5 Liquids That Can Be Used as Alternative Cleaning Solutions

Disaster preppers and the like believe on the importance of self-reliance, which is initially a necessary attitude in life since we need to be able to prepare ourselves not just for disastrous events but for an impending economic collapse as well.

For one, many people consider being prepared firsthand for all situations an advantage for when there is shortage in supplies; expect that prices will skyrocket as well. Most times we take a second look on cleaning supplies, but here in this article you don’t need to buy so much of the commercial cleaning solution.

Here are some of the natural liquid cleaning solutions that can be of much greater use.

Distilled White Vinegar

White vinegar is popularly known as ythe all-purpose cleaning ingredient and a neat trick on carpet cleaning in Brisbane is that they mix vinegar with water as their cleaning base. This ingredient has proven that it has countless uses for you in your household other than cooking; and with that reason it should hold the top spot for your essential ingredients to have as a priority item when restocking items.
Cider Vinegar

Another acidic ingredient that proves its versatility is the cider vinegar. From cooking, beautifying up to disinfecting as well as cleaning, cider vinegar should be one of the things that you need to include in your everyday stock of supplies. In addition, it also has helpful health benefits since it aids in digestion, and bloating while also curing sore throats and nasal passages for when you are experiencing coughs and colds.

Lemon Juice

Lemons, limes, and oranges! These citrus fruits work wonders for your stainless steel kitchen stoves, kitchen sink and even kitchen counters. Naturally, their acidic elements known as citric acid or citric acid crystals are a great disinfectant which kills bacteria and germs 99% of the time. It is commonly used in removing grimes and rusts from sinks and faucets.

Hydrogen Peroxide

This liquid solution should be added to your medical supplies as well since not only does it help in cleaning and disinfecting your wounds, it also a great green cleaning addition to the household. You can use it anywhere, in cleaning your cutting board and the interior of your refrigerator and dishwasher. Because this ingredient is non-toxic, hydrogen peroxide is mostly used for cleaning storage spaces where you place your dishes and food.

Water and Baking Soda Mixture

One of the primary ingredients may not be liquid but it works just as effectively when mixed with water. In addition you can also add a bit of cider vinegar for this and it doubles the efficiency of disinfecting the dirty countertops and works well as a substitute for laundry detergent. Adding ½ cup of baking soda with water for your wash is a natural way to deodorize the clothes and neutralizes the odor from all your clothes.

We need to teach ourselves and take a disciplined action of making plans to keep their food supply stocked and their essentials in top condition. We will never know what the future brings us but it never hurts anyone to be prepared for such events.

Make a Lamp with Sardines and a Twig

Manny: No matter how many spare batteries or candles you pack, eventually you might run out. But you can still make light, as long as you have a can of sardines in oil and a twig. I’m pretty sure you can find that. I’ll show you what to do with it.

To use a twig as a wick, you wanna get one that’s still green, because it needs to be fibrous. You don’t want one that’s gonna snap. This is bald cypress. I’m gonna get one out of oak. That one’s green. We’ll see how these work. Let’s go in and try it.

This is just a cotton string. So if you have that in your kit, you’re in a good shape. You can take this and make a wick out of it. Okay but what do you do, if you don’t have a wick? Well, you’ve got several options. You can use a twig. Here I have a piece of bald cypress twig and a piece of oak, which I haven’t tried. You’re gonna see me trying oak for the first time.

Another thing you can do is cut off a few strips from your shima, because you always have a cotton shima in your bag, right. Start about an inch and a half away from the end. You wanna have a rectangular piece that’s not cut and then you’re gonna cut three strips.

Now you’re gonna cut just a strip right here. A slit right about there. What I wanna do is just stick this piece of bamboo in here tight. If you’re outside and you can find a tree, then wrap it around a twig like this. Might be easier to do this than it would be to find the end and work it over the end. And now I’m just gonna braid it. I’m looking for a fairly tight, dense braid. And of course the thinner the strips you start with, the smaller the wick. The smaller the wick, the slower your oil will burn off. If you make your wick too large or too long, it’s going to burn extra oil of course, and it’s also gonna smoke.

Let’s prepare the twig wick. Roll it. A twig is essentially a wick. It draws nutrients up out of the ground, and water, to the leaves and transports nutrients from the leaves to the rest of the tree. I mean, it’s just a… it’s a transportation system for liquids. Alright, let’s try it with some oak, which I haven’t done before. I don’t know how this is gonna turn out, but… By the time I get it soft enough, it’s kind of shredding. So, I don’t know how that’s gonna work. We’ll see.

When I’m done burning the oil out of this, I’m gonna eat the sardines. So, I don’t want to turn the reamer the way it’s normally used to ream, because I don’t want to get metal shavings in my sardines. So, I’m just gonna poke the hole, and then if I need to expand it, I’ll turn it the other way, so it doesn’t cut any metal shavings. That should be good enough for the cotton string.

We’ll go ahead and soak the wick. I’m gonna go ahead and trim it. See, I don’t think this oak is gonna work so well, because when I pounded it, it just came apart into these strands. So, I’m gonna try taking off the bark end and poke it in there. Alright. Well, that’s kind of a mess, but… Cotton string, cotton sheet. That’s the bald cypress. And here’s the oak. See that cotton sheet, a little too thick, so it burns off with a lot of smoke. I think that bald cypress wick can do better.

So, I’ve blown them out, I’m gonna work on the bald cypress wick a little longer. Try to make a better one. I’m just making one from the thick end of the twig. See if that helps. I like it to be good and soft.

I love this job. So, the trick here is to get that wick really soft. You have to pound it until it’s just really flexible. More like cloth and then it wicks better. The total amount of oil in the can will probably last two hours, maybe three, if you’ve got a smaller wick like this cotton. Generally the smaller the better. Burns slower. Puts out about the same amount of light. This is the cotton string, this is the cotton sheet, braided. And that is the bald cypress twig.

There, just an idea for how you can get some light, if you have no other option and don’t mind putting a little work into it. You can go out and get a twig. And as long as you have a can of sardines or tuna in oil, would work fine as well.

'America is a bomb waiting to explode'

The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic.

Not all explosives are the same. We all know you have to be careful with dynamite. Best to handle it gently and not smoke while you’re around it.

Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is.

To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.

But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise.

But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation.

We can see how fragile the U.S. is now by considering just four tendencies.

1. Destruction of farms and reliable food source

The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed.

The Washington Post reports that the number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012.

And according to the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms.

That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves.

Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.

© Stephen Lam / Reuters 

2. Weak economic system

The American economic system is little more than froth.

The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars.

The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates.

Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable.

Fiat economies always collapse. They last on average for 37 years. By that metric the US should have already run out of gas.

Once people wake up and smell the Yuan, the Exodus out of the dollar will be unstoppable.

© Brendan McDermid / Reuters 

3. Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs

According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs.

Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.

4. Morals in decline

During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive.

Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish.

Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.

Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.

Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.

My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up.

Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.

© Mario Anzuoni / Reuters 

Nowhere to run

In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.

Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.

I would argue that the right shock event – or combination of shock events – will detonate the explosive.

Potential detonators happen all the time. Either they are contained or they are simply incompatible with the explosive or they don’t go off. But that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen or that we are not sitting on a mountain of explosives.

There was one such potential detonator – which presently has not gone off – in the UK just last week.

The UK’s Independent reported Friday that experts were ‘staggered’ after Pauline Cafferkey – who had been brought to London of all places – rapidly declined after being declared cured from Ebola.

This woman had been allowed out into the community – still sick with Ebola – and managed to visited Mossneuk Primary School in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, on Monday to thank children for their fund-raising efforts.

We will assume these events have their origins in incompetence; the fact is: we have a woman dying from Ebola in the UK’s largest population center.

What if there is more incompetence?

Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, primed the British public for the possibility of Ebola in London just last week.

Perhaps he knows something we don’t.

What do you think will happen if people start dying from Ebola in London or New York? The natural response will be to get out of the urban centre as quickly as possible.

© Eddie Keogh / Reuters 

During the Great Plague of London of 1665, for example, Defoe wrote "Nothing was to be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children, coaches filled with people of the better sort, and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away".

Once the better off city people reach the countryside there will be instant resistance from the host population, not least because they will not want potentially infected people entering their communities.

Meanwhile, the poor people who are left in the cities will run out of food in short order as suppliers refuse to enter the city.

Those who fled London in 1665 had somewhere to go: they were returning to the fields that fed them.

Today, the fields which feed us are largely in other countries, and the ones which are in our own are mainly owned by large corporations.

I am not predicting exactly this scenario for the US or for any other country. I am saying that all the ingredients are there for complete breakdown and large-scale deaths given the right initiating incident.

I am saying that volatility is baked into the cake – even into the cake of what today looks and feels normal.

I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.

Was Nostradamus Right About The World Ending?

The idea of the end of the world has fascinated people from time immemorial. Even today, there are those who have attempted to predict the time and the date of the end of the world. One of the most recent of these is eBible Fellowship founder Chris McCann, who predicted that the world would end 7 October 2015. During the 14th century, an astrologer named Nostradamus was said to have predicted the end of the world.

The Origin of Nostradamus

Among those who have made prophecies about when the world would end was a man by the name of Michel de Nostredame, usually known by his Latin name Nostradamus. Nostradamus was born in December of 1503 in Saint-Remy-DE-Provence, Provence, France to Jaume and Reyniere de Nostradamus. He had at least eight siblings whose names were Delphine, Jean, Hector, Pierre, Louise, Bertrand, Antoine and Jean II.

At the age of 15, Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his bachelor’s degree. After a little over a year, he was forced to leave due to the outbreak of the plague. He traveled the countryside for eight years after he left, studying herbal remedies and later becoming an apothecary. He attempted to study at the University of Montpelier but was expelled when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary (a trade banned by university statutes) and had slandered doctors.

Involvement in the Occult

Nostradamus was married in Agen to a woman whose name is unknown to us. He and his wife had two children. In 1534, Nostradamus’ wife and children died, possibly from the plague. He continued to travel, working both with another doctor and on his own to treat the plague. He remarried a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde while in Salon-DE-Provence and had six children with her. 

Shortly after his marriage to Anna Ponsarde, Nostradamus became involved with the occult. He began writing almanacs which became very popular. He included his prophesies in these almanacs for the benefits of his readers. The almanacs he wrote contained at least 6,338 prophesies and included at least 11 annual calendars. Readers from far and wide began asking him for psychic advice and horoscopes. Shortly thereafter, he began writing a book mainly composed of one thousand French quatrains that constituted the prophesies for which he is famous today. Nostradamus died on 1 July 1566.

Prediction of 9/11

Nostradamus is said to have predicted the tragedy of September 11, 2001. According to the prophecy: 

“The sky will burn at forty-five degrees latitude. Fire approaches the great new city. Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up. When they want to have verification from the Normans”

There has been evidence of people manipulating Nostradamus’ writing to make it fit the circumstance. The altered version of the above verse runs as follows: “Two steel birds will fall from the sky on the Metropolis. The sky will burn at forty-five degrees latitude. Fire approaches the great new city (New York City lies between 40-45 degrees). Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up. Within months, rivers will flow with blood. The undead will roam earth for little time.” The altered version makes the quatrain fit the circumstances of 9/11 more precisely.

The End of the World?

Many people have made preparations for an economic crisis. These may include the purchase of lightweight, water-resistant Tyvek suits; seed banks for an emergency garden; or meals-ready-to-eat purchased in bulk from an emergency food supplier. Others make plans for the end of the world.

Some people have claimed that Nostradamus predicted the end of the world in 2012. The truth is that he made no such claim. This claim was made based on a Mayan calendar and a so-called “lost book” of Nostradamus that bears no definitive proof of his authorship.

So, was Nostradamus right about the end of the world in 2012? He never made a claim about the end of the world in any of his writings in the first place. The best we can all do is to lead good lives and to make our small part of the world a better place. These actions have always been the only requirement for all human beings and always will be.

10 Things to Do if a Winter Storm Is Happening and You’re Not Prepared

Just weeks ago a winter storm hit the South East United States leaving traffic locked in grid lock for days, people were also stuck at the office and in school for days. Tonight ice and cold rains down on the same areas with massive grid lock and power outages looming.

For this second round of storms I am hoping that area residents know better than to expect local and federal services to be prepared and have begun to start prepping for emergencies themselves.  While it is always best to be prepared in advance of emergencies, sometimes they catch you off guard or maybe you are just now realizing the need to prepare.

Here are 10 things you can do right now to help keep your family warm and safe. These things may sound old fashioned common sense to some, but to others they could be incredibly helpful in dealing with the loss of services such as power and water in the middle of the winter.

1) Double check your carbon monoxide detector.

Ice Storm, Colbert WA
Photos by Stephanie Dayle (c) 2014

Carbon monoxide kills and people die of carbon monoxide poisoning during ice storms who are just trying to stay warm. Make sure it is working, if you have only one battery in the house, and your carbon monoxide detector needs it – use it for the carbon monoxide detector. If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector, this should be a must during your very next trip to the store. It could save your life during a power outage when using alternative sources of heat.

2) Keep faucets on a drip so your plumbing doesn’t freeze up. 

If your home is on public water consider keeping water faucets on a drip to prevent them from freezing up and damaging the home’s plumbing. It’s the movement of the water that prevents freezing, hot water lines will usually freeze first.

If you live on a well and a power outage would mean losing the water to your house, consider filling your sinks and tubs up with water.  No matter where you live, if there is any chance that you could lose running water this tactic will give you an instantly accessible water supply for drinking, washing, flushing and cooking. Other sources of water in your home or apartment are in your hot water tank and of course in the back tank of each toilet. A purchase to consider in the future to be more prepared for such emergencies is awaterBOB, a waterBOB is basically a big plastic water liner for your tub (to see it click here). You fill it up in your tub so you don’t have to worry about the water accidentally draining , it also keeps dust, dirt and pet hair out of your water. It collapses down to nothing so you can store it away until it is needed for an emergency.

Fill up any empty containers (two-liter pop bottles, water bottles or milk jugs) with water. Leave a couple inches of head space in each container for ice expansion and stick them in your freezer if you have room. These may help keep everything cold just a little bit longer, and will give you some extra drinking water in a pinch.

3) Fill your vehicle up with gas, right now. 

Winter Storm, Spokane WA
Photos by Stephanie Dayle (c) 2014

Not only for the drive home but incase you need the fuel at home or incase you need to leave home. As you have already seen traffic could be grid locked and it could take quite a long time to get anywhere. A gas tank is 15-25 gallons of fuel storage waiting to be used and if you wait too long it won’t be available either due to lack of power or due to increased demand.

4) Cover your windows with blankets and seal door drafts with heavy towels.

If you do lose power this will help stop heat loss through the windows and will trap existing heat in the house. Do not cover windows you may need to use  for ventilation (see below).

5) If the temperature has tanked, the power is out and your options are limited for warmth, try heating one room ONLY. 

Don’t bother trying to keep the whole house warm if you don’t have a generator to keep your furnace or electric heat going. Close off the rest of the house. No matter what you use for heat you will need to ventilate the room you are in a little, preferably with a cracked window so keep that in mind when choosing the room. Ventilation is especially important when burning candles, a lantern or using a kerosene or propane heater. Also consider the placement of this room within your house. Make sure it is not located where an ice covered tree could fall on it.

Mr. Heater – Propane Heater
Approved for indoor use.

Gather everyone plus your pets in that one room. Your combined body heat will help to warm the room. Rearrange extra furniture in that one room to keep everyone off the cold floor.

A local dog hoarder made the news in my area last year, when the dogs were removed from her property it was revealed that she had survived THREE northern winters without any heat at all solely from the heat of her dogs on the bed and in the house with her. If you want to snuggle up in a nice warm bed all night, cuddle up with your family and let your dog share a little body heat with you.

6) Move perishable food outside.

If power is lost, frozen food will last a day or two if you do NOT open the freezer. Food in the fridge will be okay for the day, maybe a little less – it should be the first food you move outside. Use a cooler if you have one. Place the coolers in a secure visible location. Thefts are COMMON during winter ice storms. 

Eat perishable foods first. Any left overs, veggies, thawed meat, milk, bread, basically eat whatever will go bad first. Have cereal for lunch or dinner to use up milk. Then think “non perishable foods” like canned food if you have some, there is also pasta, rice and beans. Get creative. If you have kids pretend that you’re camping and make it fun. If you need to cook – use an outdoor gas grill, or camp stove OUTDOORS. Do not under any circumstances use your gas or charcoal grill inside the house or garage as they both consume large amounts of oxygen and and expel carbon monoxide.

7) If you still have power, charge all of your phones and laptops immediately.

Even if you don’t have internet service, you can use your laptop as a power reservoir to charge other devices – like your phone. Turn your cellphone on only to make calls then turn it off again. If you can get through leave messages with friends and family to call you back at specific times, turn your phone back on during those times.

Turn off the ‘wi-fi’ on your phone so it stops looking for a wi-fi signal. If there is no cell service, but you still want to use your phone, kick your phone into “air plane mode” so it stops using power to look for cell service and turn the brightness down on the screen to conserve power.

TIP: Text messaging will use LESS power than a voice call so try that as well, another advantage to texting is that sometimes a text message will get through even when a voice call will not.

8) Gather all flashlights, glow sticks, lanterns, candles, and extra batteries in one central location. 

This is recommended so there is no fumbling around in the dark to find them when the power goes out. If you have not made prepping a habit yet – think outside the box for lighting. Do you have children’s toys that light up? Freebies from concerts or giveaways from fairs that glow? They may also be used for light or raided for extra batteries. Maybe you have some solar yard lights? Those can be left out to charge during the day and then brought inside so you can see at night. Maybe there is a flash light in your car? Your phone may also be used as a flashlight in a pinch, but if at all possible battery power should be conserved for calls, using a phone as a flashlight will drain it quickly. If you have other sources of light, like LED lanterns or flashlights, it is recommend to use those over burning candles. You can even place a flashlight or a headlamp up against a clear plastic container of water and turn it into a make shift lantern (click here to see how).

9) Consider these alternatives for heat before you try to use candles. 

A single candle will consume all the oxygen in a small sealed room therefore rooms with candles need to be ventilated. They are also a fire hazard. Fires caused by people trying to stay warm are very common during winter storms and ice storms. Remember to a certain extent it’s ok to be a little cold. Your goal should be to keep your chosen living area at a temperature that is survivable first and somewhat comfortable second.

Smaller Propane Heater Approved for Indoor Use

Build a fire in the fireplace if you have one to generate heat. Many propane and gas fireplaces will still ignite and burn even if the power is out (via a manual switch in the service panel), the blower will not work but it will still give off heat – check the instruction manual for directions and safety protocol.

Propane and Kerosene heaters approved for indoor use are an acceptable alternative to candles for heat as they are manufactured with safety features like ‘low oxygen shut offs’ and ‘tip over shut offs’ but they have their own risks and they will only keep you warm until they’re out of fuel.  If you have a propane or kerosene heater, fireplace or wood-burning stove, be sure the room is ventilated to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning and make sure you have a working carbon monoxide detector (see number one above).

Keep the area around heaters candle, and fireplaces clear of paper and anything that could catch fire. Also make sure they are not in an area where they would be knocked over by children or pets. Keep these running or burning only long enough to warm the room then shut them off, do not forget about them and leave them burning or running. This is not only dangerous for the inexperienced, but it will also consume large amounts of fuel, if stores are closed or you can get to them, fuel will need to be conserved. Also keep a working fire extinguisher nearby. If you don’t have one or the one you have is expired, this should be the very next thing you pick up at the store.

If you have a generator and use it to power your home for heat, never use it inside or even inside an attached garage as doing so will produce dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Entire families have perished in because of this.  Keep your generator running in a  visible and secure outdoor location, consider chaining to fixed structure – thefts are COMMON during winter storms and ice storms. If you purchase a generator for a weather event, be wise, and keep it for the future. Don’t return the generator after the storm is over as if it’s never going to happen again. Most experienced preppers have a very dim view of this practice.

10) Clothing: Dress in layers…

Assuming that you don’t own the proper clothing or enough of the proper clothing to deal with this kind of weather; dress in layers to stay warm (think: t-shirt + sweatshirt + coat). Double up on socks, wearing a hat even when you are sleeping will make a huge difference on your body temperature as most of your heat is lost through your head. For women, wearing tights or nylons under your pants can make a huge difference in overall body warmth.

Ice Storm Cheney, WA
Photos by Stephanie Dayle (c) 2014

How To Start Your Own Sustainable Vegetable Garden

A vegetable garden is the perfect example of a sustainable resource. By growing your own crops, you can continue to develop food and cultivate seeds for future growth and expansion. For eager preppers, vegetable gardens ensure you always have food growing, helping you to rely less on supermarkets and even more on yourself and your land. Here’s a quick guide on how you can start harvesting your own vegetables!

Ground level or Raised Vegetable Beds

When most people think of a vegetable patch, they only consider digging into the earth itself. While it’s good to get in the weeds and experience nature up close, a higher or raised vegetable bed is easier to reach. This also helps separate your actual crops from the ground, avoiding contamination from the likes of weeds. As we’ll soon discuss, this also helps you regulate the individual PH levels for each bed too. These beds can be easy to make, as they need only be large containers, wide enough to plant crops and deep enough to allow roots to spread happily. A good example should be something waist high and these are typically made from wood or other sustainable materials.

PH Levels

Depending on what you want to grow, you will need the right PH levels. In nature, everything is either acidic or alkaline. If the PH level is over 7 are alkaline (the higher the number, the more alkaline it is) while things lower than this are considered acidic. For truly sustainable crops, you need to match the crop to the soil. Potatoes, for instance, thrive in a lightly-acidic soil between 5.3 and 6.0 PH. As such, there are various ways to improve the quality of your soil, including composts and mulches, to either add or subtract the relevant acids or alkaline substances.

Reclaim Waste

A good prepper knows to never throw anything away until it loses all value. When it comes to the garden, nearly all organic matter can be used in some fashion. Compost is the easy to make, while mulch can be made through similar means. Depending on the materials and properties of the waste used, this can even influence the PH levels and add vital nutrients. This makes your home more sustainable overall and you can even use leftover clippings, dead plant matter and more from the garden to sustain the next generation of vegetables! The same goes for leftover food in the home – today’s dinner really can be tomorrow’s fertilizer!

Stay Organic

As already mentioned, it’s quite easy to support your production with organic, natural boosts. A key part of sustainability is only using organic materials, so as not to provide further damage to the environment. Compost is easy to make, while wood chippings, grass cuttings and other mulches can all be used to provide the added boost. Don’t buy calcium powder in the shops, for instance, when bone meal is readily available elsewhere! If you can’t make something yourself, there’s always someone with excess materials (many butchers and abattoirs have plenty of bones they can’t use, for instance!) so don’t be afraid to ask. It might cost a small amount but most people will be happy to let you take their excess waste off of their hands and, in return, you get to stay green and organic.

Save and Store Seeds

They say you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket and you shouldn’t plant all your seeds in one garden, either! Another key part of sustainability, as well as being prepared for anything, is expecting the worst. What happens, for instance, if you have a bad harvest and lose many of your plants? For this reason, it’s worth setting up your own seed bank. The majority of garden plants produce more than one seed – while others such as tomatoes and potatoes can be cultivated without seeds at all – giving you amply opportunities to gain additional seeds. Don’t plant all of these straight away! Store some of them in a safe environment. These will help you when you urgently need to plant new crops, or perhaps help a friend or even donate to a larger, national seed bank when you have some spare!

As you can see, it’s a lot to take in at first, but the basics are quite simple. Learn what soil your plants need, dedicate an area of your garden to it and use organic means to grow and develop your supply! There’s no need to panic, as vegetables take a while to grow, giving you plenty of time to learn and develop your gardening skills.

Survival Bread In a Dutch Oven

Hey folks, backwoods gourmet here, ready to show you another survival recipe. You can do it on an open fire, we’re probably going to do it on some all natural charcoal here today threatening rain it’s summertime Florid, rains every day. So it is real simple and a very few steps so will get it okay.

As I told you, this is about the most basic recipe you can make this is going to be for some survival bread and you only need a few things. You need a bowl, something to mix in and you need a couple teaspoons a salt. You need some warm water and some yeast or the mother of the bread that you used before, will explain that later. You need uhh some cast iron cookware cause we’re gonna cook over coals. I like this big deep pan right here, gives it a lot of room for it to rise but if you don’t have that a 10 inch lodge skillet is good. We’re probably gonna try to do this one the dutch oven. These (skillets) only work if you’re doing it in a conventional oven okay because you need heat from the top. So if you wanna do this at home because this is really really great do at home also but you’re gonna need a Dutch oven, number ten or number 12.

Just a few ingredients, its three cups of all-purpose flour or bread flour its whatever you got. Even if you’re some of my prepper friends out there subscribers um if you grind your own whatever you have is gonna work. We’re gonna use about a teaspoon of salt that’s it. We’re going to take our dry yeast we’re gonna add that straight to the flour and here we have this is just warm tap water you didn’t have warm water obviously just heat it up a little bit.

For water the optimal temperature is 105 degrees so it should feel warm to the touch. If you take it straight out of the tap it’s at 120 and will cool to 105 almost immediately so just warm tap water. And we’re just going to slowly add warm tap water into the flour and just try to get that incorporated and will keep adding it till we have the medium consistency dough. It’s not rocket science here okay. We just brought that together with just enough water to bring the flour and water yeast mixture together to where it’s reasonably smooth not like falling apart into different segments. It is consistent so that’s what you want at this step.

What we’re gonna do now is leave it in the bowl no fuss no muss we’re gonna put a dish towel over and we’re gonna set that Joker aside. If it’s cool where you live try to keep it in a warm place. Now if you’re camping near the fire optimal temperatures bout nineties to a 100 degrees. And a humidity level great. If you’re in a desert area you might want to just dampen the towel on top to keep the humidity level up inside the bowl so it doesn’t dry on the crust outside a bit. Here Florida summertime it’s already ninety percent humidity so all we’re gonna do is cover with a towel and this is the Saturday afternoon we’re gonna let that guy do its thing. Let that magic yeast do their thing until tomorrow.

All right folks, next day on the bread here been sittin over there all night most of the day today couldn’t get back to it. It’s a nice airy gooey kinda because it’s risen up quite a bit the gluten in the flour just nice and stringy. This gonna give us a nice texture for the bread. Scrape that out on floured piece of wax paper and we’ll start working it a little bit. Roll it over on itself if it starts sticken you’re gonna have to get in there if ya don’t have all your paper covered but it’s now very soft, pliable and as soon as we work a little flour into it its gonna get stretchy like pizza dough. Work it back to the middle keep your hands floured very uh stretchy a soft. Paper helps contain the mess but definitely not necessary if you don’t have it. So now that I’ve got it kinda in a ball it’s starting to take shape keep my hands floured here and I’m just turning it back around itself and keep dustin it just enough to keep it from sticken to ya. Rollin it what I’m doing is on stretching it out stretching out the glutens. We’re gonna dust that off a little bit and keep it from sticking to us use a little more flour here. Just grabbin up new flour right now to feed this yeast and let it continue the rising process. So anyways got into a pretty nice ball there and what we’re gonna to next is move it over Dutch oven here. I did grease this with lard. I like to grease with lard its more a natural product has a higher burning rate than butter. And looking for kinda smooths surface on this guy right here and we gonna put it right in the middle.

What we will do next for is take a very sharp knife and we’re gonna cut right through the top of the dough razor blade works really good for this too cut through the top that dough. Might have to put some flour on the knife cause this was particularly sticky. That’ll give it place to expand so what he needs now is more time till it at least doubled this volume.

It’s been about an hour we just had the Dutch oven sittin out here with the bread in the sun. We’ll can see it’s in pretty big is very close doubled so its time to get your fire ready. Maybe another fifteen minutes. So fire ready and we’ll bake her off. All right here we’ve got our backyard set up you know this is in loo of campfire. We’ve got by volume we’re trying to hit 375 about the same as 9 coals, these are natural coals. The rain did hold off for us so we were able to get her going. So we’re going to go ahead and get our pot on and take the rest of the chimney of home maders. We want more heat on top of tis obviously than on the bottom. So get a hold of this one down here that got away. We just kinda scoot those to the outside and we’ll keep rotating that lid.

Alright we got that set up now and most of our bottom coals around the bottom edge and the and the top coals around the top edge. We’ll come out here every 5-10 minutes and rotate that, actually every five minutes. Wanna look at about a 15-20 minute bake time to bake this bread. So we’ll just keep rotating that lid

Ok we turned that lid one time there and like I said it’ll be short cooking time we are gonna go ahead and take a peak and look at it. Uhhh that’s pretty much perfect. Golden brown bread so we are gonna go ahead and take that guy off the fire.

Alright we took him off and the first thing we do is pop him out of that pot. A very hot pot. The way I like to check the bread is thump it. If it sounds hollow that means it’s gonna be pretty good. So we will serve this guy up with some chicken and rice we made. We’ll show you how it looks once we slice it. I guarantee it taste awesome.

We are gonna go ahead and cut into this guy for ya. A bread knife works real good here. Gonna get a nice little wedge of it. Cut it out. You can see the bottom is just a little dark but not to bad. Gets nice and crispy on the bottom. It’s a hardy bread, it’s meant to be that way. Gonna go ahead and take uhh some soften butter. If you’re looking up ahead at that its real butter to btw, not margarine. Give it a good slather of that and put that right there with the chicken and rice homemade and believe me, try this, you’re gonna love it.

Very warm day here in Florida in the back woods. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Try this recipe yourself; it does take a while to perfect it. I’ve been trying myself for a couple of months now. Made it probably a dozen times. Like everything else it does take some practice. But it is something that is very simple, very few ingredients. You can make it in the woods, campin, whatever you wanna do with it.

$3,248,723,000,000: Federal Taxes Set Record in FY 2015; $21,833 Per Worker; Feds Still Run $438.9B Deficit

(CNSNews.com) - The federal government took in a record of approximately $3,248,723,000,000 in taxes in fiscal 2015 (which ended on Sept. 30), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

That equaled approximately $21,833 for every person in the country who had either a full-time or part-time job in September.

It is also up about $212,927,100,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $3,035,795,900,000 in revenue (in 2015 dollars) that the Treasury raked in during fiscal 2014.

 

Even as the Treasury was hauling in a record $3,248,723,000,000 in tax revenues in fiscal 2015, the federal government was spending $3,687,622,000,000. So, the federal government ran a deficit of $438,899,000,000 for the fiscal year.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total seasonally adjusted employment in the United States in September (including both full and part-time workers) was 148,800,000. That means that the federal tax haul for fiscal 2015 equaled about $21,832.82 for every person in the United States with a job.

In 2012, President Barack Obama struck a deal with Republicans in Congress to enact legislation that increased taxes. That included increasing the top income tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, increasing the top tax rate on dividends and capital gains from 15 percent to 20 percent, and phasing out personal exemptions and deductions starting at an annual income level of $250,000.

An additional 3.8 percent tax on dividends, interest, capital gains and royalties--that was embedded in the Obamacare law--also took effect in 2013.

The largest share of fiscal 2015's record-setting tax haul came from the individual income tax. That yielded the Treasury $1,540,802,000,000. Payroll taxes for “social insurance and retirement receipts” took in another $1,065,277,000,000. The corporate income tax brought in $343,797,000,000.

4 Reasons to Improve Garden Soil

Your garden soil is alive and is a plant’s essential source of moisture, air and nutrients. Good garden soil supports a living, thriving community of beneficial creatures such as earthworms, woodlice, centipedes, microscopic bacteria and fungi. These contribute to a healthy ecosystem by converting dead material into organic matter.

Adding organic matter will do the most to improve your garden soil in four ways:

1 . It adds structure, which improves root penetration and access to soil moisture and nutrients.

2. It helps soil workability, creating a nice mixture of clay, silt and sand, so that water can enter and remain without too much pooling. Organic matter will help retain enough moisture to provide water for your plants needs.

3. Having a nice balance of organic matter also improves the emergence of seedlings due to reduced crusting of the surface.

4. Organic matter increases productivity, allowing more nutrients to access the roots of your garden plants. This means bigger and healthier plants.

If you haven’t taken the time to do a mason jar soil test you should. This will give you a feel for the kind of soil composition you currently have and is information you need to begin to improve your garden soil.  Because soil is where it all begins in the garden.

Improving garden soil is not a quick fix, but there are things you can add each year as you go about improving your soil structure.

Get access to inexpensive organic materials for your yard

Look around for inexpensive organic matter. You can collect these materials from your own yard or get it from your neighbors. Your non-gardening neighbors will be happy to get rid of it! You can often find suitable materials for free or for sale in your community; search online for “compost” and your community name. Here’s some of the things you can use:

• Leaves gathered in the fall.
• Needles from conifer trees.
• Sawdust shavings.
• Bark chips from a tree cutter service. They will often deliver it for free just so they don’t have to pay a dump fee.
• Composted materials from your own bins.
• Peat moss is effective, but can be expensive for large areas.
• Grass clippings that have been dried.
• Old straw or hay bales that have been spoiled by rain. You can often find them hanging around in a farmer’s field (just ask first!)
• Manure, which is the uniting force of soil fertility. I’ve heard it called the “biochemical duct tape that holds great soil together.” If you have access to composted manure even better. Cow, horse, sheep and chicken are considered hot manure and need to be composted first. Rabbit manure can be used directly on your garden beds with no composting.

Cultivate the topsoil for a great spring garden

Topsoil is the rich, well-cultivated, top 12 inches in which most plant roots grow.  The depth can vary depending on whether your soil has been well-cultivated or neglected. One of the best ways to improve garden soil is to cultivate deeply, which opens up soil for air and water to penetrate plant roots.

To prepare your soil for growing vegetables next season you need to add your composted organic materials in the fall. Begin this winter by digging 6 to 12 inches deep and then adding your composted materials to the top. This process of turning the soil over in advance and letting the compost act as a mulch is the key.

It will reduce weed germination and bring those beneficial insects. In the spring you can till it in.

Prepare seedbeds for next year

As the soil starts to dry in spring, finish the seedbed by breaking down the surface into a fine crumble, using a fork and rake. If the soil is not sticky, you can walk on it at this stage, which breaks the clods and gently firms the surface. Once the seedbeds are finished though, refrain from walking on them. You don’t want to compact all your hard work.

Apply a balanced organic fertilizer, then do a final raking. Remove excess stones, remaining clods and any weeds. Ideally, you should prepare your seedbed well in advance of the first sowing, allowing time for a first crop of weeds to germinate. Hoe off the weed seedlings immediately before sowing your garden seeds, which will give your crops a head start.

I hope you’ll take some extra time at the end of the garden season and really get your beds into shape by improving your garden soil. You’ll be glad you did!