Category: Traditional Skills/Fieldcraft

Sew and Grow, Save and Recycle Your Way Into Preparedness – Part 1, by S.T.

As a society, we all rely upon a vast amount of manufactured products every day from canning jars and lids to dishes to pots and pans to toothpaste and dental floss. This list goes on and on. However, we can not forget that gasoline and diesel fuel and electricity are the most important manufactured items. Without these there will no longer be any other mass produced manufactured items made or delivered to a store near you. Every disposable item that you can now replace with reusable items will put you well ahead of the sheeple, save you money, and make …


Letter Re: Tracking Dogs

Dear Editor: I have some experience with dogs that were specially-trained to track living humans, and with cadaver dogs. I agree with the previous Tracking Dog posts regarding restrictive points of terrain and/or infrastructure. In any escape route, there are always certain areas of heightened vulnerability, which an experienced team of searchers will not disregard. The Texas Rangers at one time (reportedly) enjoyed an annual manhunt in the Texas Panhandle. They would seek volunteers from vetted and trusty inmates whose reward at the end of the day, would be the day’s freedom and a good meal. The inmate would be …


Using Canning Jars For All Food Stores and More – Part 2, by Sarah Latimer

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What We Store In Jars Dry, bulk goods. This category of items includes grains, dried pasta, dried potato flakes, dry beans, and rice for long-term storage. We buy these in 40- and 50-pound bags from the Mormon storehouse, Costco, and online vendors and then repackage them into the half gallon jars, which are then vacuum sealed, using our FoodSaver Jar Sealer connected to an electric vacuum pump system that Hugh installed into my kitchen. It takes less than a minute to put the lid on, vacuum seal a jar, and put the ring on. All I have to do at …


Letter Re: Tracking Dogs

Dear Editor:I would like to relate my experiences with tracking dogs that are not even trained. We had a beagle who was born mostly blind. She was a pet. She had an incredible sense of smell that I have seen in other trained hounds, but not in a pet. We would bring her to our children’s high school, which had 2,000 students. I would put her in the front of the multi-building facility and command her to “Find the kids.” She would start off walking making big S-shaped turns as she headed to and between the buildings. All of a …


Tracking Dogs- Part 2, by D.D.

Cross a River I specifically brought this one up. They laughed at this as a common misconception. They will have maps, and if they think you ran in the direction of a river, there is probably someone working their way up already without a dog. They will just run a dog up and down both sides of the river until they regain the trail. If they are close on your trail, they will send runners up and down both sides to see where you exited by finding the water trail and will actually gain time on you. Moving through water …


Tracking Dogs- Part 1, by D.D.

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I had read an article some time ago about tracking dogs, and I didn’t get to respond to it then. However, here is my experience. It’s not the dog you are trying to beat; it is the handler. I have a lot of experience with tracking dogs. I used to guard the copper pipeline in Indonesia. The copper mine (also containing some gold) was on top of a mountain. Once the material was taken from the ground, it was mixed into a slurry and pumped miles through the jungle to the port. This pipeline was under constant attack. People would …


Survival Escape and Evasion, by Nemo

When reading survivalist literature, on various blogs and in fiction, there are many good ideas and suggestions, but often suffering from an idealization of circumstances, both before and after “the event”, which throws all into confusion. On the one hand, preparations for disaster are too often haunted by the twin hell-hounds of over-confidence and the myth of universal preparedness. Over-confidence, in that the prepper is assumed to have unlimited financial resources and time to purchase the items suggested and to acquire the training needed to do various things. Universal preparedness, being a myth, is based on the idea that the …


Tea for Two Hundred, This Year and Next- Part 2, by Sarah Latimer

While “tea” is technically reserved for the plant camellia sinensis, in common language we often call many herbs by the name “tea”, especially when they are capable of being brewed into a flavorful beverage all by themselves. Additionally, there a many plants whose fruits, leaves, and flowers can be grown to add a variety of enjoyable flavors to traditional tea. Here are some we grow and use at our homestead: Chamomile Chamomile is probably one of my top three flavors for tea, and it has health benefits as a bonus! It has so many wonderful benefits besides being a flavor …


Letter Re: Lost Knowledge

Hugh, My great grandmother was born in the late 1800’s and was raised in an orphanage in a rural area. This orphanage had an on-site school where, in addition to the 3R’s, all the girls were required to learn to “Cook, Clean, Sew, Crochet, and Knit”. All of the boys were required to learn to farm and master carpentry skills. At aged 16 ,when she graduated school and left the orphanage, she was equipped to run a household and earn a living as a seamstress. My great grandmother lived through the 1918-1919 flu pandemic and a typhoid outbreak. She died …


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 …


Notes from “The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs”, by ShepherdFarmerGeek

Did you know that you can get an estimate of distances and elevations conveniently using nothing more than your eyes and your hands? It’s really quite amazing and useful; hikers, hunters, and preppers really need to learn these skills. Ol’ Remus at the Woodpile Report (www.woodpilereport.com) recently recommended a book by Tristan Gooley entitled The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: outdoor clues to find your way, predict the weather, locate water, track animals and other forgotten skills. It sounded downright intriguing, so I’ve been reading it on my Kindle and enjoying it quite a bit. The first Appendix had …


How to Make and Utilize the Most Excellent Tinder Sticks For Starting Fires, by D.A.

Okay, when the lid comes off civilization and things are fun again, you don’t want to be the numbskull sending up a smoke signal that can be seen from space, just trying to get a fire going. You want to be the guy who kneels down for a bit and brings forth fire, like Prometheus or somebody that gets things done. I am going to teach you to make tinder that will stay lit and accelerate your fire. It will be inexpensive, too. Then you will achieve success in building a fire so you can finally crack open that 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? …