What I Did To Prep This Week: July 5th – July 11th 2020

Hello Pack. I hope you are all getting by alright in this heat. We baled hay for two days and it did not get below 92 degrees either day. Needless to say, my suntan looks like I just spent a week in Florida.

Before baling hay on Saturday, my daughter and I took a four hour early A.M. round trip drive to pick up some fiber goats. I have been seeking Pygora fiber goats for nearly a year.

One of our tribe members is a rock star at finding rare and inexpensive or sometimes even free, livestock. Sarah came through again. I am now the proud owner of four Pygora goats! They are a cross between a Pygmy and an Angora goat.

While a pygmy goat is an excellent but smaller meat goat, Pygora goats are primarily raised for their amazing weed eating ability, and their fiber.

The $168 per pound of mohair we will get when the goats are shorn twice a year as well as the money from breeding future kids, can be funneled right back into our survival homestead.

I will of course, be keeping some of the mohair to make natural wigs for the dolls I make as gifts for Christmas and birthdays. Homemade gifts truly are the best.

I was only going to purchase two females, but since it took me all of an hour to sell a female Pygmy kid and a buckling after posting them online once I made contact with the Pygora seller, I had hoped to score a third female when I made the trip to the farm located near Cincinnati.

I had planned on selling the two goats anyway, but kicked my efforts into high gear by taking a few cute photos and getting them listed.

Rosy and Hooper are now happily living together on another farm in the region and getting along famously with their new keepers.

I asked my beloved what he thought about me buying three goats if I could get a deal and the sweet man he is, did not object. Finding the goats so close and at such an affordable price was not likely something we would come across again.

Well, buying the last female had to be done at full price because there were several others that wanted it, as well. But, the nice lady who was selling them offered to throw in an unrelated male kid if I bought the three ladies.

I am not sure that was the kind of deal Bobby had really envisioned, but it was indeed a deal.

In other preps this week, the kids and I harvested a mountain of jewelweed and honeysuckle to dry to make herbal remedies, to add to my apothecary stockpile, and to sell. Our gardens and apothecary patch are needing watered daily now with all of this heat.

I had to shake my head and laugh thinking back to complaining about all of the rain we had from January through June. I knew then that come July, we would once again be praying for rain.

This Week’s Questions:

• How has this hot and dry weather affected your daily prepping or overall prepping plan?
• Do you keep goats as part of your survival plan, why or why not?
• What do you think about the continued destruction of historical statutes and monuments?
• What did you do to prep this week?