Category Archives: Food

What I Did This Week To Prep 2/10/12

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As I mentioned last week, we’re bringing on a new monthly contributor. Leah, who we’ll affectionately refer to as ‘Momma Bear’, will write for us the third Wednesday of each month. Her debut post, Momma Bear Is The Prepper, will be up next Wednesday. I’m excited to have her relatively unique perspective as the woman in the family being the ‘main‘ prepper. Prepping has traditionally been viewed as a male thing; men are the ones who ‘protect the cave’ (yes, I know I’m stereotyping). Since this is such a male-dominated community in general, and I’m a male, I am very happy to be able to present a female prepper’s point of view; not one who is just supporting her husband – but is motivating, guiding, and directing it.

Also new this week – A Contest! We’re giving away a signed copy of The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook! After the great response to my post reviewing The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook, Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy contacted me and asked if I would like a copy of their book to give away to my readers. I immediately responded in the affirmative and requested an autographed one (which they humbly agreed to). So, since I’ve never done a give-away contest before, Sarah and I brainstormed how to do it. Here’s what we came up with: If you’d like to win the book, comment–on this post, or on the TraceMyPreps facebook page–and tell us what your biggest concern MEDICALLY is in a collapse.

You have until 8:00pm PST this Sunday (2/12/12) to respond. From the respondents we’ll randomly choose a name. The winner’s name (first name, or log-in name, only) will be posted on our facebook page at that time; I’ll then coordinate with the winner to get the book mailed. Hopefully this’ll all work… Since this is our first give away, and we have a relatively small audience, if you post something you’ll have a pretty good chance to win.

As Sarah mentioned in her post, I’ve located a source to get donkey manure to fertilize our garden. My boss’ landlord has donkeys and is happy to give away the manure. He bags it up in approximately 4-gallon heavy duty bags, and just asks that the bags be returned. Yesterday, after work, I picked up 11 bags and brought them home. It was interesting, in my little commuter car full of donkey manure, there was no odor – just a faint smell of dirt. I did a little bit of research and it appears that the basic consensus (here’s where WSU Extension discusses it) is that fresh manure is perfectly safe to be added directly to the garden soil. However, it should be added using the following guidelines: 120 days before root crops (food that comes into contacted with the soil) are harvested, or 90 days, if the food does not have direct contact with the soil. I hope to get many more bags and cover the entire garden area front and back.

What did you do this week to prep?

(Monday: Teaching The Kids: Chainsaws For Everyone)

Sarah’s View: Time To Order Seeds

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Even though we’re still in the dark of winter, now is the time of year when we peruse the seed catalogs and start planning our garden.

Last year was our first “real” garden, and it did okay. It wasn’t spectacular, but it wasn’t horrible either. Part of that can be blamed on the weather – it was a very cool summer and plants that normally do well around here, like tomatoes, struggled. But much of the garden success, or in this case failure, was directly related to our inexperience. It was the first year we started our plants from seed (instead of seedlings) and we tried items that we had no previous experience growing. We also do not have the best soil… okay, the soil here sucks. Our subdivision’s “soil” is mostly rocks and clay.

Trace has been actively working to improve our soil. He built up our back yard compost pile, brought in additional compost from the local landfill, and expanded the space for the garden. We hope to continue the soil enhancements this year. We will bring in more compost and are selecting specific crops with soil improvement in mind. Trace is also pursuing a lead on donkey manure.

There were a few plants that did well. Of the perennials we planted, the strawberries, raspberries and asparagus all survived. The rhubarb, on the other hand, didn’t go so well. And we were able to harvest some tomatoes (albeit mostly green) at the end of the season. This year we’ll again try tomatoes, green beans, and zucchini. I’ll have to check on the herb garden and see what survived the snow, but we will have – either from seed or carried over from last year – basil, rosemary, thyme, sage and chives.

Besides the “regulars”, we are hoping to branch out (pun intended) a bit this year. Trace has requested cabbage; luckily I’ve heard it grows well around here and shouldn’t be a problem. I would also like to grow potatoes. We found a potato box diagram online that will allow us to grow them without using a huge amount of space.  We are also going to add butternut and spaghetti squash, radishes, onions, garlic, black beans, and peas to our garden. None of those are all that uncommon, but will be “new to us”.

One, more unusual, plant we’re going to try is garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas). We regularly fry them on the stove to make a snack and would love to have enough to do this and make our own hummus. In addition, the other uncommon plant we are going to try is comfrey. We are specifically planting this with soil improvement in mind as it is known as a valuable fertilizer and will pull nutrients up with its long tap root.

This year, after having more time to look over the many many options, we are going to go ahead and order from Bountiful Gardens again. Their catalog has a plethora of information on each plant and I truly value their philosophy: “For the benefit of all farmers, gardeners and consumers who want an alternative, we pledge that we do not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants.” As preppers, I feel it is important that the plants we grow have seeds that can be saved and successfully planted in future years.

What are you planting this year?

(Friday: What I Did This Week To Prep)

note: This is my wife Sarah’s second post (first post: “What Do You Think of All This?” – A Prepper’s Wife’s Point of View). She will continue to post under ‘Sarah’s View’ the second Wednesday of each month. I’m excited to have her regularly writing for us!

‘Course It’ll Always Be There

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When people ask me why I prep, I tell them–assuming they are actually willing to listen to the answer–that we have five basic needs: food, water, shelter, security and energy. These needs are delivered via a series of integrated systems. In an emergency, big or small, when one or more of those systems fail, the delivery of these basic needs may be in jeopardy. We, as individuals, are powerless to control these systems or fix them when they fail. At that time, all you can depend on is the preparations you have previously made.

What kind of systems are we discussing and where might they be vulnerable? We’ll use food as an example:

  • Agricultural system – food production. Affected by: inclement weather, including droughts and floods, also blights, equipment costs, fuel prices, shortened growing seasons
  • Local laborer system – harvesting and packing food for shipment. Affected by: local regulations, regional (civil or economic) instability, employee shortages
  • Transportation system – getting the food from there to here. Affected by: ‘vehicle’ system – trucks, ships, airplanes, trains; fuel prices, inclement weather (snow, ice and wind storms, rough seas), transportation worker strikes
  • Processing and warehouse system – where food is received, repackaged, and temporarily stored (refrigerated as required). Affected by: power failures, worker strikes, inclement weather
  • Grocery store system – where food is stocked, refrigerated, rotated, and sold. Affected by: power failures, local inclement weather (real or anticipated), civil unrest, hoarding

We eat every day and we depend on these systems to function almost flawlessly. Most people give little thought to how these multiple systems interact to get food to us; they just assume the food will always be there when they want it. But if one of those systems fail and that food item doesn’t arrive, you may have to do without.

Now, say, this food item is your favorite type of apple from New Zealand. If it’s not in your grocery store today, you may wish it was but, you can make do with another type. What happens when it wasn’t just that apple shipment, but none of the local shipments arrived that day, or the next? Grocery stores don’t keep a large inventory on hand; their business model is based on inventory arriving on a regular basis for consumer purchase. Very quickly shelves would be emptied. Ever been to a grocery store when a large storm is predicted?

And similar events affect our other needs as well (with shelter being somewhat of an exception):

  • water: lines break, contamination, droughts, flooding, sewage leaks or backups
  • security: inclement weather delays police or medical response, civil unrest ties up resources, power failures cause security systems to be down
  • energy: power failure from storms, broken lines; fuel systems affects almost every level of every other system, i.e. fuel costs go up, food prices go up

Jack Spirko, on TSP, talks about how we buy all of our needs a la carte. But we know what those needs are, and we know we’re going to need them everyday. Most, if not all, can be planned for ahead of time and we can have extras stored and redundancies built-in. Ready your preps so you can be self-reliant when those systems temporarily fail, and build the knowledge and skills to be self-sufficient so that you will not be bound to those systems you can’t control or fix.

(Wednesday: Something To Lean On)

Long Term Storage (Food Part 2)

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five basic needs: 1) FOOD, 2) water, 3) shelter, 4) security, and 5) energy

Long Term Food Storage (LTS) is defined as food that can be stored 10 years or longer, some more than 30 years. Because of the long storage durations, things must be packaged correctly. To review, the biggest enemies of food storage are: light, heat, moisture, air, and rodents. LTS has to be packed in airtight, durable, sealed containers. This will require almost all store bought food to be repackaged, or you can buy prepackaged LTS items.

LTS is almost always packed in either #10 cans (coffee can size), or a combination of mylar bags and plastic buckets. Cans are the best; they are dark, sealed tight, very durable, impervious to rodents, easy to rotate/handle, and come in usable amounts that can be covered with a plastic lid once opened. But sealing cans requires special equipment that most of us don’t have at home.

The mylar/plastic bucket combination is the easiest for home packing. Mylar (a registered trademark of DuPont) is often used generically, it refers to a polyester film with high tensile strength and chemical stability, sometimes simply called a dry pack pouch. Mylar comes in a variety of pre-made sizes, most common are one and five gallon. The LTS item is placed in the mylar bag leaving room at the top, then put oxygen absorbers into the bag and seal using a hot iron (or a similar heat sealer). Another option is a vacuum sealer (this doesn’t require the oxygen absorbers). Exercise care when handling the mylar–it can be punctured–and store in a five gallon plastic bucket.

The advantage to packaging your own items is cost and flexibility. It’s much cheaper to buy mylar bags and buckets than it is to buy prepackaged items. Also you can package anything you want, including specialized or uncommon items.

But, the option of buying prepackaged LTS items also has definite advantages. When purchased this way, everything is done for you and done correctly, it’s nicely labeled and convenient – you order and pay for it, and it’s delivered to your porch ready to be stored away.

A hybrid LTS packaging option is to go to your local Mormon church cannery (they refer to them as Family Home Storage Centers). The Mormons have been involved in food storage since long before it was ‘cool’, and they have the system figured out. Best of all they are very nice, happy to share with non-Mormons alike, and essentially sell items at cost. You can buy the items in bulk (mostly 25 lbs bags) to take home and repackage yourself. But the best resource they offer is to allow you to volunteer to work on a canning crew where you all work together canning your own items (paying only the cost of the product and the cans). They have an extensive canning operation: starting with bulk size bags, you fill up the #10 cans, seal them with the metal lids, and place pre-printed labels on them. They provide boxes for each case of cans, also plastic lids. Obviously, it takes some coordination and time to get this done, but for the money involved and the finished product I believe this is the best way to do it. Here’s a YouTube video of the experience you can expect at the cannery.

Common LTS items are: black beans, pinto beans, nonfat dry milk, white rice, sugar, salt, wheat, dried apple slices, pasta, oats, dry onions, and potato flakes.

As always, look at your needs, resources (including space), and local availability to create the LTS strategy that works for you.

(Wednesday: But Water is Heavy!)

Store What You Eat (Food Part 1)

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The storage system we have now (panoramic view)

five basic needs: 1) FOOD, 2) water, 3) shelter, 4) security, and 5) energy

We know that we’re going to eat, multiple times, everyday. We know that if we go more than three to four weeks without food we’ll die. We know that food costs keep going up. We know that food today is readily available and relatively inexpensive. We know that there are multiple systems involved in getting food to the stores each day, and if one of those systems fail it doesn’t arrive. Those, and more, are the reasons to store food.

Food storage is discussed in two categories: short-term or Store What You Eat (SWYE) and Long Term Storage (LTS).

SWYE is as simple as it sounds: stock up on the non-perishable foods you eat on a regular basis. When you first begin–unless you have the extra money to go buy cases at a time–follow the “copy can” method. Each time you go shopping, if you need one can of say, tuna, buy two (or three or four…) instead. Put one can in your kitchen pantry, take the others and write the date on them and put on your SWYE shelf. Your SWYE food can be stored in any cool, dry area. Racks can be purchased to make food rotation easier. Then, when you need a can of tuna, use the one in your pantry and replace it with the oldest one (you dated them remember?) from your SWYE (add that item to your shopping list!). Rinse & repeat.

In a short period of time you’ll have your initial goal of two weeks food storage complete. From there build your SWYE to 30, 60, then 90 days. Remember, food storage’s biggest enemies are: light, heat, moisture, and air. Most SWYE items are canned or well packaged so light and air aren’t a big concern. But heat and moisture can be, so plan accordingly. I should also mention rodents, of course they won’t get into cans, but that mac ‘n cheese box…

Non-perishables are the easiest to store, but if you have the freezer space (I highly recommend a deep freezer) you can also add meat and other frozen items to more fully round out your food preps. Yes freezers are vulnerable to power outages, so have a plan. Know how long your freezer will stay ‘cold enough’ without running, and prepare to either provide auxiliary power, or to use the items if needed.

Storage system we want to get

I’ve been asked, “what do you store?”. My response is along the lines of store what YOU eat, develop YOUR own plan, blah, blah, blah. But I do understand the usefulness of someone helping you get started. The irony is that I’m also, relatively speaking, getting started myself. That being said, here’s an overview of our family’s SWYE: canned beans, vegetables, fruits, meats, soups; summer sausage, cereals, man ‘n cheese, tortillas, oatmeal, mashed potatoes, condiments, peanut butter, jelly, baking staples, cooking oil, spices, bouillon, coffee, hot chocolate, power and granola bars, and crackers. Again just a list to get you started and thinking about what would be good for you – your plan has to be your own.

(Monday: “Long Term Storage (Food Part 2)”)