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:
This past week, I did some organizing in the barn. I also re-built our old sheep pen. That pen is about 800 square feet and is located just behind our sheep shed. We have lambing season rapidly approaching, so it was important to get both the shed and the pen comfortable for our ewes.
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We have had a very busy week, this week. The weather has been very springlike mostly cloudy and showery in the mid-fifties early in the week and sunnier and warmer at the end of the week. Spring is here!! Life is renewing itself!
This week a cabinet guy installed our counter tops. We removed one book shelf from the Great Room. I was able to sort through our hundreds of books, cull some, and get them back on the shelves and get our Great Room all rearranged after the painting job. It looks so nice and is so bright, fresh, and airy in there!! We love it!
We’re still working on cleaning up a bedroom after it was painted. We will be rearranging furniture in there and then Miss Violet will move into that room, shortly.
Over a several-day time period as the snow retreated in our near-house meadow, I have been laying down pasture grass seed. It is already sprouting.
I noticed my chives are coming up!
We have a couple of rotting rails that need replacing around our corrals in the past few weeks, a top rail and a middle rail. Our bull broke the middle rail. Because we have been so busy, Jim blocked the broken middle rail with a spare tube gate until we could get back to fixing the rails. (We are also waiting for the snow to melt off the pile of rail-size logs that we have tarped in a very shaded area.)
Earlier this week, I separated the horses from the cows and put them out into the south pasture. The cows didn’t like that. They missed their horse buddies. A couple of evenings later, the bull, my matriarch cow, and her three-year-old daughter, who were suffering from spring fever, stepped through the middle broken rail and squeezed through the bar gate and got out into the loafing yard. This caused a ruckus of bawling from the five other bovines who were too dense to figure out how to get out to join the other three. Jim and I went out to investigate and decided to let the five out to join the other three, since it would be a rodeo to get them all back in again.
Once they were all out, you should have seen them run, leap and kick up their hooves. This is so much fun to watch. They were so excited to be free. After a few moments of this behavior. They ran the loop of the perimeter of the ranch, then headed to the south pasture to greet the horses. I thought I might be able to get them to go into the south pasture to join the horses, but as I opened the gate, the horses ran out to join them. Then they all ran back to the loafing area. Therefore I decided to give them all a second dinner. I threw them an extra half bale of hay to share together.
This week, I collected nearly fifty fertilized eggs from my chickens and began to incubate them. Hopefully, in twenty-one days we will hatch out a fair number of chicks.
In light of the coming worldwide famine and concerning the Smittah year observance of letting the ground lay fallow this year. We decided that yes, we will let the Main garden lay fallow this year. The Main garden has not really had a break since I began planting it eleven years ago. I have let sections of it rest but not the whole plot. Therefore, it will not be cultivated at all this year.
But we will plant the Annex garden, because the Annex garden’s right side, rested all last summer. It grew thistles!! And the left side of the Annex garden was left fallow two summers ago. So this week, we raked both sections and plowed them. I will be, Lord willing, planting potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, onions, spinach, kale, and more in the next week. And I will be starting some others in the greenhouse. And I will be working on the herb garden.
This week I am taking a break from my Hebrew studies. I listened to the book of Exodus up to Chapter 12 and listened to the books of Matthew, Luke, and Revelation.
Keep stocking up while you can.
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.