Babies! And Where My Monthly Prepping Budget Disappeared To

Sweet young things are popping out all over.

Baby 'Tribute' strawberries

An Itsy Bitsy 'Montmorency' cherry

A tiny 'Jonafree' apple

'Earliblue' blueberries-to-be

The rest of the garden has started to pick up its growth, too.

The north half of the garden, May 22. Compare to just a week earlier here.  

South half. The pea gravel is all down, finally

Lettuce galore

'Sugar Sprint' pod pea flowers

I think we are going to finally have success growing broccoli!
The heads grow visibly bigger every day.

I know I haven't posted about much other than gardening-related topics recently. And my monthly prepping plan? That's largely gone, sad to say. The reason for that is this empty space on our homestead:

Hubby Dear won't have to mow this part of our lawn too much longer

I sacrificed my prepping budget to save up for a building project this fall. If all goes according to plan, we will construct a barn, complete with hay loft, a milking area, and a wing for my ever-expanding collection of poultry. That is the plan; we'll see how it matches up to reality. We are paying cash for this construction, so our budget will be the factor that determines how grand my poultry palace will be and how many new species of animals will make their way to our homestead.

My name is Emily and I have a problem. I am addicted to livestock.

I feel better just admitting that! ;)

My June Lunacy, I mean, Preps

In case you haven't noticed, my thoughts, time, and prepping budget have been dominated by poultry-related purchases recently. Hubby Dear has come up with a term for the disease from which I suffer - Poultry Acquisition Disorder, or PAD for short. I don't think PAD is such a bad thing; Hubby Dear begs to differ!

There is a consequence of PAD, however; the cute little buggers grow up and then you have to figure out where you are going to house them. My June and July prepping budgets will be spent on turkey and duck housing and associated paraphernalia.

Oh, you didn't know I had ducks? Technically speaking, we will have ducks in 28 days since my ducks are still in ovo. I've got a batch of Ancona duck eggs in an incubator. Stay tuned for a tutorial on incubating duck eggs in an upcoming post.

We have three big projects underway.

1) Build a duck house


Hubby Dear and I shelled out big bucks for a pre-made chicken coop, but you can't just buy pre-fab duck houses. And using a chicken coop for ducks can be problematic as ducks have different requirements. For one thing, they don't roost. Their legs are also more delicate than chicken legs, so some of the taller designs with long ramps aren't ideal. They also need the nesting boxes to be at floor level.

We considered a lot of different options and nearly settled on converting a doghouse kit into a duck house identical to this, but we wanted something larger and with more versatility.

I ended up buying a chicken coop plan from the very cool Fresh Eggs Daily blog and Hubby Dear and I are building it ourselves. The coop is very duck-friendly and is large enough to house up to 9 Ancona ducks. We don't have a very good track record with home improvement projects, but so far it is going well. If you are handy, you probably don't need to buy the coop plan since she has a pretty detailed blog post about the coop, but Hubby Dear and I appreciate the cutting diagram and parts list.

The pile of supplies. We had to buy a circular saw and jigsaw plus all the lumber and miscellany, so the total came to
about $400 dollars. If you have the tools already, plus some scrap lumber on hand, this could be FAR cheaper. 

We're still cutting all the plywood, etc. and priming everything before we put it together.

Primed bits and pieces

Since ducks are so notoriously messy, I'm going through the extra step of painting the duck house both inside and out. I hope this will make cleanups easier in the long run. Right now it just seems to be slowing the process down!


2) Figure out the turkey housing situation

A brooder in my basement isn't going to cut it for my turkey poults much longer.

I think my turkeys are around 3 weeks old. They are already larger than my chickens were
when I allowed them out of the coop and into their run. Thank goodness I only bought four!

For one thing, I'm going to need my brooder for the ducklings in less than a month. And the turkeys are ready to get out of the brooder. They've already escaped several times despite the bird netting! They are little Houdinis, that's for sure.

Here's the problem: turkey poults are very delicate and disease-prone. Should they get too hot, too cold,or  too wet, they'll drop dead. People tend to baby their poults until they are 8+ weeks old, and even then many people will keep them indoors or in wire cages.

My tentative plan is to move them out into the duck house (with an attached run) when they are 5-6 weeks old. I'll give them plenty of shade and ventilation and hope for the best. They can get to know their new chicken roommates, and hopefully by the time I'm ready to move the ducks outside, I can integrate the turkeys in with the chickens. I'm taking a bit of risk by keeping our turkeys with the chickens (chickens can potentially give turkeys a disease called blackhead), but I'm willing to chance it.

Eventually the turkeys will be too big to go in and out of either the duck house or chicken coop, so they will get their own shelter. We plan to build a smaller version of the range shelter shown in Storey's Guide to Raising Turkeys. It will look similar to this:

Turkey range shelter - Ours will be quite a bit smaller because we only have four turkeys!
Image from http://www.freetimesw.com/blueoakranch/turkeys.htm 

3) Expand and fortify our chicken moat

Our chicken coop is attached to a moat that goes around our garden.

Current plan of the chicken moat

Since we're adding in a 4'x6' duck house plus a turkey range shelter and a whole bunch of new birds, we need to expand the run.

We seriously considered using electronet and making pens for the new birds out in the pasture. (You can see what that would look like in the photo of the turkey range shelter.) The birds would love that and we may do that in the future, but we have a special needs child and a toddler so I am concerned for their safety.  We decided instead to expand the chicken moat. We will bump out the right side of the moat to match the existing left side, giving a total of about 1,150 square feet for the birds to roam in safety.

We are also going to add a layer of chicken wire to the bottom of the fencing. We used welded wire mesh with 2"x4" openings to build our fence and little ducklings will easily be able to slip through for the first couple of months. And if any of my chickens go broody next spring and hatch some chicks, we'll be all ready for that!

A duckling could slip out or get stuck in the holes in the fence. We'll cover the lower
2 feet with chicken wire just to be safe. 

As you can see, I've got plenty to keep me busy over the next month and a half! I'm just trying to refrain from adding geese to the mix!

March 2012 in Review, Part II: Bug Out Bag Upgrade

As I discussed in this post, I am in the process of upgrading and updating our bug out bags (BOBs). One thing the show "Doomsday Preppers" reminded me of is that preparedness isn't all food storage and gardening. (It also reminded me NEVER appear on reality TV.) Those are my favorite parts of prepping, so of course I have been focusing my attention there, but I can't neglect other important (but comparatively boring) areas.


Bug Out Bag Upgrade

The first item that I upgraded was my backpack.

TETON Sports Explorer 4000 Internal Frame Backpack 

I chucked the uncomfortable, conspicuous red backpack my emergency kit came with and tried this one out. It holds a lot and has enough pockets and compartments to keep everything organized. You can easily adjust it to fit your body comfortably and it is relatively inexpensive. It's definitely a keeper. 


My next purchase was a nifty survival knife.
 

Gerber  LMF II Black Infantry Knife 

 I am by no means an expert in weaponry, but I think this knife is pretty cool and very useful. You can use the end to break glass or as a hammer. There are holes in the handle so that you could lash the knife to a stick and create a spear. The sheath has a built in sharpener and can attach to a belt or even strap to your leg if you're going for a full-blown Rambo look. It's a quality knife and made in the USA. 
Lastly, I tucked a coil of paracord into my new BOB. I'll continue the upgrade over the next few months.
Anyone else updating, upgrading, or building a bug out bag? What are you adding?

January 2012 in Review and February Preps

January was a quiet month for me on the blog, but not so much at home. I have been so busy. Between my kids' homeschooling, extra-curriculars, and the normal insanity of having two toddlers (including one who is doing her best to give up her afternoon nap), life has been pretty nutty. Hubby Dear and I have also been going full-throttle with diet and and exercise, which has eaten up time I normally spent on the computer. My derriere is thankful for the change, however, and I've managed to lose 10 pounds in the last month!

Even though I didn't get time to blog, I most certainly worked on preps during the month of January.

1. Sales!

I hope many of you were able to take advantage of the sales at markdown.com and Honeyville Grains. I am very happy that I was able to stock up on both Tattler canning lids and freeze dried foods.

2. Reading, reading, and more reading

I read quickly through The Small-Scale Poultry Flock and have been mulling over all the interesting ideas it gave me for the role poultry can play on our homestead. Next, I bought a copy of The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way. Talk about wow. If you are interested in growing fruit organically, you've got to get your hands on this book! The focus of the book is building plant health, starting at the soil level and working up. It has me re-imagining the layout of our orchard and has piqued my interest in permaculture. I really can't recommend this book enough.

3. Miscellany

I socked away items like work gloves, bandannas, and safety pins.  These are all cheap, readily-available preps that could be important to have on hand in an emergency. Bandannas alone have countless uses.

4. Chicken business

Our chicks are due to arrive in early March. I spent a good portion of my prepping budget this month on various chicken paraphernalia.

Feed storage

I bought a couple of galvanized steel trash cans to store feed in and a couple of bales of pine shavings. Since I intend to use the deep litter method of manure management, I need mucho mas pine shavings.

Random chick stuff 

I also picked up the supplies I'll need for our chick brooder. Hubby Dear and I weighed out a variety of options (including crafting our own brooder out of a plastic storage bin), but for reasons of ease, the number of chicks we'll be brooding, and because I'm a total sucker for a so-called complete kit, we bought the Deluxe Brooder Starter Package from Randall Burkey.

The Deluxe Brooder Package from randallburkey.com 

You're supposed to have at least 1/2 a square foot per chick in your brooder. This set up will give me just about the right amount of space for the 17 chicks I'm expecting.

I also bought chick-sized grit, a bag of starter feed, and forage cakes. I'm glad that February always flies by so quickly because I am more than ready for my chicks to arrive!

Oh, and there's this little something that arrived via tractor trailer.

After some trial and error (including a dead lawn mower battery and creative use of a tire iron),
Hubby  Dear got the coop hitched up and moved it around to the back yard

This is an 8x8' chicken coop built by Horizon Structures. The delivery driver arrived after sunset one evening and decided that he couldn't make the turn into our driveway with his 75' long trailer. That meant he had to put the wheels on our coop and unload it directly on the country road we live on. Then he and I wrestled this nearly 1700 lb coop off the road and up enough of our hilly, rutted driveway to finally make it onto our yard. Hubby Dear, of course, was at work and missed all the fun. ;) The next day, he hitched up the coop to the lawn mower and moved it around back to take its place of honor in the chicken moat.

It was tricky business to get the coop positioned in the moat. It took many tries to get it right.

Horizon Structures is located in Pennsylvania and I... am not. Take a look at the amount of road dust that collected on the outside of the coop during the long journey to our home! It would have been better to buy locally, but I didn't have any luck finding something with the size and features I wanted.

In place and ready for action! Now we just need to finish the chicken moat.

This coop has a lot of upgrades, including an easy-clean glassboard floor, electrical package, and automatic chicken door. I'm pleased with the overall quality of construction, but was disappointed that the roof and paint got damaged during transport. Thankfully, Horizon Structures is not only sending me touch-up paint and extra shingles but also hiring a handyman to make it right. That's a business that knows how to treat its customers.

What's up for next month?

February Preps:

1. Books - You know I had to have more books on my list! Continuing the theme of permaculture, I plan to get (the unfortunately named, but useful) Gaia's Garden. I also find the concept behind Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day to be very intriguing. I make all of our bread, but the recipe I use for homemade pizza recipe takes long enough that I don't make it very often.

2. Chickens - I still need to get a few odds and ends for the chickens, namely a long, high-quality extension cord so that my coop can have power. We need to finish constructing the north wall of the chicken moat as well.

3. Orchard planning - Our apple trees and blueberry bushes will arrive in March. Ahead of that, I need to work on our plan and get some of the supplies that I can't find locally.

4. Garden - We are expanding our square foot garden next year and so we need to build a few more boxes and make more Mel's Mix.  

5. First aid preps - I have a huge list of items that I have yet to buy. I hope to make inroads on this.

6. Feminine products - After my ill-fated cloth pad experiment, I kind of abandoned this area of preparedness. Time to get back to it.


So that's me. Any big plans for February or accomplishments from January you'd like to share? 

My 2012 Prepping Goals

Happy New Year everyone! Do you remember when you first heard about 2012 being such an ominous year? I do. I learned about the whole Mayan calendar deal from my seventh grade science teacher. Mrs. Spracklen delighted in sharing tidbits of knowledge that were either outrageous or disgusting. I still refuse to walk barefooted across the lawn because of her lesson on how hookworms get transmitted to humans.

Back then, 2012 seemed light years away and I couldn't fathom being 30+ years old. Of course I thought that anyone over thirty was over the hill. The intervening years melted away surprisingly quickly and I'm thankful that, although I'm now a prepper and presumably paranoid about such things, I'm not too worried that the world will end in December. I trust what Jesus had to say about this issue.

TEOTWAWKI, on the other hand, is a different story. There's been a few bits of positive economic news recently, but there is still the potential for a complete crash of our economy or some other mayhem. We continue to prepare.

My goals for 2012:

Homestead related:

1. Chickens!

• I ordered 17 chicks to arrive in March. We need to get a coop and finish building the chicken moat. I'm really looking forward to fresh eggs and (possibly) meat.

2. Gardening

• Hubby Dear and I have spent the last month pouring over seed catalogs and made our orders for 2012. We're going to be growing some of our favorite crops from 2011 with a few changes and new additions. We are growing more open pollinated, heirloom varieties this year. 
• We are also expanding our garden slightly as we work towards our goal of doubling our garden's size.

3. Composting

• We haven't really done much in the way of composting before. Our two existing pet rabbits plus the chickens we have coming will provide us a lot of manure that we can use to boost our garden's fertility. The Small-Scale Poultry Flock has given me a lot of ideas on how I can get the chickens do most of the work of incorporating kitchen scraps, garden waste, etc. into our garden fertility plan. 

4. Research other methods of adding fertility to our garden

• I'd like to learn about what cover crops I can use in a raised bed.
•  I'd like to plant comfrey, stinging nettles, and other dynamic accumulators. This is not only a wise practice for organic gardeners but it is also great for preparedness since it will make us less reliant on outside inputs into our garden.

 5. Continue to build our orchard

• We need to take care of our newly planted pecan trees. 
• We hope to plant apples, pears, blueberries, and hardy almond trees in 2012. We're going to try again to expand our raspberry and strawberry plantings after last year's plants failed to thrive. 

General Preparedness: 

1.  Finish getting the remaining odds and ends of food storage.

• We more or less have a year's worth of food stored. I have a few more items I need to add to our food storage. We will be replenishing our supplies as we use it.

2. First aid and hygiene items

• I want to finish our first aid preps this year (finally). I've got quite a bit of the basics, but we need both a deeper and broader base of supplies. 

3. Miscellany

• We will stock up on some of the basic tools and miscellaneous items we are missing - things like socks, work gloves, aluminum foil, etc. The Master Preparedness List from the LDS Preparedness Manual will be our starting off point. 

9. Add more books to our survival library

• In case you haven't figured it out by now, I like books. :) Information is important so I have an excuse to indulge my book addiction.  

7. Diet/Exercise

• I'm trying to attain a more healthy lifestyle. I have a thyroid disease which makes losing weight challenging, so I'm going to focus more on nutrition and fitness than on the scale.  

What are your goals for 2012?

My Top Five Prepping Successes of 2011

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas. We had a lovely time with our extended family and it was quite a jolt to have to get back to everyday life on Monday. We homeschool our children and I wanted to squeeze in a few more school days in the hopes that we might complete our school year in May. This sounded like a perfectly sane and logical plan when I concocted it in November, but as I sat at the kitchen counter helping The Thinker with her Latin lesson, I seriously regretted my decision to forgo Christmas break. This led me to entertain some fanciful ideas about what I would do if I could get my hands on the ancient Roman responsible for the evil grammatical construct known as the declension. My fantasies were surprisingly creative considering the general stupor I was in at that time of the morning. That, my friends, is a classic case of  Post-Festivity Latin Declension Disorder (PFLDD for short) and is a key reason why you should never skip Christmas break.

Now that I'm mostly recovered, it's time to turn my attention to cheerier matters than dead languages: my top five prepping successes of 2011.

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5. The Great Chicken Moat Build

This little fencing project was a huge undertaking

The chicken moat is not technically finished, much less put to use, but I had to put it in this countdown because of the sheer amount effort that went into it. Hopefully the chickens that will live in this moat will greatly cut down on the insect and weed pests in our garden, contribute delicious meat and eggs to our diet, and will be a source of fertility for our soil. The potential benefits made this difficult project worthwhile.


4. No more store-bought bread! 

Much better than sliced bread!

I have been baking bread since I was a teenager, but I never before attempted to make all of my family's bread products. After I bought a NutriMilland then a Bosch Mixer,it became ridiculously easy to grind wheat and bake as much bread as we consumed. So I started doing just that and even figured out how to use a Sun Oven to bake bread.

It feels really satisfying to make something so delicious and healthful for my family.


3. Explored new ways to preserve food

I have a few new tricks up my sleeve when it comes to food preservation. I've been water bath canning for a few years now, but pressure canning was new territory. Not only do I now pressure can with the best of them, but I regularly can meat, something that was very intimidating to me in the beginning.

Dehydrating oregano

I also learned the ins and outs of dehydrating. My new Excalibur Dehydrator is awesome, though I must admit I find it very tedious to place all the pieces of food meticulously on the trays.

Vacuum sealing with the FoodSaver

My favorite new trick, however, is using a FoodSaverto vacuum seal mason jars of dry goods. I have stored brown sugar, nuts, chocolate, raisins, shortening, herbs, and many other items with this little gadget.



2. One year of food storage*

Some of the comfort food items I bought during our Food Storage Blitz Month 

We finally have one year's worth of food storage! Sorta. If you go by the number of calories stored, we do, but we are still short several key nutrients (such as calcium and Vitamin C) and I want to add more meat to our supply. And then we'll need to add more food as our children grow and need more calories. And more fruits and vegetables would really be nice... You get the picture.

I can't exactly rest on my laurels here, but I'm pleased with what we've accomplished.

1. Garden re-do

Our new square foot gardening boxes

Hubby Dear deserves most of the credit here. He transformed our decidedly sub-par garden of years past to the Garden of Eatin' by adding square foot gardening boxes. That involved a lot of carpentry and an insane amount of soil toting and mixing.

This year was so successful that we plan on adding 19 more square foot boxes to our garden, albeit in stages. This will double the size of our current garden. I can't wait! (Read this post if you are unfamiliar with square foot gardening.)



What accomplishments in the area of preparedness are you the most proud of? Was 2011 a banner year or a bust? 

November in Review and December Preps

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving and have your Christmas preparations well under way. I am about 3/4 of the way done with my Christmas shopping, though I avoided the complete madness of Black Friday. Hubby Dear and I stayed at home in our pajamas and did our shopping online. We may not have bought any waffle irons for $2, but we stayed safe and sane, thank you very much!

November in  review:

1. Gardening

• We planted 1 lb of garlic cloves and mulched heavily over the top. Hopefully they will survive the winter depredations of field mice and emerge in the spring. We cleaned up all the garden debris and have everything clean and ready for spring plantings. 
• We finalized our plans for a survival orchard and planted three pecan trees. 
• Hubby Dear went through his garden journal and tallied up the final harvest totals. We learned a lot this year and I'll be sharing this information with you in a future post. 
• We have a tentative plan for next year's garden. We're expanding our garden yet again, which means we'll be building yet more square foot boxes. 

Finally! Some cauliflower! The heads were small but very tasty.

2. Food Storage

• I processed the pumpkins we grew in our garden into puree and froze it in 1 cup batches. Although I was initially disappointed with the flavor of the puree, I used it as a substitute for butternut squash in a pasta recipe I make regularly and it worked just fine. 
• I experimented with bouillon cubes and a vegan substitute for chicken broth. 
• I bought another couple of bucket of oats and wheat as well as more clarified butter from Emergency Essentials. I also bought 50 lb of sugar and packed it in a mylar bag and bucket myself. 
• I took advantage of holiday sales and stocked up on baking ingredients like chocolate chips and vanilla extract. 

I hope this captures some of the beauty of this particularly pretty sunset, despite my lack of camera skills! 

December Preps:

• My major goal this month is to finalize my year's supply of long term food storage items. I need to go over our inventory and see if there are gaps. I think we are complete other than in dry milk.
• I need to pre-order my chicks to be delivered in March! 
• My Christmas present to myself is the mack daddy chicken coop that will be delivered in January. I can't wait to share it with you all. 

That's it for me. Are you gifting yourself or others with any preparedness items? If so, please share in the comments. 

October in Review and November 2011 Preps

Is it just me or did October go by in the blink of an eye? I can hardly believe it is November and that Christmas is just around the corner. 

I don't feel like I did very much to prep this month. I bought a few new books to add to our survival library and added some odds and ends to our food storage (another gallon of oil and a few canned goods) but that's it. Hmm... I'll have to do better in November! 

I did have my first successful culinary experience with a Sun Oven.It makes me feel a lot more secure to know that I can bake bread without electricity - assuming that the sun is shining!

We also harvested the last tomatoes and peppers of the year. Both of the methods we are using to ripen green tomatoes are working well. It feels luxurious to have so many delicious tomatoes on hand when it is so cold outside.

Last, but certainly not least, we completed our chicken moat. I've wanted chickens for at least five years and I'm so excited that I finally get to buy chicks this spring! 

For November:

• We still need to plant the seed garlic we bought last month. Gotta get that in the ground soon.
• Our three pecan trees are due to be shipped soon so we'll be planting them as well.  
• I plan to process my pie pumpkins and freeze the pulp. The last of our cayenne peppers should finish drying this month and I'm planning on grinding them up for ground red pepper. We shall see if I can accomplish both of those objectives without chopping off any body parts or suffering wicked chile burns. 
• I've been using a borrowed Sun Oven for my solar oven experiments. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and buy one of my own. It is definitely an investment, but I think it is worth it. Yes, I've had some less than successful experiments, but I'm finally figuring out how to make the Sun Oven work for me. 
• I plan on taking advantage of the holiday sales to stock up on food storage items. I'm going to focus on chocolate chips, brownie mixes, sugar, flour, and other baking items. 
• Speaking of baking, I have a problem that I need your help with. It's time for another "Ask the Readers" post. Stay tuned for that later this week.

How did you prepare in October? What are your plans for this month? 

Adding to My Survival Library

I've been actively preparing for well over a year now and my list of things to get and to do never seems to get shorter. It gets overwhelming when you realize just how much stuff it would take to survive a major societal collapse - or even a minor one, for that matter. I recently finished reading James Wesley Rawles' Patriotsand the protagonists in that book have an insanely tricked out survival retreat. It makes me feel more than a little inadequate!

The best I can do is set purchasing priorities and see them through. Number one on my list is food storage. We should have our year's supply by the end of 2011. Number two is information - books, resources printed off the Internet, etc. on all sorts of survival topics. The books are helping me plan my future purchases and they would be an invaluable asset in any sort of long term disaster. I think of them as a kind of Noah's Ark of information.

Part of our survival library

I prefer actual, physical books. You'll never see me breaking out a Nook or Kindle. It's not my style and in a grid down situation, you may lose access to the precious knowledge contained in an e-book. I suppose the best case scenario would be to buy both a physical copy/copies of an essential book and to also have an electronic version.

I'm collecting books in a variety of categories:

Gardening
Canning/Preserving
Food Storage Cookbooks
Animal Husbandry
Defense
"Hardcore" Survival Topics (ie. Foraging, Trapping, etc.)
Traditional Skills
Medicine

At this point, I've pretty well gotten the first three categories taken care of. Since Hubby Dear is a medical professional, I'm not too worried about the last category, either.

Here's what I added to the library this month:

1. Barnyard in Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide to Raising Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, and Cattle This book contains bits and pieces of all the "Storey's Guide to Raising..." books about these particular animals. I wasn't very impressed. I have and love the Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens because it is very, very thorough. Barnyard in Your Backyard? Not so much. I should have just bought the complete Storey's Guides for each of the animal species. 
2. The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It A beautiful book. Inspiring and packed with lovely illustrations. 
3. The Chicken Health Handbook If my hypothetical chickens get sick, I will be prepared. More than you ever wanted to know about chicken ailments. 
4. SurvivorsThis is John Wesley Rawles' sequel to Patriots. I liked Patriots OK. I am about 80 pages into Survivors and it is driving me crazy! Ever seen a kid with ADHD hopped up on too much sugar?This book reminds me of that; it flits between so many different people that there is no narrative "flow". Please tell me it gets better!

What are your "Must Haves" for your library? Are you buying e-books or paper copies?