Posted on 03/12/2022 5:43:54 AM PST by Pollard
I've been meaning to do a prepper thread for a while now and will do my best to start one the first Saturday of each month from here out.
When you start prepping, it's about stocking up on food, water and supplies and maybe having a BOB(Bug Out Bag) and a retreat to bug out to. That leads to moving to that retreat which is usually away from the cities and your retreat likely is larger than the typical city/suburb home lot. In fact, you probably have room to produce some of your needs. Basic prepping leads to living in a more self sufficient way and producing some of your needs. It's a natural progression and as such, I'm calling these threads, Prepping & Self Sufficiency threads.
In preparation for this, I've reworked my profile page and also included a lot of info that freeper Pete from Shawnee Mission has been collecting from past Weekly Gardening threads. Gardening is a part of prepping and self-sufficiency but I'm far from being an expert so be sure to join in the weekly gardening threads. The best way to find past gardening threads seems to be by doing a keyword or tag search for "gardening:. https://freerepublic.com/tag/gardening/index?tab=articles
Thanks for posting this. I have managed to get my kids to do more prepping.
I was telling my son the other day, when we were talking about the current situation in this country, that we knew this day was coming, it was just a matter of when.
Pasta is getting sparse.
So far, flour at BJ’s is still available and not gone up in price. Yet.
I like to see prepping in 2 categories::
bomb shelter prepping, and
naked in the woods prepping.
Bomb shelter prepping is merely supplies storage. It’s dollar heavy but a hoard of supplies is a great stop gap to fill the time between the end of one paradigm while you learn and get your next reality up and running.
Naked in the woods prepping is exclusively skills prepping excluding getting the very few tools you might take with you. This one is preparing your mind with a knowledge base of foraging and bush survival. This is a huge confidence booster when you see yourself accomplishing tasks and is critical to building morale in desperate times - something you will not get if you’re locked in a bomb shelter.
A balance of 2 is always preferable - I’m doing both bomb shelter and woods prepping. My goal however is to be able to disappear in the forest and survive like sasquatch when the time comes. I see myself living energetically with God’s natural wilderness rather than smothering in some man made steel and cement culvert.
“Most people lost in the wilds die of shame. They die of shame. What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this? And so they sit there and they die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives - think.” - from 1997 movie Edge
If you have a ping list for your prepper thread, please add me. I am interested mainly in learning how to be self-sufficient if need be, for many reasons. Thanks.
Just did my weekly shopping trip, the one I do every week regardless of current needs. Picked up great deal (90% off) some canned goods. My local supermarket always has something in the store that is 90% off but not close to expiring.
please add me to the ping list
Metmom, I have Hypoglycemia and am much healthier if I stay away from pasta, wheat, bread, potatoes (except sweet potatoes- yams), rice, and of course sugar. This makes if very difficult to store and stock up on food.
In zone 8, goats shouldn’t need any supplementation.
Paddocks and “stockpiled forage”. That is keeping them off areas and letting it grow. I’m just starting to get into that. I let them on a spot last year in November. If I hadn’t kept them off of it, they would have had it eaten down short already. Only after they had eaten every tree/shrub leaf they could reach did I let them have access to that little paddock. They were starting to eat brown leaves off the ground at that point. I need more cross fencing for more paddocks to do it right.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stockpiled+forage
Look up Greg Judy on youtube. He only feeds hay when he unrolls it to use for seeding bare or thin spots. Other than that, he stockpiles forage. He’s a little ways Borth of me in Missouri.
If I rake away some leaves in some places, there’s green grass underneath. If I go down the road to some bottom land that hasn’t been mowed or had animals on it in a few years, I can see green grass down in the tall brown grass. That same piece of land comes up the hill and is right across from me. It’s not bottom land but hasn’t been mowed or had animals on it either and I bet if I(or the goats) went over there and dug around, there would be something green or at least edible. The deer seem to be eating something there.
I did have a neighbor give me four round bales that his old horse can no longer eat because her teeth are about shot. The goats are on the last one now. The hay was two years old already but kept in a pole barn. It’s got mold on it which will kill goats but they just work around it. I need to cut some more trees and let the sun in to get more pasture.
We bought a couple of dairy bucks years ago. The leaves had fallen already so I asked what they’d been eating and the girl pointed at the brown leaves on the ground and said “they seem to like it well enough”. They didn’t look to be starving. Goats will eat the bark off of trees if they have nothing else but I don’t plan on letting that happen.
I do plan on getting some seed and planting winter forage at some point. Not sure what yet. Most any typical winter cover crop for this area would do. I don’t have a lot of land and most of it is still forest.
I’ve been eyeballing bottom land around here. There’s 50 acres with a large hunk of bottom land that someone just bought a couple of years ago for recreational use. One of these days I plan to approach them and ask about putting the goats on it during the winter when they’re not coming down. The goats would clean it up nice form them and I’d be getting free forage for the goats, a win, win. There’s deer out there foraging every time I go by right now.
I’ve got a hen I haven’t fed in two years and she still lays eggs. The hawks got the rest and I figured she wasn’t long for this world so I quit feeding her.
Are you in a place where you can garden?
Diana just got the gardening thread up.
“But any ideas what I can plant to use for supplement feed for chickens and goats? I’m in zone 8.”
My chickens always loved split melons or anything in the Brassica Family (cole crops: cabbage, kale, broccoli, turnips, kohlrabi, etc.) All are easy to grow and nutrient dense.
Goats will eat just about anything, in my experience! :) Here’s a good article from Mother Earth News on growing for goats:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/growing-feed-for-goats-zbcz1502/
Conservativeimage, I like your philosophy about prepping for survival in the woods. That’s most likely what would happen in the long run. Though I live already in a remote forestry mountain area, we still are close to tiny towns for a lot of practical reasons. But in a SHTF situation I figure that this will all be taken from us either by raiders or petty self-proclaimed “overlords”. We are okay with surviving in the woods, we know first hand how to build a log house (we even backpacked for our honeymoon 52 years ago), but I just can’t yet figure out how we would survive heavy winters, at our age…. Who knows.
Perfectly preserved!!! No Botox needed, just an extra-large casket.....!!!
Oh, I've got goats and a hen so I've got plenty of manure. I've got acid soil and am saving up ashes from thee wood stove for certain plants like peppers.
I'm talking about the corn/soy/wheat farmers that farm 1000s of acres and use man-made fertilizers. Agriculture is very screwed up these days. What we need is several million small farmers who grow food plants and animals.
done
Yes I have a large raised bed garden and am learning more each year on what will grow best here (2000 ft elevation, heavy rainfall, zone 7a), and I do follow Diana’s gardening thread, and love it.
Absolutely true!
Yes, the main goats I have to have some supplementation for are my milkers. The rest can get away with forage.
I’m not trying to hijack your thread. But I posted this back on 3/8. This seems to be the primary focus and discussion in my circle of prepping circle.
Last night (3/7) was our monthly prepping zoom call with preppers from all around the country participating. This group consists of about 300 preppers ranging from complete novices to grizzled veterans. Of course the subject of Ukraine/Russia conflict was the main point of discussion. The first speaker is a well-established prepper in the group who has family ties back to Ukraine. His report was sobering. He has family in various parts of Ukraine that he has managed to stay in touch with you during this almost 2 week crisis. It is his take that people that are in the cities are in deep trouble. The Russians have indiscriminately shelled probably 100 urban areas ranging from smaller towns up to the Capitol itself. I was aware of that but I was not prepared to hear his assessment of how bad the damages are. Many of these towns and cities have been basically leveled. Destroying the preps of many people in situ. If anything is recoverable it will take time and energy in a lot of effort. He then went on to comment that the countryside is full of refugees trying to get across the border anywhere that is safe. They have swamped and overwhelmed the country areas in large parts of the country. Very little aid is making it past the border into Ukraine at this time. Many of these refugees have nothing except for the clothes on their back.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.