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 continued with firewood cutting, splitting, and stacking, on four days this week. Both Lily and our Younger Daughter (“Miss Violet”) helped with the stacking. And I helped Lily with the potato harvest.
I made several trips into town for an SUV pre-repair diagnostic, to pick up mail, and to buy some parts for an upcoming project as well as 250 pounds of winter feed for our chickens.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We have had a lovely sunny week with temperatures as high as 87 degrees Fahrenheit and lows down to 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
This week has been all about the garden and the greenhouse and processing produce.
I’ve been harvesting more potatoes: More Purple Viking, Adirondack purples, and Yukons. All the while, I am pulling weeds and chucking more rocks that I find in our ancient river-deposited garden soil.
I harvested most of the celery. That was washed and chopped. Some was soon frozen, but most of it was dehydrated. I left some celery in the ground for fresh eating and to over-winter to produce seed for next summer. That which survives the cold will regrow and go to flower and produce seed for the next summer’s harvest.
I left parsnips from last year in the garden. This summer they produced flowers and seeds which I harvested this week, just some of them. There are more flowers whose seeds are not yet ripe enough to harvest and put away for next summer’s parsnip crop.
I have been processing Transparent Apples that I picked from our second tree. I have made freezer applesauce, and some more Apple, Spice, and Cashew dehydrated pancakes. I dehydrated sliced apples sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, and made an apple pie. Whew! We’ve been blessed with a lot of apples thusfar, this season. We still have four trees with apples that will ripen at the end of September and into October.
I planted for our fall garden in the harvested potato rows: Lettuces, cauliflower, pac choi, kale, chard, and onions from last summer that stayed firm/stored excellently all year, for seed for next summer.
We are beginning to harvest and eat carrots.
I harvested several quarts of pickling cucumbers. These, I washed and sliced and put in half-gallon jars with water and salt and fermented them.
I cleaned out the greenhouse, dumped most of the trays of spent greens. I moved to our porch two potted Zuchs, tomatoes, Rosemary starts, and our Fig tree. They are on the porch until such a time as we have a frost threatening. And then from this handy spot they will quickly be brought into the house. These will then overwinter in the house under grow lights for our tomato and zuchinni source. I will also move more herbs out of the greenhouse to the porch for the same reasons. Our greenhouse only holds about a five degree difference from outside winter temperatures. So it is easier to have some sensitive plants in a closer area to bring them in quickly. I have other zuchs, cukes, and tomatoes that are in the greenhouse in pots that are too big to move. I will take my chances with them in the greenhouse for as long as they might survive.
Onions that were harvested last week and dried in the greenhouse were bagged and put into our cold cellar room, as well as the garlic.
Last Sunday afternoon, it was so sunny and clear, beautiful bluebird skies, Miss Violet and I and a friend with her pup and our pup, canoed (me), and kayaked (Miss Violet and my Friend) down the river from our home to a pull-out about five miles away by road but perhaps eight miles away, by river. I had not yet traveled this stretch of The Un-named River and I had always wanted to do so. It took us just about five hours. It was an adventure and we nearly quit because the first hour had a lot of elevation drop, with rapids and very shallow sections, so that we had to get out and drag the canoe and kayaks over the gravel bars to the next deeper section. The pups had to keep getting out and then loading up when we reached deep enough water to float. That confused them and stressed us out a bit. Mostly because my friend’s pup had not yet been paddling with her in the kayak before. But we figured that he would learn from the example of my pup.
We do not have cell phone coverage anywhere in our valley for many miles, so the arrangement with Jim was that he would wait about two hours and then drive down to the pullout and work on his laptop computer while waiting for us to get there. After an hour of struggling we finally reached a pullout that we could get out if we wanted and we could walk home and get Jim before he left, but if we continued for another hour down the river then decided to get out we would be stuck because Jim would be at our destination and out of phone reach. So, as we lay on the rocks resting from our latest boat drag over the rocks, I asked my friend if she wanted to quit, she said yes, but that she wasn’t going to quit. Miss Violet said the same. So we got back into our respective little craft and paddled past the pullout. We were now in it for the duration.
After a few more shallow sections where we had to drag the boats, it became deeper, just a little bit, and we had fast water paddling for a while. It was FUN! Then the river gradient mellowed out and we had deep water paddling for the last two hours. Our river probably averages four feet deep this late in the summer and it is crystal clear. But at some sharp bends there are pools that are easily forty feet deep, because it gets black dark and one cannot see the bottom for a few moments. Since I know that the water is crystal clear, it must be that deep. We watched for trout and saw a fair number. The largest I saw were about fourteen inches long. It’s kinda sad because when I first moved here 14 years ago, the river had a lot of trout easily two feet long. I haven’t seen them that big in years.
For birds on this outing, I saw several Mergansers, a Black Duck, a Kingfisher, and a water thrush. One of the Mergansers dove under the water from in front of me and swam upstream past Miss Violet and past my friend and continued upstream for a long way. I could see it swim under the water past Miss Violet and my friend until it went into a shady area near the bank. It was so cool to see how streamlined it was almost like a torpedo but a bit rounder and yet how swiftly it swam. Miss H. our pup also saw the bird and watched it go. It was fun to see her see the trout swimming by, too. Their movement would catch her eye and she would perk up her ears and turn her head toward them in such a cute manner and key on to it until it went out of her sight. I would see the same fish and tell her that it was a fish, a trout. “Do you see the fish, H?” The pup makes me chuckle all of the time when she notices things.
When the river became quieter, we stopped a few times along the banks and racked up to relax in the sun and snack together, and talk. Once, Miss H. tried to get on my friend’s double kayak, but I didn’t let her. I was afraid that she would tip her over and it was deep at that spot. Since in the summer the river is largely springwater-fed, the water is only about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, even in the late summer. So, whereas we didn’t mind walking in the shallows, a full immersion would be quite shocking.
My friend is also into preparing for what is coming. She works full time and doesn’t have a lot of time to do the prepping things that she would like to do — including more food preservation and more outdoor adventures and getting into physical shape, etc. I thought she would be mad at me for taking her on such a remote and difficult part of the river with potential dangers: slippery rocks, “sweepers”, the potential for grizzly bears, mountain lions, and wolves, and being so physically taxing with multiple times having to drag our boats across water bars. She had slipped on slimy rocks twice and sat down hard in the water. But she said even though it was a hard slog at times in the beginning and that she wanted to quit after that first hour, she recognized and said that she needs to toughen up and handle hard things that are difficult to do for the days that are coming. She senses too, that they are going to be very, very difficult for all of us and this trip to her was just part of the training that we need. She said that she wasn’t mad at me. She felt like it was a wonderful and bonding time with me and Miss Violet and our pups and a great, though tiring experience. I am so thankful that she felt that way. I was a bit worried. I have ticked off people in the past who are not as adventurous as me…dragging them off trail through thick bushed woods. 😉 We made it to our pullout area and Jim was there waiting for us. He graciously helped us load everything up into our trailer and packed away our gear in the back of the SUV.
As he was helping Miss Violet, first to get her Kayak out of the water and My friend and I were just floating offshore a bit, Miss H, disembarked from my canoe and was running around the parking area. She then saw that I still wasn’t out of the river, so she came back and jumped into my canoe and then jumped out of my canoe onto my friend’s double kayak to sit with her pup. Her kayak easily handled the weight of my pup. We laughed.
Our dog H. went to the end of her kayak and sat down for a moment looking out at the water. She looked ready to go paddling again. She looked happy because she had wanted to get on my friend’s kayak several times during the paddle and we hadn’t let her and now she got to do what she had wanted to do. Anyhow, she soon realized that we were loading up the kayaks and quickly disembarked from her kayak for it was next in line to be loaded into the trailer. Pups!
Jim said to me before the trip that he likes waiting for me to pick me up from my river adventures, because it’s “Romantic”! 😉 I love my man! What a guy he is.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– 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.