What I Did To Prep This Week: Apr 5th – 11th 2020
Hello Pack. I hope you all are surviving the pandemic just fine. My life has really not changed at all.
I work from home, prefer to spend as close to 100% of the time on our farm after years of running to coaching and community commitments for decades, and the three brick and mortar businesses I frequent (Dollar General, Tractor Supply, and Dollar Tree) are still open.
Listening to the news over the weekend it just astounded me how some cities were calling in mental health experts to help people deal with having to be “stuck at home” and to deal with spending so much time with their children and teaching them things.
I know that city people have a whole different set of priorities and habits that we country folks do by and large, but my oh my how American family life has changed in the past 30 to 50 decades that people need a psychologist to deal with actually being at home with their family and filling the minds of their children with knowledge.
This week has brought decent to awesome weather in my neck of the woods, and we have made great use of it. As you can see from the adorable feature photo, our duck flock has been joined on the pond by the “mini flock” of ducklings.
We all stood and enjoyed watching the ducklings leave the coop run for the first time, and summon the bravery to venture down the pond bank to engage in their first swing. Perhaps if city folks could enjoy these types of sights they would not need to be calling helplines to deal with that whole, “stuck at home” woes mindset.
Our ducks are laying like crazy since the temperatures have warmed up. They really, and I do mean really, love mating in the pond, so we will probably have more ducklings on the way soon.
We have been dehydrating and powdering some of the eggs and sharing the extra bounty with others who could use a little extra or simply love the taste of farm fresh duck eggs.
My Buckeye chicken hen is still barely laying any eggs. Soon, she will be joined by the three Banty hens that have been in the brooder for a while now.
They are old enough to be outside now, but since they are banties – or as some like to call them, “mini chickens” they are still small enough to get squished by one of my Jumbo Pekin ducks scrambling to catch a piece of something good at snack time during put up at dusk.
The six new Banty chicks my husband surprised me with are doing nicely. They are so tinky tiny that it is hard to believe the other Bantys looked like them just a few weeks ago.
One little chick, I am sure it is going to be a rooster, is so spunky and hilarious to watch at snack time. I call him Tenacious C – for chick. I try not to ever name the chickens, but his personality earned him a true monniker.
This batch of chicks struggled a bit with pasty butt. They so do not like it when I pick them up and clean it away, but I like to think they are secretly thanking me afterwards.
We have grown our flocks more than normal for this time of year, but that will mean more eggs and birds to eat in these uncertain times.
The truck drivers have been doing an outstanding job at keeping the food chain rolling – as have local groceries at keeping the shelves stocked with everything you really need. Hand sanitizer is still a no go here and toilet paper supplies low but steadily refilled.
The panicked buying seems to have ended here, with a vast number of people taking advantage of the drive up grocery service at Walmart and Kroger in adjacent counties – we don’t have either store in my rural county and that is just fine by me.
I do not shop at either one because they are anti-Second Amendment, so no drive up grocery getting for me now matter how big of a sale that they have or hard to find items still in stock.
The hospital folks are working diligently, as are all of the first responders, but the medical care industry was not nearly as prepared for a pandemic as the truckers or preppers were.
I simply do not understand how, after nearly two decades of planning and training for a terrorism attack – including a bio-terror one and dealing with mass causlity situations, that so many hospitals are short on masks, gloves, and ventilators.
One would think that those items would be at the top of the “must have” list for terror attack mass casualty scenarios.
The liberals who just assumed that big daddy federal government would have stockpiled these items en masse – because you know, relying on the federal government for our every need or want is exactly what the Founding Fathers intended, were definitely dealt quite a shock in the past month or so.
In our preps this week we worked hard on cutting downed trees for firewood. Thanks to the gas company crew coming through to make a temporary access road, the tree cutting chore was taken off the agenda.
All we have to do is cut up the logs and bring them down to the splitter and then stack it to cure. They also found some standing timber that was missed during a select cut a few years ago that we will run into one of the many sawmills in our county as soon as they are back up and running.
I think there will be enough money trees to cover the cost of putting down a concrete pad, and setting two shipping containers on them – connected by a roof and porch, for my Bobby to turn into an equipment shed and workshop for his blacksmithing, reloading, and pottery.
One of the more exciting events on our survival homestead this week happened at 2:30 a.m. this morning. Jovie finally had her puppies:
Three so far, but I think she is still going to have one or two more. They are white now, but their heeler colors will come in about two weeks.
This Week’s Questions:
- How are your prepping stockpiles and plans stacking up to the ongoing shut down of the country during the pandemic?
- If you had to stay in your house and not go anywhere at all until this was all over, would you make it through?
- What do you think of the rescue and recovery stimulus bill? And all of the pork Nancy Pelosi and her crew were allowed to add into it? I am still so angry that Republicans did not back her right into a corner and stand on principle until the bill just dealt with what it was intended and not millions for the Kennedy Center, etc.
- What did you do to prep this week?