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 hauled more than a dozen Gorilla Carts of compost to edge of one of our treelines, to form squash planting mounds. Lily planted those immediately after we soaked them with a sprinkler.
Our daughter dragged dozens of downed limbs out of our woodlot, to stack another slash pile. For a little gal, she is a very hard worker. We are proud of her.
I’ve been busy packing and mailing out Elk Creek Company orders, during our current sale on pre-1899 Mauser rifles. I expect a lot more orders, now that we’ve bumped our silver divisor up to 26.5 times face value. That is the most that we’ve ever allowed, when taking pre-1965 silver coins in trade.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather has been gorgeous this week with sunshine and a few clouds with very brief sprinkles of rain, with temperatures highs in the seventies Fahrenheit. Lows of about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The summer birds are all here, the Hermit and Swainson thrushes, Soras, Orioles, Flycatchers, Phoebees, cat birds, Western Tanagers, etc. I’ve been listening to their calls throughout the day and in the evening hours. It’s so wonderful to hear the thrushes calling in the early evenings. I love hearing their liquid trilling notes.
One afternoon, The Pup, H. and I went to check out the flooding in the Outer meadow. The mountain snow melt always floods our Outer meadows. (But not, usually, any part of the near-house meadow.) I usually canoe it, but not this year, because I have been much too busy with the lambs, and the water has already receded a lot. The pup LOVES running through the meadows and swimming through the channels that are really deep at this time of the year.
As we were walking along the raised dry berm next to the Unnamed River, I heard the short call cry of a Mountain lion just up the mountain, across the river. Though it wasn’t as quick in succession as this one’s cry in this video short. Oops, unwisely, I had forgotten to clip on my holstered Glock before leaving the house.
So I called the pup to me and we made a quick beeline for the house meadow. The pup loved it that I “ran/jogged” through the water with her all the way to the house meadow. We didn’t see the Mountain Lion. It was on the other side of the river, but… Our neighbors’ stoop camera had picked up a mountain lion crossing their front door steps several times in the past month, so most likely it was this one, that I was hearing. It is holding close into our area this spring…Oh, well, just have to remember to carry when further away from the house.
I carry off and on depending in where I am going and what is happening. Miss H. our pup is usually with me, so I would think that she would scare most things off. When I first go out in the morning, I take a look at our horse to see what she is up to, because if there is something to be alert about, then she’ll be on it. Last week, she alerted me to a moose that was at our other neighbor’s ranch, across the river.
This week was much about the sheep of both flocks. I’ve been milking the fiber meat flock, three of those girls, “B”, “4”, “G”. “4” is part of her tag number. Only my three base/original females have tags. I’m only milking one of those, the other two have twins and one has an udder issue. The rest of the flock have various colored collars, for identification.
The twin lambies that are being fostered are doing super well. Foster Mama is doing super well with them. We are very proud of her They remain jugged up together. I will keep them jugged together for the rest of this week to be doubly sure, then will let them out to mingle with the rest of the flock. I am only feeding the bummers eight ounces at bed time, just to top them off, especially “A” who I don’t see nursing as often as her sister, “P”. Regardless, they are growing so fast. Amazingly as of today they are already thirteen days old! I’ve read that generally speaking lambs that reach ten days of age will most likely survive to adulthood…
The Very Scary-Tiny babies, “J” and “J” are looking really robust after thirteen days of nursing from their mom’s rich milk. It’s truly amazing how fast they grow. However, I caught the very first born lamb of the season, who is big and robust, stealing milk from the mama of the scary tiny babies, Grr. Babies are growing nicely despite the nipper. But this means that her mother, who is the other senior mama, that I was only going to permit one more breeding from, whose udder isn’t that great, thus the baby is probably having a difficult time extracting all that she wants. The udder is very big and very saggy and very difficult to milk by hand, the few times I tried. She is seven years old.
The Mama of the bummer twins, with the dead udder, is five years old, and has just about given up on them being hers. She has stopped crying at the fence line. So sad, but if she cannot feed them… So it looks as though we will be butchering out the two senior ewes this late summer and the ram from this flock.
Every morning now, after feeding hay, grain ration and watering the sheep, the heifer (more on her in a moment) and chickens, and milking the meat flock and cow, I go to my orchard with the hand scythe and chop an overflowing wheelbarrow’s worth of mixed grasses, dandelions, thistles, some clover, and Heal all, and feed it to both flocks of sheep and to the heifer.
The yearling heifer cow was discovered in the past two or three weeks to be nursing from her mother who has a new calf, (who is now well after having a bout with bloody scours), that we separated her from to stop the nursing that was stealing nutrients from mama and new baby. I spent a week keeping her with the bull in the corrals, while letting mother and baby be together day and night in the stalls for a time to regain their calories. Then, for a few days I let the bull and heifer out to graze the meadows.
I later let mama and baby out with them to graze. But I caught the heifer latching on to mother, again. It made me very upset. So, about four days ago, I enticed heifer cow into one of the sheep pens that Jim built a few weeks ago, that are as yet unoccupied (they are for breeding purposes for early this fall) and there she will be residing for the forseeable future, which means I have to feed her hay and fresh cut grass from the orchard, too. Now, however, I can separate the calf at night with the bull from his mother and milk his mother, just a little bit in the mornings, a quart from one quarter, then reunite them after milking. I want to make cheese for Jim and Miss Violet from the cow milk, and of course they can drink it. Then I let mother, calf and bull out to graze the rest of the day. They tend to graze for a bit then loaf around the sheep pen where the heifer is now residing. They all hate being separated from each other, but if one is not respecting boundaries….Then they cannot be together.
This week, I harvested Rhubarb and chopped and froze it for a future pie.
I planted squashes in a three mounds of manure that Jim built for me in a clear section of our woods. Jim built an additional two more on Friday that I will be planting next week.
I did a lot of cleaning, organizing and laundry.
I made yogurt after a few days hiatus now that the milk that I’m getting from the three sheep doesn’t all have to go to the bummer twins.
The three of us went for a hike in the adjoining National Forest and I foraged some Buck Brush leaves and flowers, to make a hair rinse. (I have yet to make the hair rinse and try it.)
Miss Violet and I went for a canoe/kayak paddle in the local unnamed lake one evening. We paddled along the area that we ice skated just 14 weeks ago. My, time is just flying by. It was a beautiful paddle.
I had to replant cucumbers. Of the hundreds of seeds I planted both outside in mounded rows and in the greenhouse only three came up outside and only one came up in the greenhouse? The seeds were from last summer, too.
Of the sweet peppers seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago in the greenhouse, only five plants have sprouted, thus far…..Such poor germination rates?
I weed-whacked a section of our South pasture where the Knapweed is taking over. I intend to keep it down this summer.
I cleaned out the Hen House. We had almost two dozen chicks hatch last weekend from the last incubation. They are growing fast, too. At the end of the week, we transitioned them out to the Inner Hen house in the big Hen house. The last two batches of chicks have been successfully integrated into the larger adult flocks. The January chicks are now laying their trainer eggs.
I washed our living room floor rug outside on our cement pad.
I read a lot of the book “Following the Wild Bees” by Thomas Seeley. It is a very interesting little book about capturing honey bees in the forest, marking them, feeding them and tracking them over a day’s duration to their bee tree. It is a very very interesting scientific pursuit.
When I was in college studying Ecology, I made a list of subjects that I really wanted to study more indepthly in life that I wasn’t able to study at the college, because of limited time, or courses not available, etc. and bees and Bee Ecology was one of those subjects and here I’m doing it now. So neat. Other subjects that I wanted to pursue more studies on were, Winter Ecology, Fire Ecology, Astronomy, Wild edibles, Ornithology, Creationism and of course the Hebrew language and the other ancient languages of Greek and Latin. All of these, I’ve done some study of in adult life. In college, besides taking the basic core courses of Botany, Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Basic Ecology, Plant and Animal Physiology, I focused on Wildlife Ecology, Forest Ecology, Stream Ecology, Limnology, and Peatland Ecology. Later, after graduating, I took a basic Meteorology and Ornithology courses. In a nutshell, I like studying all the aspects of our Father’s created world. 😉
Our Red and Golden Raspberries are flowering and the bees are in the thick of it. There is a very distinct hum from our girls working those flowers in that side of the garden. Lovely!
I wrote out more of Chapter 12 of Matthew.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
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.