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As I work on turning this one acre homestead into a self-sustaining Garden of Eden, I have two requirements for every single plant I consider putting in the ground: they must be either edible or medicinal. Preferably both.
Why? Because frankly I don’t have money or space to waste on frivolous landscaping. Everything from the plants to the animals must have a purpose.
More and more people are beginning to see the benefit of having a garden and growing your own food, but growing your own medicine could be equally as vital to your well being. What would you do if you couldn’t get the medical supplies or help you needed for a very long time? How would you manage?
As I plan my medicinal garden, I choose what to grow by studying different medical emergency scenarios and learning which plants I would be able to use if it ever came down to that.
One day as I was doctoring up one of my kiddos, the thought crossed my mind, “What if I couldn’t get any more of these band-aids? What could I use?” This question prompted me to delve into my herbal books and scour the internet for an answer. And I found a good one.
Young Wooly Lamb’s Ear settling down for the winter.
Wooly Lamb’s Ear.
It’s one of my favorites because it’s medicinal AND edible. A Natural Antibacterial Bandage
Wooly Lamb’s Ear, botanical name Stachys byzantina, has been used for centuries as a wound dressing on battlefields. Not only do the soft, fuzzy leaves absorb blood and help it to clot more quickly, they also contain antibacterial, antiseptic, and anti-inflammatory properties. All of these factors make this plant a really great alternative to store-bought bandages (especially since many of them are made in China!). Other Medicinal Uses
Wooly Lamb’s Ear actually has many medicinal uses. You can heat a few bruised leaves in a pot of simmering water, and use the cooled infusion as an eyewash to treat pinkeye and sties.
Drink a tea made from young, dried Wooly Lamb’s Ear leaves to help with fevers, diarrhea, sore mouth and throat, internal bleeding, and weaknesses of the liver and heart. (~Wikipedia)
You can bruise the leaves so that the juices are released, and put them on bee stings or other insect bites to help reduce the swelling. The same effect can be seen when used for treating hemorrhoids, or for postpartum recovery.
Still More Uses
As if Wooly Lamb’s Ear isn’t awesome enough, the list of uses continues.
Being soft and super absorbent, Lamb’s Ear leaves can be used as menstrual pads, or in place of cotton balls. It can even be used as toilet paper!
You can eat it as well. Enjoy young, tender leaves fresh in a salad, or gently steamed as greens. Are you growing Lamb’s Ear yet?
If you don’t have any of this important medicinal plant growing around your home yet, get some. If you can’t find any plants locally, buy some seeds and grow them yourself. It’s super easy, and much cheaper that way anyways. Lamb’s Ear make a gorgeous landscaping border, and grows well in containers. Plant as much as you have room for, ’cause it’ll come in handy when your stash of tp runs out!
How To Grow Your Own Antibacterial Bandages (Wooly Lamb’s Ear) From Seed
Starting your own plants from seed really is easy. Here’s how…
1. Fill a well-draining container with Seed Starting Mix. A yogurt cup with holes poked in the bottomworks nicely.
2. Wet the soil thoroughly. If you’re on city water, use filtered water for your plants.The chemicals in treated water can inhibit plant growth.
3. Plant 1-2 seeds per small container (thinning out the weakest seedling), or plant seeds about 6″ apart in a larger pot, burying them 1/4″ deep.
4. Keep the soil moist and the containers out of direct light until the seedlings germinate. As soon as you see the tops of the plants emerging, put them somewhere where they can get at least 6 hours of sunlight daily, or under a grow light. It helps to set the cups/pots in a shallow tray of water to keep the soil from drying out.
5. When the plants have at least three sets of leaves, they’re ready to be transplanted to a semi-shady place in your yard. Space them 12″ apart. They will multiply readily in good soil. If you haven’t started thinking about growing some medicinal herbs, Wooly Lamb’s Ear is a perfect one to begin with. And in my opinion, you can never have enough!
Once you have it, don’t stop there! There are so many medicinal herbs you can be growing no matter where you live. Check out Grow Your Own Antibiotics for more great suggestions.
What would an EMP attack really look like on US soil? How bad could the destruction be? What are your EMP preparedness survival options? What’s the best EMP Emergency Management Plan? What the heck is an EMP anyways?
Electrical Magnetic Pulse…seems technical. Seems complicated. Doesn’t really sound all that scary. Seems more like something you used to hear your boring physics professor talk about…right?
Today I want to discuss the following:
What An EMP Is
What Weapons Can Cause An EMP Attack
How Much Damage and Chaos An EMP Attack Could Cause
What Will An EMP Aftermath World Look Like
What Your Only 2 Options Are For EMP Preparation
Electrical Magnetic Pulse
When a conductor moves through a magnetic field an electrical current is produced.
This is how the generators work at your local power plant. Likewise, when a moving magnetic field passes a conductor, a current is created.
Here’s a small EMP demonstration destroying a calculator.
But what if the magnetic field created is very, very strong when it passes the wire? What if the magnetic pulse is immeasurably strong?
The voltage and current generated will be extremely large. Perhaps large enough to damage the wire, especially if that “wire” is microscopic and lying on a printed circuit board.
Given a strong enough magnetic field, microelectronics can be destroyed by this electrical burst. Completely burned out.
So How Are These Large EMP Pulses Created?
The phenomenon is called Electro-Magnetic Pulse, or EMP for short. One way EMP’s can be created is during the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
During the initial energy release from a nuclear weapon a large electromagnetic field in the form of a “pulse” radiates outward. This pulse from the explosion will travel in a line of sight fashion. Any electrical wiring in the path of the pulse will burn out,
The nuclear explosion does not have to be very large to generate a dangerous EMP. At least dangerous for our computer friends, not so much for us.
Unlike the radiation released during the nuclear explosion, EMP is not particularly dangerous to people. Unless you have a pacemaker installed. But it will destroy unshielded computer systems.
Since EMP travels line of sight it can cover a very large area if the nuclear detonation occurs high in the atmosphere.
Most nuclear military weapons are not intended for high altitude detonations. This is because those detonations do little damage to the enemy and cause very little fallout. However, if one were detonated at high altitude the EMP would travel outward crossing everything in its line of sight. Covering perhaps thousands of square miles.
Though the EMP magnitude diminishes with distance, it may still be strong enough at thousands of miles to fry most microelectronics.
This makes the nuclear EMP a near perfect weapon for a terrorist, rather than a conventional military force.
Here’s an interesting question. If you are a terrorist organization and could only lay your hands on one nuclear weapon. Would you want to blow up one city or detonate it high enough to wipe out the electrical systems for thousands of cities?
Aside from nuclear weapons there are EMP-generating devices called “explosively pumped flux compression generators.” These devices use a combination of electromagnetic physics to generate large pulses of electromagnetic energy.
The basic concept is to generate a electromagnetic pulse in a coil surrounding a metal core using current from a capacitor bank. While at the same time compressing the coil into the core using explosives.
This change in core geometry causes a compression of the electromagnetic field momentarily before the whole thing shorts out and is destroyed.
So What Kind Of Damage Are We Talking?
Any device not shielded against a large EMP attack is likely to be damaged or destroyed.
We’re talking damage to the following:
Power plants
Laptops
IPad
IPod
Smart Phones
Cell Phone Towers
Telephones
Desktop Computers
Mainframe Computers
Routers
Automobile Engine Management Computers
Jet Aircraft Systems
Air Traffic Control Systems
Banking Systems
Hospital Diagnostic Machines
Televisions
Internet Servers
Refrigerators
Thermostats
Plus Anything Else With A Micro Chip
Which is damn near everything these days.
Can you imagine everyone within a thousand-mile radius losing all technology at one time?
How about a city like New York or Los Angeles, with 8-10 million people suddenly finding themselves in a pre-industrial world without power?
Things that will still work, however, are mechanical systems (i.e. guns and bullets). So we’re talking instant anarchy.
EMP Preparedness: So Is There A Way To Protect Electronics?
Is there a way to protect your personal electronics or your home electrical systems?
There are several ways to protect against an EMP attack. One EMP preparedness survival technique is simple EMP protection otherwise known as electrical shielding.
If an electrical cable has a grounded external braided shield, the electromagnetic field will not penetrate the shield. It will induce a current in the shield which will be harmlessly released to the ground.
This is great, but what about devices, such as microelectronics?
You can shield entire devices using something known as an EMP Faraday Cage. Named for Michael Faraday, one of the early scientists in the field of electromagnetics.
Faraday discovered that electromagnetic fields will not penetrate a metal cage made of copper or other good electrical conductors. The fields impinge on the exterior of the cage. Since all sides of the cage are electrically connected to each other, there is no induced electrical current.
For current to flow there must be a differential in electrical potential.
When all sides of the cage are connected as one—there is no electrical differential potential. It’s as if there is a short-circuit before the current even begins to flow. Devices held inside the cage are protected from induced currents which can damage components.
Nested EMP Faraday cages are even better for EMP preparedness. This involves nesting a cage within a cage.
A simple EMP Faraday cage is a covering of aluminum foil. If you want to protect your devices, wrap them in a layer of aluminum foil. But take care, they must be completely covered with no gaps in the foil.
Also, if you wish to use multiple layers of foil, place a layer of insulation between them, something that won’t conduct electricity.
Just adding thickness of foil means nothing. The only reason to double wrap is to better prevent gaps in the foil.
A galvanized trashcan with a lid will work in a pinch. If you know something bad is coming, place your valuable electronics inside a sealed cardboard box and place that inside the trashcan. Ensuring the lid closes completely and seals.
Now that you have all your devices protected when the terrorist EMP event strikes you’ll be ready. Assuming you knew in advance it was coming and took these defense precautions.
So let’s say you did.
The “Event” happens and the lights go out.
You quickly retrieve your fully functional cell phone from the foil and trash can Faraday Cage. And presto, you have one of the very few functioning cell phones in the Northern Hemisphere.
Did your EMP preparedness survival pay off?
How many bars do you have? None?
Can you hear me now? No?
You pull out your protected laptop or IPad and boot up. Internet connection? Nope.
You’ve got a four hour charge on the device, great. Now where are you going to plug in your charger (assuming you placed the charger in the Faraday Cage in the first place)?
No sweat. I have a home generator—nope—it’s fried by EMP.
Oh, but I have home solar panels—nope—fried by EMP.
The water company’s filtration and pumping systems are fried.
Food will quickly begin to spoil and we just lost a war without firing even one bullet.
There are really only 2 EMP preparedness options:
EMP Diaster Prep Option 1 – Plan for an Amish survival skills future. Plan to revert to an 1860 agrarian society with the sort of survival skills our great-great-grandparents knew. But, our society has forgotten.
EMP Diaster Prep Option 2 – Store a complete, disassembled home electrical power generation system inside very large Faraday Cages. Solar and wind are your best bet—since you won’t be able to get gasoline or natural gas. Everything electrical associated with these systems should be boxed in Faraday Cages.
Most People Will Have To Take EMP Preparedness Option #1.
Why? Because most people can’t afford to drop $10,000-25,000 on a home generation system. Especially one they do not plan to use immediately and then take extraordinary precautions to store it all.
Most people don’t have the resources for grid-independent electrical systems that work today. Let alone ones they keep stored in Faraday Cages.
However, if you do end up going with EMP Preparedness Option #2, you’d better be prepared to defend it. You’ll be the only one on your block, maybe your town with any kind of electrical power.
By the way, you EMP disaster prep Option #2 guys, I would wait until long after the attack before assembling your system. Any good terrorist or even a state sponsored enemy threat will be smart enough to allow us to install our spare power system trying to bring things back online. Then pop us again to destroy the rest of it.
An EMP blast from a single nuclear device at 20 miles altitude will cover a large portion of the US with EMP.
An enemy doesn’t have to destroy the entire nation to destroy its society and kill off large portions of the population.
Even the US Government admits as many 9 of 10 Americans could die within one year of a crippling EMP attack on our homeland.
There are simply too many people, and too few with survival skills, for a majority of our nation to survive with no electrical power for a year.
This means near the end of that year looting and rioting will be rampant—everywhere. It’s time to take EMP preparedness seriously and learn some real survival skills.
Your Best Defense Is EMP Disaster Prep Option #1
EMP Preparedness is similar to most other emergency disaster preps in many ways. You need to have a large food stockpile, a water storage and replenishment plan, skills to constantly replenish your food stocks. Throw in some defense skills to protect your resources and some basic medical supplies.
Food, water and medicine. You need regular amounts of food and water resources to survive and you need to be able to defend these precious resources from others.
It’s really as simple as that, but just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. The best way to describe the survival skills you need to learn to prepare or an EMP attack is this:
The skills our great-great grandparents called everyday life we now call survival and prepping.
So look backwards in time for inspiration.
The closest modern day example is the Amish. By choice, they live without power. They don’t use it today and won’t miss it after an EMP attack. However, will the Amish be willing to defend their resources to the death? To me, this is the biggest challenge the Amish face, but you can learn them and throw in a bit of firearm training.
That’s how you prepare for life without power long term.
