Bison Prepper

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Friday, April 17, 2015

consuming to invest 25

CONSUMING TO INVEST 25

Garbage Can Wine

Decades ago Kurt Saxon introduced a lot of us to homemade Ripple, junk wine on the cheap ( Kurt Saxon, for those new to the survivalist way, was a crazy as a craphouse rat but loveable rogue who was the author of books on improvised weaponry and 19^th century technology level-of-social-decline survivalism ). It wasn’t much more complicated than placing a can of condensed grape fruit juice in a big jug, adding a lot of table sugar and a pack of bread yeast and water, then placing a balloon over the opening and waiting a week. Of course, everyone had to try it out, and some improvements suggested were using actual wine yeast ( bought in bulk through the mail, you paid no price difference penalty ) and using a purpose made jug with one of those relatively inexpensive doo-dads that lets fermentation gases out without letting air in. Garbage can wine is a different animal all together, and by employing its name I’m only being cute and clever and am NOT suggesting to anyone you should try making it. Garbage can wine is prison made wine, and the yeast part is dangerous. Those fools use moldy pieces of bread, or any other kind of mold, to try to turn juice in a plastic bag into wine ( I’m a bit vague on the added sugar part, if there is one ). Needless to say, garbage can wine can get you drunk, or dead, or wishing you were deceased rather than in excruciating pain. Although, honestly, if fellow prisoners were shoving their junk up my nether regions, I guess drunk or dead is just as good.

Economically, junk wine of the Kurt Saxon type has a lot going for it. Even if you use a whole bag of sugar, you are looking at what? $4 a gallon for wine, which includes the yeast and juice. If that. You’ll have to do a bit of research, as I don’t have portions or exact brew time, but I know you can use almost anything for flavor. Surely you’ve heard of strawberry wine and the like? Be creative and original and frugal ( dumpster diving for, say, the tough core scraps of pineapple that are thrown away as the stores produce department makes those hideously expensive cut fruit bowls, then pureeing them in a blender before using them as wine juice ). Have several jugs in production at once ( look into buying the air-lock caps, as a balloon sounds like too chancy health wise ), and before you know it you are getting drunk or buzzed every day on pennies or quarters rather than dollars ( I’m glad I don’t drink anymore with beer in bulk bottle cases going near a buck each for crap brew ). Plus, homemade gifts! You will have new friends and family you didn’t know existed. All for the price of a few pieces of brewing equipment and some bulk ingredients.

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Thursday, April 16, 2015

consuming to invest 23

CONSUMING TO INVEST 23

Sprouting Trays And Seeds

Now, before you skip over this section, mumbling about sprouts tasting like green dirt, stop and think how much your last garden salad ran you in Greenbacks. Not cheap anymore, are they? Not too long ago, you bought veggies several to the dollar. Now, you are lucky to get each one under a buck each. I’m not going to get into all the reasoning-just keep in mind a primary cause of all the contributing factors is drought, infertility in most soils and energy costs. In short, we will never go back to “too cheap to meter” vegetables. Worse days are here again, and we won’t go back to a cheap oil era with less population. Before, if your twenty five cent cucumber stayed too long in the crisper drawer and started to mold, you tossed it out without a thought. Today, it is cause for weeping and anguish. If the price goes up too much more, it might be cause for spousal or child abuse. Yes, of course, everyone should grow their own veggies ( which will NOT translate into post-collapse pantry planting. You need a farm for that. Gardens are for your fruits and vegetables, your vitamin foods. Not your calorie foods. If you read a post-apocalypse story wherein a garden feeds the family, throw your Kindle at the wall, then promptly pour carbolic acid in your brain to scour the information away as everything the story “taught” you was dis-information most likely from someone you should protect yourself against with aluminum foil hats ). But veggies take time to grow, sometimes if you see one more of veggie X you over planted you will plant the wife under next years crops and a lot of time it is winter. For all those times, sprouts are a good vegetable substitution.

Now, you can eat sprouts. Most people put all those crunchy bastards on a salad with some low fat ranch dressing, then chew their cud for twenty minutes consuming them. I prefer to put some juice in the blender, then add sprouts, then run on “liquefy” for a minute or so. OJ works best for me hiding the taste, but you can use V8 or whatever. I’m not a huge vegetable eater, other than potatoes a couple of times a week. I crave salad once or twice a month ( I take a multi-vitamin with dinner, and mega-dose on vitamin C twice a day ), and I believe that is for the enzymes rather than the vitamins. Sprouts works just as well with that craving. A lot of folks claim sprouts are “over sold” on their health benefits, then site very low vitamin content. Do your own research, then try them out. If you listen to your body and what it wants, you’ll be able to tell if they can work for you. You can buy your own commercial trays, or make your own for almost nothing. All you are doing is wetting the seeds once or twice a day, then allowing them to drain so as to stay moist but not wet, so a Mason glass jar with a ring and a screen of cheesecloth should work just as well as a store bought unit. Do a little online searching for seed ( such as Alfalfa ) sales, sprout instructions and sprouter construction. It is pretty straightforward. If sprouting works for you, you can save money getting your vegetables, while staying nice and healthy.

CONSUMING TO INVEST 24

Buried Tube Cooler A/C

I tried this method and failed miserably, but my neighbor did it the correct way and it works perfectly. I only went four foot deep with four inch pipe. Even though I stretched it out one hundred feet, and went uphill, that wasn’t good enough. The neighbor only went fifty feet long on flat land, but he had a backhoe go down eight foot and installed the largest PVC pipe they had, the sewer pipe. What you are doing is drawing air through the pipe into your home. The temperature of the dirt at the lower pipe is what goes inside. So, the summer blows in close to fifty degrees ( and you use a 12v fan from the auto parts store ). A PV panel and a few back stock fans and you can have twenty years of air conditioning for just the digging and the pipe cost ( in a small yard, you can loop around in a circle to get the required length of pipe, but follow online instructions as you need X amount of dirt between pipes ). Some folks recommend a black pipe vent at the tallest part of the house to act as a natural draw for the air, no motor needed. Do sufficient research here, as a backhoe is an expensive investment and you want to do this correct the first time. I’ve even read of a commercial greenhouse that used this in the winter, to pre-heat with fifty degrees for the cost of the fan alone, so it is a “thing”. Just do due diligence.

END

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Wednesday, April 15, 2015

raiders

RAIDERS

Way before we were our own country, raiding was a way of conflict. The indigenous tribes didn’t like us taking their land ( and, no Virginia, this was no Santa Claus land where the Indians cared nothing for property rights and were all butt hurt when they shared it with us and then we wouldn’t let them return to hunt because we were farmers. I think that load of crap was started to discredit Indians, implying they were just stupid humps, and hence furthering the White Mans Burden Myth. All tribes are territorial, everywhere and every when, for survival ) so they raided our settlements and we didn’t care for getting massacred so we raided back on their settlements. It got to be quite the mess rather quickly. And although at heart the Revolution was about keeping all the colonies wealth for the local politicians ( and make no mistake, Washington was a rich twat politician that had no remorse in screwing over his troops and everyone else-which is why he is the Father Of His Country, an upstanding example to businessmen ), it was marginally about our unwillingness to pay more taxes to pay back the home country for helping us pacify the indigs ( which wasn‘t even that much, comparatively speaking ). Which set another precedence in business-socialize the cost and privatize the profits. Nothing new under the sun. Same old hump the poor ( the Scots-Irish settlers encouraged to pacify the Indians in the frontier were later rewarded by being screwed ). Glen and Rush being the two biggest mouthpieces today for the poor being sub-human.

So, anyway, the Indians raided because it was militarily sound tactics and we did the same mainly because it was the cheapest way to win. No standing armies to pay for ( no need for one until the central bank needed to colonize the globe-you can be proud of being a warrior, or for your accomplishments personally, but I wouldn’t be bragging about “serving your country” when you are in fact the spear tip for the bankers. We don’t spread democracy, we enforce trade rules to our advantage. Semantics matter ) so the land was nearly free. But do raiders get any respect anymore, even if that is how the British Crown got most of the land we took from them? No. No respect at all. Except perhaps for naming a football team on the West coast, and I think those are pirates anyway. Who gets the respect? The Kings Men, the standing army. Even the National Guard has been stripped of its militia status ( the one they kept as an argument for gun control, mainly ) and is just the Reserve in all but name. All those punk ass gun porn jerking off suburban survivalists out there just love the standing army, their hero’s ( remember, there is a difference between a warrior and a soldier and, I am NOT disparaging the individuals, merely the organization and how it is used ). How few of them actually served? They are worshipping a false idol. The government is wearing pretty uniforms and waving shiny flags, but they too started out as raiders. All land is stolen from a previous owner. All governments formed when the previous one is overthrown by force. The difference with raiders is that they never put on a parade to hide how they get what they want. They wear their greed and willingness to employ force without excuse proudly.

Come the Apocalypse, there are going to be a lot of areas, mainly in the West, which is either abandoned as untenable or used as a retreat from pursuing forces from the agricultural centers that raiders attacked. Desert is a great moat around a refuge. And the West is mostly desert. The Mormons, a great irrigator group, was able to reclaim the edges of the desert, but nobody can do anything about the interior. The current effort to farm the desert relies on hundreds of aquifers being pumped and thousands of dams ( which will still be standing dry and silted up, for a very long time. It is the silt that kills our dams long before drought does. The first explorer/engineer was well aware of this and his advice was buried under layers of civil servant job security concerns ). It was a monument to an ocean of crude oil having to go into something useful. And little else of lasting accomplishment. The West has so few agricultural areas naturally maintained that very soon the Redoubt’ers will find themselves either dead or forming into raiding parties.

Now, here is the thing. Raiders don’t have to be cartoonish caricatures of rabid biker gangs or escaped prisoners. Raiders are as much part of nature as carrion animals and serve a purpose. Besides the nomadic herding functions that actually utilize the wastelands, raiders can also police the non-agricultural lands rather effectively. As cream always rises to the top, so the most militarily effective gang consolidates power ( same in agricultural civilization ). Nobody likes competition and fellow gangs are a threat to monopoly and riches. In their own self interests, gangs remove fellow gangs. In the end, a dominant group inhabits the wastes and actually reduces the incidences of violence to outsiders. Business is best served with a minimum of violence. A bribe is paid, and hence protection is assured. Yes, granted, you are buying protection against the protector himself. But more importantly, you are paying a tax that minimized violence in that location. You are paying the army that uses some force to eliminate a lot of force. Just as the dominant nation in trade polices the oceans, taking a bit of a bribe to ensure all can then trade ( and trade is absolutely critical for everyone ), raiders or nomads or bandit tribes police trade outside of farm settlements. The “tax” they demand, a low level of theft, is lower than it would be for a standing army to patrol that land. It functions well economically.

END

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

consuming to invest 21

CONSUMING TO INVEST 21

Coffee French Press

We just talked about thermos coffee, and the only reason I now include a similar product is because I can read the future of 99% of my readers, their palm bespeaking of angst and denial. “Ain’t no damn way I’m having some trashy looking piece of crap thermos in my beautiful kitchen, no sir no how”. How am I doing? Five bucks and I’ll guess your year of death. Look, I’m not judging. If you want to put most of your treasure into good looking dust catchers, who am I to say anything? You want good looking, go with the French press to make your coffee. They are all fancy and bespeak of elegance and all that rot. And why would you want one? Less energy to brew the elixir of life, coffee. Coffee is like the adults version of mothers milk to an infant. A gift from the gods. And, a very good reason to NOT hate the Arabs. Sure, a few of them are disagreeable when it comes to beheading infidels and what not, but those mother humpers domesticated the coffee bean! That is like why you have to love the French-mayonnaise. To you city slicker grid sucklers, coffee brewing might seem a very small deal. But for those of us off-grid, the sad fact is that besides the refrigerator, very few things use as much electricity as a coffee brewer ( if you said clothes dryer, Wrong Answer. Your clothes dryer is a piece of rope out back ). When in the future every watt counts because of brown-outs or rate hikes, you will be pleased as punch you listened to me and de-electrified your elixir brewing.

You still need gas or wood to bring water to a boil, but flame to water is much more efficient than flame to boiler to electric line to transformer to electric brewer. Every step of the way, energy is lost. And that is even before you waste electricity keeping the hot plate under the carafe going. A french press coffee maker is to a brewer as a moped is to modern US Army tank ( something like twelve hundred feet to the gallon ). You might think $30-$50 bucks for a coffee maker is silly, but how many people do you know that bought a $120 maker to brew single serving eighty cent cups of specialty coffee? Buy the all metal press, not the glass one. They break too easy, and you both don’t want the replacement cost nor do you want your flesh close to broken glass. I had a wonderfully generous minion send me a metal one after I’d broken my second or third glass unit, but you don’t write like Baby Jesus’ personal scribe like I do, so you will have to spend a bit extra. It will be worth it, as it is almost a lifetime tool ( try to send away to the company for the internal replacement parts if possible, just in case ).

END

CONSUMING TO INVEST 22

Pressure Cooker

A pressure cooker is just like a pressure canner, except it is for quick cooking raw foods, not to seal foods in canning jars. For instance, cut potatoes cook in five minutes. All it is is a steamer, really, but highly efficient. Just like a coffee brewer that does not use electricity, a pressure cooker is there to really shave off the energy you need. It claims to tenderize meat, so in theory you could buy really crappy cuts of cheap meat and not be offended by them, but I was doing something wrong and had little luck. Perhaps it works best for thick, large chunks. Just Wiki the darn things if you need convincing. The potato cook time sold me on them ( of course, I could also use the thermos to basically almost do the same thing, but a cooker is cheap enough to be good insurance. The thermos won’t do meat, or at least it won’t do portions above bachelor size-if I ever find myself needing to cook for more than two, I’d feel stupid only having the thermos. Each tool is practical even if they sometimes overlap ).

END

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Monday, April 13, 2015

consuming to invest 19

CONSUMING TO INVEST 19

Grain Grinder

A grain grinder does pay for itself pretty quickly. Just in whole wheat flour alone, you spend fifty cents a pound in the store ( and, it is already partially rancid. Not like brown rice which has different oils and really goes “off”, but with old wheat flour, if nothing else, you’ve lost vitamins ), and that is the cheap stuff. Sometimes you are spending seventy-five cents a pound. The feed store sells whole wheat kernels for twenty-five cents a pound ( they were thirty-I was pleasantly surprised to see a decrease. This was January 2015, so if you read this down the road and wheat is a lot more, don’t get pissy with me ). Half the price, and much healthier. It might take a year or two to pay for itself, but it does. And, a very helpful post-apocalypse tool it does make ( have more than one ). Considering today’s transportation and smelting ( and mining ) costs, a $40 grinder is not a bad deal. Sure, it is twice as much as it was five years ago. But so is everything else, except your salary. Still need incentive to invest now, before prices double again? And what was that you say? The “fracking gas/oil miracle of national energy independence” didn’t keep product prices from doubling? How could that possibly be? Oh, my, a paradigm shift! I believe I’m getting a case of the vapors! Ready to accept resource depletion for real, yet?

If you have a baby, a grinder also helps with that rice cereal. You know, the crap in the box that sits on the shelf for years? Granted, no oils to go rancid or vitamins to lose, since it is white rice. But you can save plenty by making your own. I don’t know anyone who is so in love with themselves that they can’t drink regular generic coffee out of the can ( perking really increases the flavor, with a french press a close second ), but if you are some spoiled rich puke, you can always grind your own coffee beans with a grain grinder. Also, legumes. Grind, then boil the paste. Refried beans without all day boiling. Just remember what we talked about last year. There is something in beans that protect it against raw digestion ( so birds crap it out and the plant spreads ). You can’t, as I once believed, just add boiling water to the paste. You must cook it for a bit. It just won’t be an hour or two or longer like whole beans. And older beans won’t cook up whole at all. So there the paste comes in handy. Also keep in mind the limitations of the cheaper Mexican grinders ( look around the upper right corner of Bison Prepper Blospot dotcom for a graphic link to Amazon for the grinder ). They are made for corn. For wheat, you must grind three times. First on a course setting-plates far apart-then on a medium and then fine ( plates close but not touching ).

CONSUMING TO INVEST 20

Thermos

A Thermos is a great way to cut back on cooking times ( it is the same principle as a hay box cooker but for small portions ). All a hay box cooker is is a crock pot without electricity. You boil food for five or ten minutes, put it in the cooker ( the pot surrounded by hay or other insulation inside a larger box or other container ) and then it cooks itself for awhile. It won’t work on all foods, and since the heat inside does dissipate even if very slowly, too long inside will spoil the food. For instance, I would trust boiling up some meat and potatoes in the morning for a stew at lunch, but I would not think it would work for dinner. From my own experiments, potatoes did not last the entire day to dinner without having a bit of an odor to them. I didn’t experiment with meat since I don’t own a freezer or refrigerator. Just be careful as the idea is to save money on cooking fuel, not to waste money on your funeral or hospital stay. You will need to find a wide mouth stainless steel vacuum insulated thermos. Good luck finding an affordable one. Wally had nice $15 Korean ones but dropped those in favor of $25 brand name units.

You can also make coffee in a thermos. Dump in your grounds and boiling water, seal and in ten minutes pour through a filter to get the grounds out. About the same cost as a French press but without the moving parts to break. Although it doesn’t clean up as easy. I can never get all the grounds out-there is always a pesky one or two trapped in the cap or the cavity. But think of it this way. A drip coffee maker is $12-$15. For just ten dollars more you have a food cooker AND a coffee maker which uses no electricity. Yes, you must have enough patience to wait for your coffee. A drip maker is one of the fastest ways to get a cup of coffee but it also makes the lousiest tasting one. One final word on cooking with a thermos. Set it one its side once the food is in, NOT straight up. Then, the food cooks through out rather than just its bottom.

END

The Old Bison Blog on CD
Over five years of work and nearly two million words of pure brilliance. Here is the link to order:
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Also as a free e-book, but not cleaned up or organized, at Lulu

Friday, April 10, 2015

3 of 3 today

GUEST ARTICLE

Re: Pellet guns and low tech archery for survival.

The Crosman Nitro Fury in .22 cal, has proven to be a great gun thus far James. The trigger pull is heavy, but there are several mods available on the web that illustrate how to alleviate this problem, I just haven't got around to it yet. That aside, it shoots amazingly well. I can tear a smaller soda can (Red Bull) to pieces at about 60 paces, even with the terrible trigger pull, and with all shots more or less centered on the small can. The gun is very quiet, and has enough power to easily take down small game such as rabbits, squirrels, etc.

Didn't come with a scope as it was said to, so you have to watch out for this sort of thing sometimes with Amazon vendors. But for a $100.00 for a Nitro Piston gun, it can't be beat. The only test left is the overall life expectancy? But these Nitro Piston guns are said to hold up longer than the spring guns.

In addition to a snare set for small game, consider for archery equipment, the Spectre take-down bow. Can't hurt to have one of these for the price of $80.00.

http://www.amazon.com/Spectre-Compact-Take-down-Survival-Arrow/dp/B003O98OJI

If you want to spend a little more, the Primal Gear Unlimited Take-Down bow is a nicer bow, but twice the cost.

http://www.goprimalnow.com/Compact_Folding_Survival_Bow_p/cfsb-1-50.htm

As you've pointed out before James, crossbows are superior in that most folks can fire and hit with one accurately. I can at times, put a bolt within the same hole with my excalibur crossbow at 25 yards. The only problem is that they are not as easy to reproduce in a resource down situation, as would be a primitive bow and arrow set. But if one wishes to explore this option, there are several good videos on youtube illustrating homemade crossbows.

As much as I like the modern air guns and archery equipment, I still don't feel comfortable relying on anything that requires a modern infrastructure to maintain. The above mentioned products are a good start, but ultimately I feel that it's best to learn primitive trapping methods in addition to procuring your own low tech archery equipment.