Hardening Your Home

Hardening Your Home
From R.F.

Most of us who consider that we may get caught by deteriorating societal circumstances in our present homes wonder how we might be able to harden that house for ballistic protection in case it is needed. Almost anything you can come up with is going to have to be prepared well ahead of time & might ruin the value of your home if the poop never seriously hits the paddle & may cost a tremendous amount of time, effort & money.  Berming your perimeter walls w/gravel, building a thick veneer of some sort of masonry ?

 

Well what about this - - unless you live in the most southern locations you will probably want to have plenty of firewood stocked.  Especially in the north you may want to invest in a LOT of firewood while it is relatively cheap & available - so why not pile it against your house to protect it ? You do NOT want it piled in the back yard to provide cover for attackers.  Don't pile it the first way you'd think of which would be perpendicular to your walls - this would be easiest, but pile it parallel and held in place by a frame of uprights driven in the ground & attached to house at top & also some horizontal members. Get the cheapest (salvaged ?) wood you can - do you have access to 'slabs' ? Lay your hardwood at least 16" thick (softwood out west thicker) by at least 5 ft. above your interior floor (go right over your windows). A military .223 or 7.62 cal. may go through a softwood 6x6, but not 16" of hardwood - make it a little thicker if you're not sure.  Cover the top of this w/a tarp strip - I like free 'lumber tarps' from the lumber yard down the road. Anyone should be grabbing as many of these excellent tarps as they can anyway.  A cord of wood will cover 16 running ft. of wall at 6 ft. high & 16" thick, so under 10 cords would protect my house.  This will admittedly look strange to your neighbors, but less so than a gravel berm laid up against your home, or concrete blocks poured full of cement ? When law & order is restored, or if it never quite fails then you pull the wood down & burn it that winter in your stove - doing no damage to your home.  Hope y'all are chipping in a few fading US dollars each year to this legendary blog ?? (SurvivalBlog. com)

 

P.S. of course I got some flack from many people in termite country (which ME isn't), but that could be dealt with easily enough.

R.F. in Western Mtns. of Maine

Keeping deer from eating your garden

Keeping deer from eating your garden
by Hunter

Over the years I have had to deal with deer eatting my gardens and have come up with some ways of at least making it not worth their while. A few of the things that I have used are as follows.

1) Eggs and dish soap. I put three or four eggs in a blender with some dish soap once mixed I add to a watering can with the rest filled with water. Then I cover the pole beans that are growing on my fencing. If I keep up with this every week or more if heavy rains and watering I find that the deer will leave them alone. I have also used this methode in open gardens and have had simular resaults. works well on bunnies and bugs to.

2) mouse traps and peanut butter. Take a dozen or so mouse traps and drill holes to run a wire through and hand them about two feet off the ground. deer love peanut butter but are not to fond of the mouse traps hitting their nose. The same idea can be used with an electric fence by smearing the peanut butter on the wire for the deer to lick off.

3) fencing, I have used the high 6ft fence with good resaults

4) deer follow trails at least to get into your garden area, if you remove as many theings that the deer nibble on around the edges and use tactics around the boarder of your land in will help reduce the number of deer that cross your land. Trim lower limbs that deer eat on and find cover in. If you have dogs use there droppings up and down the trails the deer have been using to get onto your land. supply the deer with something they like that draws them away from your garden area. Create obsticals.

5) Motion activated lights and radio. It is nice to have the lights turn on and a radio play when you are enjoying the garden in the evening hours but with it on a motion activated system the deer will be surprised. To set this up get a two light motion activated light unit and one screw in outlet to plug in a radio ot tape player.

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