Compost

Anyone have any suggestions for starting a compos bin/area etc? I feel so overwhelmed and would like to get one up and going this spring.

Focus

I struggle to find a happy medium in my preparations mostly because I'm not sure what me "scenario" is.

There is the short term emergency which is what I tell everyone I'm preparing for when it comes up. "Why do you have 10 bags of spaghetti noodles?" "Blizzard."

Then there is the longer term emergency which I think is what most "preppers" are prepping for. But even in there I find wildly different views.

For example, in a true long term immediate emergency ala "One Second After" (Which, if anyone ever wants to discuss that book with me I would LOVE to.) having lots of food storage would be helpful. For awhile. Canned soups and fruit will only go so long and then you have real issues once that begins to run out. Assuming you get to keep it all to begin with. (I'm going to be optimistic and assume that no one will take my food. Probably because we have guns. And ammo.)

Which is where/why I begin to lose focus. Should I buy lots and lots of canned goods or should I focus more on the ingredients themselves. For example instead of buying split pea soup should I work on having the split peas, carrots, spices, etc. instead? Will that take up more space? Will my family even EAT split pea soup?

There is no harm in learning to cook from scratch, I get that. Which is probably why I tend to buy more of the raw ingredients than the prepackaged stuff BUT since I can't cook everything from scratch yet (it takes time) where should I focus?

You can see I get a little ADD/OCD about this.

So for the rest of the first quarter of this year I'm going to focus on medical supplies.

I have three children. There will never be a day where I will wonder about the kinds of band-aids I have. My only question will be "Do I have enough?"

Anyone have any suggestions about what your medical supply closet has? Aside from band-aids?

Christmas Gifts

I neglected to mention (because I didn't post at all in December) that for Christmas this year we gave canned food as gifts. Home canned food that is.

The inspiration hit me in the summer while I was going over my list of "to can" items. I thought it might be fun to can something that represented each of the members of the family and give the collection of items as gifts to family and friends.

My canned gifts were:

Lace's White Chocolate Raspberry Sauce
M's Caramel Apple Butter
K's Frog Swamp Cinnamon Apple Sauce
L's Vanilla Strawberry Jam
W's Fuzzy Butt Peach Butter
Bad Dog Peach Salsa

All of the main ingredients are Colorado grown and where I could I supplied additional items from my garden like jalapenos and onions for the salsa.

Dearest husband made labels that reflected each of us. For example L's had hearts on it, while K's had Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. W's had a pacifier that looked like a peach at the end.

We got plastic baskets from our local dollar store and wrapped them up. They were HUGE hits with all friends and family and a great ego boost for me. It's one thing to think my jam tastes good, it 's another to hear that some families ate it up before Christmas break was over.

When people asked about it (and they almost always did) I had an opportunity to share with people about eating local (since all the ingredients were as local as I could get them except of course the chocolate) and preserving our own. I got to talk about the environment, useful skills, local economics, avoiding preservatives and chemicals and health. It just LOOKED like a jar of Peach Salsa instead of charts and grafts etc.

We have already received some jars back from family with winks to "not forget them next year".

Which leaves me some creativity to think about next year.

Help me readers? You're my only hope?

Does the idea of our Canned Family sound like a winner and something I could do next year with different canned items? Ideas include:

Pears - pear chutney, pear salsa, pear butter
Peaches - spiced peaches, peach ketchup, vanilla peach sauce, peach rum sauce
Strawberries - ......after strawberry jam I'm not sure what else to do
Tomatoes - Tomato salsa, tomato sauce, marinara sauce, spaghetti sauce, whole tomatoes
Cherries - Cherry jam, Cherry pie filling

You get the idea...

The OTHER idea I had was to make "gift packs". For example:

Home canned tomato sauce, homemade (and dried) noodles, homemade bread and dried garden herbs

Home canned salsa with homemade chips and seasonings

You get the idea. Right?

So if it was you, which would you receive better? The Canned Family or the Gift Packs?

Bread

I'm such a doomer....

One half of my brain tells me to master skills, like making bread by hand. In a post SHTF/TEOTWAWKI situation I wont be buying bread at a store, I'll be making it for my hungry family. So I made bread this weekend. Sure, I'd done it before, years and years ago but it was more of a "Oh can I do that" novelty thing and not so much "Master this skill so your family doesn't starve" thing. I made two types of bread, both successful in that they were bread but one was certainly better than the other.

The other half of my brain says that while there is wheat growing in Colorado right now and even if there was what are the chances that I would be able to get my hands on it. Sure, I can store some wheat and get a grinder (and I probably will at some point) but being in the suburbs means that I don't have a LOT of space, certainly not enough to grow enough wheat for my small family of 5 let alone the people I assume will be moving this way to be with us in an extended emergency. So why bother learning to make bread if I truly don't think I'll have access to wheat in the future?

That's part of the "rub" with TEOTWAWKI - how bad does it get in your mind and what will you have access to the the future if you're right?

Winter brings on different planning

It's winter here (as with just about everywhere else in the US) and it's cold. And snowy. But mostly cold.

I almost didn't think winter was going to happen for us. Christmas found us with balmy weather as high as in the 50's. Just a couple of weeks ago we had a day in the 60's. It's insane.

And now it's REALLY cold. REALLY.

This kind of cold really helps me to focus on what kinds of preparations I need for cold weather days. The obvious, everyday things are hats, mittens and scarfs but I also think about food, movement of the house and entertainment.

We have been fortunate not to experience any kind of power outages associated with the cold weather but I imagine what my life would look like should society collapse suddenly and I needed to protect my family in the middle of winter.

To that end January saw me storing more food and also gathering experimenting with cooking for cold weather.

Christmas gifted me with a cast iron dutch oven (does my husband know me or what?) and I received as another gift a larger cast iron oven and skillet this month. I've been working on my chili recipe and hope to have a few other recipes perfected enough to try them outside. Well, outside when it's a little warmer.

As for food storage I ordered some more basics from Emergency Essentials. I have been using the food storage analyzer as a tool to help me keep track of what I already have and helping me order what’s missing. My next step is to actually start cooking with those items but it's intimidating to look at #10 cans and realize that once you open it you better start consuming because the clock is ticking.

My food storage is mostly basics like whole egg powder, milk, and rice, just to name a few. Basically things that I think I wont be able to grow or acquire quickly but that will certainly aid my family in times of hunger.

Another concern has been heat and this is where my mind tends to wander in terms of suburban survival. Hear me out.

I have a ranch house with a finished basement. It has a fireplace but its' downstairs, in the basement, and the chimney is currently not operational. The last time someone came out to look at it they quoted me $3000 to fix it and sadly I didn't have that kind of money laying around. That was 4 years ago.

The house is heated with a gas furnace and we are comfortable.

Now I could certainly save my pennies and do a couple of different things. I could a) fix the fireplace, b) rip the fireplace out and replace it with a wood stove, c) something else regarding wood heat and the house.

But I don't love this house. I don't plan to stay in this house forever, only another 4-5 years or so. So my motivation is not to upgrade this house until it's complete survival/non-grid ready but rather just get by until the dream house is acquired. And there is my dilemma. How much do I "prep" at this house, a house I dont plan to live in?

I'm still considering it.

Planning for next year

I know that often this seems like a garden blog more a survival or preparedness blog but it's really not.

It's just that in my mind self sufficiency is the path towards survival. Sure, I buy #10 cans of food. Not often. But I save up and do occasionally buy it. I do that though with the idea in mind that if a total economic/social/energy/EMP/whatever collapse were to happen I would have that stuff for TODAY because I am new to preparedness and I am, well, not totally prepared. I would like, in the future, to someday produce enough food from my small suburban lot to at least feel like I had a handle on survival if I had to. At least in the short term until I could get to somewhere bigger.

So I garden. I plan on fruit trees and bushes. I hide herbs both kitchen and medicinal into my landscape. I am slowly growing a preparedness library and constantly testing myself to see "can I do that without electricity?"

My family is not on board. Well. They are on board with the small containers of tomatoes, of pretty flowers in the front yard (can you say chamomile?) and the canning of local produce. But they are not yet into the bigger picture of powering down, of doing by hand, of going without or making due. Not yet.

Everything is a process. Just like learning to garden, can, cook from scratch is a process. And I'm getting there.

Next year will see big changes to my back yard. Right now it's large and has some very old tall trees (I think elm but I could be making that up). It's mostly grass or dirt with some trees and bushes around the perimeter. There are lilacs, that I love and other stuff, that I don't care about.

Next year though will see actual garden beds put in with a work table and an arch to a new path. My mother in law has it all planned out. I think she knows about the survival/preparedness stuff but has never asked about it. She has, however, seen my under stairs cold storage closet and I've talked at length about how I want to produce from my land but make it beautiful (to be deceptive). There will be more tomatoes next year, more beans, more cucumbers. She has promised there will be apple trees.

So I've already started looking at seed catalogs and researching heirlooms. I've started saving money for the materials. I've started planning meals.

I'm excited to plan, that's actually my favorite part of preparedness. The planning. I like to have a list, a plan, an idea.

This winter will find me focused on cooking from scratch and local. I'll be working on my library and working on my kids, trying to power down, trying to increase their attention spans.

It's exciting for me because I feel like I'm finally making progress.

And I'm ready for green beans straight off the vine.

Applesauce

Several years ago when I was still married to my first husband I escaped to my Aunt's house in Wyoming with my then only two kids and begged her to teach me to make and can applesauce.

At the time I had a two year old who are like a bird and one of the only things she would eat was applesauce. It also seemed a LOT easier than learning how to can salsa or make jam. I was so silly back then.

Ahem.

This weekend I decided that while my dreams of planting appletrees this year did not come to fruition I would still make applesauce. And apple butter. I actually made carmel apple butter.

The apples we local, bought at the nursery down the road from us. I bought half a bushel of Jonathon and half a bushel of Jongold. Note to self: perhaps a bushel is too many apples.



That's a lot of apples in total.

I happen to own a foley mill bought at a garage sale for $1 but I also own a kitchen aid. I will admit, I tried to make the applesauce after cooking them in the foley mill first.

It was taking too long.

So I ended up using my Kitchen Aid mixer to make them into pulp and them using the mill to make it smooth and keep out the debris of apple cores and peel etc. It worked well for me.



I spent 8 hours on Saturday and another 1 on Sunday because a)my kitchen in small, b)my canner only holds 7 pints at a time and c)apple butter takes longer than I had anticipated. But in the end I ended up with the equivilent of 21 pints of applesauce and apple butter.





Feels pretty satisfying overall. But next year I'm employing child labor for the foley mill. That thing sucked the energy right out of me.