. Traditional tea, herbal tea, and flavorings must be dried, stored in containers (preferably air tight ones, under a vacuum), and in darkness (away from UV light) to …


Two Letters Re: Hunting for Self Sufficiency

Hugh, DK may want to investigate joining a private hunting club that leases or owns their own private land to allow hunting boar year round and of course other game in season. – Lone Prepper o o o Hugh, The statement “In spite of that, all Florida public lands only allow boar hunting for a few weeks of the year in special WMAs” is kind of misleading. In reading this, it sounds like a person is only allowed to hunt hogs at certain times in certain areas and with a permit; this is not true. This statement applies only to …


Letter Re: Hunting for Self Sufficiency

Hugh, I am not sure how far the writer is from the Georgia Border, but you can hunt feral hogs year round, 24/7, with night vision, flashlight; it doesn’t matter. Farmers in Georgia do have issues with these non-native animals that were introduced for sport hunting in the early days of this nation. If you can find a farmer that would allow you to hunt (and if Georgia is not that far from you), you should be able to take quite a harvest. You can even hunt over bait with these critters. I am amazed that Florida would only allow …


Letter Re: Hunting for Self Sufficiency

James, I’ve been a follower of your blog for many years and find it both a good resource and a great way to keep your ear to the ground among all the survival/prepper sites that trend to sensationalism and speculation. Patriots was my first real fiction and began a great love of survival fiction. Thirty or forty books later and daily searching for solid tips on the prepper blogs, I believe the time has been well spent. My wife and I live alone, and due to a degenerative neurological affliction neither one of us can work and I am her …


Letter Re: How To Trim Your Horse’s Feet

Hugh, There’s a lot of good information in the article on trimming horses’ feet. The old saw is “no hoof, no horse.” So you have to be able to provide good hoof care. I don’t have the education or breadth of experience that RB does, but I’ve been trimming my band of horses for more than 20 years. I’ve found some things over the years that make things easier that folks may want to consider. I prefer to trim sitting down. I’ve never developed the skill that lets me trim comfortably standing the way a farrier does. I bought a …


How To Trim Your Horse’s Feet- Part 2, by R.B.

Using the Hoof Knife The next step is cutting away dead sole at the toe to find the white line. Dead sole is hard, flaky, and depending on the moisture of the foot may come out with little effort. If you live in a dry area, I recommend watering down an area about 10 feet in diameter around your horse’s water trough for about a week before you do your trimming. This way, every time they drink they will stand in water and mud, which will soak into the sole and make the trim a lot less work. After cutting …


How To Trim Your Horse’s Feet- Part 1, by R.B.

For starters I should let you know that I was school trained as a farrier at the Oklahoma Horse Shoeing School in Purcell, Oklahoma. I went there right after two tours in the U.S. Army. I worked full time as a shoer for about 10 years, then part time for another 10 years, and now I just shoe my own horses. In short, I have about 30 years and thousands of horses under my belt. I suspect the readers of this blog have already read JWR’s Patriots, which was the inspiration for this article. The purpose of this article is …


Letter Re: Shopping on Amazon

Hugh, In addition to the information in this article I would like to mention that there are many free Kindle books at Amazon as well at archive.org that are in the public domain. You do not need a Kindle (or Amazon Prime account) to download and read these books, you can read them on your laptop/desktop computer with the free downloadable Kindle PC reading app from Amazon. If you use the shipping option that gives you a 99 cent credit usable on Kindle books or digital audio products it has been my experience that the length of time between ordering …


Letter Re: Venezuela Eating Worse

Hugh, I understand the situation. The people are desperate. Looking at those pictures it is easy to see they are subsisting on too many starches, which makes them appear well fed, though they are not. So I’m not meaning to criticize, but there is also in those pictures of their food something of note. There’s lots of foods there that can be reproduced. Seeds in the veggies can be planted, beans can be planted, coax seeds from the onions and carrots, plant a potato, etc. Are they doing that? Do they have a place to do that? Would it be …


Letter Re: Realities to Off-Grid

Hugh, Just wanted to share that the bucket toilet seats don’t last long, only about five months. You need to build a wooden box and put on a real toilet seat. You will get a build up in the bucket over time and bleach doesn’t clean it. Pour boiling water over the sides and bottom and it will come out clean and odor free. Laundry done by hand will need a place to drain, since you can’t wring it out as well as a machine. You can use a wringer, but it doesn’t do well for jeans and sweat shirts, …


Maintaining Your Household in the Post-SHTF World- Part 2, by S.T.

Wood Stove Cooking The same recipes that you use in the summer with a wonder oven you can also cook in the winter on a wood stove. The Ice House Keeping Food Cold or Frozen in the Hot Summer I do not have ponds or horses and buggies to move large blocks of ice during the winter, so I must improvise. During summer, when cutting and splitting firewood, this will be done over a tarp so that the sawdust can be collected and saved in buckets. When winter is full force, I have 10 each of the 20-gallon Rubbermade totes …


Maintaining Your Household in the Post-SHTF World- Part 1, by S.T.

Today I washed clothes the easy way: I placed the clothes in the washing machine, added homemade laundry soap, and turned it on. When the washer was done, I transferred the clothes to the dryer and turned it on. When the dryer was done, I removed the clothes from the dryer and folded everything. While my automatic washing machine and automatic dryer are working, I am sitting here typing this. I do this three times every week– once for my family, once for my father who can not navigate his basement stairs, and once for my aunt who also can …


“Recycle, Repurpose, and Reuse”, by Regan and Hawk

My husband and I fall into the category of people known as “preppers”; we store food, weapons, supplies, and money for when it will be needed in the not too distant future. We track our stores and make sure that we won’t be caught short on many different things. However, one thing both of us have found is that all this prepping is not really enough. What do you do when something breaks or wears out and the stores are closed or it just can’t be found? What happens when you need something out of the norm for a project? …


Letter Re: A Real Neat Prepper Trick

Hugh, My wife and I have been looking at ranch style houses right now, mostly to see the floor plans and what works and doesn’t. We came across one where the previous owner got an old slide top bar cooler. He removed the cooling system and put a system of copper tubing inside of it and then connected it to the water inlet to his home. Whenever a water spigot, shower, dishwasher were used in the house the water first flowed through the pipes in the old cooler. He used it to store his vegetables that he grew in the …


Letter Re: Prepper Auctions

HJL, In my 26 years as an auctioneer I have conducted over five of these type auctions. Three were defaulted storage auctions. Normally, we don’t know what we have until the door is opened. The first one that I remember was around 1993. It was a 10 X 20 unit. In it were three crossbows, boxes of climbing gear for mountain climbing (crampons, pitons, ropes, and harnesses), first aid kits with blood expander, packs and pack frames, firearms, various brands of dehydrated food, small cook stoves, and so forth. The next one I remember was a 5 X 10 heated …