Outdoor Survival Info

Archive for the ‘Sustainable Living’ Category

Rabbits are plentiful in many regions, so learning how to clean and prepare them could help you out in a survival situation. The article below comes complete with images, instructions, and a how-to video. In my opinion, the video is more informative than the article, but you can judge for yourself.

How to Eat Wild Rabbit

Since it’s deer season, I was skimming over the venison section of my copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game, by By John Mettler, Jr., DVM. If you are interested in sustainable living, hunting, or ranch life, you need to read this book.

It covers killing, skinning, quartering, and butchering of several popular livestock and game animals. It does this with detailed instructions and illustrations. Here are some of the meats you can learn to butcher from this book:

• Beef
• Veal
• Pork
• Lamb
• Poultry
• Venison

There’s even a section for less popular (in America) meats such as goat, and over 30 recipes at the end of the book. Basically, this book walks you through taking the animal from the field to the table. This book is a must-have reference for anyone looking to take care of their own meat.

Pick up a copy at Amazon.com:

Remember when I said I was growing tomatoes as a part of my own education regarding sustainable living? Well, they’re not as hard to grow as some people make them out to be, and they are quite tasty, too.

So far, I’ve had three tomatoes come off of my little container plants. And they were much better tasting than any I’ve bought at a store in recent years. In addition to the food, I learned about care of a tomato plant and how to rid it of leaf fungus. Trials and tribulations indeed.

I’ve been keeping the two plants in good health and they are producing many more tomatoes. A few of them will be ready for harvest in a few days. This gardening thing is kind of fun. From a survival perspective, I now have another sustainable living skill in my toolbox.

You should try it out. You might like it.

Here are two pictures of my growing tomatoes. These pictures are a few days old (maybe 4 or 5), and the tomatoes have grown a lot since then.

And here is a picture with my hand up to it so you can get some size perspective.

Those in the picture have grown so much since I snapped these photos. I’ll take more pictures once they start to turn red. I have no idea when that will be, but at the rate they are growing, it will be soon. The two plants in that planter have doubled in size since I bought them. At last count, I had six tomatoes growing. Besides that, I have many flowers getting ready to bloom.

And since the flowers are where the tomatoes are going to show up, I’m looking to have a great yield. Which is good because tomatoes are very healthy.

Well, my tomatoes are starting to grow!! I’ve got three little tomatoes sprouting from my plants (2 plants). I’m pretty excited about them. You see, I love tomatoes, and it seems I’ve got a bit of a green thumb, too. Yes, it is probably too early to make such a bold claim, but I’m going to throw it out there any way.

If I think of it tomorrow, I’ll take a few pictures of it and post them here.

Not much of a gardener? Don’t worry, I’m not either. But that’s not going to stop me! I have — just this afternoon — planted two tomato plants. We love tomatoes at this house, so that’s what I planted. I just took two tomato plants that I bought from Lowes (”patio” tomatoes), and put them in a self-watering container filled with organic potting soil.

Why vegetables? The answer is simple. We need vegetables to be healthy. Even though we get key amino acids from meats, it’s entirely possible to live off of nothing but fresh veggies and water. The survival implications here should be obvious: Gardening should be a skill you have if you are at all interested in survival, homesteading, sustainable living, or anything in between.

This is not my first gardening experience. Two years ago I successfully grew some fresh herbs in my kitchen for cooking. They were great. Now I’m trying my hand at tomatoes to prepare me for having an actual garden in the earth on the land we’re going to acquire sometime this year.

I’ll post pictures of my tomato plant’s progress through life.