Survival Hunting - The Crossbow

This weekend I had the opportunity to try out the ultimate in quiet hunting equipment, the compound crossbow. My brother-in-law, Devin, gave my son and I the opportunity to do some target shooting with this awesome weapon. I was very impressed. The crossbow that we fired is powerful (150 lb. draw weight), but it makes less noise than clearing your throat. It is pin point accurate; and, most impressively, it requires very little skill to operate. My son and I both shoot primitive wooden bows, and after years of shooting we are pretty good with them. This was the first time that either of us has ever fired a crossbow, and we were both shooting 2” groups from 60 feet from the very first shot. Of course the crossbow will fire much farther than that with deer killing accuracy, but we just had a small high density foam target, so we were shooting at fairly short range. The aluminum arrows (called bolts) were penetrating a full 12 inches into the high density foam with no problem.



By now you know my philosophy of keeping a low profile as the cornerstone of home defense. This is the weapon to do it with. Easy to use, deer killing power, reusable ammo, and virtual silence. What more could you ask for? I guarantee you that this will be my next survival weapon purchase, and if hunting is part of your survival plan I would recommend that you do the same.

Food Storage - Onions

Onions are one of the plants that it makes a lot of sense to grow in your garden. They are so cheap and easy to grow, and they are so expensive in the grocery store that it’s really a no-brainer whether to plant them or not. An onion may cost as much as a dollar in the grocery store, and I can raise a couple of hundred of them for five dollars. My onions may not be quiet as big as the ones at the store; but they are a lot cheaper, and they don’t have any pesticides sprayed on them. I buy onion sets and the local hardware store and plant them in late February to early March. I plant them in a 3 foot wide bed about 6 inches apart in each direction, broadcast a little 8-8-8 fertilizer on them, and water them well. You will have to weed them a time or two as they are growing, and keep them watered if the rain is not regular. When the green tops begin to die and fall over in late May, they are ready to pick. Pictured below: Bed of garlic and onions early in the season and then later on about two weeks before harvest. Garlic is in the foreground, and onions are in the back.



After picking I brush the dirt off on the onions and lay them out on a table under my porch to cure for a week or two. When they are cured and the tops are pretty dry, I braid the onions into strand about a foot and a half long, tie the ends with string, and hang the braided strands from the beams in our living room (I know, it sounds weird, but it doesn’t look that strange in our country home). Pictured Below: Onion braids hanging from a livingroom beam.

Now we have a good supply of onions to use throughout the fall and winter. All we have to do is walk into the living room with a pair of scissors and snip an onion or two off of the braid. Easy, fun, and money saving. Who could ask for more?

Food Storage - Homemade Pickles

I love the taste of home canned dill pickles, and they are really easy to make. I grow my own cucumbers. I always plant Boston Pickling cucumbers. They are an old heirloom variety that is specially suited to canning. I like to raise my cucs on a trellis to save space in the garden and to keep them up off of the ground. I use an old galvanized cattle panel and wire it up on metal T-posts. Then I plant my seed about 6 inches apart along the bottom of the panel. A little 8-8-8 fertilizer and careful watering will produce a good crop. Pictured below is my cucumber trellis before and after.


When the cucumbers start to get ripe you have to watch them like a hawk. One day they’ll be little bitty things, and the next day they’ll be six inches long. I pick them when they are about 5 or 6 inches long, wash them thoroughly, and store in the refrigerator until I have enough to make 4 quarts (nothing magic about this number, it’s just what my water bath canner will hold at one time). Pictured below: Garden fresh cucumbers.


Here’s my recipe for homemade dill pickles.

Dill Pickles (4 quarts)

Ingredients:
4 quarts cucumbers cut in ¼ inch slices (I use Boston Pickling Cucumbers)
½ onion cut into slices ¼ inch wide
5 cups white vinegar
5 cups water
5 tbsp salt
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp celery seed
2 tsp dill seed
6 pepper corns
1 bay leaf
¼ tsp cinnamon
4 whole cloves
¼ tsp ginger
½ tsp garlic
¼ tsp turmeric

To Prepare:
• Sterilize jars in boiling water
• Sterilize lids and rings in boiling water
• Heat water, vinegar, and salt in pot
• Place all spices in spice bag and suspend in boiling water, vinegar and salt.
• Reduce heat under spices and liquid, and boil at low temp. for 15 minutes
• Remove jars from boiing water and drain
• Pack sliced cucumbers and onions in sterilized quart jars
• Remove spice bag from boiling liquid
• Pour liquid and spices into jars leaving ½ inch head space
• Wipe jar rims and screw on lids and rings
• Process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes making sure that water covers tops of jars by ½ inch
• Remove from water bath and allow to cool
• Make sure lids have pinged (lids should be bowed down after jars have cooled)
• Label and date jars
• Pickles will be ready to eat in approximately one week
• Discard any jars whose lids have bowed up while in storage as this is a sign that contents have gone bad.

If you have any of the pickling liquid left, you can store it in a closed jar in the refrigerator and use it on the next batch. Enjoy. Pictured below: the end product

The Survival Garden - Green Beans

I always plant a bed of Blue Lake green beans in the garden. They taste great fresh, and even better canned. The bed I planted this year was 3 ½ feet wide and 32 feet long. I plant my seed about an inch deep and four inches apart in each direction. I planted in mid-march. I have stated before that you can get an unbelievable amount of produce from a small garden by using the bed planting method, and Blue Lakes are a good example of what I am talking about. After I picked and snapped the beans I had 30 quarts; this is off of a little more that a hundred square feet. Also, because green beans are an early crop (I picked mine at the beginning of June) that same 100 square feet of garden is now available for a second crop. I planted the same bed with purple hull peas. Pictured below: Former Blue Lake bed has been replanted in Purple Hull Peas.

Don’t fertilize beans or peas. They produce their own nitrogen and actually improve the fertility of soil that they are planted in. After I have picked over my beans, I never pull up the vines. I cut them off at ground level. This leaves the roots and their nitrogen nodules in the ground.

Green beans can be stored in several different ways. One is to make Leather Britches, a type of dried bean. To make Leather Britches, take the whole green beans and string them on a piece of twine. Use a needle to string them. Push the needle through the side of each bean about in the middle, then hang the string of beans up to dry. By the way, tying a knot in the thread when you start will not work. The beans will slide off. I usually tie a button or a small stick on the end of the string, and this keeps the beans on the string. They will keep for months without refrigeration. Too prepare the beans just slip them off the string into a pot of boiling water. Season with salt and pepper, and simmer for a couple of hours. They will not look like fresh or canned beans; they will have a kind of wrinkled leather-like appearance. Hence the name Leather Britches.

Greens beans can be frozen and stored in plastic freezer bags, but you really need to blanch them for a minute in boiling water before freezing them. Blanching stops the enzymes in the beans from working and helps protect the taste.

My personal favorite way to store green beans is by canning, but you must pressure can them. Don’t ever try to can green beans by using the water bath method. It will not work, and it is dangerous. If you have a pressure canner, follow the canning directions that came with it. If you don’t have directions, you can buy a USDA publication on home canning that will tell you everything you need to know.
Pictured below: Home canned Blue Lake Green Beans in the pantry.

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.