Category Archives: Garden

What I Did This Week To Prep 2/10/12

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As I mentioned last week, we’re bringing on a new monthly contributor. Leah, who we’ll affectionately refer to as ‘Momma Bear’, will write for us the third Wednesday of each month. Her debut post, Momma Bear Is The Prepper, will be up next Wednesday. I’m excited to have her relatively unique perspective as the woman in the family being the ‘main‘ prepper. Prepping has traditionally been viewed as a male thing; men are the ones who ‘protect the cave’ (yes, I know I’m stereotyping). Since this is such a male-dominated community in general, and I’m a male, I am very happy to be able to present a female prepper’s point of view; not one who is just supporting her husband – but is motivating, guiding, and directing it.

Also new this week – A Contest! We’re giving away a signed copy of The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook! After the great response to my post reviewing The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook, Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy contacted me and asked if I would like a copy of their book to give away to my readers. I immediately responded in the affirmative and requested an autographed one (which they humbly agreed to). So, since I’ve never done a give-away contest before, Sarah and I brainstormed how to do it. Here’s what we came up with: If you’d like to win the book, comment–on this post, or on the TraceMyPreps facebook page–and tell us what your biggest concern MEDICALLY is in a collapse.

You have until 8:00pm PST this Sunday (2/12/12) to respond. From the respondents we’ll randomly choose a name. The winner’s name (first name, or log-in name, only) will be posted on our facebook page at that time; I’ll then coordinate with the winner to get the book mailed. Hopefully this’ll all work… Since this is our first give away, and we have a relatively small audience, if you post something you’ll have a pretty good chance to win.

As Sarah mentioned in her post, I’ve located a source to get donkey manure to fertilize our garden. My boss’ landlord has donkeys and is happy to give away the manure. He bags it up in approximately 4-gallon heavy duty bags, and just asks that the bags be returned. Yesterday, after work, I picked up 11 bags and brought them home. It was interesting, in my little commuter car full of donkey manure, there was no odor – just a faint smell of dirt. I did a little bit of research and it appears that the basic consensus (here’s where WSU Extension discusses it) is that fresh manure is perfectly safe to be added directly to the garden soil. However, it should be added using the following guidelines: 120 days before root crops (food that comes into contacted with the soil) are harvested, or 90 days, if the food does not have direct contact with the soil. I hope to get many more bags and cover the entire garden area front and back.

What did you do this week to prep?

(Monday: Teaching The Kids: Chainsaws For Everyone)

Sarah’s View: Time To Order Seeds

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Even though we’re still in the dark of winter, now is the time of year when we peruse the seed catalogs and start planning our garden.

Last year was our first “real” garden, and it did okay. It wasn’t spectacular, but it wasn’t horrible either. Part of that can be blamed on the weather – it was a very cool summer and plants that normally do well around here, like tomatoes, struggled. But much of the garden success, or in this case failure, was directly related to our inexperience. It was the first year we started our plants from seed (instead of seedlings) and we tried items that we had no previous experience growing. We also do not have the best soil… okay, the soil here sucks. Our subdivision’s “soil” is mostly rocks and clay.

Trace has been actively working to improve our soil. He built up our back yard compost pile, brought in additional compost from the local landfill, and expanded the space for the garden. We hope to continue the soil enhancements this year. We will bring in more compost and are selecting specific crops with soil improvement in mind. Trace is also pursuing a lead on donkey manure.

There were a few plants that did well. Of the perennials we planted, the strawberries, raspberries and asparagus all survived. The rhubarb, on the other hand, didn’t go so well. And we were able to harvest some tomatoes (albeit mostly green) at the end of the season. This year we’ll again try tomatoes, green beans, and zucchini. I’ll have to check on the herb garden and see what survived the snow, but we will have – either from seed or carried over from last year – basil, rosemary, thyme, sage and chives.

Besides the “regulars”, we are hoping to branch out (pun intended) a bit this year. Trace has requested cabbage; luckily I’ve heard it grows well around here and shouldn’t be a problem. I would also like to grow potatoes. We found a potato box diagram online that will allow us to grow them without using a huge amount of space.  We are also going to add butternut and spaghetti squash, radishes, onions, garlic, black beans, and peas to our garden. None of those are all that uncommon, but will be “new to us”.

One, more unusual, plant we’re going to try is garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas). We regularly fry them on the stove to make a snack and would love to have enough to do this and make our own hummus. In addition, the other uncommon plant we are going to try is comfrey. We are specifically planting this with soil improvement in mind as it is known as a valuable fertilizer and will pull nutrients up with its long tap root.

This year, after having more time to look over the many many options, we are going to go ahead and order from Bountiful Gardens again. Their catalog has a plethora of information on each plant and I truly value their philosophy: “For the benefit of all farmers, gardeners and consumers who want an alternative, we pledge that we do not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants.” As preppers, I feel it is important that the plants we grow have seeds that can be saved and successfully planted in future years.

What are you planting this year?

(Friday: What I Did This Week To Prep)

note: This is my wife Sarah’s second post (first post: “What Do You Think of All This?” – A Prepper’s Wife’s Point of View). She will continue to post under ‘Sarah’s View’ the second Wednesday of each month. I’m excited to have her regularly writing for us!