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:
Because of an injury, I had a quiet week. I concentrated on writing and editing the blog in advance. What happened? I broke a toe, while doing some carpentry. Here is a recap of my mishap: I was building a base for a new outhouse. I used treated 6x6s to construct the base, which measures 4 feet square. Just after squaring it up, and attaching some 2x6s with power screws, I wanted to flip it over, to cut tapers on the front of the 6×6 skids, to make it easier to tow around the Wee House with a tractor or ATV. At that point, the outhouse base weighed almost 200 pounds. When I flipped it over, I misjudged the distance and one of the skids landed on my big toe. Ouch! I was not wearing steel-toed boots. Thankfully, I had been standing on uncompacted gravel. If my foot had been on concrete, this accident might have severed one or more toes. I had a lot of pain for the first four days. It is gradually diminishing. With a broken toe, my mobility will be hampered from most outdoor chores for several weeks. Learn from my mistake: Think things through, move slowly, and wear safety shoes or boots whenever moving heavy objects!
With that injury, I couldn’t do much more than drive our SUV and our pickup to the nearest town for their seasonal snow tire swaps. (Those are already on rims, so it is quick and easy.) There is a lot of snow in the forecast for this coming winter, at least in our region. I hate just hobbling around. But I’ll make the best of it. I plan to catch up on organization projects that don’t require much standing or walking
Now, Lily’s report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had some rain this week. We received our first dusting of snow from about the five-thousand foot level up to the top of the Unnamed mountain. I thought we would have had more rain and snow, this week, but the sun has come back out. It looks as though we will have rain for the foreseeable future starting on Saturday. We had a few more frosts during some nights this week. High temperatures were in the high fifties and low sixties.
This week we were mainly maintaining that which we have. I worked some more in the garden, plowing and pulling weed roots. The greens seeds I planted in the greenhouse are sprouting. I cleaned out the cow shed, chicken, Hen House, and sheep shed.
As you will see in the following paragraphs, we have had some issues we are troubleshooting.
I cleaned the house. I did more vaccumming, washing floors, and laundry, and cooking from scratch, etc.
I bought leather boots from L.L.Bean two years ago, before we decided to boycott them for Wokeness policies. I love the boots. I wore them all summer without caring for them. This week, I slowed down, took them off, scrubbed them, and then treated the leather with Bee Natural Leather Care Leather Amore by the woodstove. They were so dried out that it took seven coats to get the leather back to good condition. They had splits in the two boots near the big toe. Hopefully, the conditioning will slow down the splitting. Other than the two splits, they look and feel great again.
Currently, we are having plumbing issues in the Master bedroom bathroom. Our usual all-around fix-it guy is on a month-long trip. So Jim and I and Miss Violet are all using the Two Guest bathrooms in the main part of the house during the day. Miss Violet’s guest room bathroom has a shower that works, the other bathroom’s shower does not work, but we can use that tub if we want to. Generally speaking, we are not bath persons.
Jim and I, for our middle-of-the night, wee-wee needs, are using the portable Lugloo toilet seat on a five-gallon bucket. I don’t mind using that. We dump the liquid contents in the garden in the morning while it is still fresh and doesn’t have a large bacteria content. I burn the TP that was used and thrown into a trash can next to the loo. I’m okay with urine in the garden this time of the year because it will have the whole winter to break down. Otherwise, I don’t trust or believe in using humanore for the other/#2, at all.
Since all three of us like to shower and are using the other shower in the house, I decided that we each need our own colored towel and washcloth, to distinguish who’s is who’s. Miss Violet and I usually use white towels. And they are also for guests. But they were getting old and stained and we were using a new one every single shower thus creating a ridiculous amount of laundry. So I sorted through stained white bath towels that we were using, culled some for rags for the future, and brought in some new white ones from the storage in the shop for guests, only! I chose three different colored ones for our use. So hopefully now with each of us having one towel of our own designated color, we won’t have so much laundry. Now that the colder damper weather is here, our clothes are not drying as well outside on the racks, or in the house even with the wood stove going, currently. So I have to finish drying them in the electric dryer, and that is a poor machine. It takes about three runs for it to get things dry if coming straight from the washer. I rarely used it at all this summer, since we had all of that lovely sunshine and heat to dry our freshly laundered clothes. Anyhow, less laundry overall will be better all around.
Well, last week I mentioned that on several occasions, I had been sort of hearing from the Lord but hadn’t “caught” the word and acted on it as I should have and had several severe losses. I just want to report that one of the losses righted itself, and we are rejoicing because of that. We lost something valuable and thought it had been stolen because I didn’t move it to our vault when I heard the Father say to do so before we left on our trip. Well, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be when we returned home. It turned out that Jim had seen it on my bedside cabinet after I had been looking at it and trying to decide what to do with it. I guess I had left it out. We just don’t remember all of the circumstances surrounding it. He stuffed it in his computer bag, forgot about it, and took it unbeknownst to us on our trip to New England. He found it this past week, in the computer bag, three weeks after returning home. I discovered it was missing two weeks ago, when Jim asked about it, and I went to look for it in the drawer and it wasn’t there. We are so pleased that it was found and not stolen. It was an awful feeling to think that someones had possibly violated our space and trust and taken something from us. It’s awful to look at some friends, not just the ones who took care of our place but their relatives and other friends and relatives, who knew we had gone and run through ones mind if they were the guilty party. We were so glad that we had not said anything to anyone about it, either. The Father seemed to tell us to remain quiet, even though I so badly wanted to say something. Our silence definitely saved multiple friendships, I am sure. And because we found it, it increased our trust in our friends, to know that they were trustworthy to us all along and we could still trust them in the future. We praise the Father for that answer to prayer.
The other two losses cannot be recovered. They occurred during two consecutive nights after returning home. I take full blame for those, for not acting on the Father’s promptings to check on something to make sure it was closed.
The first incident occurred with some feral chickens a friend gave me. They were supposed to fend for themselves in the wild and had been doing a great job of doing so. One of the hens hatched out some chicks after we returned home from our trip. She took to brooding the chicks in our open hay barn because I was feeding her grain with my other birds near there. The barn floor is not a safe place for her and her and her chicks. We have a ton of skunks and other critters about coming around to look for a free meal of grain or chicks. I knew that during the past three nights. Mama had been brooding the chicks in the barn. I thought she was playing “Russian Roulette” and I wished I could catch her and the babes and put them somewhere safer at night. She would have been much safer out under a bush in the meadow, in my opinion, than in the barn. But since her flock roosted in the barn on a shelf she wanted to be near them and since I fed and watered the other chickens around the barnyard during the day she liked being there. So one evening, while I fed my other chickens just inside the run door, all four the the baby chicks went inside the run to get some grain. They were only about two weeks old. Mama did not go in there. It crossed my mind to catch them and try to get Mama and put them in the inner coop of the hen house. I could have caught them. But I most likely wouldn’t have been able to catch Mama. So, I didn’t do it. I didn’t know exactly where she was brooding at night, so there was no way for me to get her after dark. I left her that night to do her thing. I really wanted them to be wild and am trying to work on “Survival of the Fittest”. Sadly, the next morning Mama hen greeted me, crying with no chicks about her and a trail of feathers going across the parking lot. All four chicks were gone. I felt very bad about it. These birds were touted as being very wild/feral, able to fend for themselves, raise their chicks without intervention, etc, which is why I took them on.
That same evening, as I was again putting my chickens to bed, after a full summer of leaving the hen house windows open day and night with screens on them, with no issues whatsoever, the Father dropped the thought in my mind to close the windows to the Hen house. But, I had already closed them both, I had thought. But I had already closed only one of the windows a few weeks ago. I stood in the doorway and looked at the left window when the thought came to my mind, and it looked closed. I should have actually walked into the coop and closed it. But, I didn’t. The next morning, still feeling sleepy, I went to the coop opened the door, and looked straight to the back right corner. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw a dead half-eaten chicken in the corner. My eyes quickly scanned to the left to see if the guillotine door was open. It was closed. Next to the guillotine door, I saw my usual floor birds in that corner against the wire of the inner coop, looking fine. I quickly looked up and saw my other usual birds on their roosting boards. My eyes quickly continued to sweep left to the window on the left. The screen was broken!!!! I remembered the thought to close the window the night before flashed through my mind. My eyes swept up to the roost on my left and the usual birds were there as well as the ones up on my right. My eyes dropped to the floor to my left corner by the door. Lo, there was a pile of dead chickens on the floor. Oh No!!!!! AWFUL! I immediately stepped up into the coop, walked over to the window with the broken screen, and closed it. I had thought was closed! I hadn’t checked to make sure it was closed after being prompted by our Father in heaven. Feeling thoroughly devastated and chastized for not obeying the prompting the night before, I went out and went to the house to tell Jim. He came out, and we retrieved a wheelbarrow and counted dead chickens. There were twenty-two of them. One was still alive and had to be dispatched by Jim. That is about a 20% loss of our flock. Painful!
I think that whatever it was that had killed the four chicks the night before, came back to see if it could eat something more. Whatever it was, most likely a raccoon or a bobcat, it couldn’t be a skunk, because I have never seen them climb up onto things and they are not strong enough to break a screened window or go through chicken wire…A bear would have been too big for the window. Anyway, as far as I know, only Skunks and raccoons go on killing sprees..? It had to be an animal big and strong enough to break through the screen and chew through the chicken wire because it also broke into the bottom of the chicken wire of the Inner Chicken coop. After dumping the chicken carcasses in a hole we had recently dug for the outhouse and filling it back up with soil, we will now dig another new spot for the outhouse, Jim cut hardware wire and nailed it to both windows, so in the future, we can open the windows again, and not risk another beastie breaking in.
I have now, made it a huge point in my day to make sure I am outside at dusk and closing in the birds at night and making sure their front door is locked. And I am making sure that the sheep are locked in their shed at night and the Cows also.
We are entering days in which not only four-legged predators want your livestock but also some two-legged predators also.
Anyhow, those were the three times I heard the Father speak recently, and didn’t act on the Word and, suffered a near loss and then two real losses. We need to really ask HIm to speak louder and for us to get quieter on a regular basis to hear what His saying to us. He wants to help us. He wants us to hear him and obey him. Father help me.
We went to town a few times this week to get winter tires put on two of our vehicles. We picked up groceries that I cannot grow here, avocados, limes, pomegranates, grapes, cashews, walnuts, etc. Also on the second trip, Jim picked up grains and alfalfa pellets for the chickens and the Mama cow, respectively.
I picked the last of the apples off of my three producing fall apple trees.
I picked Hazelnuts from our two Hazelnut bushes. This year they produced only about a pint of nuts. Hopefully next summer they will produce more prolifically.
I planted Rose flower seeds all over the ranch that I collected from rosehips that I dehydrated. Additionally, I had elderberry fruit that I harvested from our trees. I also spread many of those out about our land.
We are having serious smoking issues with our wood cook stove. We need to get someone who is young, very nimble, and well-balanced to get up on our roof to remove the spark arrester and to look inside the chimney to see if there is something blocking the free flow/draft of the smoke. When I last fired it up this past week, smoke was coming out of it, but it was also smoking in the house. So we don’t really know what the issue is. It hasn’t been a priority up until now. We have so many other things on our plate to do.
So in the meantime, I have been doing some cooking in our wood heating stove. I build a fire, burn the wood down to coals, move the coals aside, and put my cast iron stew pot in the side of the stove with the coals moved aside, and cook it. I have made several stews, sourdough bread, and an apple pie. It is fun for me to cook like this.
Also, twice now our propane oven has acted up. I cleaned the element the first time and it worked well again. Now, a week and a half later, it’s not working again. We think the sparky thing has bit the dust. So, until we get the part and fix it, the baking will have to be done in the wood cook stove or in our little toaster oven. I bake all of the time, a lot of chicken, salmon, roasts, squash, potatoes, Einkorn muffins and cookies, etc
Our recently bought new modern appliances, propane stove, clothes dryer and, a washing machine, in the past three years, have had very poor performances and short lives. Is this by design, perhaps, Hmmm?????Seems like their condition, as well as what we are about to face anyway, is causing us to step more often, away from modern conveniences. We are in a good training ground right now.
At the end of this week, I pulled out our solar oven and read up on it. I’m hoping to give it a try on the next very sunny day.
The last time I used my Presto pressure canner, it did not come up to pressure. I’m not much into pressure canning anyhow, not from fear of the thing, but because I feel that it removes far too many nutrients from our foods. Therefore, I left it alone for some months, and instead of pressure canning, I continued freezing, dehydrating, and fermenting our harvested foods. This coming week, I would like to can up some broth, because we have too many soup bones taking up space in our freezers. So, in light of it not working the last time I tried it, I replaced its sealing ring and over-pressure plug with new ones and gave it another try. That did the job. It is working, again. So, Lord willing, I plan to make beef bone broth next week for future soups.
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.