Hip Shots

Hip Shots - not long enough to be Prepper Ponderings...

Garden Update

This weekend I ate my first strawberry from my patch.  Delicious!  My tomato plants are looking very nice and have sprouted some buds.  We should be eating lettuce and carrots by the weekend. 


Subway Urban Prep Kit

I'm going to DC tomorrow for an emergency management conference.  Several weeks ago, I did the same thing and built a last minute kit.  I'll put one together tonight with a few modifications for the warmer weather.  I'll let you know tomorrow what I get out the conference.


Chicken Coop Design

The latest issue of Lowe's Creative Ideas magazine has a link to plans for a cute little chicken coop for the urban farmer.  My wife suggested that it might help convince the spouse who might be opposed to having chickens if they have a large, slapped together coop in mind.


More Pests

Our neighbors have seen a very large raccoon running around in the daylight.  Of course, rabies comes to mind with that description.  I set out my live trap Saturday with a can of cat food for bait.  Next morning, the trap wasn't tripped, but the can was empty.  I closed the trap and left it there.  I carried a new can of cat food down this evening and found that the raccoon had come back for more and been very upset at the lack of cat food.  He dragged the trap roughly 30 feet through the leaves.  I put the new can in, but instead of having it all the way open, I pulled the tab and opened it, but replaced the lid so he'll have to make more of an effort to get in to it.


Rice

A few days ago I talked about using 3 liter water bottles to hold rice.  A reader, RiverRider, suggested that I ought to use O2 absorbers or diatomaceous earth or else I'll end up with a bottle of bug poo eventually.  I'd like to try O2 absorbers as an experiment, but I'm worried that the bottles might collapse from the vacuum created.  I used DE back with the 300 pounds of rice I put up in 5 gallon buckets for Y2K, and it's kind of a pain to use.  I'm going try a different approach.  I've got some room in the big freezer, so I'm going to put the bottles in for about a week to kill off anything inside.  I've read a lot of things about freezing flour, rice, etc... before storing to kill off the bugs.  I will get some O2 absorbers to try, though, and I'll report how the bottles hold up.  Thanks, RiverRider for pointing out the risk of bugs.