Instead of tackling the next "Top Question" in this issue, I'm going to talk a little about a real-life situation that I encountered this month.
My husband and I are always working toward becoming self-sufficient and although we're not hard-core "preppers", some of our friends are. We'd like to think we can survive in a "grid-down" sort of situation. In temporary trials, like a week or two during winter storms, we do just fine.
But what about longer spanning situations? Would we do fine if suddenly we couldn't go to the grocery store or to Walmart anymore and had to rely only on what we had available at home for months or years?
Food-wise, I think so. And dealing with ordinary health concerns, I think we'd do fine. It's the more serious issues that are concerning.
One person I know has a stockpile of medications and emergency supplies for injuries. We have some, but woe to the poor person that gets to be my guinea pig if someone needs stitches. Or woe to me if it's me with the wound that needs stitches, lol! I think I could do it, but the biggest trick would be keeping a wound like that from becoming infected.
I did recently learn how to put in and remove staples from the top of my husband's head. Ha. I didn't actually put them in, but the nurse/doctor showed me how to do it as she did it. I did get to do the removal. And now we have the leftover stapler, some staples, and the remover tool stashed securely away in our supply cabinet. Treating an injury like this is something I do think I could handle if the need arose.
However, I recently learned all about something first hand that I'm pretty sure would have killed me had we been in the sort of scenario where doctors weren't available. Hell, I nearly died in spite of making two emergency room/urgent care visits in two different states. I am just now recovering from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It wasn't until our regular doctor, and older man with a lot of experience under his belt, correctly diagnosed and got me started on the right medicine for the condition that I began to improve rather than continue the decline toward what would have certainly been organ shut-down and death.
There are other tick-borne diseases with symptoms that would probably lead to death if not treated, too, like Lyme and the newer one called STARS. All of them can be managed or cured with doxycycline, an antibiotic that works on these illnesses. But what if you don't have that particular antibiotic on hand in a time of dire need? It's not one that stores long term very well. And none of the others that do store better will work on it.
I'm not sure, but it's pretty likely that if something like this had happened to me during a TEOTWAWKI situation (The End of the World as we Know It), I would have just been a casualty of the circumstances. I'd be dead.
For those of you on this list who are preppers, what would have been your solution for this had it happened in a survival situation?
One of the old guys in town told me an "old guy" told him to make an extract with ginseng and goldenseal in grain alcohol (otherwise known as moonshine) and to take a swig of that every week and you'd never get tick fever.
So I guess prevention would be one approach. Diligently removing ticks is another way of prevention, but that's a lot easier said than done. I don't remember having one biting me for more than a few hours recently, although I did miss a small one a few weeks ago that I found the next afternoon. That was probably the culprit to my downfall right there.
Wild Ozark Ginseng Status and Updates
I still have some first year rootlets available. I've been bringing them to the market with me, so if you're local, come out to the Downtown Rogers Farmers Market on Saturdays to pick them up. I can ship, too.
Most of the ginseng here has finished dropping berries and the plants are beginning to turn yellow. It's very dry in the woods right now and we badly need rain.
If you're in Rogers, AR on Saturdays you can come by our booth to taste our unique Shagbark Hickory syrup. We sell it there for $10/bottle. I have a separate announcement list to let folks know when it'll be ready for retail and wholesale ordering. If you tend not to read these newsletters, but want to know when it's open to order, sign up for that list. The only thing I'll send out on that list is the announcements about when it's ready:
I have a new photo ebook ready for pre-orders at Amazon and Apple: https://books2read.com/photos1
It's a collection of 20 photos from the past few years that I really liked. There will be another photo book out soon, and I'll try to make it hold 50 photos. I'm not sure how many I can put before the file sizes become too large, so it's a trial and error process. This one is $1.99, the next ones will probably be $2.99.
That's it for this month. As always, I love hearing your feedback about what you think of Wild Ozark and the newsletters, and your emails for any reason are always welcome.
