To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make 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 this column, in the Odds ‘n Sods Column, and in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
I’m traveling for the month of September, so I’ve put Elk Creek Company on an ordering hiatus. While caring for an ailing elderly relative, I’ve been able to take a little time to hunt for more antique gun inventory. I plan to reactivate our shopping cart system on Wednesday, September 29th, and shipments will resume on Monday, October 4th, 2021.
As usual, when I travel, I do my best to keep fit. This past week, it has been calisthenics, bike riding, and some gardening chores.
Please pray for the folks who have homes in the path of the western wildfires. We have some relatives, friends, and acquaintances that are quite near the Caldor Fire, which is licking at the edges of South Lake Tahoe, in Nevada. I don’t expect the fires to truly abate until we see a seasonal weather change.
Now, over to Lily…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Ah, this week was a busy one. The weather has been beautifully sunny and cool-ish.
I don’t have a lot to report.
This week three days were spent in town shopping, running errands, and eye appointments.
I harvested, weeded, and manured the last cabbage patch. I still need to preserve the cabbages.
I have harvested most of the Russet Potatoes. I need to finish getting them in, and the field fertilized and tilled.
I harvested all of my Orange Cherry tomatoes green or ripe and took down the vines from in the greenhouse. They will finish ripening in the house. They had something attacking their leaves and I want to plant fall crops in the bed that they were occupying. I also cleaned up a few spent bussing trays, and filled with compost the water troughs in the greenhouse to plant herbs in sometime soon. I cleaned up dead leaves on cucumber and Butternut squash plants and cleaned up the greenhouse floor. It’s looking quite good in there.
Of course because we haven’t had rain, now in over a week and a half, I’ve gone back to rotating sprinklers and bucket watering some pots, etc.
I cooked a meal over the campfire this week using a cast iron pot. It was a slow-cooked cabbage, carrot, potato: sweet and regular, onion, tumeric, paprika, salt, oregano, apple cider vinegar, and thyme meal with Lamb steaks. Yum!
This week we took delivery of more cast iron cookware that I didn’t yet have: a 14-inch wok, two muffin tins, two pie pans, a pizza pan, a cast iron stand, and a bacon press. (Though we don’t eat bacon, I can use it for other stuff.) Now for me and the girls to do a whole lot more cooking over the campfire…
Embarrassing to say, but I am no Annie Oakley. We have serious skunk predation issues on our chickens this week. Over a two-day period we have lost nine birds. The skunks are digging deep under the chicken tractors and climbing up and in under the tarps. After Miss Violet and I lost five birds, I spent a full day totally enclosing the top of the chicken tractor with chicken wire, mine and Miss Violet’s Chicken tractor, our birds share one, and the next night the skunks dug under Miss Eloise’s tractor, which was already fully enclosed with Chicken wire… I have shot at the skunks three different times between evenings and mornings around the tractors and on the compost pile and can’t seem to hit them. I do aim, then close my eyes. I don’t really want to see them hit, just kinda afterwards, ya know? However, after the next day of seeing four more dead chickens, I am furious with them. Now I am so furious that the next time I see them, I’m aiming carefully and watching as I shoot… How do we know they’re skunks doing the predation? We’ve caught them in the act!
UPDATE: Friday night, after dark, the girls and I transferred all of the birds, more than sixty, back into our straw shed for protection after Miss Eloise witnessed a large brazen skunk vermin kill and carry off into the forest one of the chickens. She didn’t have her gun with her and I was busy watering the green house. It turns out that there are a whole bunch of skunks, just not one or two that have learned to take a meal from our birds. They are no longer safe at all in the Chicken tractors…
Well, this week SH. the bull, approached me and shook his head at me. I went into his pen to scoop water out of his tank to clean it, and he came to me shaking his head. I jumped up and over the bar fence and avoided him from coming in contact with me and dropped down to the other side, lickety-split. (Like I said last week, ‘Use it, your body, or lose it”, because I do use it, I can hop the fence lickety-split with a minimum of heart poundage ;-)) Then he did a little hop around his pen. I said to him, “Yeah, Buddy Boy, you just didn’t want me in your space this morning.” This is why you never take your eyes off a bull when working around them. He is mad at me for keeping him separated from his girls. I bet one of them is in heat and he can smell her even though they are over five hundred yards away. So I just flushed his tank that day, instead of cleaning it.
The puppy and cats are doing well. Puppy and I have gone on a couple of perimeter hikes together this week, both on the leash and off. Fun!
I spent some time reading up on the Shmittah year that is the seventh year of rest. It begins this coming Monday, September 6th at sundown. The year of Jubilee appears to be an agricultural rest for the land in Israel. But I am thinking and praying about it, too. The Shmittah year is either a year of blessing or judgment. I think it’s going to be a year of worldwide judgment and even the beginning of serious Christian persecution. I believe that when this Shmittah year ends: Rosh Hashana, September 7th 2021 to September 27, 2022, we may enter into Daniel’s Seventieth Week or the Last Seven Years of this Age. I really think that the Blood Moon Tetrad in 2014-2015, the last Shmittah was the next to last seven years. And, like Joseph was told to prepare for seven years for the upcoming famine, we too had the past seven years to prepare and now we will be entering to the Seven years of persecution, famine, economic crash, war, and pestilences. But God will protect His own if we obey His word and pray for His protection. I believe that we need to make sure we have completed our last-minute preparations very shortly. Get prayed up and keep studying God’s Word.
May you all have a very blessed and safe week.
– 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.