Preparing for the Worst (Winter Storm) My 63 Part Checklist

Happy day! They are calling for a crazy winter storm this weekend. Up to 2 inches of ice, up to 18 inches of snow. That's crazy where we're from. But no worries, I live prepared. Plus I have this prepare for the worst checklist. I've got that for you down in the description for free. We're gonna go over that today. What are you starting with, buddy? Water. Hey! Water jugs. We've got a diesel generator to run our pump and keep us in water. —but this is just in case. Just some redundancy. Buckets are everywhere. Buckets for hauling water to the toilets for flushing in case you need it. Fill bathtubs with water. That's for flushing, cleaning. I guess you could boil some of that water if you needed to for drinking. That's our water. Let's check out food. These freezers be consolidated? This one's empty. It is? Oh yeah, this one's empty. Not much room in there. We want to consolidate freezers because, uh, it'd be a shame to lose all our homestead goodness in a power outage. Not a whole lot of room in that one, maybe some. A little bit more room in this one. What we want to do is see if we can consolidate an entire freezer. We do always have an empty one going for in case one freezer goes out. We live in abundance, y'all. We live in abundance. Living in abundance lends itself to preparedness. And what do we got here? Yeah, I don't think it's worth it to consolidate down to one freezer. I don't think we could. Still more freezers. I don't want to put anything more in this but chicken. These chest freezers, you lose everything unless It's all one meat, so we put only chickens in the chest freezer. How you feeling today? Still a little down? As food growers, we constantly have food. I did check our list, a couple things Rebecca's gonna get it today. Sauerkraut was the other thing. Poultry seasoning for our sausage. Pantry, well stocked. What happened here? Big Daddy pick us up some 100% wood charcoal. Starter cubes. I think we've got 3 or 4 boxes. Handy for starting the grill. Lighters, 2. This is handy. Now to the livestock checklist. Acquire feed. We get our feed in 2,000-pound totes and try not to get it lower than much more than 50%. We're good on pig feed. You're good on alfalfa. What do you think, Joseph? Good on alfalfa. We're good on chicken feed. Acquire hay, that's something we did when we put up hay when the sun was shining. And it's nicely stacked on the north side, the windy side. I'm double-checking that so to keep the cows and the sheep extra warm. Buckets for collecting water if we need to, that's redundancy. Trough heaters, let's check their heaters while we're at it. Josie, hot water heater working? This trough heater is working. The other day— we've already started looking into this because you can't just go to Tractor Supply and get these trough heaters. I mean, maybe you can, but I ordered one on Amazon. It should be here tomorrow for the ones out in the pit, the ones for the pigs in the field. Solar energizers in case the grid and the generator fail. Does this one work, Jesse? Do you know? Yeah, it does. Pretty sure. All right, let's double-check it. Okay, all right, we're good. Let's make it look like we're organized and thoughtful about why this is on our shop desk. Wood chips for bedding. I think we're good. But if you want wood chips for bedding, you've got to keep it covered. It's going to get wet. Oh, a tarp will do. It's a good use for old, uh, pallets. Better if you've got wood chips under shelter, because if we get 18 inches of snow, I don't want to be digging it out. New section: first aid. First aid fully stocked. Make sure you have your off-grid health books available. This is one of our favorites, Be Your Own Doctor. There's another one called Be Your Own— Be Your Own Pediatrician. That are great. So that's, that's good that we know that. That's handy. We got our first aid books. And now you want natural remedies, so we make sure we've got— when we do— manuka honey, colloidal silver. What's the other one? Um, aloe vera, things like that. Rebecca takes a thyroid medicine. Looks like we got plenty of that. Full checklist. We've got a shovel, we've got a splitting them all for splitting wood if we need to. We got 2 of those. Pickaxe. These could serve as snow shovels. And somebody on X told me to get some, uh, salt. You think we should get some salt? No. Why do you think it's not gonna snow? Because it never does. They're calling for so much snow. How much? Well, it was 18 inches. I do think they've calmed down a little bit as we've gotten closer. My friend Sean Hendricks says they'll know— they'll be able to predict it on Monday, which is when it'll be over. I need to have a splitting wedge in case you have a really stubborn stump. This is where I like to keep it. I don't know why it's right there. Well, I'll give you two guesses: Gideon or Henry. Wheelbarrow. I don't know why we need a wheelbarrow, just in case. We've also got our cart. Just make sure it starts. We have chainsaws. Do we have 3, 4? How long has it been since we sharpened this chain? A while. Chainsaw safety equipment. Why do I have 3 different gloves? We have a left and a right, so we're good. That stink. Wear chaps. Don't be cool. Don't be cool. And if you're felling tree, wear a helmet because the limbs can fall out of the tree on your head. If you don't think you need chaps. What do you think would have happened if we didn't have chaps on when that went down? It's the most dangerous job you can do, period. Certainly on the homestead, most dangerous job, clearing and using a chainsaw. Why are you gonna make it that much more dangerous by being cool, not wearing safety equipment? Come on. All right, you got the chain? Yep. Since we're clearing 2-ish acres a year, I'm going to show you a tool that's Invaluable. What am I doing wrong? Chain, uh, hold on, it's been a minute. Try this. Maybe that's it. Yeah, make it all the way loose. That's right, right? I already covered the snow shovels. What else is in snow? We have Billy. Also another way to guarantee it's not going to snow. Is put on the snow plow. I'll go drop it. No, other way. Okay, it works. All right, lift it back up. Solar chargers. We'll count this. This is a solar phone charger. Fill up generators. We checked them the other day, called them. That was several days ago. It's— that fuel is supposed to come today or tomorrow. To prepare for the tank refill, let's empty even more of it. And fill up the generator. We got a long enough extension so that we could fill our generator from that 300-gallon tank. So technically we have 400 gallons of diesel. This is concerning. I was able to start it the other day, but it did have this warning sign on it. Fuel. We good? You got it the other day. Okay, you filled up the truck and the Suburban, Josiah? Yep. Ah yes, I used to just stay in batteries. The flashlights. Hey, let's start this. Radio? Battery powered? We're good. Special weather radio. It's been handy over the years. Highs in the mid-30s. Chance of precipitation near 100%. Sunday night, mostly cloudy. Wind chill values as low as zero. We might not have to worry about the snow as much as we're going to have to worry about that zero degrees on Monday. Walkie-talkies. Let's make sure they work. Bingo! Our big weakness in Hurricane Helene was not power, was not food. We were, uh, we were suddenly without power for 15 days, but we rocked it with the generator. It was communications. We now have a Starlink for sure, and it'll run off the generator, and it's in working order, so we're good there. You want plenty of firewood. How we doing? 3/4 of that one, 3/4 full. We got one more in the woods. We might work up one or two more. Yeah, what do you need, bud? What's he saying this time? Are you saying tea? So are you saying cheese? Did you just say yes? What's he saying? Flat cheese. Flat cheese? Yeah, I'll show you cheese. Okay, everybody else calls it sliced cheese. Make sure the splitter starts. You want to make sure you have extra blankets. We did. We have lots and lots of blankets. We'll just all pile. You know what we'd do if push comes to shove? Speaking of warmth, we would just all pile in here. Duct tape, always very useful. Have a tarp, just beat up a little bit. We're so organized. Big one on sanitation is a compost toilet. You could do a Lube of the Loose situation, which is just a toilet seat over a bucket and just some sawdust. Heck, you could use some wood shavings. If you want to be fancy, we got coconut coir in there. This thing here, just had that on vacation. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. That's the poop chute. You leave that shut, you just pee in there, you pee through there. Pee is captured in a different container. Coconut coir for the mixture, and then that's your carbon. And you turn this thing and it mixes in the poo until— well, you might want to do it before it gets stinky, but until it's about to get stinky. Biodegradable soaps. Just make sure you're good in soaps. I've ever shown you all this though? Not, not sponsored. Favorite bar of soap right here. They've been at it for a while, they know what they're doing. We're good. It's a good idea to have a clothesline because dryer takes up a lot of energy, so it's hard to run those on a generator. This is my solar dryer. We hang up lines in this greenhouse. We're good there. Oh yeah, look, it's up. Okay, it's still up. We never took it down. Okay, good. We're ready to go.