To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both 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 the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
I took advantage of the recent nice weather to start in on my annual firewood cutting here at the Rawles Ranch. As usual, I started in with dead-standing trees and a couple of deadfalls. There were not many of either, this year. And there were just a few irreparably “snow-squashed” young fir trees. My next target will be the “leaners.” Again, there won’t be many left to fell, this year. It has taken a dozen years, but I finally have our stands of timber looking the way that I want them. I am thankful to God for his providence! I’m just trying to be a good steward of what he has given us.
Now, Lily’s report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Happy Spring to you all! We had a gorgeous week here in the northern American Redoubt; Sunshine with temperatures in the sixties. It was “shorts” weather. I soaked up lots of sun while doing chores. I also took a couple of naps in the sunshine in the garden on my inflatable sleeping pad. It was just a lovely week. At the end of the week the clouds and rain returned. There is a possibility of accumulating snow over the weekend. I pray not.
The migratory birds are now in full return mode. This week I heard the Winter wren, Flickers, Song Sparrows, Juncoes, and Red-winged Blackbirds.
So this week I finished scrubbing out the Redneck pool and refilled it. This is the earliest we have ever done that. I will have to clean it out multiple times in the months ahead. It’s just the nature of the beast. It’s a redneck pool: Just a hole in the ground with a pond liner. ;-). But we love it.
As you know I have been marking the progress of the sun through the year at our ranch through observation and through the Time and Date website. I had bought a Survivalist Science experiment kit for the grandsons around Christmas time to do with them when they visit this summer. I had been studying its booklet. It has a paper sundial in it. On Equinox March 19th when the sun supposedly is in the place in the sky to give us exactly twelve hours of sunlight and twelve hours of darkness, It’s not exact because of one’s latitude, ours is 12 hours eight minutes and the sun rises at 91 degrees east and sets at 271 degrees west, not the 90, 270 that it was two days earlier. Since we had sunshine and warm weather, I decided to see how the sundial worked. I set it up according to our latitude. It was off by two hours. I was thinking how can that be? After thinking about what may cause this, our mountains blocking the first 20 or so degrees and Daylight Savings an hour ahead, and maybe the actual increments are not uniform like on the paper card, I decided to do our own sundial according to how the sun hits our ranch at each hour.
I set a slender wooden post in the ground, collected fourteen cut slate squares we had left over from a kitchen project and watched the time from my computer. Each slate I measured and marked with a pen the exact center of each slate and wrote down the hour under the mark. Then starting at 11:00AM when the shadow fell at a certain spot exactly at 11:00 AM I placed my marked slate exactly in the middle of the shadow, exactly 54 inches out from the wooden post. Five minutes before the top of each hour, I ran to the sundial, and placed another slate down in exactly the center of the shadow. I did that until 6PM. Around 6:35PM the sun drops behind the mountain to our west. Thus ends our sun tracking day on the Spring Equinox. The sun rises over our east mountains about 9:50 AM so the next morning I was out at that time awaiting for the sun to rise over the Mountain so I could set the 10:00 AM slate. As the spring and summer progresses, I will be placing the slate markers exactly at the 7, 8, and 9 AM spots and the 7, 8, 9, PM spots. Thus tracking the full amount of sunshine hours at summer solstice on our ranch. We might not see the sun at 7 AM because of the height of our nearby mountains. But we’ll see.
In the Main garden, last fall, I transferred most of my Strawberry patch down to a new bed in the orchard. This week I transferred the rest of the Strawberry patch to the orchard. We cleaned up the garden area. I had some pots and boards that needed to be moved elsewhere.
Our final lamb of the season was born this week, another little ewe.
I made my own “air” Sourdough starter and made Sourdough bread. I mixed a quarter cup of ground Einkorn flour with a quarter cup of water mixed it up and left it on the shelf with an open top for twenty-four hours. It began to bubble. The next day, I added another quarter cup of flour and a quarter cup of water, stirred it in and left it on the shelf. It continued to bubble. I did that for four days and then made Sourdough bread with it. It was so good to eat after not eating any type of bread for the past three years. Oh My goodness! It didn’t bother me at all. We captured a yummy wild yeast in our home. ;-). In the past, store-bought yeast bothered me, as well as the modern-day hybrid wheat, that we have had since 1950 in the USA. But this natural wild yeast and Natural Einkorn, don’t. I highly recommend Einkorn to all who are gluten-sensitive.
We picked up a large order of Einkorn in 25-pound sacks this week, to supplement our other stored grains.
I did some bike riding around the ranch.
I read some of the book of Ruth in Hebrew. I re-read some of Exodus.
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.