How to Get Free Sand for Your Garden

Many gardeners face the problem of having soil that is too heavy.  The soil on my farm has a lot of clay which holds water for a long time and gets really hard when it dries out.  Some crops don’t seem to mind this too much; but some, like onions and sweet potatoes, need loose, well drained soil to produce a good crop.  I am currently putting in a small bed of sweet potatoes, and I really need to amend my soil to loosen it up.  I have grown sweet potatoes in the past but, because of the heavy soil, the tubers tended to be long and thin and very misshapen.  Nothing like what you find at the grocery store.

So I need, basically, two things to add to the soil.  I need sand and compost.  The compost is no problem because I make my own, the sand is a little more problematic.  I thought about buying some bags of sandbox sand at the local hardware store, but the price was a little steep ($3.50 per bag).  

Gardening is fun, but I also want it to be cost effective.  It doesn’t make sense to spend $20 on dirt to grow $5 worth of sweet potatoes, so I started looking around for an alternative.

I found the alternative less than a mile from my farm.  East Texas gets a lot of rain, and nearly every road has what we call bar ditches dug on each side of the road to channel run-off away from the road.  When we get a good rain it washes sand off of the nearby fields, if they have a lot of sand in them, and deposits the sand in the bar ditches.  

The county road crews have to constantly clean out the bar ditches because they fill up with sand.  I found a bar ditch that was loaded with beautiful, clean, washed sand; and I decided to save the road crew a little work.  I took my truck, a five-gallon bucket, and a shovel down to the bar ditch, and in about 20 minutes I had scooped up eight or ten buckets full of sand.  Probably the equivalent of about 5 or 6 bags of sandbox sand.

I spread the sand out to turn into by future sweet potato bed.  

It is perfect, and I saved myself  about twenty bucks by using free bar ditch sand.

Make a Fast, Simple, and Effective Baited Deadfall Trap

Improvised traps are a great hunting tool.  They can hunt for you while you are doing other thinks, but they do have a couple of drawbacks.  For one thing trapping is a numbers game.  Not every trap will catch an animal every time; so the more traps that you can set, the more you increases your chances of catching some dinner.  The second problem with traps is that, if they are very complicated, they can take a long time to construct.  The figure 4 deadfall is a beautiful trap and very effective, but it requires a lot of material selection, whittling, fitting and balancing.

The deadfall trap illustrated below requires very little preparation.  If you already have something to bait the traps with, you can make a lot of them in a very short time, and they work. The most time consuming part of setting these traps will probably be finding a good trapping location for them.  To make this trap you will need a flat rock to use for the deadfall, and a couple of strait sticks.  The size and length of the sticks will depend on how big of a trap you make.  A pocket knife will make it easier, but you can build this trap without one. 

First you will need a good, heavy, flat rock to use for the deadfall.

Now take one of your two sticks and whittle or grind one end of it to a point.

Hold the deadfall up and place the other stick along the underside of the rock with your bait wedged between the stick and the rock.

Now place the pointed stick with the flat end on the ground and the pointed end against the bait stick.

That’s it!  When the animal tries to pull the bait out, it will move the bait stick a little bit.  This will cause the pointed stick to become dislodged, and the trap will spring.  Quick and easy.  The only thing that you have to look out for is to be sure and position the pointed stick so that it doesn't catch the deadfall and keep it from collapsing to the ground.

You can increase your chances for success by placing a second flat rock on the ground under the trap.  This will catch the animal between two hard surfaces and insure a quicker and cleaner kill.

You can use this same basic concept to make a trap that is faster and a little less likely to hang-up, but it is more complicated.  The trigger is illustrated in the two photos below.  In this configuration the upright stick is moved out to the very end of the stick that lies on the underside of the rock.  A baited cross-stick keeps the trap from springing until the bait is moved.  This set-up will throw the upright stick out and keep it from accidentally catching the rock as it falls. It’s a good trigger, and the notches are not nearly as complicated as a figure-4 trap, but you almost need three hands to set it.  If you are working with a partner, this is a good trap to use.

Build a Hand-Held Corn and Bean Planter

Planting beans and corn by hand is a pain.  It involves a lot of stoop labor and crawling around on the ground.  I don’t plant enough corn or beans to justify buying an automatic seeder, but I plant enough that it gets very old poking holes in the ground with my finger and dropping a seed into each hole.  I decided to build a hand seeder that would let me stand up to do this job and to, hopefully, make it go a little faster.  The results turned out pretty good, so you may want to build one of these if you find yourself in a similar circumstance.

My seeder is basically just a piece of PVC tubing that I can drop a seed through to plant the seed in a hole.  The nice thing about this simple device is that it also makes the holes and spaces the seeds at the correct interval, and it only cost me about five dollars to build.  Here is how I built it:

The main part of the planter is a piece of ½” PVC that is about 48” long.  You can make it longer or shorter depending on your height.  This tube is what you will drop the seed down to plant it.  To make the tube easier to use, I dropped down about eight inches from the top, cut the tubing, and glued in an inline-T fitting.  I glued about an eight inch long piece of tubing into the T to form a handle.  I glued a cap onto the end of the handle, but this is not really necessary.

To add the seed spacer/hole poker to my planter I came up about six inches from the bottom of the planting tube and glued in another in-line T.  I glued a 5 ½” piece of tubing into this T and then glued an elbow onto the end of the tubing.  I then glued a piece of tubing that is about six inches long into the bottom of the elbow.  At the bottom of this tube I inserted a tapered wooden plug to do the actual hole poking.  The plug is made out of a piece of an old broom handle.  It goes up into the tubing about an inch and sticks out of the tubing about an inch-and-a-quarter.

To hold the plug into the tubing I drilled a 3/16^th hole through the tubing and the plug.  I then took a long, narrow bolt and cut the head off of it so that it is like a small piece of all-thread.  I put the all-thread through the hole, put a washer and nut on each side, and snugged them up to the tubing.  I left about an inch of all-thread sticking out on each side.  The all-thread serves as a depth gauge so that I know how deep to push the hole poker into the ground.

The last thing I did was duct tape a small tin can up near the top of the planting tube.  This can is to hold the seeds that I am planting.

The planter is easy to use.  You start a row by using the hole poker to make a planting hole.

Now move the planter so that the planting tube is over the hole.

Take a seed out of the seed can and drop it down the planting tube.

Now press the hole poker down into the soil to make another hole that is six inches farther down the row. Use the all-thread depth gauge to make the hole the proper depth.

Move the planting tube over the new hole, drop a seed, and so on, and so on, and so on.

I plant beans six inches apart and corn twelve inches apart, so it is a simple matter to use the same planter for both types of seed.  I just plant the corn in every other hole.  I have found that this simple device saves me a lot of time and a lot of crawling around on my hands and knees.

How Much Food do You Need for a One Year Storage?

Most people don’t have a clue about how much food they eat in a year.  This is easy to understand because who goes out and buys a year’s worth of food at one time?  Back in the day, a homesteader might take the wagon to town once a month to buy supplies, but these days most people drop by the grocery store two or three times a week to pick up a few things at a time.  That makes hard to get a good idea of how much you’re buying.  Add to this the fact that most families eat out several meals a week, and it gets even more confusing.

The truth is that we eat an enormous amount of food in a year’s time.  Since I keep pretty close track of the foods I buy, and since I usually eat twenty of my twenty-one weekly meals at home, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how much food I should have stored for a year’s storage.  When I started putting the pencil and calculator to it, I couldn’t believe how wrong I was.

Let’s just use three examples of staple foods that should be in any long-term food storage.  Let’s talk about wheat, rice, and dried beans.  Let’s say that you have 100 pounds of hard red wheat to grind for flour, 100 pounds of dried beans, and 100 pounds of rice.  This sounds like a lot of food until you start breaking it down.  It turns out that this amount of food would allow one person to eat two meals a day for one year.  Each meal would consist of ¾ cup of cooked beans, ¾ cup of rice, and one slice of bread.  That’s pretty Spartan rations for someone who is doing hard physical labor, and remember that’s only for one person.  A family of four would need 400 pounds of wheat, 400 pounds of rice, and 400 pounds of beans.

Of course this diet is just awful.  There’s hardly any fat in it, no fruits or vegetables, and you are missing a lot of necessary vitamins and minerals.  If a family of four wanted one serving of canned vegetables and one serving of canned fruits per person, per day; this would require about 1170 cans of fruits and vegetables.  Yea, it’s amazing.

I guess what I’m telling you is, don’t just guess at whether you have enough food storage.  Figure out what you want to eat, how much per day you will eat, and get the old calculator out.  It’s the only way to know for sure that you have enough.

Smith & Wesson SD9VE – review

My wife decided recently that she wanted a handgun to carry for self defense, so we started doing a little research and window shopping to try a pick out a good one.  We pretty much decided to go with an auto-loader for magazine capacity, and we talked some about caliber.  We considered both .380 and 9mm.  Many .380’s are more compact and it’s a slightly tamer round than the 9mm, but my wife wasn’t concerned too much about recoil.  She regularly shoots my .357 revolver so she knew that the 9mm wouldn’t be a problem.  Our main concern was the thickness of the grip.  She shot my Taurus PT-92 and found that it didn’t feel comfortable in her hand.  The grip was just too bulky, and her thumb couldn’t reach the left side magazine release button.  She fired my brother-in-law’s Ruger LCP .380, but she felt that it was too small and she was concerned about the stopping power of the lighter round.  So we pretty much decided on a 9mm; it was just a matter of finding one with a double stack magazine that would fit her hand.  A 9mm would have the added bonus of being kind of a family standard round.  I have a 9mm, my son has a 9mm, my brother-in-law has a 9mm, and my son-in-law has a 9mm; so when we get a good deal on ammo we can buy in bulk (no good deals lately).

So we knew that we were looking for a 9mm auto loader with a high capacity magazine.  The next step was to go to the gun shop and try a few on for size.  We tried a Beretta, a Glock, a Sig, a Springfield, a Kel-Tec, and a Smith and Wesson.  The Smith and Wesson SD9VE was the best fit. We held the SD9VE up next to a couple of the other nines and determined that the difference in size was due to the thinner slabs on the grip.  The body of the grip was the same width as the other pistols, so it had no problem holding a double stack magazine. 

The only thing that worried me a little was that, with the exception of the Kel-Tec, it was considerably less expensive than the others.  I didn’t want my wife trusting her life to a junker (although I have never heard of a Smith and Wesson junker), so it was time to do a little inter-net research.

The reviews that I read and watched were nearly all positive.  There were some concerns expressed about durability of the slide guide-rod since it is polymer rather than steel; and several noted that the SD9 has no safety.  But all reviewers seemed to agree that it was a sweet shooter and fed all brands of ammo with great reliability.  I was interested to read that Glock had actually sued Smith and Wesson over the design of this pistol, and I can see why they did.  I held it up next to my son’-in-law’s Glock and it looked almost like a twin.  Glock lost the law suit, by the way.

So here’s the basic info on the Smith and Wesson SD9VE:

The Smith and Wesson SD9VE is a medium size auto loading pistol with a polymer frame and a stainless steel slide and barrel.  The barrel is four inches long.  The SD9VE is chambered for 9mm parabellum.  It has a double stack magazine with 16 rounds capacity.

View holes on the sides of the magazine allow you to see how many rounds are in the mag.  The SD9VE is striker fired so there is no exposed hammer. 

 Every shot is double action, and the trigger has about a seven pound pull.  There is no safety on this firearm.  It will still fire without the magazine inserted.  The SD9VE is 1.5 inches wide, 7.2 inches long, and weighs 22.7 ounces without the magazine.  The sights are fixed with a white dot on the front post and to each side of the rear notch. 

There is a small rail under the barrel that can be used for mounting a laser or light. 

The body of the SD9VE is black and the slide is dull silver-gray.  The slide is deeply textured for easy grip when chambering a round.

The slide release and magazine release are both located within easy reach on the left side of the frame. 

One feature that I particularly like is a small half-moon view port on the back of the chamber that enables you to see, without pulling the slide back, if there is a round in the chamber.

 To disassemble the SD9VE for cleaning; make sure the chamber is empty, pull the trigger to drop the striker, and remove the magazine. 

Pull the slide back slightly, pull down the small pins located on both sides of the slide.

Push the slide forward to remove it from the frame.

 Remove the the slide spring and guide rod.

And, finally, remove the barrel.

My personal impression of the SD9VE is that it appears to be a good solid, reliable firearm.  The price is very reasonable.  Both my wife and I fired several magazines through it.  The trigger pull did not fell too stiff to either one of us, and every round fed without problem.  Magazines transitions were smooth and easy, and accuracy was good.  Of course, this firearm is not nearly as rugged as my all metal PT-92, but we are not anticipating prolonged field carry or huge volumes of fire.  This firearm is plenty rugged enough and plenty reliable enough for civilian defense purposes.  It is a great gun for the money, indeed it is the easy equivalent of guns that cost much more.  I would recommend it to anyone.

Yaupon Holly as a Coffee Substitute

DISCLAIMER:  Don't believe anything I or any body else tells you about edible wild plants.  Don't eat edible wild plants based on what you see in a book or on the inter-net.  Get a qualified instructor to show you the plants, and don't eat them until the instructor shows you how to prepare them, and then eats them him or herself.  Be aware that you may be allergic to a plant that someone else can eat without harm.  Be sure that any plants that you gather have not been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides.

Coffee was a highly valued commodity on the American frontier, and it wasn’t always available.  Frontiersmen tried many different concoctions as substitutes for coffee.  Roasted and ground dandelion root was used.  Chicory root was widely used in the Southern United States, in fact it is common to add chicory to coffee in Louisiana even today.  I have read that some people even roasted and ground okra seeds to make a coffee substitute.  None of these taste much like coffee, and more importantly, none of them have any caffeine.  My old survival mentor was a caffeine freak.  He had to have his buzz.  So when we were having one of our living off the land outings he made a coffee substitute out of Yaupon Holly which he said was our only native plant in East Texas that contained caffeine.

I don’t know for a fact that Yaupon is the only native plant with caffeine, but it does indeed have caffeine.  In fact it has more caffeine pound for pound than coffee.  Yaupon Holly is pretty easy to identify, especially in the winter when it is one of the few green shrubs in the forest.  Yaupon is a shrub.  I have rarely seen one that was over eight feet tall.  

 It has small oval leaves that are about an inch to two inches long.  The leaves are lightly lobed along the edge and they grow in a random pattern along the branches.  They are not neatly opposite each other, or neatly alternating; they are just random. 

In the fall and early winter the female plants are covered with red berries.  Don’t eat the berries or get them mixed in with your tea leaves.

To prepare Yaupon Holly tea/coffee just pull a handful of leaves.

Put the leaves in an oven or a skillet (medium heat under the skillet) and roast them until they turn dark brown to black.

Let the leaves cool.

Then crush them coarsely and throw them into a pot with two or three cups of boiling water.

Leave them at a medium boil for about ten minutes.  Then pour the liquid through a cloth or a tea strainer to remove the leaves.

It doesn’t taste bad.  Not much like coffee, but not bad; and it definitely has a jolt of caffeine.  So if the real thing isn’t available, and you need your caffeine fix, give Yaupon Holly a try.

Coffee in a Post Collapse Economy

Coffee is not really necessary for human survival, but some of us feel like it is.  Unfortunately coffee is only grown in tropical regions that are above 3000 feet elevation, so unless you live in one of these regions you will not be growing your own coffee.  So storing coffee, or coming up with a substitute, is the only option.  The question is how do you store coffee, how long can you store it, and how do you process it?

First of all, coffee does not store well.  Moisture and oxygen are the main enemies of coffee.  Once coffee has been roasted it begins to deteriorate immediately.  I am no coffee expert, but I am told that roasting releases the oils in coffee and the beans begin to turn rancid when they are exposed to oxygen.  If the coffee is ground, this process happens even faster.  Now the question is, what is bad coffee?  I and the coffee connoisseurs have a little difference of opinion on this.  The gourmet will tell you that you might as well drink mud as to drink coffee made from pre-ground beans.  Well, I don’t pay $4.00 a cup for my coffee, and I have even been known to drink left-over coffee that was made the night before.  So if you are a coffee connoisseur my opinion is probably not worth much to you, but I have drunk many a cup of coffee made from ground coffee that came from a can opened three or four months earlier.  It maybe wasn’t the best quality cup of coffee, but I lived to tell about it. 

I will say that if you are going to store coffee long-term, the order of preference is:

best – whole green coffee beans

next best – vacuum packed roasted whole coffee beans

worst – vacuum sealed roasted ground coffee

You can buy green coffee beans over the inter-net for around $7.00 US per pound.  If you buy green beans you will need to repack them into smaller storage bags, add oxygen absorbers and seal the bags in a food grade plastic bucket.  Coffee stored this way will keep, I am told, for two to five years.  I have not stored any coffee for this long, but it sounds reasonable to me.

If you are storing whole roasted or ground coffee, leave it in the vacuum sealed bags, and let your taste buds be your guide.  What one person thinks is awful coffee, another person may find perfectly good. 

If you are storing green coffee beans you will have to roast and grind the beans before you make a cup of coffee.  There is no mystery attached to roasting coffee beans.  Just put the beans in an iron skillet over medium heat and keep stirring them until they change color.  They will go from yellow-green, to tan, to brown, and eventually to black. 

Just roast them until they are brown or black depending on whether you like light roast or dark roast coffee.  Don’t be worried if they smoke a little.  When they are the color that you like, let them cool and then blow off the chaff.  You are now ready to grind the beans. 

You can grind coffee beans in your grain mill but this is kind of a hassle unless you are grinding a lot.  I have a small grinder that is perfect for making a cup or two of coffee at a time so this is what I usually use.  If you are using pre-roasted beans you will, of course, need to grind them also.

 

I was on a campout one time and a friend of mine named Doyle said that he would make us a pot of coffee.  He pulled out a bag of green coffee beans and put some beans in a skillet to roast.  Immediately he started digging through his pack, pulling out socks, and sniffing them.  The rest of us wondered what the heck he was doing.  When he found a sock that passed his smell test, he poured the coffee beans out of the skillet and into the sock.  He then placed the sock of coffee beans on a stump and started smacking it will the hammer end of his hatchet.  When the beans were sufficiently crushed he dumped them into a coffee pot and proceeded to make a very good batch of coffee.  Every campout after that we always called on Doyle to make us a nice, fresh pot of “toe-jam coffee.”