Friday roundup

Goodness, I have been utterly scatterbrained this week. It's been busy, yes, but that's no excuse for the absolute blog silence. Apologies to all my loyal readers!

So here it is – Thursday – time for our "Friday" Roundup. These, as you recall, are so we can all check in on what steps we've taken, big or small, to inch us incrementally toward greater preparedness (regardless of what day it's posted).

Here's what we've done in the past couple of weeks:

• We butchered five animals last Wednesday.

We were getting way too crowded – not just at the feed boxes, but also too many for our property to easily support. Now we're down to ten animals, a far more manageable number. We're not expecting any calves this year either, since we currently don't have a bull.

• In anticipation of sorting out which animals to butcher, Don built another "airlock" gate. We're putting in fences and gates across critical pinch-points on our property to assist when we need to sort out animals.

We tested this latest "airlock" when shooing the animals not getting butchered down to the pasture for a couple of days. One of the targeted animals escaped, but since she couldn't get past the airlock, it was a simple matter to get her back where she needed to go. As Don and I lose our farmhands (the girls), we need to come up with ways to work smarter, not harder; and airlock gates serve that purpose.

• After the butchering was done, Don took advantage of the livestock being down in the pasture to clean up some more of the muck underneath the feedbox awning. We didn't want the livestock in the pasture for more than a day or two, since the grass is just starting to emerge and we don't want it trampled or eaten down too early; so after a couple hours of scooping poop, we closed the gate and brought the animals back up from the pasture.

• I planted seeds indoors:

• 25 cayenne peppers
• 25 basil
• 10 Brussels sprouts
• 10 broccoli
• 18 tomatoes (6 large, 12 paste)
• 10 red bell peppers

The broccoli and Brussels sprouts are just starting to come up.

It's always fun to watch an infant plant push upward.

• We picked up the four hazelnut trees we ordered and paid for last fall.

For some reason I expected these to be a lot smaller than they are, so I'm delighted they're already at such a height. Unlike the walnuts we planted last May (and may take as long as 15 years to produce), hazelnuts should bear a crop much more quickly.

Hazelnuts (sometimes called filberts) and walnuts are the two types of nuts which will successfully grow in our area. Having a permanent source of plant protein (nuts) is a valuable addition to our farm.

• It's been raining an awful lot, precluding much work in the garden, but I got a bit of a start at weeding some beds.

I noticed this little guy...

...at the edge of the pond...

...keeping a sharp eye on Lydia.

• One of our pear trees, which bears prolifically, had two large branches growing out at awkward angles.

These would get so heavily-laden with fruit in the fall that we had to prop them up with tomato cages.

So I sawed off these two large branches, and nipped off a few smaller branches growing at odd angles. The result is a much nicer-looking tree.

• I've been admiring the birds we've been seeing:

Quail:

Western kingbird:

Robin (possibly my favorite bird):

Killdeer:

The spectacular mountain bluebird:

• We ordered two pounds (!!) of flower seeds, specifically a species called lacy phacelia.

These flowers were among the mixed seeds we planted in the orchard last year.

The bees went absolutely ballistic over them.

Come to find out they're extraordinarily heavy nectar-producers. They're also friendly to cows (some farmers even plant them for grazing). We're planning on sowing the mounded hillsides of nasty clay dirt that was piled when the pond was dug. This will not only stabilize the slopes, but provide endless food for the bees.

• I'm working on the talk I'm giving on May 6 at the Northwest Preparedness Expo in Prosser, Washington. This is put on by an nifty church-based group called the Lower Valley Assembly whose purpose is "to promote the advancement of self-reliance and security within the Lower Yakima Valley in accordance with the laws of nature and the commonly held Judeo-Christian principles by which the United States of America was founded." Hopefully if anyone's in the area, you can attend the expo.

That's what we've been doing around here. How has everyone else done as far as preparedness?

Friday roundup

So what's today -- Wednesday? Oh well, I've decided it's time for a "Friday" Roundup which, as you recall, is posted so we can all check in on what steps we've taken, big or small, to inch us incrementally toward greater preparedness (regardless of what day it's posted).

Now that spring is here, we're getting more active. Here's what we've been doing for the last couple of weeks:

• On March 1, I was a guest with the "Advanced Prepping Intensive" webinar run by Preppers University on the subject of -- what else -- homesteading and rural living. Really neat course if anyone's interested in signing up for future classes.

• I organized our medical supplies. This is necessary not only to keep things in easy-to-find order, but it also allows us to determine anything we're short on.

• A neighbor and I attended a day-long gardening seminar with multiple workshops. Of the various subjects offered, the one thing we both wanted to learn something more about was permaculture. The hour-long class we attended on this subject was, of necessity, little more than an intro, but we may be attending a 12-hour version coming up later in the spring. If permaculture lives up to its hype, it might be a decent solution to the problems of growing gardens in a dry climate with minimal water.

• We peeked in at the bees -- and they're still alive (yes!). We'll be making a new little "bee lot" to put the hive (we're also getting in two more nucs in a few weeks) near the house so we can keep an eye on them. We'll also be putting out wasp traps to catch yellow jacket queens in an effort to avoid the disastrous attack that killed one of our hives last summer.

We're also going to get some pollen patties to feed to the bees when the weather is warmer and they can start foraging. Pollen patties stimulate brood, so we don't want to feed it to them too early in the season.

• I backed up my computer and my blog. I urge everyone to do this!!!

• I planted two tiny sweet cherry bushes (they look like tall twigs at this stage). These are probably the last fruits we'll plant in the garden. Right now we have a wide variety of wonderful fruits (some of which haven't yielded produce yet): peaches, pears, apples, plums, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, sour cherries, and now sweet cherries. The nice thing about planting fruit is they're perennial and low-maintenance.

• We cut, split, and stacked a bunch o' firewood. Before:

After (hard to see, but there are three layers of wood):

• We augered holes, inserted railroad ties, and made the first of what will be several "airlock" gates to keep cows out of the driveway or otherwise go where we want (or don't want) them to go. As we get older and the girls are not available for cattle roundups, we need to find ways to guide and direct the beasties. Via this gate, the cows can go directly from the wooded side of the property to the field side without having to be directed through the driveway.

• We made an appointment with the regional mobile butchers for early April to dispatch six or seven more cows (and steers). Yes, you read that right. We're halving the size of our herd and shifting the focus of our farm a bit to make things more efficient. Cattle are wonderful prepper livestock to have, but we don't need that many at the moment and we can ramp things up with very little effort (and the help of a willing bull) at any time.

• I cleaned chicken coop. Heavens how it needed it.

That's about it for us. What has everyone else been doing?

Friday Roundup

Aren't you proud of me? Here it is Friday, and I'm actually putting up a Friday Roundup! On a Friday!

Friday Roundups (regardless of what day they're posted) are posted so we can all check in on what steps we've taken, big or small, to inch us incrementally toward greater preparedness.

Since it's winter and outdoor work is limited, our Friday Roundups have been modest lately, but here goes:

• I wrote a WND column on why prepping is still important despite Hillary's defeat.

• A bunch of us teamed up to help get a neighbor's vehicle out of the snow (no photos, sorry). March roared in like a lion with 30 mph winds and snow, which built drifts three and four feet high across our road. Neighbors got together with a snobmobile, shovels, snow blowers on a tractor, and finally a bulldozer to get the road cleared. Community, the third leg of preparedness!

• I did a webinar with The Survival Mom as part of her Prepper's University "Advanced Intensive" series. The subject, of course, was homesteading and self-reliance.

• As a continuing process of decluttering our house, I took some of the accumulated discarded papers...

...and got about half of them burned in the burn barrel.

Some of the stuff we had packed away was absurd. A wall calendar from 1998? Oh puh-lease.

We probably had 150 lbs. of old papers to burn. Didn't get to all of them, but it's a start.

• Our wood cookstove started smoking and not drawing properly. We suspected the stovepipe was due for a major cleanout. We just didn't realize how bad it was.

Earlier, a reader asked why we didn't burn the purged papers in the cookstove. The reason is because it builds up ash in the pipe like crazy.

Cleaning the stove is dirty, but obviously necessary.

And once it's cleaned out, there's no finer way to both cook and heat the house than a wood cookstove, in my opinion.

• I went through the girls' old doll clothes, which had just been tucked in an open-topped box and so had mice poo on them. I washed everything (including some of the cloth dolls) and scrubbed down the plastic dolls. I'll pack everything away in a mouse-proof crate after this. Some of these dolls' clothes were made by my mother with the girls were young. Others I wore when I was an infant, or when the girls were infants. Preserving childhood treasures is, we feel, important.

• I tentatively -- and that's tentatively -- plan to be at the Self-Reliance Expo in Denver in September. That's tentative ... or did I say that already?

So that's our roundup over the last two weeks. What has everyone else done, big or small, to increase self-sufficiency?