Preparedness for when

1Tonsil

I have been missing in action due to the storms then trying to catch up on the chores I had to leave while the storms were hitting us. Have had three nice days in a row so I am not complaining about the strangely coloured, stormy looking sky now...

My neighbours are all busy trying to collect the wine grapes and set the wine to fermenting before the weather changes again. The village is a hive of activity, sometimes literally as every wasp and hornet in Europe has arrived to feast on the fermenting grapes. They get real nasty when they are drunk on the fermenting new wine (the hornets, not the villagers!)

Your comments brought memories to me...the quail eggs that used to be sold on the market in Thailand, all left with yolks intact in one huge omelette cooked in butter. They often had about twenty eggs in them and my husband loved them.

The comments about the chickens with the slugs and mice brought back a memory from a few years ago. I was driving along a country lane and had to wait for a tractor...suddenly my visitors in the back car started screaming and making horrific choking noises.... I was horrified and all they could do was point to a chicken at the side of the road. The chicken was attempting to swallow a foot long snake. My visitors never got over it. Folks in the countryside here often keep chickens to fend off snakes and ducks and geese to keep unwanted visitors away from the land.

I agree that we can be prepared for whatever comes up but still not be able to cope with certain things. We just have to do our best to be prepared for most things that might happen to us in our particular mode of living. Some of us are much more in danger from natural events than from terrorism for instance. This forum is such a help to many of us.

[Deleted User]

Found this in £land, which I thought would be ideal for carrying in the pocket/handbag, now that winter is approaching.



Contains 9 LEDs, and is made from soft touch orange plastic, making it easy to handle with cold hands, and easy to find if dropped in the snow.

Weight, including batteries (3 X AAA), is 1.8oz (52g).

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

I have the Base Camp with the cookset but haven't yet used the cookset - bit hampered by living circs. Will be playing around with it on the allotment after October 1st when the burn-bans comes off.

I've heard mixed and contradictory things about the cooksets, with some people suggesting they're just about OK for warming stuff thru but not really cooking.

I guess the KK requires a bit of skill to handle, in terms of maintaining the fierceness of the flames roaring up the volcano chimney, so it may be that is a restriction on the efficiency of the cookset, and some users have taken the time to master it, and some people quit before they'd got there.

I honestly don't know, hopefully someone more experienced with this aspect of the KK will post an answer.

My concerns were about having to keep topping up the water while cooking. I did think that the cook sets could be avoided, saving £35 and I could boil water in the kettles and then cook on the hobo stove, costing £10, which makes more sense, as I could use any pan. Since my camping plans are based more around dehydrated meals I can skip taking the hobo stove and pans on many trips. The Hobo stove would be more useful if in SHTF situation.

DawnW

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

It is cranefly central here at the moment and they are real pests this year, there are hundreds of the blurdy things!

Chickens like those too :rotfl:

Frugalsod

DawnW wrote: »

Chickens like those too :rotfl:

Chickens the ultimate weapon when the slug apocalypse strikes. Maybe we should all get some?

katep23

jk0 wrote: »

I mentioned a few months ago the time back in 2009 I had to walk home 4 miles in the snow from a BTL I was working on. This was due to my car being stuck, and all the buses stopped running.

When I was about half a mile from home, (& the snow about 6" deep) I saw a neighbour getting in his car about to go out.

I warned him that all the roads were gridlocked, and that I had to abandon my car. He said his kids had rung him from Reading to pick them up, as the buses weren't running, so he had to go.

Silly man. The kids would have got home quicker walking as I had, but I bet they wouldn't want to do that.

JK0, I'm south of Reading and remember the stories of how it gridlocked. My neighbour left the kid's soft play centre near the stadium and got home in 15 minutes, her friend left at the same time but stopped off at a supermarket on the way and got home 7 hours later.


I was in Munich at the time where it was -11 degrees and everything just worked.

Caterina

thriftwizard wrote: »

Shame you can't see this, GQ - it's Slugmaggedon out there this morning! We had a lot of rain overnight - there's a massive storm rumbling away over the New Forest as I type, but it's dry here now - and every giant slug from here to Timbuctu is galloping around our lawn. I think it's been so dry here for so long, they're the only ones who had enough moisture inside to survive. The chickens are going bananas and have totalled ignored their carefully-prepared breakfast; who wants fruit, veg & oats when there's slug-on-the-hoof to be had? They're squabbling over the 6" ones... not a pretty sight! There are times when poultry-keepers can see that the dinosaurs never died out, they just grew feathers...

Can you actually give chickens unlimited slugs and snails to eat? I have millions of the little and not very little so-and-so's in both garden and allotment. We are planning to have chickens in our garden and if I can feed them slugs I am going to spend very little in maintenance! Do they make the eggs taste disgusting, though?

katep23

Caterina, our ducks love slugs and snails too. We go out in the evening with a torch and catch them, put them in a big tub with airholes (well, you don't want to suffocate them) then feed them to the ducks who go mad for them.


I do feel a bit squeamish about telling anyone we give/sell eggs to that they eat snails but it doesn't make any difference to the taste.


My dad's mum kept chickens when he was young but wouldn't go into the chicken shed "because of all those spiders in there". Dad told her not to be daft, the chickens eat the spiders. She never ate another egg after that!

[Deleted User]

It's getting quite misty round here.

I can no longer see the wind turbines, on the hills.

thriftwizard

Caterina, chickens are omnivores, meaning they can - and will, given half a chance - eat just about anything. They are by no means natural creatures, having been selectively bred over thousands of years away from the jungle fowl they are descended from. They are creatures of the forest floor; forget the wide-open spaces, an open field is actually quite stressful for them. (But not as stressful as a battery cage.) And whilst they certainly do eat grains & seeds, they also dig for & eat worms, grubs, and even small mammals - mine are better mousers than my elderly cats! So slugs & snails are an entirely natural part of their diet, and will become a rare sight in your garden; ours used to be over-run with them, and no small plant stood a chance. Not that chickens won't eat small plants too, but they're not as destructive as slugs. And it doesn't affect the taste of the eggs; we've never yet had a taste come through, not even garlic or chilli. Or chocolate cake or cheese sauce - they really do eat anything...