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 [1], 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:
Lily and I cleaned out the sheep shed. That mixed sheep manure and hay bedding was hauled via wheelbarrow to one of our compost piles near the main garden.
I helped an ailing neighbor, by cutting and stacking most of his annual firewood supply.
The lambing season for our fiber flock has been complete for more than a month. But lambing has just begun with our other sheep flock — the one with a larger breed, dedicated to milk and meat. Lily will give you the details in her part of the weekly report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather this week was intermittently cloudy with some sun and a few rain showers. Temperature highs were in the mid-sixties.
We recently celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary! We celebrated by going for an exploratory drive through the National Forest that we hadn’t been to for several years. We did some hiking and we parked at a scenic spot, to smooch! It has been a wonderful fifteen years! I love you Jim, and look forward to sharing at least another forty years of sharing life with you as your wife and partner, if our Lord and savior Jesus Christ tarries.
This week was super busy. I cleaned the cow stalls, the henhouse, and the sheep shed. (With some help from Jim.)
I mowed the garden paths in the Main garden.
I decided after much study of the extended weather forecast, that we might not have another frost this spring soo…. I planted Zucchini, corn, beans, Delicata, Blue Hubbard, and Burgess squash seeds and some of my tomato seedlings in the Main garden. I figure that I have enough clear totes and blankets to cover them if a frost seems to threaten, to protect them.
In the greenhouse, I started in three inch pots, thirty-six of each: watermelons, cantaloupe, and pepper seeds. I didn’t have enough peppers that I started back in January, only nine of those survived. So I needed more.
Miss Violet and I gathered three quart’s worth of dehydrated Dandelion flowers this week. Additionally. we picked and dried a quart’s worth of red raspberry leaves.
I made Dandelion Fritters again this week, Yum!
I hand-scythed the long grass In the Main garden along the edges and in between raspberry canes, and from the orchard for the animals in the corrals. I’m leaving them cooped up to give our meadows time to grow grass to seed to naturally reseed the meadows, then I intend to mow the grass and then let the animals free graze for the rest of the summer. In the meantime, there is plenty of grass growing in the orchard for me to cut and give to them in addition to their regular stored hay.
I continued to make sheep yogurt, yogurt cream cheese, and butter with milk from my meat and fiber flock ewe.
In my dairy sheep flock, “N” birthed a little ewe lamb in the early hours of Wednesday morning. I’m looking forward to milking “N” in the coming weeks. The dairy ewes are reported from their previous owner, to produce up to a half gallon of milk each, per day. I have a total of four ewes in that flock. Three of them are due in the coming weeks. I’m really looking forward to getting that quantity of milk. My plan is to freeze some and to make sheep cheeses and yogurts. Also, in running these two flocks, I have a darker colored flock and the Dairy sheep have white fleeces, so that gives me more options for fiber arts to have two wool colors, and one that can be dyed any color that I want.
I’ve been so busy, recently, that I failed to notice that my cow’s yearling calf was nursing off her at the same time that the new baby calf was nursing. The calf is only five weeks old. I separated the mom and new baby one night for the first time, to milk the cow in the morning. I milked her the next morning, just a bit, and took about twelve ounces. Then let her out her out and watched the new calf latch on her, then I saw her yearling heifer do the same. She was literally hogging the milk being so much bigger and stronger. I was very unhappy to see that. She had been weaned last December and I had watched her and the mama cow interact after the baby was born and it seemed that the mom had kept the yearling away in the beginning, but some time in the past two weeks or so, she must have started in. But, whenever I looked in on them, I would only see the baby nursing, and the few times that the yearling had appeared interested when I was there watching, the mama had discouraged her in my sight. Therefore, I thought all was good. So I was really surprised to see it that morning.
The calf is looking a bit thinner than it should and mom is a bit thin. So that evening, I separated the mom and calf from the yearling and bull and put them in the two open adjoining stalls, and for the past four days have been keeping just the mama and the new calf together in there. I have been feeding them extra hay, Alfalfa pellets, and the cut grass. The baby wants to be with big sister in the outdoors, not be closed up, and big sister wants to be with mama. (She has been bawling her head off.) But I’m not going to let them. Later, after the calorie deficit in baby and mama have been remedied, perhaps I will try milking her again, so I can make cheese for Jim and Miss Violet.
I am beginning to think that I might really prefer milking the sheep much better than the cow. Sheep are smaller, more easy to manage, and they are safer. Jim and Miss Violet enjoy the sheep milk, and I love the sheep and their sheep milk dairy products which agree with my system more than cow’s milk. I still haven’t tried the A2 cow milk. But since I did react to cow milk in the past and I’ve heard that folks who had a bad reaction to A1 milk sometimes continue to react to A2 cow milk, too. So…I’m doing fine with the sheep milk and there is much higher protein, calcium, and omega-3 fats in Sheep milk than cow milk. I think I might just want to stick with it and keep the cows just for meat…We’ll see… Stuff is always changing around here.
I wrote out chapter nine in Matthew this week.
A quite important video to watch: Brain-computer interface. [2]
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.