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Tips on building pocket survival kits
Tips on building pocket survival kits
(Natural News) A bug-out bag (BOB) lets you carry all the items you’ll need to survive for 72 hours after SHTF. But if you’re looking for something lighter or if you need a backup plan, try making pocket survival kits (PSKs) to cover basic needs like self-defense, first-aid and signaling. (h/t to Survivopedia.com)
Escape and self-defense PSK
The items in this PSK can help you escape a survival situation:
- Diamond rotary cutoff tool – This item is easy to hide because it’s small and flat. Use a diamond rotary cutoff tool to shape bobby pins, hair clips or metal scraps into tools.
- Lock jigglers – When trapped or kidnapped, use lock jigglers and a fleet key or two to escape on a commandeered vehicle.
- Norseman SNAP card knife – This small but versatile knife can be used for shelter building, firestarting, finding food and food prep. It’s also compact enough to fit in a small PSK.
- Oleoresin capsicum (OC) powder – This irritant is the active ingredient that makes chili peppers spicy. In concentrated powder form, OC is the irritant used in pepper spray. Use a small vial of OC powder to contaminate your scent tracks if you’re being followed.
- Petroleum jelly – Use petroleum jelly to slip off handcuffs or other restraints.
- Restraint escape tool – While the other items should be stored in your PSK, it’s best to hide a restraint escape tool somewhere else on your person so you can easily find it if you’re capture by an enemy. Secure your chosen tool and hide it inside your sock or the lining of your jacket while traveling.
- Safety pins – Use safety pins to open flex cuffs or hide smaller tools under your clothing.
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A Homemade Vegan Version of Natural & Organic Fertilizer
A HOMEMADE VEGAN VERSION OF NATURAL & ORGANIC FERTILIZER
Last year I worked a couple of gardens with a friend/boss, Buck, who has been cultivating these spaces for decades. Though some of his techniques don’t jive with my permaculture sensibilities, such as tilling every year and walking in garden beds, on many things we were in lock-step. For example, once our seedlings had popped up a few inches high, we used leaves that had been piled the previous autumn to mulch the entire garden.
Up until then, I’d been dismayed with the amount of weeding we were doing each week. Once we’d applied the mulch, I asked why we’d not done it from the outset. Buck told me he preferred to keep a closer eye on the young seedlings—It was easier to amend the soil or address obvious issues without mulch being in the way—and thought of the early weeds, many of which were “chopped” into the soil, as nutrients for the plants. At the end of the growing season, he tilled the leaf-mulch into the garden to replace nutrients.
I have to admit, despite being a proponent of no-dig gardens and cultivating soil life (i.e. not killing it with a tiller), Buck’s technique had a lot about it that seemed sustainably conceived. Leaves had to be raked from the lawn and driveway (Buck is a caretaker for these properties) in the autumn; gardens had to be grown in spring. It made a lot of sense to me to do it this way. Other than adding a little soil enhancement to the hole when planting, the garden’s fertility was set-up to cyclically revive itself.
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How to Make Your Garden Have Less Weeds?
HOW TO MAKE YOUR GARDEN HAVE LESS WEEDS?
In crop gardens, we sometimes get into a spatial race with weeds, and the solution is to replace the weeds with “designed weeds” to take up the space. This can be done with green manure mulches to fertilize the gardens and supply quality mulch. This is an example of how understanding the inner workings of weeds allows us to harmonize with natural systems to both repair the earth and create production for ourselves.
It’s important to understand that the term “weed” is applied to any plant that isn’t wanted in a particular area. While we now call dandelions weeds, they once were sought-after greens. Banana trees are so prone to take root in the tropics that someone might consider them a weed, removing them from the yard, though they are the best-selling fruit in the world. The point is that just because we call a plant a weed doesn’t mean it lacks value. “Weeds” can be useful, or they can be prevented. Often, it’s us, as cultivators, who make and foster these choices or pick our small battles.
Mulch – The best way to have a weed-free garden is to prevent them in the first place, and organic mulch is probably the best way to go about that. Thickly (about 5-10 cm) mulch gardens with straw or leaves to effectively suppress weeds, and those weeds that do make it through are much more easily pulled. Not only will mulching help with weeds, but it’ll reduce the need to water, support soil life, and prevent erosion. Ultimately, the mulch will break down and continually replenish and improve the soil.
Humanure Part 2: Dealing With It
HUMANURE PART 2: DEALING WITH IT
In part 1(1) of this article I explored a little into why humanure is beneficial to the planet, including the need to replenish our aquifers and for people to have access to safe drinking water, the high phosphorous content of human poo compared to the finite and dwindling supply of phosphate rock as an agricultural product, and the reconnection of the ‘human nutrient cycle’ (2). In this part I will look more deeply into the different ways you can safely use humanure, and make some practical suggestions for beginning the process of redressing the human nutrient balance, even while we live within an unbalanced system.
Ways to deal with our crap
In ‘The Humanure Handbook’ (2) , Joseph Jenkins points out that we as a species have four different ways to deal with human excrement:
- To treat it as a waste product and dispose of it – this includes all water-based sanitation techniques such as flush toilets. As mentioned in part 1, this method ends up contaminating water even if the sewage is later treated, exacerbates the spread of water-borne diseases, and ignores the principle of ‘Produce No Waste’.
- To use it unprocessed in agriculture – at the time of the Handbook’s publication (1999) this was apparently still a common practice in parts of Asia (2). As you may guess, spreading unprocessed human waste on fields can be quite a large health risk because of the pathogens which are present in fresh humanure. This practice, euphemistically known as ‘night soil collection’ (3) , has apparently now been banned in many countries although there are some reports of people continuing to use fresh human waste, or ‘faecal sludge’ on their crops, for example in India (4) .
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Humanure Part 1: Why Should We Give a Crap?
HUMANURE PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE GIVE A CRAP?
Permaculture is not just about garden design. Even if you don’t have land or access to land, looking at life from a permaculture perspective can help you to make life decisions and take actions towards upholding the ethics of permaculture in your daily practices. This article series will take a look specifically at one of these practices which we all share, examine the benefits of changing our habits from a scientific perspective, and offer some practical ideas of what to do next.
That which cannot be named
It’s something which everyone engages in, sometimes as often as once or even twice a day. It can often be the first sign of illness if it is uncomfortable, and if it’s comfortable can help us to feel healthy and of course relieved. We do it almost as often as we eat and yet many people only feel comfortable talking about it with their closest friends or doctor. This could be seen as unbalanced, but probably even more unbalanced (especially from a permaculture perspective) is how we deal with our faeces. The most popular way of treating faeces globally is still by using water, either to flush to a public sewage treatment facility or to an onsite septic tank, or, in many places, by flushing it directly into the sea or a river (1). There are many reasons why using water to treat poo is environmentally detrimental, and most readers may well be familiar with these already. However, below I will briefly go into a few. Likewise with reasons why you may wish to change your pooing habits (if you haven’t already) to that of non-water treatment.
Why do we do what we do with poo?
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Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things, Part 3
BACKYARD CHICKENS, AND THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS. PART 3
This article is Part 3 of a Series that is mostly about chickens. It’s not a how-to-care-for-chickens article, but a how-to-appreciate-the-specialness-of-chickens article.
If you are interested only in chickens and would like to read about the funny things one of our roosters gets up to, this article will be fine to read by itself.
But if you missed the earlier articles in the series, and you’re interested in what backyard chickens have to do with the interconnectedness of all things, you’ll need to go back to the beginning of Part 1.
ROOSTERS ARE A LOT OF FUN TO WATCH
Roosters are gentle, generous, and protective, particularly as they get older, feel they have their place well established, and don’t have to compete with other roosters for space or mates.
They show the hens all the good things to eat that they find, calling them and sharing the food in a similar way to how a mother hen shares with her chicks. And they come running to defend the hens when they hear one in distress.
In our flock of about 30 hens, there are currently three adult roosters. The oldest has his own family group of hens who go with him to forage in the same areas each day, to rest in the same shady spots, to dust bath in their designated dust baths.
The other two are younger, and very different. One, a large white rooster who stars in the stories I’ll share below, seems to be where-ever there is food to share with hens, or where-ever there are good spots for hens to lay eggs.
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