The Survival Garden - Building a Movable Fence

My garden is plagued by rabbits. They love my pole beans when they are first coming up and they think my greens are their own personal salad bar. I tried a lot of things to get rid of rabbits without success, and I finally decided that I was going to have to build a fence. But, I have several problems with the idea of a fence. For one thing, my garden is constantly changing size and shape, so I hate to lock myself into a specific area for gardening. For another thing, many of the things I grow don't seem to attract the rabbits and don't need to be fenced, but I rotate my crops to different parts of the garden each year, so I would have to build a fence around all of my crops whether they needed to be fenced or not. And lastly, to keep rabbits out I would have to build a fence out of the smallest (and most expensive) welded mesh wire. I thought about it for a while, and finally decided that what I needed was a fence that I could put up around the crops that need a fence, but that could be easily taken down and moved when the location of those crops was moved. So, I developed my slightly ugly, but highly effective portable anti-rabbit fence. For fence wire I chose 2 foot high chicken wire. It is relatively inexpensive and has a small enough weave that rabbits can't get through it. For posts I ripped a bunch of 3 1/2" cedar fence pickets in half, cut them three feet long, and sharpened one end to a point. You don't have to use fence pickets. I just happened to have a lot of old fence pickets lying around. You could cut small saplings, use PVC pipe, old re-bar, or just about anything for the posts. Once you have your posts in hand you can use a hammer to drive them into the ground around your crop. I drive them in about 6 or 8 inches and put them about eight feet apart. One hint; don't place the posts too close to your crop. Leave yourself plenty of room to work. Now that you have the posts in place, it's a simple matter to take some tie-wire or other light gauge wire and wire the fencing to the posts. I put one loop of wire at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom of each post and give them a couple of twists with pliers to keep them tight. You're not building the Great Wall of China, so don't wire the thing together like it's going to be there forever. Make sure that you have the bottom of the fence wire down on the ground. If you leave any room, those rascally rabbits will sneak under your fence. If the fence is too loose at the bottom, you can use coat hanger wire or bailing wire and make stakes to hold the bottom of the fence down. I put mulch down on both sides of the fence so I don't have to mess with weeds. Now you have a (hopefully) rabbit-proof fence around your crops. It's only 2 feet tall so you can easily step over it to get into the garden and work. Next year when you move your beans and greens to another location, you can move the fence along with them.

Rabbits also seem to love broccoli, Brussels's sprouts, and other plants when they are young. I build little round cages out of small mesh welded wire to put around these types of plants. The cages are about a foot across and a foot tall.
By the time the plants grow up out of these cages they can pretty well survive on there own, plus spring is now well advanced and the rabbits have more choices of wild plants that are easier to get to than my caged plants.

Get Out of Debt Now

One of the things that seems to plague people the most these days is personal debt. And look at the examples they have to follow. Our own government is trillions of dollars in debt, and every year they set a budget that they know going in has more debt built into it. Everything that you see on television tells you to buy, buy, buy. Never mind if you can’t afford it; just charge it. Our whole economic philosophy is just one big Ponsey Scheme. The only way to keep the economy going is for everyone to keep buying, whether they need to or not. What was George Bush’s advice to the country after the 911 attack? “Go shopping.” How sad is that? I read a good quote somewhere. It said, “Most people spend their whole lives working at jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they can’t stand”. Sad, but pretty true. We have allowed advertisers to convince us that if we don’t have whatever they’re selling, that our mates won’t love us, our children will feel neglected, and our friends will think that we are losers. They are drawn to our insecurities like sharks are drawn to blood. And poor pitiful us, we believe them, and we pile up mountains of debt so that we will feel worthy. Well, no more. Now is the time to make your own personal Declaration of Independence. Quit being motivated by your insecurities and start putting an end to personal debt. No, you won’t be helping the American economy. But, it’s already in the toilet anyway, placed there by the escalating consumerist policies of the last 50 years. It’s time to thumb your nose at the economic experts, and start helping yourself. If this sounds appealing to you, read on and I will outline my plan for developing your economic independence; and by the way, unlike your friendly financial adviser, I will tell you right now that financial independence does not mean being rich.

Step One – Learn Patience
When I was a kid, television was in its infancy, had been around less than 10 years. I remember how I used to wait and look forward all week to Saturday morning, because that was when I could get up and watch Hop-Along-Cassidy, Lash LaRue, Roy Rodgers, and all of my other favorite TV shows. What do kids look forward to on television now? Answer: nothing. If they want to see something they Tivo it, or order it from pay-per-view, or just scroll through the 150 channels they have until they find it. They totally lose the joy of anticipation. If a kid wants a toy, they don’t visit the toy store every Saturday for three months looking longingly at the object of their desire, and going over in their minds how much fun they will have when they finally save enough allowance to buy it. They just badger their parents into pulling out the credit card and going deeper into debt.

We, as a nation, no longer have any patience. We want it now, and the advertisers, the banks, the economists, and our national leaders all assure us that we can have it now. Here’s the truth, and you should make these words the preamble to your economic declaration of independence, IF YOU CAN’T PAY CASH FOR IT YOU CAN’T HAVE IT NOW.

Well, you say, how can anyone buy a house? No one can save up that much money. I must, respectfully, disagree. When my wife and I moved to our farm we bought a used trailer. It was 8 x 32 feet. We paid $500 dollars cash for it. It was no mansion, and it wasn’t the house we wanted to live in, but it was what we could afford. I worked at my job, and each week we would set money aside. In the evenings we would draw house plans, and read books and magazines about houses, and talk about what we wanted our house to be like. When we saved up enough money, we’d go and buy building materials. We had to save for a long time to get the slab poured. This was our single biggest one-time expense. After that, it was buy a little lumber every week or two and start framing up the walls. We did nearly all of the work ourselves. I won’t go into all the details, but seven years latter we moved into our new three-bedroom dog-run style country home; and the day we moved in, it was ours. You may say, “Seven years! That’s a long time to wait on a house.” Well it is a long time, but at the end of seven years we owned our home. For most of our friends it was another 23 years before they had their houses paid for; that’s if they didn’t move into a newer, bigger house and assume a newer, bigger mortgage. Over the years we have had economic down-turns, job losses, and unexpected expenses; but it has always been a comfort knowing that our house is ours. And by the way, we also saved about $70,000 dollars in interest payments by paying cash for our home, so patience can pay off in the long run.

Example #2. I just bought a new/used truck. My old one had 160,00 miles on it. My new truck cost $10,000. I paid cash for it. Where, you ask, did a poor country boy come up with cash to buy a vehicle? Well here’s my approach to buying vehicles, and the nice thing is, you only have to exercise patience the first time you buy one. Save your money and buy a used car that you can afford, then set up a bank account and start making a car payment to yourself every month. It doesn’t have to be as big as a regular car payment that you would make to the bank because you’re not paying any interest. You could put aside something like $300 a month, and at the end of four years you would have over $14,000 dollars to spend on a new vehicle. And, if anything should happen in the meantime, no one is going to repo your vehicle. Just a little more peace of mind in a stressful world. I will have to admit that I had to fudge on this a little last year. My son needed a new car to go off to college in, and a friend of mine had an almost new car that they were offering at a really good price. It was a little more than we had put back and so we had to finance part of it. It ticks me off every month when I pay that note knowing that the bank is making money off of me. My philosophy is that I make money off of the bank.

Step 2 – Know Where Your Money is Going
Make a list of all of your expenses for a month. House payment (if any), car payment (if any), insurance, 1/12 of you property taxes, gasoline, utility bills, estimated grocery bill, etc. Now write down how much your take home pay for a month is. Compare the two figures. If you are like most folks, you will find that about a third of your paycheck has disappeared without explanation. Eating out at lunch, buying a soft drink and candy bar everyday, making impulse purchases, buying a new piece of clothing when the closet is already full, spending $20 to see a movie that will be out on DVD next month; it just sort of disappears. Now, I’m not telling you that you should live like a monk. I like to go to a movie every once in a while, and I consider the occasional 6-pack of beer a good investment; but we’ve got to rein in some of that disappearing paycheck. What I would suggest is that you take half the difference between what you bring home and what your known expenses are, and have it automatically deposited from your paycheck into a savings or money market account. It’s fairly painless that way because you never see the money in the first place. Try it for a couple of months and see if it has any major impact on your life style. You can always go back and lower or raise the amount that’s deducted. I bet you will be surprised to find that it doesn’t really make all that big a difference in how you live, and you will be surprised to see how quick your little account will grow.

Step 3 – Avoid the Credit Card Trap
Some people can handle credit cards, and some people can’t. If you have nerves of steel, and can avoid the siren song of the advertisers, carry a credit card with you. There are some places that you have to have one. Renting a motel room or a car is just about impossible without a credit card. I personally use a credit card for buying gasoline because I feel that it helps me keep better track of my gas consumption, but I try to use cash for everything else. Market research shows that credit card purchasers spend about 18% more than cash purchasers; that’s why the banks and merchants want you to use them. If you do use a credit card, it is imperative that you pay your full balance every 30 days. Carrying an unpaid balance on a credit card will cost you interest that would have landed a banker in jail for loan-sharking in the old days. If you can’t control your credit card spending, then don’t carry one. Leave it at home and only take it out of the drawer for a specific purpose, then put it back in the drawer after you’ve used it. If you can’t handle that then cut the thing up and get professional help; you’re problems go way beyond financial management. If you do have a credit card, I would suggest that you just have one. Mastercard and Visa are accepted almost anywhere, and if all of your spending is reflected on only one bill it will make it easier to keep track of what you are spending and harder to fool yourself about how much you are spending.

Step 4 – Invest in Preparedness
If the bottom should fall out of society I would rather have a year’s supply of food than a $100,000 in the bank. I’m not saying that you should cash in your 401-K and buy MRE’s. I hope to retire someday, and I have a retirement account that I hope to get to spend, but I want to be prepared if things should go unexpectedly sideways. It doesn’t have to be painful. Couldn’t you keep wearing your old watch and buy a generator (and a lot of other things) with the money that you were going to spend on that new Rolex. How about investing in a good food storage program instead of that new set of golf clubs. Just be sensible and try to maintain a balance between living in the world as it is, and preparing for the world that might be.

Well, that’s my program. It may seem kind of out of place to you on a blog about survival, but I think that being financially independent is an important part of preparedness and self-sufficiency. I hope that some of what I’ve written here will be of help to you.

Survival Hunting - The Pellet Gun

When I was growing up, nearly every kid's first real rifle was a pellet gun. We ranged far and wide through the woods with our pellet guns, and birds and squirrels feared us. Of course we soon graduated to .22's and shotguns and our childhood pellet guns were forgotten in the back of the closet. Well, it's time to dig into that closet and pull out your old friend, because a pellet gun can be a handy survival tool. Think about it. The pellet gun is accurate, it's quiet, it's powerful enough to kill small game, and you can hold 250 bullets in the palm of your hand. And if you don't have your old pellet gun anymore, go to the store and look around. Your old model may still be there along with some interesting new arrivals. Pellet guns all operate by using compressed gas to force a small lead or alloy bullet out of the rifled barrel, but the system for compressing the gas is different in different styles of gun.

The Pump-Up Gun
When I was a kid the Benjamin Pump was the king of pellet rifles. The air was compressed in a holding chamber by pumping a lever located beneath the barrel. The more you pumped (up to a point) the more power behind the pellet. The Benjamin came in .177 caliber and .22 caliber. I never have really figured which caliber was better. We argued about it as kids, and as far as I know the debate continues to be unresolved. The .177 has a faster muzzle velocity, but the .22 has a bigger bullet and thus more shock power. I guess they both must be pretty good, because after all these years; manufactures still make both calibers. I had, and still have, a 177. caliber; but that's just because that's the one that my dad bought me for Christmas. You can still buy a Benjamin, and they haven't changed over the years. The cost now is about $125, and they still spit out a pellet at about 1000 ft. per second. My brother-in-law recently bought a good, working Benjamin at a garage sale for $25. I've offered to give him twice that for it, but he won't bite. Several other companies now make pump pellet guns including Daisy and Crossman, but they just don't seem to be the same quality as the Benjamin. For one thing the Benjamin still has a real wood stock, and for another it's made in the USA.
The CO2 Gun
There is a whole class of air rifles and pistols that are powered by CO2 gas that comes in small cartridges. They are hard shooters, but I stay away from them because they are worthless without the little compressed gas cartridges. I'd rather have a gun that I can compress the gas in by hand.

The Break Action Pellet Gun
I had one friend, when I was a kid, that had a pellet gun that broke open like a shotgun. Breaking the gun open to load it also compressed air into a holding tank to fire the gun. I was not particularly impressed with this gun, because it was not very powerful. These break open, one stroke air guns have improved a lot since those days. They now fire with as much power as the pump guns. The Germans developed some particularly high quality, and expensive, guns of this type. This type of pellet gun has become increasingly popular, and there are several companies making them. The level of quality is all over the board. There has been a recent flood of 22. caliber, Chinese break action guns on the market. They are inexpensive, around $30, but the quality is poor. My son bought one at an army-navy store and it shot pretty well, but didn't have as much power as the Benjamin, and it didn't last but about six months. Personally I'd pay the extra and have a gun that I know will last a lifetime. I recently bought a Beeman break action pellet gun, and I have been very happy with it. It is made in the U.S.A. It has a real wood stock, it came with both .22 and .117 caliber barrels, and it has a fairly good scope. I shot it into a catalogue from 75 feet and it penetrated 100 pages. At 120 feet I was consistently hitting rabbit sized targets. This seems to be a good quality gun for the mere $135 it costs, but only time will tell.

Pictured Below: top, Beeman break-action pellet rifle; middle, Benjamin pump; bottom, inexpensive Chinese single pump.

If you do buy a pellet rifle, make sure that it is a compressed air gun and not a spring powered BB gun. A BB gun does not have the power or accuracy to be considered a real hunting weapon.

Food Storage - Dried, Canned Hamburger

I came across this recipe for preserving hamburger meat on the End Times website a couple of years ago and I have been using it ever since. It is a great way to store meat without having to rely of your freezer, and the meat is always ready to use, no waiting for it to thaw out. I usually buy ground chuck in the five pound logs. You are going to cook and drain all of the fat away, so the leaner meat you start off with the less waste you will have. If you are going to can the meat for long term storage, you will need to sterilize your jars and jar lids before, or at the same time as, you prepare the hamburger. Five pounds of ground meat will fit in 2 to 3 pint jars, or 4 to 6 half-pints; depending on how fatty the original meat is.

Directions for preparing hamburger:

• Thoroughly brown the meat in a large cast iron skillet.

• When meat is browned, pour off the grease and transfer the meat to a colander.

• Rinse the meat thoroughly under hot running water to remove any remaining grease

• Wipe any remaining grease out of the skillet and place the drained hamburger back in the skillet.

• Heat the hamburger in the skillet until steam quits rising from the meat. Use a spatula to turn the meat and keep it moving so that it doesn't burn.

• When the hamburger quits steaming, spread it out in an even layer on baking sheets and place in a 200 degree oven. Leave the oven door propped slightly open and let the hamburger dry for about 2 hours.

• Place the, still hot, dried hamburger in hot sterilized jars, and cap tightly with sterilized lids and jar rings. In about 15 minutes the lids will ping and you will know that you have a good seal. Label and date the jars, and place them in storage.

I don't know how long the hamburger will keep when stored this way, but I can attest from personal experience that it is at least 2 years. To reconstitute the meat all that you have to do is put 1 cup of dried meat in 2 cups of water and let it soak for a while. I usually keep a pint can of dried hamburger in the kitchen pantry and when I make spaghetti sauce or vegetable beef soup, I grab a handful of meat and toss it in. It will re-hydrate as the other ingredients are cooking. You can use this meat in tacos, lasagna, chili, or any other recipe where you would normally use loose hamburger.

What to Plant, What to Buy at the Store

What to Plant, What to Buy at the Store

Like me, you may have limited garden space. Maybe you live in the city. My problem is that I live in the middle of the forest, and to make more garden room I would have to cut down trees. I do have one area that I'm slowly clearing so that I have the potential to have a much larger garden, but for now I'm limited to about 1600 square feet. So, I can't plant everything I would like to. I've had to make some decisions about what to raise in the garden and what to buy at the grocery store. I take mainly three things into consideration; flavor, price, and storability.

Take bell peppers for example. I was at the grocery store the other day, and one green bell pepper was $1.19. I bought it (stir-fried pepper beef doesn't taste right without the pepper), but it ticked me off. Last Spring I bought 6 bell pepper plants for $1.79. I turned up a little patch about a foot across for each pepper, planted them inside of a little PVC collar to keep the cut worms away, sprinkled a handful of 8-8-8 fertilizer around each plant, and laid down a good bed of mulch to keep the weeds down. That was it. Total work time about 45 minutes. I had to water occasionally, and when the plants got bigger I staked them up for support. What I'm saying is that there was no intensive labor involved here. I figure that at $1.19 each I must have harvested 75 or 80 dollars worth of bell peppers off of theses 6 plants. I picked bell peppers from June to November. Now that is a good return on investment.

Onions are another good example. A good onion at the grocery is $0.75 to $1.00. I can grow 300 onions for $5.00. We pull them, braid them, and hang them from the ceiling beams, and have onions all winter. Again, a good return on investment.

Now pinto beans are another story. I could plant my whole garden in pinto beans and not harvest as many as I can buy at the store for $10. It just doesn't make sense to take up garden space for pinto beans. I plant a few just to enjoy a meal or two of fresh picked beans, but that's all.

I plant purple hull peas for flavor. Dried peas or canned peas just don't come close, so I plant bed of purple hulls and get enough for ten or twelve meals of fresh peas.

Tomatoes are a good example of planting for taste and to save money. Eight or nine tomato plants will yield hundreds of tomatoes. My Arkansas Travelers yield all summer; even in the heat of August. I eat fresh tomatoes that are so much better than store-bought that it can't be described. I can tomatoes, can spaghetti sauce, and can hot sauce. I also dry tomatoes, and I give a lot of tomatoes to friends. All of this for the price of about 5 tomatoes at the grocery store.

I plant Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce, a type of leaf lettuce. It is fairly heat tolerant, and a dollar's worth of seed will yield many bunches of lettuce. A good return on investment here, plus you know it's not loaded down with DDT or contaminated with ecoli.
Boston Pickling Cucumbers are great for making pickles. I plant about a dollar's worth of seeds along a trellis and get pounds and pounds of cucumbers. Last year I planted a trellis about eight feet long by 4 feet high and put up about 30 pints of pickles. Of course there's some additional expense and labor involved in canning pickles, but man are they good. You can also eat these cucumbers fresh, but I'm not a big fan of fresh cucumbers. They give me heart burn, but if you can tolerate them, the taste is good.

I can't understand why squash is so expensive in the grocery store. I plant about 4 or 5 hill of it (7 seeds to the hill), and I get sick of squash I end up with so much. I eat it, I freeze it, I give it to friends until they run when they see me coming, and I still have squash. I like Yellow Crook Neck, Zucchini, and in the fall I plant Butter Nut. Squash seeds are super easy to save. Plant one good crop and you'll have squash for life.

Potatoes are good when they're fresh from the garden, but when they're planted in the traditional way they take up a lot of space relative to the yield that you get. I'm trying a new method of potato planting this year where you plant the potatoes inside of wooden frames and add more frames and mulch as the potatoes grow up through successive layers. The yield is supposed to be huge for a very small area. We'll see. If it works I'll do a post about it; in the mean time, potatoes remain on the buy-it-at-the-store list.

I currently buy flour and cornmeal at the store, but this year I will be trying my first corn crop in my new garden area and we'll see how that works out. I would love to be able to raise a good crop of Country Gentleman each year and grind it on a home grist mill.

Well these are just a few of my thoughts that may be of some help if you are planning a garden and wondering what to plant. By the way, if this is your first garden, plant some radishes. I don't really like radishes, but they come up so fast its almost like an instant reward. A good confidence builder.

The Survival Garden - Forget Rows

One of the most common mistakes that beginning gardeners make is plow up a huge garden and plant rows and rows of crops, then they spend the rest of the spring and summer fighting weeds. You will get higher yields from a smaller area and do lots less work, if you plant in beds. Many people think that crops are planted in rows because the plants need a certain amount of space between them in order to grow. It's true that plants do need room to grow, but they don't need near as much as is usually recommended on seed packets. Row planting was developed as a system when man first started using plows. Space was left between each row so that the plow animal would have a place to walk during cultivation. When mechanical agriculture came on the scene, the rows were spaced even wider. So unless you are using a mule or a tractor to cultivate, you don't really need the space between rows. Look at your typical seed packet of bush beans. It will probably say something like, "Plant seeds 6 inches apart in rows 2 feet apart." If you are doing hand cultivating using beds you can forget about the 2 feet apart. I plant bush beans in beds that are 4 feet wide, and I plant the seed 6 inches apart in each direction. Now think about it, I am planting 500 plants in a 100 sq. ft. bed. To plant the same amount of beans in rows that are 2 feet apart would take up 500 sq. ft. of your garden. And guess what's going to grow in that empty 400 sq. ft. You got it,---WEEDS. The way I plant, the beans are close enough together that the weeds don't have anywhere to grow. So while I'm sitting on the porch drinking iced tea, you're out in your garden hoeing weeds. Doesn't seem fair does it? Pictured below: A bed of different kinds of greens in early March.

Another advantage of planting in beds is that once a bed is established it takes way less effort to keep your soil loose and workable. I have permanent beds in my garden. I plant different crops in them each year, but I keep the same beds. My beds are about 4' wide and I leave an 18" walking path between the beds. I pile about 6" of pine needle mulch on the paths to keep weeds from growing in them. I hand turn the beds with a turning fork to a depth of ten to twelve inches; and once a bed has been established, I never walk on it again. All planting, cultivating, and harvesting is done from the paths. By staying off of the beds, the soil does not become compacted and is easy to turn for the next planting. I do fudge a little bit by stepping into the beds when I re-turn the soil each season, but that's about the only exception to my "don't walk on the dirt" rule. My garden is about 1200 sq. ft. I have been gardening the same patch of land for over 25 years, and I have never used a tractor or garden tiller on it. I couldn't do this if I was row planting, but by planting in beds it is easy to keep the garden up with nothing more than a turning fork, a rake, and a hoe. Pictured below: A bed of garlic and onions. This bed has 25 garlic plants and about 300 onions in about 100 square feet.

The one concession that I make to mechanical gardening is that I use a gas powered weed-eater to cut down bush bean vines after I have picked them clean. I tried cutting them down with a yoyo but this tended to pull the roots up along with the vine. I want the roots, with their attached nitrogen nodules, to stay in the ground and enrich the soil; so I yielded to modern technology in this instance.

Bed planting cuts way down on the time you will spend weeding. As mentioned above, I don't have to weed bush beans or field peas at all because of the dense planting. My walking paths are kept mulched so there's no weeding there either. I mulch around my tomatoes, squash, peppers, and cucumbers so that I only have to weed a very small area right at the base of the plants. I do have to weed a little along my pole beans; but here again, mulching right up close to the vines keeps weeding to a minimum. The only thing that I just flat out have to weed is my onion patch. I haven't figured out a way around this one, but if you have tried anything that works I'd sure like to hear about it.