Two rules:

1) don't be an idiot
2) enjoy

What causes injuries and how they are they divided by cause?

Anything that can damage the body can cause an injury: blunt or sharp objects, impact at high speed, falls, animal or insect bites, fire or extreme heat, and exposure to chemicals and toxins. According to the cause the injury can be divided into:

-Mechanical injury: injury to any portion of the body from a blow, crush, cut, or penetrating force (bullet)
– Thermal injury: injury caused by exposure to excess heat and excess cold sufficient to cause damage to the skin, and possibly deeper tissue
- Electrical injury: injuries caused by exposure to natural lightning or electricity in the home or workplace
- Injury produced by ionizing radiation

These are the items that should be present in every IFAK at a minimum. I usually stuff in hemostatic gauze/powder, compression guaze, nylon suture kit, locking forceps, hydration powder, burn/antibiotic/itch cream or dressings, and trauma shears (or at least somewhere else accessable on my person)

Knowing how to use your IFAK is just as crucial. I can go in to further detail about these products in future posts. First aid is a massive topic, here is an excellent PDF

Last fall, you should have prepared your garden for this years crop. Aerate your soil and prepped your compost piles. Now that the winter season is about half way over, we should all start preparing our seeds over the next month. @LotLMain has excellent gardening guides for further reading

How they made ice cream in the old days. Interesting show - but I have never heard of cucumber ice cream before :)

This PDF is one of my favorites in the collection. Made in house by our very own admin Wes. All 8 sections of powering your house from the sun in one large PDF. Almost everything you need to know to set up your own solar power grid.

Addendum: Growing seasons change dramatically depending on what part of the world you are in. Always refer to your regional growing chart before starting seeds

How to Hide Anything

AS GOVERNMENT IMPOSES MORE AND MORE RESTRICTIONS on what we can—or, more importantly, can-
not—own; as the number of burglaries soar; as terrorism
by aberration or by design escalates; and as the possibility
of anarchy seems closer to home than ever, the need for
having a safe space for goods and persons becomes
pressing.

Here are the guidelines to the design, selection,
and construction of hidden storage areas small enough
to hide cash and jewelry and large enough to conceal
armaments and ammunitions or, in the extreme, a family.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Home-Base Hides
3. Elaborate Hiding Places
4. Secret Safe Spaces for Personnel
5. Away-from-Home Hides
6. Hints and Tips

#Survival
#General

The sun is well known for its crop and electricity production, but the suns energy can be harnessed in many more ways

Similar to a solar oven, a solar dryer can dehydrate your crops /fruits for seasonal preservation

During the Great Depression, much of the country still heated their homes with manually fed stoves designed for coal or wood. These can, with a bit of effort, burn a wide variety of other fuels less well.

Today, for most households, this isn’t an option. You most likely have an automatic furnace or boiler fired by natural gas, home heating oil, or propane. If you are particularly unfortunate, you have electric heat. Those of you who live in a rural area or have been preparing for a while might have a fireplace or stove for backup heat.

In a gas producing area, natural gas makes for a good primary heat source. As a secondary, you should be looking to something that you can provide yourself without having to bring in anybody else. The number of field tap natural gas customers being shut down in West Virginia shows that even being in a gas field doesn’t guarantee access to gas. While a homeowner with mineral rights could use a private well, with a going rate of $300,000 for drilling, it is cost prohibitive.

There are a number of fuels that you can use to heat independently. I am not going to go into great detail, there are far better resources available, but instead aim to provide an overview of the options available for further research. The most obvious are wood and coal, the mainstays of heating just a century ago.

The general rule of thumb, if you have no shortage of rain, is that 5-10 acres will supply sufficient wood to heat a good sized and well insulated home in most temperate climates. There’s a lot of variation both in how much heat a house needs and how much wood an acre of land can produce. Stove efficiency also plays a large role, with European masonry stoves, developed in response to wood shortages, being far more efficient than the iron stoves common in North America. The masonry stoves are able to extract far more heat from the exhaust gas and store it in the thermal mass of the masonry, releasing it over time into your home instead of out the chimney.