Category Archives: For Your Eyes Only
Sour Dough, Sweet Dough, But We All Love Yeast
Jamie from Weed, California writes, “If the end of the world as we know it will happen in December, how to I stock up on yeast?”
Great question Jamie. Yeast is a not a bacteria, it is a fungus. A plant. So if you are going to stock up on carrots for a collapse, you can stock up on yeast seeds. Wait, you’ve never heard of yeast seeds? Well, they don’t exist. As we use seeds to restart a new generation of plants, we can do the same with yeast. And the best way, the yummiest way, is to make yeast. There are many ways of doing it, but the best way I think is from the Amish Friendship Bread recipe. Here is the starter:
Ingredients
- 1 (0.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
- 1/4 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup milk
Directions
In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in water. Let stand 10 minutes.
In a 2 quart glass, plastic or ceramic container, combine 1 cup flour and 1 cup sugar. Mix thoroughly or flour will lump when milk is added.
Slowly stir in 1 cup milk and dissolved yeast mixture.
Cover loosely and let stand at room temperature until bubbly. Consider this day 1 of the 10 day cycle. For the next 10 days handle starter according to the instructions for Amish Friendship Bread found here: http://www.friendshipbreadkitchen.com/amish-friendship-bread
- Day 1:
- Do nothing with the starter.
- Days 2-5:
- Stir with a wooden spoon.
- Day 6:
- Add 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, and 1 cup milk. Stir with a wooden spoon.
- Days 7-9:
- Stir with a wooden spoon.
- Day 10:
- Add 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar and 1 cup milk. Stir. Take out 3 cups and place 1 cup each into three separate plastic containers. Give one cup and a copy of this recipe to three friends. To the balance (a little over one cup) of the batter, add the following ingredients and mix well.
Note: When you make a starter from scratch, you can sometimes end up with a much greater yield than 4 cups depending on the temperature of your kitchen and eagerness of your starter! If this happens, reserve one cup for baking and divide the remaining batter into Ziploc baggies of 1 cup each to freeze or share with friends.
As long as you continue to “feed” your starter, it can stay at room temperature indefinitely. One of the wonderful things about the starter is that you can bake almost anything with it, pancakes, bread, biscuits. It is a sweet dough, not a sour dough because of the sugar.
Just give it a bit of flour every week or so and it will continue to survive and you’ll have a lifetime of yeast. Run out of flour? Then dry some acorns, and ground them up fine to be a flour substitute. Any carbohydrate like flour, rice flour, will work.
See the original article here: http://www.thecovertprepper.com/?p=329&cpage=1
How a Small Town Can Survive The Collapse
The following is a backbone of a concept that every small town Mayor or Council should consider BEFORE the collapse happens. Granted, this will not solve every problem. If you have a plan such as below you can then incorporate ideas for solving problems. For example, if there is a nuclear fallout issue, then consider what might need changed or added, but use this as your primary example of what can be done to increase your town’s survival.
The collapse happens:
- Small towns usually means limited law enforcement
- Roving mass of people out of cities – imagine the zombie movies
- Small towns can be viewed as a stopping point to spend the night or find food and water
- Small towns are close to agricultural areas so food is easier to find such as eggs and grain
- Small towns can be victimized much easier
- Small towns are usually closer knit families and are usually related in some ways
The question is how do you minimize the risks and increase the benefits: PLAN!
First:
- Make a map
- List natural resources:
- Lakes/ponds within the city limits
- Trees/parks/forests
- Coal mines
- Quarries
- Creeks/rivers – can be a liability
Assets:
- Abandoned cars and homes
- Variety of skill sets
- Library
- Hardware store
- Restaurants
- School
- Sewing machines
- Thrift stores
- Ham radio operators and gear
- Good geographical location
Liabilities:
- Creeks or rivers
- Rail lines
- Roads
- Drug addicts
- Health issues
- Bad geographic location
Once trouble happens establish armed guards with radios:
- At the roads, rails, and waterways, about ¼ mile from town
- Sniper points for forward observation and backup
- Have roamers to keep an eye on inside the town
For my small town that’s about 18 people that’s needed, so triple that number for a 24/7 crew.
Once the guards are established meet at a church or school and explain the situation with the best available information.
Request volunteers for the following jobs:
- Water distillers
- Mining
- Lumberjack
- Foundry
- Security
- Medical
- Gardening
- Seamstress
- Animal wrangler
- Hunters
Everybody CAN work. A paraplegic can sew by hand or toss wood into a fire for the distillation plants. Idle hands are tools for the devil, so give kids a job too!!
- Age < 2 can be baby sat by those who are doing the sit down work like sewing
- 2-5: Garden Patrol: Chase bunnies and squirrels away – The gardeners would use teenagers to help with the younger kids
- 5-18: Split ½ day in school, ½ day in the same work as adults as possible. Some can carry small loads of wood or coal in back packs – age appropriate loads and work. At about age 15 figure out who has natural talent and encourage them to learn a particular trade. Get the next generation prepared for living.
- Adult: Jobs can and should be rotated around.
What should be done first?
- Once security is set up – rotate 6 on / 6 off schedule
- Find every abandoned car and remove the alternator, battery, light fixtures, wiring, radiator fans, radiator, and coolant.
- In every abandoned home rip out any water heaters, lighting fixtures, wiring, and plumbing
- Have kids carry as much as they can to a central location like an empty classroom in the school. Have a few locations if you have a bunch of cars and homes
As the homes are being dismantled keep the following:
- Nails and screws
- Windows
- Long pieces of lumber / siding
- Insulation
- Carpet
- Bricks and masonry
Believe it or not you can make solar ovens with the above items!
Once you have a a few hot water heaters, remove the outer shell and insulation. Cut a 4 inch hold midway down the middle, and then 90 degrees to that cut out a 8” x 24” rectangle. Once it’s on it’s side you now have a steel wood stove. Fashion a few pipes over the burning area to boil water and now you can distill water easily. Have gallon jugs handy and kids can carry water to the elderly and infirm.
Any rainwater caught can be used for drinking as well. Create some reservoirs as I discussed in a previous show.
Depending on your population use the restaurants for the main dining areas. They are set up much better for crowds, more storage areas, and as you come to have a meal, you can bring stored food that you’re sharing so that not all the food is in the restaurant to prevent looters from stealing your food. The restaurant also provides socialization. It’s very important as information can be discussed, plans made, and then implemented.
Those in leadership should consider the following:
- Crazy Joe has an idea. Mayor should say, “Joe, you build a working prototype and if it works well enough, we’ll make more”
- Beware the ethereal concepts such as “We could be like the ancient Greeks or aliens or…” This is a distraction and waste of time
For electrical power:
Creeks/rivers:
- Make water wheels with the alternators. As many as you can, and attach them in parallel to a battery bank. Run car headlights for security areas, along creek beds, railways etc.
- Tie the lights in with the motion detectors from the frogs, owls, and what other toys laying around. The relays from the abandoned cars will work great for that. As people try to creep up, the lights will come on. Think of it as a force multiplier
Windy areas:
Make windmills!
To supplement the power:
Make thermopyles with copper and steel plates. A small unit can provide 50 watts an hr, more than the Harbor Freight Solar Panels. Place them onto the steel wood burners for 24/7 power generation. If you put several onto a burner you can get about 1200W per day per unit.
Make a foundry:
Using wood and/or coal, melt the steel down from abandoned cars to to make nails, bolts, fireboxes for those homes that burn oil for heat. Put a radiator to the rear of the firebox to act as a heat exchanger.
The foundry can make aluminum netting to catch fish traveling down the creek or river. Put this fish into the town’s pond to build up your aquaculture.
Bullets can also be made, as well as arrowheads and animal traps
Seamstress:
- They get to use the power from the wind/solar/fire.
- They do the laundry and clothing repairs.
- Patch clothing and use the clothes in the thrift store as needed.
Laundry can be done with a standard clothes washer and hung outside to dry. Use a front load for less water consumption. Water is drawn in from a buck on top, and the grey water can go into another bucket for distillation.
Animal wrangler:
A single rabbit doe can produce over 300 pounds of meat per year. Use captured rabbits for breeding of females and eat the males unless they are bigger than your male. Use the weeds pulled from the gardens, parks, wherever, to feed them. Does can be re-bred every 6 weeks after giving birth.
Chickens, woodchucks, beaver, etc. Raise them if you can.
Use dogs for security, cats for rabbit, squirrel, and rodent control. Terriers are born rat hunters, let them do your job for you. Let the flesh of rats become maggot infested and then feed to the chickens for extra protein.
The wrangler also mucks the pens for the compost on the garden.
Tans hides for clothing.
Gardener:
Every horizontal, sunlit patch of ground should be gardened, unless you run out of seeds.
Teach kids how to weed and harvest the food.
Build a worm bed for better composting and gardening
Take window screens and make them into racks, place the veggies inside a dark car to be dehydrated passively.
Feed the weeds and bugs to the animals. Chickens will love the variety.
If a cat catches a rabbit, give the body to the wrangler for processing and skinning. They in turn give to the restaurant for dinner.
If gardening can’t be done year round, use the winter to consider next years crop, compost the garden, improve techniques, build more dryers, and then work where they’re needed.
Hunter:
RESPONSIBLE management of game – old and infirm animals first
Working in shifts they bring home the game to the restaurant and the skins to the wrangler.
Hunters can also manage the aquaculture of freshwater fish in the town’s lakes or ponds
Koi is Japanese for carp. You CAN eat them. Toss into the pond some rabbit guts and make those some big fish.
Lumberjack:
- Falls trees for firewood, but first uses all limbs from dead trees.
- Cuts down dead, diseased, and insect infested trees.
- Plants new trees where possible.
Trees such as apple and cherry are tended to. Mulch and compost material can be laid down. Limbs from these trees should be chipped for smoking meats.
Miners:
- Break coal down so kids can carry it home.
Have the football team POSITIVELY encourage the younger kids when hauling coal back to town. The kids should have armed guards when moving out of town.
Use the mines for storage and as a safe location for bad weather or hostile actions. Put in bunks for such events.
Ham Radio:
Provides weather information from WEFAX satellite images
Operator listens to the chatter but does not engage
Uses kids as messengers to provide the mayor with up to date information.
Medical:
Maintains everyone’s health via counseling
Maintains a medical herb garden – See my site for a seller of such a garden.
Practices good old fashion doctoring, and provides care for the deceased.
How to deal with refugees:
- Stop them well away from security check points
- Using a digital camera, take photos
- Find out their intent:
- If they are just passing through then explain what you are going to do
- Take their bags and have another team escort them out.
- Keep their bags within their view
- Return the bags, and if they have small children, give them a toy
- Refill their water containers
- If they are needing a place to stay consider:
- Their beliefs & faith are agreeable with those who make up your community – Ed.
- Their skills
- Their health
- Current load on resources
- NEVER LET THEM DO SECURITY
- Explain why you are doing this and the penalty for lying
- Consider them to be new blood. We don’t want a family tree that’s a straight line
- Find them a home in an empty APARTMENT
- Give them a schedule to follow
- Do a meet and greet at the restaurants
- Trust your gut. If you think they might be trouble, send them on.
- If you are low on resources, tell them and send them on.
So what is in the day in the life like:
Wake up at sunrise and wash face and hair, maybe shave. Carry some food down to the restaurant and have a chicken sausage and omelet, some fruit and a doughnut for breakfast. After that, head to work. Today the misses is doing seamstress duties and washing our clothes. Kids 1 & 2 are going to school, and then #1 is in the garden, #2 is hauling wood to the distillers. Lunch is brought to us by a teenage runner. It’s going to be rabbit stir fry and apple juice. After work, we head to the restaurant for dinner – we split a trout, have some mixed veggies and potatoes. People use the local school to shower. Water is collected on the schools roof, fed through to a wood burning hot water heater, and then fed to the showers. Soap is made from chicken fat and woo dashes. Because this is Saturday – it’s the weekly social. Kids have their dance and adults have their card games and sample the latest moonshine. The misses is going to show off her handmade fur lined rabbit skin boots. Tomorrow is church so we leave early. Kids come home to a solar lighted home with us listening to music from the laptop we charged up today at the battery bank. We then head to bed to be woken by the church bells.
How To Develop 3-D Thinking
I’m not talking about anything unusual or alien in nature. What I’m talking about is how to thinking outside of the box requires just a little bit more work than you may be used to. Once you master the simple concept of ABC-XYZ, then you’ll be thinking in 3 dimensions. I take the idea from the movie, “The Wrath of Khan”, a Star Trek movie. The USS Enterprise is in a nebula chasing Khan who is in command of the USS Reliant. Mr. Spock says, “His actions represent two-dimensional thinking” and then Captain Kirk orders Mr. Sulu to move the ship down [belly first], or -Z in the XYZ axis.
Let’s start with prepping. While you’ve been prepping, you told yourself, “I’ll need chickens, rabbits, goats, and whatever else”. But did you think behind and ahead of this need? Prepping is a cause and effect system. The cause is concern for your future, the effect is setting things aside and learn new skills.
So this is where ABC begins.
ABC is the beginning sequence of our alphabet. ABC represents cause and effect and how sequence of events need to be considered.
“A” may be “I need to get chickens”, but unless you consider B and C, it may be a waste of time and money. Are there alternatives to chickens, such as rabbits? How about getting cats to hunt small game for you? You have alternatives, think of them now instead of later. If you decide to get chickens, how many should you get? What breed is best for your area? Do you want eggs, meat, or both? Think about it now, not later. And then act on that decision.
“B” would simply be raising the chickens. Have you figured out what to feed them pre- and post collapse? Have you thought about where they are going to live in the winter? Are you going to long-term store the eggs, eat them daily, or sell them?
“C” would be what to do once they stop laying. Are you going to slaughter them, or just let them sponge off of you? If you are going to slaughter, what are going to do with the left overs, the “guts and feathers” of a chicken? How are you going to store the meat?
I’m simply using Chickens as the object of the cause and effect. It could be accepting someone into your prepping group, or having a child in a post collapse society. It could be anything.
Now XYZ is a bit more complex.
Look up, Look down, Look around. That is the XYZ part of 3 dimensional thinking.
Our prepping is the same way. We see shelves, so let’s fill them. We see totes, so let’s fill them. Did you look above or below for places to conceal food? Did you check to see if your false ceiling had spaces along the wall to store things, or the crawl space could be made to store water with an afternoon’s worth of work?
Do you live in a small town? If so, look at your street. More than likely, somewhere on that block is a manhole cover. Now I’m not saying you should put your preps there, RIGHT NOW, but rather when they start going door-to-door it may be a good place to hide yourselves, or your group, or maybe your food. Now it’s too dangerous to be there full time, but it doesn’t mean you can creep up at night for fresh air and water.
Move away from your home block and look for open spaces. There may or may not be enough room for a person to stand, but at least you can sit things out for a few days.
If you are concerned about flammable gases, then remember you can use that gas to your benefit. If it’s too nasty for them, it’s going to keep them away.
Storing materials UP into trees is also an option. Climb up a ladder and store things in small steel containers. That keeps the squirrels from getting in. It works best with full foliage trees, or evergreens in the winter. USE YOUR IMAGINATION!
Where Should You Live To Avoid Natural Disasters?
Not Louisiana or Texas!
After last week’s horrifying news of tornadoes that swept across the South, killing over 350 people, you had to wonder: Is anywhere in America safe? On the Mid-Atlantic coast, there’s hurricanes, which every year seem to be getting more and more fierce; all across the south, tornadoes; and the West Coast lives under constant threat of a catastrophic earthquake. And enormous tracts of our country face severe droughts.
This astonishing infographic from The New York Times lays all those risks out — and, most remarkably, compares them all against each other. What you get is a map that shows what cities are safest from and which are most threatened by natural disaster.
[Click to enlarge]
The larger the circle, the more people live there. The redder it is, the more risk of natural disaster. As you can see, Texas and Louisiana are pretty terrible places to set up huge cities, given all the immediate threats.
The data was crunched by Sperling’s Best Places, and it takes into account the infrequency — but greater threat — posed by earthquakes, compared to severe weather.
They also produced this nifty set of heat maps, showing the threats posed by hurricane, earthquake, and tornado:
[Click to enlarge]
If anything though, this analysis isn’t quite complete because while earthquakes and tornadoes are scary, maybe the most significant long-term threat to a city’s well-being is drought. You can easily imagine San Francisco rebuilding after an earthquake (because it has). But if, say, Atlanta, saw a 20-year period of low rains, you can bet that the city’s growth would slow and that the city would face an enormous drag on its economy, as a greater and greater share of dollars went to procuring just enough water to get by.
Originally posted at: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663770/infographic-of-the-day-where-should-you-live-to-avoid-natural-disasters
Why I Am Not A Survivalist
Life is an amazing and complex wonder. Only on Earth are there life forms that can live in waters hundreds of degrees temperature, life that lives in well below freezing, life that lives in environments without water, or light. There is even life that can survive being in outer space. To quote Malcolm in the movie Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way”, because sometimes life finds itself forced to survive in nearly unsurvivable conditions.
The human body is the same way; a person can survive with:
- One half of a brain
- No ears, eyes, tongue, lips, eyelids, arms, legs,
- No lower jaw, teeth, or skin
- No genitals or testes or ovaries
- A partial stomach
- One lung
- One kidney
- Very little intestines
- No spleen
- Partial liver
- Partial pancreas
Please note I said “SURVIVE”.
You can live through a horrific accident which takes the above items away from you, and in today’s medical advancements – you would survive a long time.
Not to sound too superficial, but what kind of life is it to survive permanently in a hospital bed? And not to sound too SUPER superficial, what kind of life would it be without genitals or gonads?
And that is the point. I don’t want to survive.
I want to live.
Survival isn’t enough. A survivalist survives and that will not be living. Beans, bullets, and bullion won’t be enough.
MRE’s, BOV, and a bug-out compound would only get you through a few years after a collapse.
So what is the answer?
Living.
Living means hardcore prepping – prepping beyond a few years post-TEOTWAWKI. Not seeing seeing the big picture like the common person, but seeing the picture in HD 1080p – 3-D on an IMAX screen, so that you can plan what needs to be done for the next generation. As we are the original wave of the post-collapse world, we get only one chance to get it right to pass the torch onto the next generation.
So clearly, it is not the time to be running around in camo fatigues in the woods, or cussing out the government, wasting our time and resources on trivial matters.
Now is the time to learn lost skills, big and little, to pass onto our kids and grand-kids.
It’s time to develop a network of like-minded friends and build what may be the last bastion of free people.
Survivalism is short term thinking.
Prepping is long term planning.
Which one do you want?
