The Preppers Lament (10 page)

“Apocalyptic nothing” David mused with a grin. He used that trademarked Sun Oven year round. Not only did it keep his kitchen from heating up in the summer, but reducing his electricity bill was also a key factor anytime. It was so efficient that he had no problem in his southern winters producing some of the most flavorful and juicy food you ever had.
Sun-baked foods stay moister and have less shrinkage than conventional oven-cooked foods.

https://www.sunoven.com/foster-coupon

“Oh I know what you’re talking about David! Seems that I remember something about the theory of them kind of solar cookers from a science class I once had. I have never seen a commercially made one however, what’s it made out of? Hey, It looks like Charlie is either out and about somewhere, or he might of moved in with that girlfriend of his around Dothan. Looks like no one is to home.” Mike said noticing no vehicles in the driveway in front of the trailer on the hill.

“I haven’t seen him around for a few weeks now come to think of it. He
was
here when the power first went out, we chatted for a second in passing. Back then I wasn’t sure how long this blackout was going to go on and just stopped by for a few minutes to check on him. He hadn’t made up his mind then if he was going to the girlfriends or having her come down here. I would have thought if he was taking off long-term he would have come down and told me something, but there is no telling with Charlie. He has his own ways and might have just left without a word and will pop back up whenever.” David said and after a quick look around the property he and Mike headed back to start processing the Deer.

3

Gardens, Bug Bites And Water

Julie had been listening to the news on the radio while David was gone with Mike and besides the bad news about uncontrolled fires in several major cities along with the litany of boil water warnings and various announcements that the government wanted you to know they were doing everything they could to restore power there were some new things to add to the list. Flu pandemics, Cholera, Famine, late season Ice storms.

“Damn depressing to listen to the station, but it was indeed some news, life still went on and they were not alone.” Julie mused. Life was going on elsewhere and folks talked about it over the airwaves and gossip fences. How long it could remain so as a norm seemed to be becoming more questionable by the day. For now, she and David had food and they were not physically sick so they regarded it as being blessed with a future. The hope of spring planting seemed a far away and distant thought but they had faith in their self-reliance and hopefully all their stored preparations would win out the day. Not many complaints or laments to despair regarding these rehearsed plans to grow a victory garden of sorts in the face of adversity.

The thought of growing a big garden was treasured and this hope shone like a beacon to them as the hopes of an early spring approached. They held solid hope in their knowledge of raising a crop this spring and their stock of precious vegetable seeds appeared to be adequate to achieve their goals.

David and Julie spent odd evening hours occasionally pouring over his library of gardening books looking for new tips or tricks to help them insure a good crop by gleaning some wisdom from some tidbit of knowledge forgotten or yet undiscovered. Long gone for the pair were the days of jumping in the truck and running to the seed and feed store for plants or insecticide. Whatever things they had on hand now garden wise on this particular day, was all they could expect to have for the foreseeable future and beyond. Anyone who has ever gardened before can tell you that there were a million and one things that could go inexplicably wrong come planting and growing season. That weather was often fickle and contrary was a known fact to think about and prepare for.

David’s big three worries for the garden were drought, insects and disease. Drought was the easiest to handle because there was a certain amount of preparation you could do for it like strategically placing rain barrels at the perimeter for the hand watering that would soon be necessary.

Insects and disease were another matter. He had lost the seasonal war with insects like squash borers more than once and had lost plenty of tomatoes and squash to fungus like diseases over past growing years. Often times he blamed the wilt on possibly already infected plants he got from the nursery; other growers’ problems in his area supported this theory. Julie and David hoped that since they were raising this year’s garden straight from seeds that the risk or threat of disease or infestation was nonexistent. However, the gut wrenching thought that his raised bed gardens had once held disease and bugs before and might yet remain to infect the new plants nagged at them. David was practicing crop rotation and he and Julie had spent the previous day trying out and implementing an idea Julie had found in one of his books.

The concept for cleaning up
the old beds was called soil sterilization. They had spread clear plastic sheeting over his dozen or more garden boxes in hopes that the sun’s ultra violet light would get the ground hot or UV saturated enough by spring planting to kill any lurking viruses or insect eggs. David should have done it more towards the end of summer to maximize the positive effects the book said would be heightened but that was hindsight now.

He had done his customary burn off of most of the raised garden beds when the vegetation had died down during late fall and it was dry enough now to catch fire again after having accumulated enough fallen leaves and pine needles to get a small blaze going. He burned the surface of each bed to its 2 by 6 wooden  soil line  one at a time because a grass fire  if it got out of control could also catch the leaf litter of the nearby forest on fire and wildfire was the last thing anyone needed..

All those raised growing beds had previously produced plenty of veggies for David and his household’s consumption and he proudly declared it also grew a decent amount to spare that he could give away to friends. However, the area he had planted did not produce that much extra, NOT near enough surpluses to think about canning or drying to try to fill a pantry for winter.

About the only thing David could think to do about this shortfall of produce was to till up the ground  outside the edges of his garden fence and hope something would grow in the farmed out Alabama red clay soil with no fertilizer or soil amendments added by him to improve it. One thing David did have plenty of was leaves and pine straw in his woods and he and Julie had decided to start trying to build up a layer of debris around the gardens fence in hopes it would compost down some and even if it didn’t they would till it into the soil come spring. David said pretty much anything they did would be an improvement and said use the area as a dumping ground for anything organic within reason from now on.

The outside of the garden facing the back of his house consisted of a slight downhill slope and David had a trick he wanted to try out called “Swales” to increase production along its length. A swale is basically a series of little C shaped “dams” that catch and hold water in small depressions in front of them.

He had considered doing this landscaping project for some time in order to up his chances of self-reliance in food production as well as he found it aesthetically pleasing to landscape the area in this intelligent way. David had accumulated a small stack of bricks leftover at a jobsite to build himself a more permanent lower maintenance landscaping project to take advantage of this particularly advantageous growing system by terracing up the slope properly.

The small inclined slope, which was about a 100x 20 or so feet in length, lent itself to a unique swale arrangement.  He could make a series of swales traditionally going downhill but he could also tweak on the principle and do some terracing as well as in order to create some catchments sideways to feed water into his main growing area.

He had a shit load of what he considered dubious germinating seeds left over from years gone by and other growing seasons that he planned on just willy nilly planting around the garden in hopes of creating a food forest of sorts should even 10% of them produce a sprout he could coax out of the ground he would have something amazing if it worked..

He had purchased a couple boxes of seed mixture recently from the dollar store of French double mixed color marigolds and he had high hopes and plans of interspersing them all around his garden to deter insect pests. Dwarf Marigolds are pretty much as good as regular ones to help keep them damn squash bugs and other crop destroying insects away. You need to companion plant marigolds, but you need to grow the French ones, they have the most scent those nasty bugs hate.

Planting all those marigolds was damn sure going to screw up any OPSEC ideas he had of doing any gorilla gardening as far as concealing the glimpse of the 35 or 40 foot of his garden you could see from the road and he pondered on that.

A bunch of bright pretty flowers in a landscaped setting would draw someone’s eye dead toward what he wanted to remain more obscure he had realized. After giving it some practical thought, he had decided for himself that the solution  would be to plant the area in mostly Seminole squash that you could see from the road about 75 yards away.

To the uninitiated eye, at least for part of the growing season, it would look damn near like a patch of the noxious weed Kudzu to the country boys around here. That acreage eating nasty weed scourge of the south was something to be avoided and despised by most folks with any walking around sense.

Having Kudzu on your property dropped your land value to nil because it was so damn hard to get rid of, that is  unless you managed to find the main root in a field full of it and dose it with used motor oil or some other toxic substance equivalent to Chernobyl. That stuff was so voracious in its growing patterns it covered up and ate telephone poles, cabins, farm equipment, barns; you name it in a period of less than a few years unless you fought it with determination and hateful diligence.

It was also snaky looking as hell and no sane country boy dove off in a patch of it without a pair of armored snake boots and stick to whomp four legged and slithering creatures as well with. What was worse than ducking and dodging the possible venomous and otherwise snakes was the most assured fact that at certain times of the year the risk and threat of getting a master case of the “Red Bugs” was alarmingly high.  Once you got that you knew you were in for a case of the worst itching and needing to scratch you were ever going to get.

Now for those folks that are not experienced with southern climes might not know what a red bug is. It is an anthropoid, what northern folks call a chigger and they are a force to be reckoned with and to be avoided at all costs if you can. This biting blood sucking microscopic insect actually digs into your skin and lives there until it dies or you get rid of it. The resulting round the clock itch of them son of a bitches will drive you bug eyed crazy even if it was just a couple of them little tiny red spiders that jumped on you. The bite wound starts out as a small red dot and soon develops into an angry looking small pimple affair that just gets redder and itchier as time goes by.  You can’t stand not to scratch it but you know if you do it will make it worse.

Those that are familiar with this parasitic nemesis perform Herculean efforts for days trying not to scratch these bites for fear of infection or stirring the critters up to dig deeper and cause even worse itching, but scratch eventually we all do whether consciously when we are awake or subconsciously when we are sleeping. Damn it, it made David itch and burn just to consider them pests. Many memories of the number of times he had got them and had been trying to focus his mind on not to scratch regardless of how good it would feel just for a moment stayed with him. The cure to immediate itch t is to smack it, yea smack the skin like you would a wrist playing schoolboy games to raise a whelp or draw the blood to the surface. That little trick lasts a while and seems to help relieve the need to scratch or rub the itch so incessantly.

David had done some research on the internet about how to get rid of the 2
nd
worse scourge of the southern pine woods and fields (the first is imported fire ants) and came up empty except for an untried patented medical solution to get rid of the frisky persistent itchy bastards.

What amazed David the most in his research was the number of so called experts or doctors who poo pooed the notion of the number one cure for the bedeviling beasties was somehow ineffective. The general idea of how to get rid of them amongst generations of southerners was you had to smother the nasty’s before they ate you alive or reproduced. The experts said for many reasons we were full of it and our concept of the insect and its feeding habits on humans and other animals was inherently flawed because their research said the wretches died after they burrowed in and didn’t feed or reproduce the way our country lore suggested.

“Well, bull shit!” David had exclaimed in his own mind or to anyone that would listen after reading such expert bull hockey that was in his opinion bad advice given without tried solutions.

“Why he had been he himself had been
dealing with them pesky insect critters for more years than he could count. The number one universally accepted tried and true remedy of the southlands  was to put clear nail polish on them, lacking that valuable commodity he had tried  using everything from rubbing alcohol, hot as you can stand it showers, baby oil, Zinc oxide cream (if that’s all you had, good for poison ivy and oak)Red Devil lye soap, Witch Hazel, mercurochrome, gun oil, turpentine, kerosene, paint thinner, soap (Irish Spring, Life Buoy etc.( strong scented soap to leave on awhile and itch before scalding one’s self in hot water.) etc. had all been tried at one time or another in his experiences  or overheard by him  listening to  others at National Guard drills trying to get rid of the incessant deep abiding itch a bite site would give you with varying results.

If you were a
very lucky human you would only have one or two bites where those little buggers would feast wherever your blood was closest to your skin like where your socks or underwear connected to your body. That’s the places where they would start to first get you as they traveled up a pant leg after attacking and milling around the tops of your well tied or bloused boots.
It was wherever your clothing got closest to your skin they would attack. The closer the blood is to the surface the more apt something is to get bit. Your waist where your belt, your underwear or your pants contacted waist skin was a favorite for them biological hazardous little bastards.

There was more than one
deep wood hunter around here that swore that wearing women’s panty hose kept the red bugs and ticks off of you, but David had not got around to trying that particular fashion. Spraying insecticide on those thin military nylon or canvas belts he wore when he had his army uniform on and spraying the area where he bloused his boots seemed to offer a degree of protection, he had even tried blousing his boots with dog flea collars with marginal effect.