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 did my best to get caught up on projects around the ranch this week. I also made several antique gun purchases from estates. As always, I have to scramble to keep guns in inventory. Sales have been brisk at Elk Creek Company, so I’ve also been busy packing orders. We’re now down to just 17 antique handguns, 16, percussion replicas, 14 rifles, and four shotguns. I did add another Mauser cavalry carbine that just arrived. Our month-long Patton’s Birthday sale ends on December 11th, so if you want to place an order, then do so, soon.
One of the projects for the new chicken coop was laying step-stones in front of the door. Lily and I went to the far end of our property and gathered three large flat stones that were roughly 20 inches square and 6 inches thick. I estimated that they were just over 100 pounds apiece. We hefted them into the back of our truck for the short ride back to the coop. After rolling them off the truck, I laid down a base of gravel and set the stones in place. The leveling process just took a couple of minutes. We also brought one other stone that was 30 inches long, three inches thick, and a foot wide. I positioned this one as a ramp, just outside the chicken door at the back of the coop–inside the fenced chicken run–so that the chickens won’t have to hop up or hop down, at the coop’s sliding Guillotine door entry.
Deer and elk season has just ended, leaving me empty-handed. I was so busy with out-of-state travel, and then “catch up” that I didn’t get the chance to get out and hunt. So I suppose that we’ll slaughter and butcher one of our steers sooner rather than later. It is nice to have plenty of beef available, on the hoof.
Our new sheep have settled in. I’m sure that Lily will have more to report, on that…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
This week, weather-wise, has been nothing but rain until the end of the week. Three Atmospheric Rivers have roared through our region — mostly to our Canadian neighbors to our northwest, causing widespread flooding in many areas. Prayers for all of you suffering from these flooding rains.
This week we re-established the seasonal Indoor Bathroom Greenhouse. We moved Miss Violet’s stuff out of that bathroom to the guest bathroom and I retrieved some wooden boards to put on top of the bathtub to expand our usable horizontal surface area. Jim hung up our two grow lights. From the main outdoor Greenhouse, I carried in thirteen bussing trays and shallow clear totes filled with soil. Some of those are already growing the greens that I planted out there this fall. In five of the bussing trays and totes, I planted seeds: kale, beets, Oak leaf lettuce, Swiss Chard, and a deep red/purple leaf lettuce.
The Sheep are all settled in. They are little cuties. I am no longer interacting with the ram, none of us will. After doing some reading up about rams, I learned that it is best not to have any contact with them, since they will charge with little or no provocation. We do not want to get hurt. Jim did not warn me about them because they had never had a problem with a ram butting in the past… Though, I did provoke him, without understanding the possible long-term consequences. (Remember, Jim wanted me to size the crook to their necks.)
Since we have two doors on that shed and a divider in the middle, I go in on the ewes’ side to give him his hay and water. He always stomps his front hooves at me… This week for the first time since we’ve brought them home, the ewes approached me when I entered their stall with hay in my arms. They began to nibble at it, before I was able to put it in their hay rack. I thought that that was sweet of them, since up to that moment they had continually run away from me when I opened their door. I felt like they were finally accepting me as their new shepherdess. 😉 It was a really sweet warming feeling to see their peace and interest in the hay I was bringing them. Sheep are very quiet and appear to be very clean, meaning they don’t soil up their stalls very quickly. I like that.
Now the chickens, on the other hand, need to have their hen house cleaned out on a very regular basis. I cleaned them out this week. Since we have moved our birds to the new hen house, their egg-laying has dropped off nearly completely. Yes, they do not have lights, yet, in their house. Jim is working on that. But they also did not like the change in their nesting boxes. They are refusing to lay in them. Additionally, I know we have some egg eaters. Therefore this week, I bought some wooden eggs to do two jobs; One, seeing the eggs in the new nesting boxes should encourage them to lay their eggs in the boxes. And two, hopefully, if a chicken pecks it they will be discouraged from pecking at their own eggs.
We also hung burlap flaps over the nesting box openings to give them more privacy. I had to cut the flaps in half to make it easier for the chickens to get into the nest boxes. Then as another bid to get them to lay their eggs, I put two small round plastic netted laundry baskets in their hen house as an additional place to lay the eggs. Hopefully, their production will come back up, soon. Jim is still working on insulating and wiring the hen house. I suppose if I didn’t keep dragging him out on hikes, that he’d have it done by now. I have the hiking/skiing bug these past three weeks. (See the following.)
Jim and I went for a four-mile round trip hike up into the National Forest during a break in the rain. The day was dark with very dark gray heavy clouds. The forest smelled so good, fresh, clean, and balsamy! The coniferous needles and lichen were exceptionally shiny green. The reds, browns and grays of the tree bark of the trees glistened. The temperatures were “warm” in the mid-fifties and the air was quite moist. It was a lovely hike.
Later, in the late afternoon, as it was beginning to get dark, I went for a half-hour bike ride. There was a most gorgeous sunset. Living in a canyon without a long view of the western horizon, and without much hazy air we just don’t get too many amazing sunsets. The clouds were pink, violet, purple, then a pinky-orange, and firey red. I just couldn’t get enough of the outdoors that day.
The next day, Jim and I went for an almost six-mile hike up a hiking trail into a mountain valley.
And then the day after, Jim and I, the girls, and the dogs went for another hike up into the National Forest. After a period of time, the girls went back home with the dogs, leaving Jim and I alone. We went for a long off-trail bushwhack hike to scope some areas out. In all we covered about four miles After three days of hiking for about a total of about thirteen miles this week, probably more since I forgot to add in all of my walks around the ranch earlier in the week, my feet and shins are hurting quite a lot. A couple of good magnesium salts soaking baths and a Sabbath’s rest ought to heal them right quick.
I did more manure clean-up.
Be Ready For The Mark
In the past two weeks, somehow a channel from a group of Seventh-Day Adventists showed up in my Youtube feed. They were talking about surviving outside of the Mark of the Beast System in a “No buy/No sell period of time that is very, very quickly approaching. See: Danna Gesellchen.
She confirmed several things that have been worrying me in the back of my mind for months. One was the thought, “If we ever escaped persecution to the forests, would we be kept safe from the wildlife?” And she addressed that very worry with the scripture in Ezekiel 34:25 which says:
“And I will make with them a covenant of peace, and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land: and they shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods.”
When I heard that scripture, I don’t know how I’ve missed it all these years, I had such a sense of peace. If we ever find ourselves in that situation I will be reminding the Lord of His Word very frequently, and trusting Him to keep it for us.
Secondly, the Lord has put it strongly in my mind during the past two years to study up on wild edible plant identification and foraging. Danna addressed this, too, very clearly, confirming my own intuition. Therefore, I have been studying up on them and collecting wild edible plant, edible herb, and medicinal herb seeds to plant around our ranch and in other areas in the future. I also wish to encourage all of you to purchase books on these topics. There is no reason for any of us to starve, if and when we don’t have access to our usual food sources in the future.
Just a reminder: The vaccines/gene therapy, kill shots, and their “Certificates of Vaccination”/QR codes on your phones, are precursors to the Mark of the Beast. The real Mark may be these things plus your driver’s license info, Medical information, Credit Card, banking info administered through a digital currency, Social Credit score Smart Mark that is put in your hand or forehead subcutaneously. It is coming once they crash the economy and go digital. Christians will not be able to buy or sell without it.
Therefore, you must be prepared to live outside of the system. In living outside of the system I believe that we will be eventually lacking in food and shelter and will be persecuted. What do you need to do now to prepare for those times, which are not far off: Know your wild edible plants. This is a important topic. Know how to build a shelter in the forest. Know how to get fresh water, and how to build a fire without matches.
May you all have a very blessed and safe week.
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
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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.