Meet My New Favorite Garden Gadget

Hubby Dear and I worked our tails off in the garden this weekend. The weather is lovely and we'll be planting in just a couple of days. I'm so excited for the upcoming garden season!

I wanted to share a handy gadget that is perfect for my fellow gardeners. It is so simple, yet extremely useful. Meet the Weather Watch.

It indicates both wind direction and wind speed. You can even figure out the wind chill by using the chart printed right on it. It has a thermometer, rain gauge and a marker that you can use to keep track of the total amount of rain you have received. We bought thiselectronic rain gauge at a local farm supply store and if it wasn't getting clogged with grass clippings, spiders jammed it up with webs. It stopped working altogether after one season. This is an instance where low-tech works much better! 

If you homeschool your children like I do, this is also a great educational tool. We are currently using RSO Earth and Space Science and there's a whole section on weather observation. Bingo! Some children just got some "homework".

We bought our Weather Watch from Lehman's, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to shop. I highly recommend it for the meteorologist in you!

The Long Winter

The Thinker has been reading through the "Little House" series of books over the past few months. I cannot count how many times I read the "Little House" books as a girl. Heck, I still read the series every year or so. There is so much to learn from and love about these books.

The Thinker is in the middle of The Long Winter and I have been looking forward to discussing this book with her ever since I got into prepping.

For those of you who may not have read the "Little House" series, shame on you! Get thee to a library and check them out.  In the meantime, here is a quick summary of The Long Winter,which is a mostly factual account of a real event:

The people of the tiny town of De Smet, South Dakota nearly starve to death during the "Long Winter" of 1880-1881. A cheerful topic for a children's book, eh? Back to back blizzards mean the trains cannot run, stranding the townspeople for months without food and fuel. Laura's family heats their home by burning hay and survive on plain brown bread made from wheat laboriously ground in a coffee mill.

There are so many lessons and modern day parallels in this book that I'm not going to attempt to detail them all. These are simply the first ones that struck me.

Provisioning:

The endless cycle of blizzard after blizzard meant that the stock in the grocery stores was depleted rapidly. Folks nearly starved, avoiding this only because of the bravery of two men who managed to find some wheat for the townspeople. It was months and months before a train could finally make it through.

I've heard it said that the average grocery store in America only has enough stock on hand for about 3 days. If there's ever a disaster that disrupts the food supply, a critical situation will assuredly develop. You need to have food storage and be prepared to feed your family for a length of time.

Ingenuity:

The Ingalls family would have frozen to death except Pa Ingalls had the foresight to harvest a huge amount of hay the previous summer. Normally, hay burns up very quickly, but Pa figured out a way to twist the hay into sticks to extend their burning time.

You need to be able to think outside the box and be creative enough to find solutions in a crisis. To be able to do this, you need to have your head on straight, which leads me to my third point.

Mental state:

                   "It can't beat us!" Pa said.

                         "Can't it, Pa?" Laura asked stupidly.

                         "No," said Pa. "It's got to quit sometime and we don't. It can't lick us. We won't give up."

                         Then Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small but it was strong. It was steady, like

                         a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it

                         would not give up.

                    

                                                         -From the chapter entitled "It Can't Beat Us", The Long Winter

The difference between a victim and a survivor often is a matter of psychology. Your will to survive, the belief that you will make it through whatever trial besets you, and a faith in a higher power are key. You can have all the survival gear and gizmos on earth, but if your head isn't right, you'll never make it.

You need to believe you can survive in order to survive.

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I've barely scratched the surface of this book. The Long Winter may have been written for children, but there is enough in this book to interest and educate any adult. Pick up a copy and draw your own conclusions.

Does Prepping = Homeschooling? And vice versa?

I was a homeschooler long before I was a prepper. Our family chooses to homeschool our children mainly for academic reasons. We seek to provide our children with an excellent, individualized education. Our desire for family togetherness and flexibility follows in close second. We also seek to develop our children's relationship with the Lord. I've never seen a formal poll, but it seems to me that a lot of preppers/survivalists homeschool their children. I know at least three of the blogs that I read regularly are headed up by homeschoolin' mamas.

If you prep, does that automatically mean you should homeschool?

Reasons to homeschool if you're a prepper:

1. Preppers are independent by nature. 

Preppers know that they cannot rely on others for the essentials of life. They have found that anything the government is involved in is going to get messed up. Most parents can do a much better job teaching their children than any brick and mortar school. Keep in mind that I used to teach at one of the top high schools in the country, so I'm not slamming those educators out there that are doing their best with a tough job. It is honestly a lot easier to teach your own children, catering to their own abilities and learning styles than it is to pound education into the heads of a class of 39 hormonal teenagers. Or so I've found.

   2.  You can design your family's curriculum to teach your children the skills
        you deem essential.

The SurvivalMom takes advantage of her flexible homeschooling schedule to fit in   target practice with her youngsters. Organized Prepper's family engages in "Family Fun" activities like building a box oven. My own darling offspring are learning how to cook and garden. These are not only essential survival and life skills but they also have the side benefit of teaching math and science. As our lifestyle becomes more self-reliant, our children will learn many new skills at our side. If you are always at the beck and call of the school schedule, you may find your children's lives are more filled with homework than homesteading.

  3.   Your children more likely to be near you during an emergency.

This is probably not a super important reason to homeschool, but it is a benefit. As a preparedness-minded person, you are much more likely to be able to keep your children safe in an emergency than some poor overworked soul in a run-down school building. Contrary to popular opinion, homeschooled children aren't cloistered at home with mom all day, every day, but you do have a higher likelihood with being with your children than most parents of school-age children.

Reasons to NOT homeschool:

 1. You need two incomes to support your family.

Some people manage to both work full time and homeschool. All it takes is a little ingenuity and flexibility. Others think the sacrifice of one income is well worth the benefits of homeschooling. But perhaps you are barely making ends meet. Or maybe you're a single parent already spread too thin. Those are cases where it would be most challenging to introduce homeschooling into the mix.

2. You don't want to spend time with your children.

OK, so I could have worded that better. The truth is that homeschooling parents are no better or worse than other parents. We all have days when we fantasize about putting our children on the big yellow bus and merrily waving goodbye. I often lack every single one of the nine fruits of the spirit, particularly patience and self-control. I always manage to pull it back together some how, though. When it comes down to it, I am always glad I homeschool.

And if you do homeschool, how should prepping affect it?

Things to think about:

• Consider buying your curriculum ahead of time. If TEOTWAWKI  happens, obtaining curriculum will be the least of your worries, but if you already have it on hand your children will be able to get an education. An education will always be worthwhile.
• You might also think about the kind of curriculum you invest in. We use Sonlight for our primary curriculum needs. The vast majority of it is non-consumable, which means it can be used for multiple children. We have shelves of wonderful literature that all of my children will get to enjoy as they go through their education.

• A lot of homeschoolers use computerized curriculums. If you have no power, you will be unable to do school. That's something to think about. The Thinker's math curriculum is computerized and if we were without power for a long time, we'd have to come up with an alternative.
• Approach electives with preparedness in mind. We encourage our children to pursue things that are of special interest to them. In addition to the sports and music they are already involved in, we are going to join 4-H. This will give them valuable skills in many preparedness-related areas.
• Think about life insurance. The current recommendation is that you have 10x your annual salary in life insurance. Would you have enough money to continue homeschooling and maintain your current standard of living if your spouse should pass away? 

Obviously, homeschooling, like prepping, is not "normal" or "average". Both, however, are getting to be a bit more mainstream. For our family, both are part of our way of life.