Yet as is true of all the ‘best’ tools to amass for homesteading purposes, the question of what type of weaponry one may need is tied to what type of situations any weapon will be expected to deal with. Sometimes that may mean firearms. The homesteader will have to take into consideration what types of wild animals are most likely to be encountered in their location, whether or not someone in the family hunts for food, the likelihood of having to put down injured livestock, and any property or personal protection needs the family may encounter. In many cases the best tool for the job – and the person wielding the tool – could be a BB or pellet gun. Which is surprisingly effective at discouraging bears from the trash or compost without actually hurting them so as to leave an injured bear on the property (a real, live danger). These can be well less than deadly, but also come with CO2 cartridges that can turn them into effective small game/bird hunting weapons.

Your basic pump-action pellet gun will also discourage a fox from the henhouse without killing it, but you’ll probably have to spend enough time guarding the henhouse with it that the fox learns to associate chickens with the ouch. If you are a good enough shot with a long, compound or crossbow, these weapons are every bit as deadly as a rifle for most encountered critters that must be killed. There are entire weeks set aside in my area for bow hunting game, and there is never a shortage of hunters making use of the no-gun time span. Just remember that arrows are as deadly as bullets – small children don’t need access to pointy sticks of any variety. Older kids often take to archery like ducks to water, which is why it’s a regular feature in many youth organizations’ listed activities.

For actual firearms individuals will need to be aware of various regulations and responsibilities associated. Traditionally, homestead firearms have fallen into the long gun classification – rifles and/or shotguns. The caliber of long gun you may need should be dictated by what you’re most likely to be shooting, and how good an aim you are. You have to be a pretty good shot to kill a chicken-stealing fox with a .22, while also being educated enough about guns to know a .22 won’t stop an angry bear (but just make him angrier). And despite what you may remember from fictional television westerns, no kind of gun is the best weapon against a snake. Having had to deal with a rabid raccoon at our homestead this summer – big threat to pets and kids as well as all other wildlife in the area – the mess you can expect with a shotgun can be justified by being able to kill quickly and surely with just one pull of the trigger.

For home protection, the homesteader is in the same boat as anyone else with the expectation that the likeliest target in a showdown will be human. Some deep and honest soul-searching is required before rushing off to the gun shop, more than just the question of what type or caliber of gun you should get. If you honestly can’t think of any situation where you could shoot at another human being, don’t get any kind of gun for home protection. Bluffing with an unloaded gun can get you killed in a tense situation much quicker than simply giving a burglar what he came for.

If you have small children in the home or who visit regularly, keeping a handgun where it would be handy to YOU in an emergency situation could well prove way more dangerous to your family than not having a gun at all. My husband and I chose early on in our homesteading life not to own any kind of handgun due to a steady supply of children around the place at various times. Even though there have been a couple occasions over the past twenty years when grandpa’s shotgun did have to be pointed in the general direction of invading humans (home/property defense), in neither case would a handgun of any variety have served better.

Trust Mother Earth News to have excellent information on this very subject. This link is to an available 6-page article, and there are links to Mother’s over coverage in a sidebar. I think most homesteaders can get a very good feel for the questions and issues there.

Pioneer Living has some good member discussions some may find informative, and Homesteader Life blog has treated the subject as well. The FreeLibrary offers a good article on the .22 as an entirely adequate weapon from Countryside Publications, .22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon. It also takes a look at various types auto-loaders and the handgun vs. rifle pros and cons. Much good information is out there for anyone planning to enter a homesteading lifestyle, or is just now getting around to meeting the challenges of said lifestyle that would call for designed-to-be-deadly tools.

Meanwhile, for those of us who started our homesteading life with Better Homes and Gardens in our monthly magazine roundup along with Mother Earth and Organic Gardening, I have just recently discovered what is to me a ‘new’ high-end country-living (or just consuming) rag: Garden & Gun. A friend’s newly-opened establishment in WNC was featured in the June/July issue of Garden & Gun “Summer in the South” review issue, thus I encountered this publication. I’ve gone ahead and paid for a subscription, as I can see this will be a new favorite of mine in the rotating magazine rack.

Useful Links:

Choosing a Homestead Firearm
.22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon
Homestead Guns and Some Thoughts…

After heading down to the springhouse around noon today to patch together the badly jerry-rigged connection from the cistern so as to get the water going again (no, the new ram jet system isn’t there yet, but we did get the new cistern to bury on the ridge…), I was glad for the gorgeous, crisp and clear weather. For a change, the summer having been absolutely miserable hot and humid inch-a-day rainy yuck until the second week of August. It’s quite a hike, so I was resting in my chair being grateful for peace and quiet and gazing at the impossible Carolina Blue sky out my window.

Then I felt the shaking. I thought it was Starfish the German Shepherd scratching right under my chair and turned to look. She was laying across the room looking at me like it was MY fault. Then the china started rattling and knick-knacks on the shelves, and I knew it was an earthquake. It didn’t make that deep bass rumbling sound I remember from my childhood in the Philippines and California. Guess the piedmont here east of the continental divide is just too much mud and clay to generate those good deep basalt earth-groans.

Only lasted about 15 seconds or slightly less. Nothing broke, nothing fell, and all the trees are still standing. But the USGS now rates it a 6.0, centered under Mineral, Virginia. Little aftershocks continuing.

6.0 is a pretty darned big earthquake. Our very first experience with serious rural living was when my hubby got out of the Navy in 1975 and got a job at the North Anna nuclear plant just outside of Mineral. We rented a house on a 700 acre farm between there and Orange, some of the most beautiful rolling hill country anywhere. They hadn’t actually built the power plants yet, planned for four of them in a row on a big man-made lake they had to build for cooling. Deal is, they’d managed to site all four of their planned units smack dab astride a 15-foot wide earthquake fault they didn’t know about until they started digging. We got there just when the pit for the #1 reactor had reached its spec depth.

Now, you and I might reasonably suppose that if you found out your reactors were going to be suspended astride a fault, you might want to move them over about 30 feet in either direction so they’d be safely on one side or the other if the fault ever gave way. But alas, we are not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So on a tour one day I got a bird’s eye view from a specially built platform over the pit to see them busy like little ants attempting to wire the earth together with rebar. Really, I kid you not. Struck me at the time quite hilarious, and I’ve laughed about it ever since.

Hubby’s job consisted of going with another ex-Navy nuke across the lake every day in a nice utility company speedboat to change the paper at various seismic stations to monitor for earthquake activity. They found a floating slalom ski one day and took turns using it to get to the sites during that summer. It was all quite idyllic, but life intervened and we didn’t stay long enough for them to actually finish building that first plant. Only two ever got finished before the NRC wised up and nixed the other two.

Today that plant lost offsight power and operators had to manually scram, emergency diesels are operating to keep them cool. Power should be on before too long, but there’s quite a lot of damage in the area. Something to think about in the wake of Fukushima, as North Anna was identified years ago when I got that bird’s eye view as the nuclear facility most likely to suffer earthquake damage east of the Mississippi. There are of course more dangerous ones in California, right on the coast where tsunamis could wreak havoc as well.

Yet another reminder of how important it is for us to get serious about producing alternative power. For our homesteads and to feed the grid, all over the country. You never hear about horrible wind spills or solar meltdowns. When a wind turbine falls down it doesn’t make entire swaths of the countryside uninhabitable for hundreds of years. When solar panels fall off the roof it might kill whoever happens to be standing where it lands, but it doesn’t doom whole generations of children to gnarly disease and ugly death.

We homesteaders must be the backbone behind the vanguard. Today’s little shake-up is a timely reminder of that.

Over the past two weeks a rather spectacular one-two punch of severe weather wreaked havoc across the eastern half of the nation from Texas to Virginia. Many of us were stunned by the huge, mile-wide F4 tornado that plowed a deadly path through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama. That monster and as many as a hundred other tornados killed more than 300 people in 5 states and injured thousands who literally had no place to hide as the winds flattened homes, apartment buildings and businesses completely, even to blasting out the concrete slabs and tearing up streets and sidewalks. It is the deadliest tornado outbreak since the Great Depression.

A friend who lives on a well-planned homestead in southern Tennessee posted on FaceBook about the damage from a tornado in his neck of the woods that downed trees and power lines wholesale, but spared him and his family and even his goats. He was feeling darned lucky even though the devastation across TVA’s service area – and the station blackout that shut down the three reactors at Browns Ferry – made it likely that his ‘stead would be without electricity for days, maybe a week or more. We who live on the land know from experience that we aren’t the first people in line to have our services restored after a nasty storm. First in line are the people in urban areas where shelters and hospitals and emergency services must be restored as quickly as possible to minimize the human cost of nature’s wrath.

I am now quite jealous of the amount of serious planning my friend put into his move from the city to the land a few years ago. In response to a question about how his family was set for food storage in the time it would take to get the electricity back on, he said that’s the least of his worries. Seems he has a well-stocked solar powered freezer that doesn’t need TVA at all. Heck, as long as a homestead is capable of operating despite the ravages of storms and downed power lines, the need to use oil lamps at night can be considered romantic! I’ve gotta get me some solar powered refrigeration for sure, though this item on the wish list may have to wait (along with others) for the day when I finally win the lottery I never play…

At any rate, I went surfing the web on my computer – which fortunately didn’t have to go without electricity because the tornados jumped the mountains and didn’t come down again until they were between Charlotte and Raleigh. I found that there are several companies out there specializing in solar powered refrigeration. Backwoods Solar Electric Systems offers units from several manufacturers along with the peripherals you’ll need to get them up and operating.

If you’ve priced new, efficient standard electrical refrigerators lately, you know the nice ones are approaching the $2,000 range. A solar powered, direct current system for a refrigerator or freezer unit can cost twice that much when all the costs are added up – the solar panels, the converters, the batteries, etc. The appliances themselves are well insulated and energy efficient, but still suck up a lot of ‘trons during the course of a day – averaging between 200 and 800 watt hours per day. Size matters, of course, and an 800-watt solar collector takes up some serious room. Some come with an AC/DC switch so that you could use regular electricity and save the draw on your household solar for when the electricity’s out. That would separate the costs on the system so that household solar generation isn’t solely dedicated to the refrigeration in normal times, as refrigerators and freezers are big users.

The SunDanzer company offers some battery-free, direct solar units that are somewhat compact but surprisingly efficient and not more expensive than a regular new appliance without the solar panels added in. Solartron Technologies offers a modest size, ultra high efficiency battery refrigeration/freezer unit that can be operated with just an 85 watt solar panel that costs less than $500. The batteries and peripherals will hike the initial price considerably, and I know many homesteaders who would dearly love to be able to operate off-grid if they have to, but are reluctant to invest in those expensive batteries that need semi-regular replacement. It’s far easier to simply go with the backwards meter. For them, the AC/DC switchable for straight running off the panels in times when the grid is down will probably serve as well and involve less investment cost over the long run.

When you sit down to figure out what your homestead actually needs in the way of reliable electric power, the water pump from well or spring looms large (at least, at my place) along with food storage – refrigeration. I don’t know many homesteads that heat the house or greenhouse with electricity, as there are much better ways to get heat that are not so wasteful. Lights aren’t that big an issue either, as oil lamps are quite nice and most people I know don’t do their hard homestead work in the dark anyway. Who needs lights when you’re sleeping? If the family is unable to entertain themselves without television or desktop computers, you’ll have to add in that much generation capacity as well. Though I am dreaming of a stationary bicycle or the treadle and wheel unit from an old sewing machine as a way to generate computer ‘trons when the regular power goes out. That ram jet I forever plan to build and install down at the creek to pump water from the spring cistern to the top of the ridge so we can then get gravity feed to the house would save us a lot on the 220 pump that’s now in the cistern. We heat with wood and don’t need air conditioning, so refrigeration would definitely be our biggest user of generated power once we get the ram jet, solar panels and wind turbine installed.

So I’ve added solar powered refrigeration to my wish list for when I win the lottery and have the money to invest. Until then, if the electricity goes out for several days at a time from anything that’s not a blizzard or ice storm in the middle of winter (when keeping food cold isn’t difficult at all), I’ll have to stick with transferring cold items to plastic milk crates in the creek. Not very convenient, but workable because being spring fed, the water stays right at 40-45 degrees all year long.

And yes, I’m still darned jealous of my friend’s impressive foresight to have planned for this contingency when he built his place, as well as his ability to thumb his nose at TVA when the lights go out. A new modern malady for us back to the landers – Homestead Envy. I’ve got it…

Links:

Backwoods Solar Electric Systems
SunDanzer
Solartron Technologies

I have offered a few posts over the years about this or that home remedy, tonics, tinctures and immune system boosters with the idea that staying healthy is a much better way to live than being dependent on allopathic medicine and too often harmful pharmaceutical drugs. But anyone who does a lot of work around the homestead – building projects, repairs, gardening, wildcrafting, etc. – is going to encounter the slings and arrows of basic life on the land and will need some ready means of attending to various cuts, scrapes, stings, sprains, bruises and such. Thus this series on the essential Homestead First Aid Kit will focus on the best remedies and treatments to be found (or grown) on the land.

I call it a “kit,” but homestead first aid is as much about knowing and doing in real time out on the land when the medicine cabinet isn’t handy as it is about having the right things in that medicine cabinet ‘kit’. And for the most common types of minor injuries people encounter in this lifestyle, I will begin with the most useful plant I know of: Mullein.

Mullein [Verbascum thapsus] is a common plant easily recognizable with its large, hairy leaves and tall, yellow-flowered stalk. All portions of the plant have been used in herbal medicine for centuries, including the deep taproot. For home use you will want to avoid plants that grow in places likely to be polluted (industrial yards, train right of ways, next to busy highways, etc.), and any whose stalks are not straight and tall. This is because mullein, like horseradish and some other deeply rooted plants tend to absorb and concentrate pollutants.

Thousands of years ago the common mullein was known to the armies of Greece and the legions of Rome as ‘Soldier’s Herb’, even as its fanciful name in Europe and the Americas was ‘Aaron’s Rod’. As Soldier’s Herb the thick, astringent leaves of the plant were used as both poultice and bandage on wounds, and this is still one of the most useful ways the plant can be used out on the land. For sprains and contusions (deep bruising), the fresher the leaf the better.

A friend once twisted his ankle badly while hiking, the foot swelled and turned a nasty shade of purple-black quickly enough to cause us to suspect it was broken. I gathered a few large basal leaves of mullein and washed them in cold water. Then I cut out the leaf spine from the back with a pocket knife, rolled the halves and lightly bruised them while still wet by squeezing. These were wrapped around the foot and ankle well and then held in place with an Ace bandage. By morning the bruising and swelling was completely gone, and remaining soreness in the foot was not a big issue so long as my friend tied his hiking boots firmly.

I have found this wet leaf and Ace bandage treatment also works on wrenched knees, tennis elbow and attacks of carpal tunnel in the wrist and hands. Everyone who has tried it swears their aches and swellings are so much better with the mullein than just wrapped without it, that several have taken to growing their own mullein in corners of their yards in town.

The astringent property also makes bruised leaves good for staunching blood flow from cuts, and mullein itself – leaves and or flowers – is an emollient wonder for almost any kind of skin condition or injury. There are better things for poison ivy or poison oak, but for rashes, dry patches, scrapes and burns, a quick application of clean, wet mullein is soothing and aids in quick healing. Cuts must of course be well cleaned and disinfected as soon as possible, but between the time of the injury and getting back to the house mullein can help a lot to staunch blood. Hold it to the cut tightly.

Mullein has also long been recognized as useful for the treatment of various lung and bronchial issues, including asthma and allergies, pneumonia, sore throats, coughs and croup. It contains expectorant saponins, and leaves are smoked both as remedy for bronchitis and as a tobacco substitute. The flower oil is used in treatments for skin rashes, digestive upsets, earaches, eczema, warts, boils, hemorrhoids and such. Recent research shows compounds with antibacterial, anti-viral and anti-tumor action in the flowers.

Teas made from the leaves for treating respiratory illness should be finely filtered to remove the tiny hairs, as these can be irritating all by themselves. Extracting essential oil from the flowers is a difficult process, which is unnecessary for most applications (skin, earaches, antibiotic for scrapes and wounds). Just pack fresh flowers into a jar of olive oil and let them infuse. Don’t use this on an earache involving ruptured ear drum, but for your average earache a few drops of this warm oil are soothing and help to loosen wax and fight bacteria. Mix this oil with some beeswax and you’ve a very nice skin cream. Good as a diaper rash cream as-is, mix with infused calendula (marigold) oil for treatment of rashes and dry skin.

Mullein for the homestead first aid kit should thus include at least an ounce of dried, shredded leaves, for use in poultices for wounds. Also an ounce of dried and powdered mullein leaves and flowers for making teas (1.5 tbsp per cup). An ounce of infused mullein flower olive oil in a dropper bottle for earaches. A jar of mullein/calendula infused oil/beeswax light cream for antibiotic and healing skin treatment.

Stay tuned for future installments in this series, each of which will come with a collection of links to all previous articles. Next time: insect bites, poison ivy/oak treatments to keep handy.

Useful Links:

Natural First Aid Kit
On the Farm First Aid Herbs
Home Remedies: Mullein

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

To Deep Harm’s work I would add just a few details that should also be kept in mind whenever you hear that the plume is in your area, or has been in your area during the most important weeks of the growing cycle (like spring). First, it is NOT the external gamma dose given off by radioactive particles in the cloud/plume that are of primary concern. That will be so minimal on this side of the planet that it won’t add up to a single chest X-ray all told. The real danger comes from the isotopes themselves – atoms of matter in the air that you can’t even see. If these get into your body by breathing or being ingested with your food and water, they can do many times the biological damage right up close to your internal organs.

And for those of us who grow some of our own food, it is important to know that it’s not just these isotopes “falling out” of the cloud onto the ground and plants that needs to be considered. You could wash that off of many foods without too much trouble. A bigger problem is that when isotopes such as cesium, strontium and many others will, if they are in the soil, be uptaken by growing plants and incorporated into their very cells. Cesium is uptaken just like potassium, neither plants nor animal bodies (including yours) can tell the difference. Strontium is uptaken just like calcium, which will, if you ingest it, be greedily allocated to your bones. And this is known to cause leukemias and other cancers over time. The iodine that is such a threat to thyroid glands isn’t uptaken in high amounts due to its short half-life (8 days), but easily gets on the grass that is eaten by cows and from there into the milk.

Officials will of course be keeping careful track of the situation both in Japan and here in the U.S., but self-reliant homesteaders should also bear in mind that potential problems will tend to be downplayed drastically. Supposedly to prevent “panic,” though no nuclear power plant accident has ever actually caused people to run screaming down the streets as if they were being chased by Godzilla. In situations where radioactive fallout is present, what you don’t know CAN hurt you. Those who are in charge of knowing are too often unwilling to let you know everything you need to know. So bear that in mind as the weeks and months proceed, Fukushima’s nukes will be releasing steadily for the foreseeable future because they are not and cannot be contained.

As a perfect example of the kind of insufficient and occasionally downright misleading information that can come out of supposedly responsible ‘officials’, let me just deconstruct an article from the March 21 edition of the Mainichi (Japan) News:
No need to fear radioactive contamination of food, rain if proper steps taken: experts. This article is a short series of questions and answers, the most misleading of which I deal with below…

1. What happens if you eat food products that have been contaminated by radiation?

Expert Answer: Radioactive iodine has a tendency to collect in the thyroid, and ingesting massive amounts raises the risk of thyroid cancer. However, it has a half-life of eight days, which is relatively short.

Me – It doesn’t take “massive” amounts of iodine to cause thyroid problems or thyroid cancers, which tend to show up years down the road. The greater the dose, the sooner the problems appear, 3-5 years if you get a lot, 10-20 years for far lesser doses. The 8-day half-life means nothing in this equation except to assure you that what you have ingested is emitting its radiation quickly and steadily to your thyroid. Sure, it may be essentially gone in a two or three months because it has decayed, but the damage it did to sensitive internal tissues while it was decaying is already done.

2. What are the “provisional regulation levels” of radiation that spinach and raw milk were found to exceed?

Expert Answer: These levels refer to standards from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on [Japan's] Food Sanitation Act.

Me – Spinach, milk, canola and other leafy greens in a 150-mile distance from the stricken reactors have tested for iodine and cesium at above these standards and the Japanese government has acted to prevent those food products from getting into the marketplace. It is reasonable to presume that agricultural products from this entire region will be a total loss this year, and due to large amounts of longer-lived isotopes in the soil, may have to be abandoned as a ‘dead zone’ like that around Chernobyl for many years into the future.

3. Is it okay to keep eating such food products?

Expert Answer: According to former University of Tokushima professor Jun Sekizawa, much of the radioactive material found on spinach can be eliminated by washing and boiling it. As for milk, Sekizawa says, “drinking even the most contaminated [1,500 becquerels] several times is still less than one tenth of the radiation people are exposed to in the natural world. He adds that people will be fine if they do nit keep drinking the milk.

Me – This is nothing less than insidious. You cannot scrub green leafs enough to cleanse them of radioisotopes (root crops should be okay if they are harvested now). Nor does boiling affect radioisotopes in the least. Pasteurization of milk won’t get rid of iodine or strontium either. So it’s a complete lie that it can be boiled out of vegetables. Assuming that ‘officials’ are reporting truthfully about contamination levels – which has never been known to happen in the entire history of nuclear technology – telling people to boil is doing WORSE than nothing. The fair assumption should be that the ‘official’ story on radiation is short by at least a factor of ten. Proceed accordingly.

4. Is it safe to drink tap water?

Expert Answer: The maximum consumption limit per one liter of water is 300 becquerels for iodine and 200 becquerels for cesium. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says that while people should refrain from drinking water whose iodine and cesium levels exceed the regulation limit, it can safely be used for bathing and washing. The ministry also says that it is safe to drink the water if there are no other alternatives.

Me – I’d avoid drinking the water entirely when radiation levels are present. If I had no other choice (and many people still stuck in the prefecture don’t have a choice), I’d drink it to stay alive. Here in the U.S. levels are unlikely to reach anything close to federal limits, but I’d sure replace the charcoal and particulate filters on my water filtration system just to make sure. Iodine is captured very well by activated charcoal. Then I’d change them again when the all clear comes. I would seriously avoid showering or bathing in hot water, as the steam will bring contaminates right into your nasal passages and lungs. Only lukewarm or cool for washing, and definitely use an abrasive type soap such as Lava. Or use a loufa sponge. Throw it away after a few uses.

Whenever there is radioactive contamination present in the air, soil and water, people who spend time outdoors should definitely wash off thoroughly once indoors. Dry quickly and well, especially the face, and don’t re-use towels. Keep soiled laundry in enclosed containers. Don’t wear your outdoor shoes inside the house. Luckily, the Japanese are noted for fastidiousness in these areas, it will serve them well in this crisis.

5. What should we do when it rains?

Expert Answer: Stay out of the rain as much as possible, and whatever you do, don’t drink the rainwater.

Me – Always wear a brimmed rain hat to keep the rain out of your hair, and a rain coat to keep it off your skin. Keep this outer clothing away from the living areas of the house (like in a mud room) along with shoes and boots. And do that scrubbing wash thing whenever you’ve been exposed – the rain will contain far more contaminates than will be present on a nice day in the air.

Bottom line for those of us who don’t live in Japan, we are not going to be exposed to seriously dangerous levels of isotopes or gamma dose from the plume. Most of the very serious heavy metal fission products will fall out of the cloud over the ocean (or very close to Fukushima) well before they get here. But if we remember that it’s not the exterior gamma dose that will most harm us – but the isotopes falling out of the plume that might get inside us – we should be mostly okay.

Back in the days of atmospheric bomb testing the levels were very, very high. I can remember when word came down that we couldn’t make snow ice cream anymore, and always wondered how much of a nasty dose I got from eating it every year up until then. Yet another reminder that ‘officials’ aren’t going to tell the truth about the dangers if they can help it. Besides strontium and iodine, which were specifically cited back in 1963 as the reason for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, cesium that got into the food and water supplies was a big consideration.

Think about this, then – there is more cesium-137 in just one of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima than was released by all the nuclear weapons ever exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age. Sobering thought, but one that it might be valuable to hold when the real debate on shutting these nasty things down for good comes to a forum near you!

Many modern homesteaders became modern homesteaders in a “back to the land” movement geared toward greater self-sufficiency in all things the average citified automaton expects government, corporations and society to supply. As government, corporations and society have begun to fall short of those provisions – either during exceptional circumstances or generally failing to provide goods and services cheaply, safely or consistently enough to be counted upon – we left to carve for ourselves a life where we can be primarily responsible for ourselves.

Now, it’s a long-term project. Unless you’re very rich to begin with, getting your homestead up to real self-sufficiency (and fully in your own name) can take decades. Maybe a lifetime or two. We can grow some of our own food, but probably not all. So we develop relationships with farmers and other homesteaders in our regions and learn to trade and barter for consumables. We can slowly but surely develop our own power sources (or learn to do without), but will likely remain tied to the grid or some other out-supply until the technology is developed and affordable enough for us to go off-grid. Etc., etc., etc.

We who keep track of the news – even if just to remind ourselves of why we decided to live so far out in the boonies now that gasoline has become a serious drag on our limited incomes – are increasingly treated to the impressive spectacle of what Global Warming is causing and how it may drastically affect survivability in tropical and temperate regions. The Arctic ice melt is dramatically increasing this summer, the largest ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere has broken into three pieces, a 7 square mile ice sheet has broken loose in Canada, and Greenland’s glaciers are melting fast. Some predict the entire Arctic will be ice-free within just a year or two.It’s a fact – the temperatures hit 80º in the Arctic during the last week of July. Arguing about the cause of Global Warming (natural or man-made) is a moot point at this juncture. The climate change is in overdrive, irreversible, and we’d all better plan accordingly. No, the government, corporations and society will not take it seriously or plan accordingly. The result will be the very doomsday scenarios we once wanted to escape, one of the reasons we determined to become modern homesteaders. Things will get much worse before they get better, and as we’re discovering just how badly our economy has been wrecked by the idiot greed-meisters in power for the last 8 years, we don’t look to have much conserved wealth to bail ourselves out.

There is serious drought here at my homestead this year. But I’ve lived here for 16 years, and have seen the weather change quite a bit. Sometimes there is drought in my microclime, sometimes I get an inch of rain a day all spring and summer long. Some winters it snows a foot a week at least, some winters it never snows at all. Some autumns put on a spectacular leaf show, sometimes they hang on until mid-November before simply turning brown and falling off. Fact is that these mountains have long been known to “create weather,” and weather tends to occur in cycles.

Thus I’ve no idea how a rapidly changing global climate will finally leave my homestead. A desert or a rain forest? Too hot to live or too cold to be productive? Luckily, the very fact that my climate changes on a fairly regular annual basis (with four distinct seasons every year) allows me to consider a lot of possible scenarios I can plan for and hope to accomplish that will mitigate any drastic seasonal or annual changes. I will be talking about some of those in an upcoming series of posts, and would love to hear from my readers any ideas or actual projects they’ve entertained or engaged to help their homestead remain as self-sufficient as possible in a changing world.

It’s easy to simply say “don’t plan your homestead on any land scheduled to become sea-bottom when the ice melts.” That’s a no-brainer. But it’s also tempting to plan your homestead in heretofore unsuitable places of high elevation or northerly climes where land is cheap and dying forests are begging to be cut and turned into homes, outbuildings and fertile fields. Some climatologists warn that an unstable climate – even a warmer one – may not simply shift your homestead from one planting zone to another. Entire regions may become frozen, well south of the Arctic in places that were temperate before!

So… how are you planning to deal with the changes of climate humanity can no longer ignore? Please offer your thoughts in the comments.

In Part I of this series on being prepared for the storms of nature and humanity that may require us to take care of ourselves and our families for days or weeks at a time, we looked at the idea of “Survival Kits” and where those should be kept so that we’re never far from them if ever we need them.

On a scale of likely types of emergencies or disasters homesteaders (and the rest of society) might face, it’s best to be prepared for the ones that would present the most significant survival challenges when planning on what to put into our survival kits. That way the lesser emergencies will seem positively trivial in comparison, and the whole family will become ‘expert’ at getting through tough times. Some examples on that scale -

• Short term local utility outages. Usually resolved within hours or a couple of days, sometimes these last weeks if storm damage to the infrastructure is severe.
• Major earthquake. These can cause extended utility (including water) outages and make it very difficult to evacuate due to road and bridge damage or earth/rock slides.
• House fire that destroys all or part of the home and contents. Definitely a “disaster,” and the one thing you’ll wish most to have saved on your way out are the family photo albums. I know this because it happened to me!
• Getting stranded in your car in a remote location. Both heat and cold can be deadly in these situations. Be prepared!
• Widespread, extended power outage. Major regional storms or a serious breakdown of the grid infrastructure could cause the power to go out for weeks or months.
• Flu pandemic. We’ve heard quite a bit about this one as Bird Flu starts crossing from fowl to humans. In this situation you’ll want to keep your family isolated so long as they’re not themselves sick with flu.
• Larger neighborhood or forest fires. These can be fast-moving and take out large swaths of property.

Some considerations on things to keep in your evacuation bag or do ahead of time just to ensure survival of things you might not be able to save if you must leave home quickly include those family photo albums I mentioned. It’s a terrible feeling to lose your family’s entire history – baby pictures, family portraits, candid snapshots of junior’s 4th birthday party, your wedding album. Such precious items can seldom be replaced. The well-prepared homesteader will have the albums in an easily accessible spot where they can be quickly grabbed and tossed into the car trunk as you’re leaving. Some people keep negatives in their safe deposit box at the bank, or in a fireproof safe in the home.

If you have a safe deposit box, do keep copies of all your important paperwork in it. Birth certificates, wills, deeds and mortgage paperwork, marriage license, vehicle titles and insurance policies. Now that home computers have become fairly indispensable for household recordkeeping and such, make backups regularly of your necessary files and put those in the safe too.

What Needs to Be In the Survival Kits?

There are some things that you’ll want to have with you at all times no matter where you go, to be on your keychain or wallet, or taking up space in your everyday purse or fanny pack. Among these will be your photo ID (usually driver’s license), your cell phone, an LED flashlight, Swiss Army knife and some sort of tweezer thing. You should also carry a basic magnetic compass, a few band-aids and a little tube of antibiotic cream. I also carry a coach’s whistle (good as an alarm system and not too big to put in the purse), a little zip lock bag with matches, a travel-size bottle of aspirin and a few bubble-pack tablets of Benedryl.

I’ve also purchased a few of those little plastic packs of rain ponchos and mylar “space blankets” and have divvied these up between the car kit and purse. My purse doubles as a back pack, so it goes with me on all hikes through the National Forest that borders our homestead.

In the car (which for us is actually a pickup truck) we keep a cell phone charger that plugs into a lighter socket and has replaceable phone jacks that fit a variety of cell phones – since we can’t seem to ever get cells for all of us at one time that all use the same jacks! Got it for not much at Radio Shack. In the glove compartment we keep twine, a roll of duct tape, a little sewing kit with small scissors, and the basic first aid kit along with a couple of space blankets still in their tiny folded and packed state and those cheap folded plastic ponchos with hoods – dayglow orange – in a zip lock bag. In the truck bed there’s a 2-gallon plastic jug of water bunjee’d in a front corner along with a couple of quarts of extra oil and a little socket wrench and tool kit in a metal box.

There are bill caps behind the seats, along with a couple of sweaters and some leather gloves plus towels and rags. A box beneath the passenger seat holds some flares and a good sized crank flashlight/radio. These things are totally cool, and never need batteries! My husband always carries his “Man-Tool” multi-purpose tool he got for Christmas and would never be without. It’s got a saw, a nice file and pretty much any other tool you can think of built right in, and fits in his pocket.

What I need to add are a metal camp-kit, some candles and sterno, and some basic survival food. Granola bars, Ramen noodles, high vitamin dried drink mix and such. There’s a deck of cards and 5 dice in my purse, so if we’re stuck we won’t get too bored. Now, I realize that what I’ve described isn’t exactly a “kit” all packed into a single container put somewhere specific in the truck. But that’s sort of the story of my life… stuff here, stuff there, all of it’s somewhere.

Everyone in the family has taken – and passed – the basic Red Cross first aid and CPR training course, but the first aid kit has that information in a little booklet too. I also keep a field guide to edible plants in the glove compartment and several similar type books in the house. Did you know that you can eat kudzu? It’s officially an “invasive species” in my region, but it’s also a high-protein legume that can be eaten raw like salad greens or steamed for side greens. Jerusalem artichokes and ground nuts grow wild in much of the country as well, and these can add some potato-like chewable substance to a little pot of greens.

Some experts insist you should carry at least a couple of hundred dollars in bills and coins in a little cash box, but I’m pretty sure those experts aren’t as cash-strapped as my family is. It would be nice, but if we’re caught out in the wilderness in a broken down vehicle, I’d be surprised to find a grocery store, restaurant, motel or ATM anywhere close by anyway.

Insect repellant is a must for most of the year in the southern Appalachian region where we live. We use whatever’s on sale at home (and I have a net shirt-hood combo thing I wear in the garden because those bugs will bite no matter how much repellant you wear). In my pack-purse I keep a little container of straight DEET repellant. Only need a tiny bit of that and you’re bug-free for hours. Yes, it will eventually cause cancer (if you live long enough), but given the diseases you can get from bugs (Lyme and West Nile and Encephalitis are big around here), I figure the trade-off is reasonable. Kind of like chlorine, which also causes cancer ‘someday’. Carrying chlorine water purification tablets as well as some patches of filter cloth in your first aid kits is a good idea – the diseases you can get from contaminated water are nasty too!

I mentioned in my last post that you should double up on prescription medicines in the most you can get at one time from the pharmacy, then divvy those up between your home and car kits. I keep medicines I take frequently (aspirin for headaches or other aches, Benedryl because I have allergies) in my purse, replenish regularly because I find I need them whenever I’m away from home.

You’ll also want some toiletries in your kits or vehicle or somewhere within reach in an emergency. Motel-size soaps, shampoos, lotions and tissues are great for this. I have a friend who travels for work as a nursing home inspector, she always takes her own toiletries but collects the freebies from where she stays. Twice a year she gifts me with a shoebox full of stuff, and I always carry a full set in my purse. The box full is right there in the bathroom for anyone to raid any time, so I haven’t bothered to put these toiletries anywhere but the evac bag.

An extra toothbrush or two or three is a good idea, along with travel size tube or two of toothpaste. In a pinch you can use baking soda, which I keep in a zip lock in the first aid kit because baking soda paste is the best treatment I’ve found for insect stings.

In the household kit (or cabinet) you’ll of course want the duct tape, tie wire and plastic sheeting Homeland Security told us will protect us from the terrorists (and we all laughed about). At least 50 feet of good nylon rope is a good idea along with those water purification tablets and filters, and a manual can opener. People tend to forget that last one, though we use a manual Swingline opener on a daily basis at this homestead. Having some canned goods on the shelf in the basement or root cellar won’t help you if you can’t open them.

Another thing most people don’t think of is a regular plug-in land line telephone. When the electricity’s out your cordless phone won’t work even if your land line is just fine. I keep one in a drawer of the treadle sewing machine that normally holds our cordless unit. When the electricity goes out I just plug it in and can call to report the outage.

Some experts advise a battery powered lantern, but the batteries don’t have a long shelf life and seldom get replaced if you don’t use the darned thing regularly. We like oil lamps, in which we burn kerosene instead of expensive scented lamp oil. I keep extra wicks in a drawer in the shed where the lamps and kerosene are stored, as they burn rather quickly if the lamps are your only light for days or weeks. The light is lovely, the lamps are pretty, and kerosene in a proper container doesn’t go bad.

I have also been collecting those nifty solar powered yard lights when they’re on sale. These can go anywhere, give some nice white light, and emit no heat at all. Keeping a roll of aluminum foil near your survival supplies is also a good idea. You can make good light reflectors out of it that will magnify the output, and of course there’s a million other things you can do with foil that you can’t do with anything else. A roll of kitchen-sized garbage bags too, these can be used for lots of things if you put your mind to it. Your homestead tool kit(s) will also be handy, and don’t forget that you need a basic tool kit in your vehicle at all times too!

In part III of this series we’ll look carefully at survival food choices for your home, vehicle and evacuation kits. There are specialty foods made just for the purpose, but who really wants to eat something processed not to go bad in your lifetime? There are choices from the supermarket or discount outlet that will serve fine, and only need to be replaced on a yearly or semi-yearly basis (rotate ‘em out).

And do check out sarahnity’s Frugal Fridays diaries over at DKos for great information. Her post Disaster Looms is particularly useful, a collection of expert advice and sensible extras that could well save your and your family’s lives one of these days!

Links:

Disaster Looms

USAToday: Survival planning starts at home

Survival Unlimited: Supplies

Emergency Essentials

CPR Savers: Emergency Kits

It took the government six days to get water to storm refugees in New Orleans while people were dying. How many people know that many sectarian relief organizations were trying hard to get into the city with trucks full of supplies, food, water and preparation trailers the moment the rain stopped? FEMA wouldn’t let them in, confiscated the supplies and sent the volunteers home. I recall wondering at the time if perhaps the government was doing this on purpose – using the opportunity of the Katrina disaster to teach us all a lesson about taking care of ourselves. Then I came to the conclusion that they were simply incompetent and just didn’t care. THAT, I strongly suspect, is the most valuable lesson any of us can learn!

My family became homesteaders late in the fall of 1992 when we moved to these beautiful mountains. Four months later we got hit hard by the “Blizzard of the Century,” which dumped 4 feet of snow and ice on us and cut the power for two solid weeks. We luckily had a portable radio and a few extra batteries, listened as reports came in daily of people dying up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Freezing in the dark mostly, or dehydrating, going without necessary medicine, unable to get to the shelters, the few open stores or even to the hospital.

Meanwhile, we had plenty of nice oil lamps, extra wicks and 2 gallons of kerosene in a container in the shed. We had plenty of wood for heat, the wood stove being our ‘central heat’ in this cabin even when the electricity’s on. Food from the fridge and freezer was stacked neatly on jury-rigged shelves on the second-story back deck, which has no outside access so animals couldn’t get to it. And of course you can cook just fine on a wood stove. I kept a big pot of beans-from dry or veggie soup on during those long days, and rigged an oven out of an old metal box without a lid, in which I baked bread and cornmeal. Had a 5 pound sack of Masa too, so I got to put my wood stove tortilla talents to good use and we ate very well.

We’d bought an old Land Cruiser a month after moving here for $1500. One of those crusty old 4-wheel drives with the removable top and rhino-proof doors, that looked beat-up enough to actually have encountered a rhino or two in its day. So we had no trouble getting down the driveway or to open stores in one of our local towns for bread, dog and cat food, and yes – beer. Problem was that even with 4-wheel drive we couldn’t get back up our driveway with the groceries. So we parked down by the road and hiked it in using the tire tracks as our path through snow so deep we’d been pushing it with the grill on the way down. It’s half a mile long – half of that nearly straight up – so it was quite the workout. Living and working on the land had us in good shape, though.

In fact, the only real problem we had was water. The cistern is more than 200 feet down the mountain, and without electricity the pump didn’t work. That meant we had to melt snow and ice for wash and flushing water. So we did, and it worked just fine even though it was a hassle I’d like to avoid in the future by installing an old fashioned hand pump in the line where it enters the house.

Nine days after the storm a National Guard helicopter finally came along to check on us. We must be near last on the county’s list. It hovered low over the garden checking on signs of life. We went out on the back deck and waved. They saw smoke coming out of the stovepipe, saw food neatly stacked on the deck, and quickly moved on to check on others who weren’t so lucky. We were warm, dry and well-fed. We’d transported one of our elderly neighbors to town the day after the storm in our Land Cruiser because she had no heat.

Two months later we had our first forest fire. The trains using this grade over the Continental Divide tend to lay on the brakes through these loops, and this literally melts the metal-asbestos brake pads. They throw this molten material off the tracks around the curves, and that causes forest fires. Luckily centrifugal force tends to throw the molten metal to the other side of the tracks, which means the fires are usually in the National Forest rather than on our property. We did learn about the wisdom of keeping our property well-raked and clear of underbrush, cleared trees growing close to the house. Thus in 15 years – with an average of one fire per year until recently when the feds came down on the railroad for bad use of brakes – we haven’t lost our cabin or any of the stately forest trees, fruit trees, grape vines or berry stands on our property to fire.

In this series I want to look at what kind of supplies a homesteader should keep on hand at all times, how to organize and store them, and how to weather the storms of nature and humanity that are likely to come your way over the course of years. There will of course be different types of dangers in different areas of the country. Some places are prone to hurricanes and floods, some are prone to tornados or wind storms, some places get a couple of big blizzards a year, some have forest fires or mud slides or earthquakes. If the homestead doesn’t get washed away or destroyed, the survival kits for getting through the times of no services and no help are all basically the same. Things you’ll need, and things you’ll want to have on hand.

Before we get into the various items everyone should have on hand in case of emergencies, we should consider the kinds of survival “kits” we’ll need to put together and where they should be kept. Most of us know enough to keep first aid kits in our cars, homes and offices, but emergency survival kits should be kept there as well. These are:

• Evacuation Bag. This is a bag or pack containing the most vital things you need. It should be kept in a convenient location near an exit so you can grab it quickly if you have to evacuate your home in a hurry. This kit won’t contain enough to survive for days, but should contain things you can’t do without and can’t easily replace if you are in a shelter. And keep your family photo albums in a single convenient place so you can grab those on your way out too.

• Home Survival Kit. This kit should contain everything you’ll need to keep your family healthy and well for at least 3 days (a week is better). Or, in the cases like I mentioned above for homesteaders out in the countryside, a month is even better yet. This kit can be kept on a particular shelf or in a particular cabinet in your house or one of your easily accessible outbuildings.

• Car Kit. This kit should contain everything you need to keep yourself and your passengers alive if you happen to get stranded in your vehicle somewhere for hours or days, in the heat of summer or the cold of winter.

• Work Kit. If a disaster strikes while you are at work away from home, you might be stranded there for a day or more before you can get back to your family. Having necessities stored in a desk kit can save your life.

For all of these kits it isn’t necessary to spend a lot of money. Remember that what you’ll need in an emergency are pretty much the same things you’d need every day. The most salient consideration should be prescription medicines if you take any on a daily basis to treat a chronic condition. If you can double up on the largest supply (30-90 days’ worth) you can divvy the supplies up so you’ve a week or more worth of medicine in each of your kits. Rotate these every 6 months or so to make sure the medicines don’t lose their potency. Most everything else will keep for a year or more (including foods if you’re careful about what you include), and some of the supplies will never go bad!

In my next post we’ll look at the essentials that should be in each of these kits. It’s more than just duct tape, tie wire and plastic sheeting, no matter what Homeland Security tells you! If we’re all good scouts we’ll come out the other end of occasional disasters just fine by relying on ourselves instead of the government to do for us what we should all be capable of doing for ourselves!