A lot of people try gardening by putting seeds in the ground and waiting. When nothing comes up, or plants barely grow, they chalk it up to being bad at gardening or not having a green thumb. In reality, their soil probably just doesn’t have the nutrients plants need. Soil testing is your chief weapon
There’s been rioting in Northern Ireland for six days in a row, and most of the tension is over Brexit-induced trade and border woes. Leaders from all sides are calling for calm, but few are engineering solutions to the problems driving the unrest. The US is exporting a whole lot of corn, and we’ve blown
Over a year ago, we told you how to disinfect packages from COVID-19. In the interim, some doctors and scientists became aghast that people were doing this. The CDC offered conflicted and confusing advice, which we happily fact checked, and the CDC withdrew. Many of you are still following our package disinfection advice. Now the
Let’s say you find yourself needing to grow food quickly, but you don’t have a lot of tools to work with, and your soil is either devoid of nutrients or is hard to work. Perhaps the most efficient way to get started is with a simple mound, which survival gardener David the Good calls a
Rates of reproductive harm by industrial and environmental contaminants are growing. Some projections seem almost hyperbolic—half of people will need clinical help to conceive in two decades? But folks have been studying this for decades, and the trends are very concerning. It’s tough to address in everyday life because plastic and plasticizers are ubiquitous and
Covid has caused tremendous pain. But it could’ve been so much worse, and it’s frankly dumb luck that things weren’t 100-1,000 times more painful. The (potential) silver lining is that things were juuust bad enough to catalyze meaningful change in the future — such as treating essential workers better and building more local slack in
How could a boat stuck in a canal be one of the largest single-point-of-failure logistics disasters in the world? Corporations monopolizing shipping and supply lines, a dearth of anti-trust laws, globalization, and using container ships as big as the Empire State Building have a lot to do with it. FEMA recognizes that climate change is
It’s a classic children’s science experiment: insert a nail and a penny into a potato and use the slight bit of voltage produced to power a small clock or some other low-power gadget. Those of us of a certain age may remember MacGyver pulling off a similar trick. When I was a kid, I would
Spring is here, which means it’s time for yet another gardening season. I’ve spent a lot of time over my past year with The Prepared considering the ideal form for a survival garden. Tilled rows? In-ground beds? Raised beds? After a great deal of study and consideration, and with a great deal of input from
We knew global shipping was backlogged even before the container ship got stuck in the Suez. It’s been freed now, but many months of shipping and logistics chaos are left in its literal wake. Costco, for example, is having trouble stocking cheese now. Expect shortages of odd and sundry items and general price increases. Baltimore
There was a mass shooting in Boulder, CO on the 22nd, and 10 are dead. There’s typically a flurry of debate on gun ownership after mass shootings, along with the swift drafting of legislation—but in many places gun laws are broadened after shootings. It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen now, but the US
Many new homesteaders, when asking what to do about the overgrowth of brush or brambles, often get the response: “Just get some goats,” due to their reputation for eating grass, briars, and pretty much anything. When I bought my five-acre property in 2017, I intended to buy some goats straightaway for milk and meat, and
A recent US intelligence report paints domestic extremists as a looming threat. Extremism from both sides of the political spectrum is unlikely to die down in the wake of the ongoing pandemic, disrupted economy, and recent civil and political unrest. Homelessness is still rising in the States. Iceland has had its anticipated eruption. So far
12.6 million people have been displaced because of climate change in the last six months alone. The Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies report that most of these displacements were due to natural disasters. Asia has been hit hardest. Louisiana is losing land to sea level rise. The state has a $50 billion plan to
Many preparedness-minded people want to get into foraging wild plants but are worried that they’ll pick something that might kill them. An easy plant to start foraging is field garlic or wild garlic, which is plentiful, easy to identify, and versatile. You may even have some growing in your yard now. HEY! It’s almost spring,
