Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Month Ten in Review and Month Eleven Prepping Plan

I feel so accomplished. Hubby Dear and I really got a lot done around the homestead this month.
  1. I upgraded my EDC. BTW, thanks for all the great comments and ideas. The stuff some of you all carry around is quite impressive. 
  2. Our Food Storage Blitz Month was quite successful. It's such a nice feeling to know that we wouldn't have to go hungry during an emergency or job loss.  
  3. We did a ton of work in the yard. Literally, we moved a ton of materials into our garden, a few bags at a time. First, Hubby Dear finished filling all 19 of our garden boxes with Mel's Mix. This was a major undertaking, especially since we had to drive 50 miles each way to get the materials and could only fit a certain amount in the ol' mini-van. I think we exceeding the load limit a few times.

    The boxes - filled with Mel's Mix and grids in place
  4. We're also nearly done putting down pea gravel to cover the pathways between the boxes.
       
     
    The grids are optional, but handy. The larger areas are where we're planting
     pumpkins. Radishes, lettuce, and peas are in the smaller boxes.
    
    We planted radishes, peas (sugar snap and shelling), lettuce (both a romaine and leaf lettuce mix), cabbage, strawberries, and onions.
    The Thinker's radish seedlings.
    We also added a few more raspberry canes, doubling our raspberry patch in size.  We're still waiting on the organic seed potatoes we ordered to arrive. The delay is irksome enough that I think next year we'll buy our seed potatoes closer to home, even though they may not be organic.                                 
  5. You might be asking what happened to the cloth pad project? Well, I got sidetracked with all the gardening work. And I got a huge stack of uber interesting books at the library. Then the NCAA basketball tournament started. (We are giant college basketball fans.) The result? I still have only two (partially completed, at that) cloth pads. I will get back and finish the project, eventually.   
What's in store for Month 11 of my Prepping Plan?
  1. I want to add more cash to our BOBs/at home emergency stash.
  2. We're going to craft our own water filter using food safe buckets and ceramic filter elements.
  3. Using some of the suggestions from my Ask the Readers post, I'm going to stock-up on some more can openers.
  4. I'm going to buy some garden seeds for long term storage.
  5. We're going to continue building our food and oh-so-important toilet paper supplies.
  6. We'll be very busy in the garden. Hopefully we'll have some lettuce to harvest.  
  7. I have some preps of a unique nature that I'll discuss with y'all in an upcoming post. I've got to pick your brain again!

2 comments:

  1. OK. I'm HUGELY impressed! Especially with your garden boxes! Do you have an automatic watering system? Last year, that's what did us in. When the temps were super hot (110+) and then we were out of town for about 3 or 4 weeks, total, our garden didn't exactly thrive because it was all hand-watered. Won't do THAT again!

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  2. Lisa - Thanks! No, we don't have an automatic watering system... unless you count our kids! It's definitely something we're considering adding. Weeding has historically been our biggest challenge, and these garden boxes make it so much easier.

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