My Thrivalist Binder

This is a topic I've been meaning to post about for some time.  As is the way of things, events have conspired to reveal the good advice I've been meaning to share with all of you as something I should have heeded better myself.  I've been having serious computer trouble lately, and there's the possibility that I may permanently lose a great deal of information and photos saved on my hard drive.  Physician heal thyself.  I've never been too diligent about regular backups.  The last backup performed on my computer was months ago, if not a year ago.  It's a hard lesson to learn, but it brings home what I had intended to write about.  What follows is the post I've been working on incrementally for a few months...

Plenty of peak oil doomers, preppers, and thrivalist types have blogged about their shelf full of reference books for Camp Teotwawki, including me.  But there are an awful lot of loose, unbound, but important bits of information floating around my life that aren't in books.  A great deal of it is on my computer hard drive, here on my own blog, or resides at websites that are as familiar to me as old friends.  From a prepping perspective, this is a bit problematic.  If something suddenly takes out my electrical supply, or the network of datafarms that stores the content of the internet, that information is gone.  And that's probably when I'd most need this information.

This has been nagging me for a while and I finally started printing out important bits of information as they came to my attention.  I put these pages together in a three-ring binder similar to one I keep for recipes I use over and over again.  Each page is placed in a plastic sleeve and then in the binder.  This has always been really handy for the recipes, since the sleeve protects the page from batter, splattering oil, wet hands, etc.  It has saved me having to reprint a given recipe many times over.

So what sorts of things have made it into my thrivalist binder so far?  Here's a sampling:

• Our yearly harvest records and notes from the garden
• A planting schedule specific to my hardiness zone, our local first and last frost dates, and the dates when we lose and gain ten hours of daylight
• Some guidelines on biodynamic beekeeping
• General principles of curing meat
• Worksheets for each of my curing batches and a supply of blank curing worksheets 
• Instructions on making soap the old-fashioned way
• Where There Is No Doctor - available as a free download
• Instructions for caring for fig trees grown in containers in my zone
• Guidelines for disinfecting water through exposure to sunlight
• Homemade rooting hormone recipe, and a few guidelines on growing plants from cuttings
• Sharon Astyk's recommendations for 25 plants we should all consider growing
• Detailed information on growing a few specific medicinal herbs and their various uses
• Planting instructions for garlic
• Basic information on seed saving
• A few working notes on meals cooked in the solar oven
• A printout of Rocket Mass Heaters
• All of our soil test results from year to year and bed to bed
• Guidelines for processing raw wool
• Guidelines for preparing natural dyes from plants, and a list of which plants produce various shades

Mostly this is information that's either self-generated and therefore not available in any book, or specific pieces of information taken from books that I don't feel the need to own as a whole.  Some of it I may not ever need, but much of it is information I'm already using regularly, if infrequently.  None of it is information I want to trust to memory alone.  There are plenty of things I haven't yet remembered to print out and add to the binder.  But at least having started it there's now a ready repository of information that fits the bill.  I'm more likely to bother to print out the pages since the binder is there and stocked with a supply of empty plastic sleeves. And even if disaster never occurs, having the hard copy means I don't need to use any energy to access the information.

Incidentally, Kathy Harrison not long ago posted about an emergency binder of a different sort.  She has assembled various pieces of critical information and legal documents for her family in case one of the adults is incapacitated, or in case of the need to evacuate her home on very short notice.   This is a binder of a very different sort, but well worth putting in place, in my opinion.  You don't have to be a doomer to benefit from the sorts of preparations Kathy writes about.  After all, we can pretty much count on being incapacitated or dying at some point.  The information she advises assembling would benefit any family trying to deal with the serious illness or death of an adult member of the family.  You don't even have to live in an area prone to natural disaster to use her advice; house fires can happen to anyone at any time. 

So what about you?  Have you printed out information you think is valuable and put it in an easily accessible place?  Care to share what bits of knowledge have made the cut?