Never put off until tomorrow

I got up early yesterday, planted some seeds for the fall garden, then got busy pulling all my onions and preparing the bed for next year. Bruce and I took a look at the corn and it hit  us at the same time. We need to get the new freezer! Right now as in we should have done this weeks ago.

I don’t care for canning corn. It takes a really long time and the result are only acceptable. Without electricity, I would but I have electricity so I don’t. I dry some and it actually tastes a lot better that way but again, it takes a lot of time and space and the corn all seems to be ready at once. Well, three at onces. We plant three varieties and have it over a long season but we have a lot in each season. The pigs will be ready soon too. I got on line and did the research to find the model I want and made some calls to find out who had one and would deliver within the next day or two.

We settled on the 24 cubic foot Kenmore. It’s huge and expensive but it has some features I wanted. It’s Energy Star and actually uses less power than some of the smaller models, has a quick freeze option so I can freeze large amounts at once and has a pop out lock and lighted interior.

This will give me three freezers. The one on the top of the refrigerator, the small upright in the mud room and now the huge chest in the basement. Bruce and I rearranged the food storage and he built a small freezer room yesterday. He framed in three walls and a floor and painted them up. The walls and flooring are insulated now and they will protect the freezer from some of the basement moisture. Eventually, the whole basement will be sealed from moisture and insulated but we won’t get to that until winter.

This whole project, as tough as it was on back, served the very useful purpose of making me take stock of my inventory. I went through a lot of food last year! I need to do a big shop this week and fill in around the edges. I have very little left in the way of canned juices and nearly no pineapple, the only canned fruit I purchase other than mandarin oranges when the are on sale. I got rid of some canned food that we are not going to eat like outdated green beans. The reason they were outdated is because nobody here can stand canned green beans. The pigs got those.

The other thing I did since I was down there and cleaning anyway was to rearrange my canning supplies. I had way more rings than I will ever need as I remove them as soon as the jars cool. A lot were rusty too. I took a rubber band and a paper clip and made a kind of bungee cord that I slipped through canning rings in groups of seven (a full canner load). I did this for 6 sets of large and small rings. I put these and all of my canning equipment like jar lifters and funnels in one 6 gallon bucket with a gamma seal and twist off lid. Now I have everything I need in one place and none of it is cluttering up my kitchen drawers. It will stay clean in the bucket and I can stop searching for a good lid in a bag with hundreds of  lids. I love getting organized. Systems are our friends.

I will do a whole post on this later this week but Bruce questioned the number of jars I have. I see his point as there are many extra but here is my reasoning. I pick up jars at tag sales and occasionally when I get to the market. They don’t deteriorate, I have the space and they are one thing I would really need if the grid ever collapsed. I could set up an outdoor kitchen and can all of the meat and frozen vegetables. We would have to work round the clock and use both pressure canners and it would take days but we could do it. If I ended up with some of kids at home, we would have to enlarge the gardens and can a lot more produce as a matter of course. Jars are alos a great barter item. I keep a couple of new boxes on hand and donate one to the occasional raffle along with a copy of my book. I am also trying to rid myself of most of the plastic in my house. Now that I have the space, I will be freezing many vegetables and fruit in jars. I will be able to reuse the lids and extract the air with my my food saver. This will save the money I would have spent on plastic bags and keep those bags out of the landfill. Win, win.

 

What to do first

I have gotten a couple of private emails directing me to an article that is linked at the survivalblog website about a family on unemployment in Elkhart, Indiana. I suppose it could make you angry (it did a lot of people) because this family is losing their rental home while still purchasing beer, soda and cigarettes but it just made me sad. These guys thought they had a contract with America for a specific kind of life and somebody broke the contract. Pointing fingers won’t help.

This got me to thinking about a couple of other emails I have received asking where I thought families should begin in starting a preparedness program. These were people less concerned with big disasters and more concerned with recession depriving them of their livelihood. Yesterday, I spent some time looking over what I have and trying to prioritize  in terms of real usefulness. For instance, I have a bottle capper because I like to make soda but I would not give that a high rating. Making soda is fun but not necessary for survival. What follows is my “gotta have it list” for preparing to live on less.

Water bath canner: I start here because water bath canning allows you to glean and gather fruit and process it with very little effort. You can buy a couple of bushels of tomatoes and put up quarts and quarts of sauce. If you have some land, and by some I mean ripping out the roses if necessary, you can grow tomatoes and your sauce will be nearly free.

Pressure canner: Meat in bulk is a lot less expensive but you need to be able to preserve it. Freezers and electricity cost a lot more than a quality canner and the meat is there, able to be turned into easy, stove top or outdoor cooked meals. I would start by learning to can hamburger, chicken and stew beef.

Dehydrator: Today, I am buying bags of frozen vegetables at the big box store and drying them for long term storage. They are cheap right now and I want to avoid buying another freezer so drying is the way to go. Drying herbs and fruit is easy and requires less electricity than any other method of preservation.

Food Saver: Having a vacuum sealer makes it possible to keep dried food in optimal condition. I dry larger vegetables and grind them up for soup base.

Canning jars: You can never have too many. Check out yard sales and Craig’s List for the best buys but if you must pay cash, consider them an investment.

Weather proofing: check out every program that is available to help you reduce your energy consumption. Sell the big screen TV to buy insulation.

One good, basic cookbook: You need to know how to prepare real food. Every time you are tempted to buy fast food, put those dollars away and make biscuits and gravy and a simple vegetable dish. Follow up with a fruit cobbler.

Community: Got friends? If you have friends, you have people to share expenses with and people to learn with. That canner is less expensive if you buy it with your sister or your best friend. You half the cost and double the fun. Instead of spending money going out to eat or to the movies, pick a couple of bushels of apples and put up apple sauce. You will have so much fun and be eating great food in January when the stuff in stores is expensive and shipped in from Chili

Land: By land, I mean garden space. Maybe your church or synagogue will put in a garden if you get the ball rolling. We have a garden on our school grounds this summer. Families are taking turns caring for it. Go to the library and check out books on self sufficiency on small spaces. There are lots to chose from and they are full of ideas. Check out books on thrifty living. The Tightwad Gazette books are a good place to start. I have all of them and read them often for inspiration.

This recession is far from over. The people in Elkhart would call it a depression. If only they had prepared for this time, there lives would be so much better, so much healthier. We all need to be preparing for a life of less. It is up to us to make decisions now that will keep our families healthy and happy, no matter the economy does.

 

dehydrating for storage

First, I have to admit I am not an expert at dehydrating. Until last year, I had an old tag sale garnered dehydrater that was not very efficient. It was one of the tall round models without a fan or temperature control. Still, I managed to dry the easier things like herbs, onions and peppers without a problem although I spent a lot of time moving shelves around and picking out food from the base as the mesh  was too large and and the food kept falling through. Then I tried a friend’s Excalibur last year. (thanks Dan and Kathy)I was an instant convert. In no time I had a gallon jar full of dried tomatoes (we just ate the last of them), a years worth of dried peppers (great rehydrated and put on pizza), quarts of herbs for tea and seasoning as well as garlic, onions and apples. I even took all of the vegetables that got too big to eat, dried them, ran them through a grinder and made a kind of stock base that flavored soups, stews and rice all winter. As I recall, I put in string beans, onions, carrots, leeks, celery, summer squash, zucchini, red peppers, green peppers and a bit of cabbage. I went very easy on the strong tasting stuff and loaded up on the carrots and squash. I stored the stock in brown bottles. I kept one bottle out and one in the freezer. They held up equally well and took up almost no space. I plan to make a lot more this year. I also dried some granola and made a batch of yogurt. I did not raise bread in it but if the day was cold and damp, it would be the prefect place. I don’t have to add that I bought an Excalibur.

Dehydrating is my favorite method of preservation. It is easy, cheap and reliable. The food stores with no refrigeration. It weighs practically nothing and takes up very little space. It does take a while to get uses to how funny looking the produce is-all shriveled and ugly-but it plumps up to look close to fresh in some simmering water.

But, like everything, there is a learning curve and it pays to get a good book on the subject. I have several food preservation books that cover drying but now that I have my own Excalibur, I am going to buy a stand alone book on the subject.

Some produce like herbs and some fruits can be dried as is-just a quick rinse and pat dry and into the machine. Other things need pretreating, much as you would for freezing to halt the enzyme action that causes spoilage. A food like blueberries needs to have the skin broken to facilitate drying. Pricking the skin would be a laborious task so the berries are usually immersed in boiling water to split the skin. A lot of food that is prone to discoloring should be pretreated. Some foods should be peeled, some not. Here is the reason for a book. There are far too many variables to cover in a post.  Different foods should be dried to different stages. Some things will be dry but pliable; other dry and brittle. It is even possible to dry meat if it is jerked first. I have never done this but I would like to try. The re-hydration methods are also different. There are a lot of things you can eat at the dry stage. We love dried apples as is. Others must be soaked before cooking. Still others can go straight into a stew or soup. As I said. There is a lot to learn.

Storage of dried food is vital. Done wrong and the food picks up moisture from the atmosphere and will spoil. I store my dry food in food saver bags with the air removed or in dark jars. I sometimes use mason jars and keep those in a dark cabinet. I will sometimes put an oxygen absorber packet in the jar. I stored some of my tomatoes in olive oil. Those I refrigerated but I don’t know if I had to. I think dried food is perfect for preparedness. All you need is water and heat and you have a meal.

I just ordered some attachments for my food saver that will allow me to suck the air out of mason jars and wine and soda bottles. I am hoping to make fruit and vegetable leathers and store them in air free mason jars.

I know a lot of people use solar dehydrators. I am a big solar fan but I live in Western Massachusetts and our climate is just to unpredictable to count on for food preservation. If I lived in a hot dry climate, I would have one of those.

*If you are really interested in drying food, go the web site, dehydrating2store. It is run by a Mormon lady who knows her stuff. It is series of videos (I think 11 of them) that take you through the process. A word of warning. You will want an Excalibur and a Food Saver when you are done.

I expect a lot of my readers know a lot more about this subject than I do. I hope you will not be shy about chiming in. I consider this site a kind of friend’s chain letter. I add something, you add something. I go to your sites and you send friends to mine. It takes the place of letter writing in a way. It is also the only way for me to keep up a homesteading journal. I appreciate all of you who keep coming back and adding on.

By the way. This leads to something I have wanted to do for some time. I know I have visited some terrific sites that I have misplaced URL’s to. Could we do a check in with first names and URL’s?I will try to get them all together in a post. I want to update my blogroll and I know I am missing a few favorites.

 

I’m back

I am back, although using a very old computer and really disliking it. It is really quite frightening just how quickly we become dependaent on a new technology.

It has been a very busy week around here. A frost kept us busy protecting plants from the cold, then highs in the 90′s the next day kept us busy protecting them from the heat. The temperature swings are hard, especially on the new plants. We have several new fruit and nut trees that need special care. It is one thing to lose a tomato set when I have 4 dozen more but to  lose one of my plum trees would be a tragedy. I think we can finally hope we have had our final frost. I am so anxious to get out my tender crops. The greenhouse needs some cleaning and I can’t do it until the starts are moved.

Our piggies showed up this week. They are still at the adorable stage. I am already hearing from friends who can’t believe we area able to eat an animal we have hand raised. I think it is far more respectful to raise an animal humanely, giving it plenty of food, water, space and attention, then quickly dispatch it and use all of it to nourish my family, use the manure to enrich my soil, then use the surplus vegetables to feed another meat animal than it is to buy factory raised meat that is mired in cruelty from beginning to end, pollutes water and soil rather than replenish it and fills our bodies with questionable additives. That is a closed end system that only enriches agribusiness pockets. The kids are surprisingly accepting of the notion that the pigs are food, not pets. We take good care of them but we keep the end in sight. They have a lot of questions about the process which gives us the opportunity to talk about some important issues.

I cleaned out the two freezers this week. I found some treasures there. Two bags of peas, one of asparagus and several bags of beans. Perfect timing because the asparagus is the only vegetable besides the salad greens producing just yet. I found a huge bag of elderberries I had forgotten about so I spent yesterday getting another batch of wine going. I am expecting an infestation of fruit flies soon. When that happens, the carboys will have to go in the cellar but for now, I like keeping an eye on things.

Our final big project has been the bees. We are up to 7  hives in the enclosure, two of them belonging our neighbor, Tom. They are ready to be split again. We are getting a bit crowded and may need to either enlarge the space or start selling excess bees. We are also getting a lot of beeswax. I am looking for some good recipes for lip balms and salves. I have also started saving any small containers. In addition to our personal use, there is real gift potential for this product. Speaking of gifts-I had a niece get married and our gift to her was a set of glass cookware. I wrapped the gift in brown paper from some bags I had and, instead of a ribbon, I used a sprig of lavender I had dried last summer. The gift looked lovely and I felt good about giving it. Lot’s of people commented on how unique it was. It just illustrates that living lightly on the planet needn’t be about sacrifice as much as the opportunities that abound for a rich, creative life that is not dependent upon great outlays of cash.

Preparedness wise, this is a fun time of the year. I try to follow the one in one out principle for my stores but things invariably get put off and then I have to do a big shop for medical supplies or toiletries or something. In spring, the preps are all about the garden, the orchard and food preservation equipment. There is a happy, abundant feel to those things.

Our big spend this month is a new, double flue chimney. We have a wood furnace in the basement but we don’t use it because we have an old chimney with a single flu. We are updating so we can heat entirely with wood if necessary. Given what is happening with the price of oil, I think this is a good spend. We plan to be energy self-sufficient as well as nearly food self sufficient. There is no better preparedness.

 

a very good idea

Last night, after a fabulous dinner of local chicken breast stuffed with fiddle-heads, the first asparagus, the last of the mushrooms and cheese, a salad from the garden, a loaf of fresh bread, our canned peaches and, to drink, one of the last jars of home canned grape juice, I was speaking to my friend, Helene, on the phone. She gave me what I think is a terrific idea, one I am going to steal and expand upon. She pulled out an old day planner. Each day she keeps track of what was planted, foraged, and preserved, along with the location and other garden and food details. I plan to take this one step further. I am thinking of turning this into a kind of journal. I have a full size day planner that I never used because it was too big for me. It has room to record all of the above information alongwith some other things like weather, yields, animal and pest sightings. If I treat it as I do this blog, with a dedicated time for posting each day, I can put in preparedness information such as weather and flu alerts and odd supplies used. If I start today, on May first of next year, I will have a book that details life on the farmstead. It will provide an inventory of what food I have put up and what I have used. It will keep track of what we build and what we still need.

This won’t work for a lot of people but for folks like me who like to write and like to be organized, it will be fun and informative. What I will record today is that it is raining (finally!!!). The mushroom logs were soaked yesterday and have begun fruiting, the rest of the turnips will get planted between raindrops, I purchased quinoa seed for storage, we will eat another garden salad, the fiddleheads are poking up everywhere, the trillium is out and gorgeous and a lot of my herbs are out and looking very healthy.

My other project has been to design permanent row and plant markers.  I printed out the names in a lovely font on heavy photo paper and had the sheets laminated. Then I cut out the labels and stuck them in the tines of some old stainless flat-wear. You have to cut the labels into individual pieces before laminating so each is sealed on all four sides. These made really cute markers for my herbs especially. I am so motivated to get out there and start planting and weeding but I can not begrudge the rain. It has been dry and the hand watering is awfully time consuming. I am just thinking that markers like these would make terrific, low cost gifts.

 

experiment

I pulled all of the parsnips yesterday and was then conflicted about how to store/preserve them. I decided the thing to do was experiment a bit. I put one small bunch in the vegetable crisper in a paper bag. I planted another bunch down by the bees. They will apparently grow quite tall and have lovely flowers that bees love. I dehydrated another bunch. They are taking a while to dry but when finished, I will use the food saver and store them in a cool dark place. Some I plan to pulverize and add to mashed potatoes and soups for thickening. The final bunch was stored in food saver bags with all the air sucked out. I put these in the vege crisper. I love Parsnips but no one else really likes them much so this was good thing to experiment with. If one method turns out poorly, it won’t matter the way it would if we lost a bunch of broccoli or peas.

One of the fun parts of this homesteading preparedness stuff is the experimenting. Admit it. You all love to be the one to come up with some nifty idea to save time/money/labor or that results in amazing yields. I know there are folks out there who think this home making  stuff is deadly boring and some of it is. There is just no good way to spice up cleaning a toilet. But figuring out a recipe for home made cleaning solutions, then calculating the cost per ounce (thanks Heather) is alchemy. It makes me feel like a good witch.

It’s easy to run to the store and trade money for a mass produced product. It is much more stisfying to figure how to meet the need without spending money. My Phoebe outgrew a thick cotton dress that she wore over her bathing suit. It has a couple of stains on it and was not really good enough to pass on. I got a brilliant idea. I ran a seam across the bottom. Now using the wide shoulder straps as handles, I have a nifty little produce bag for my occasional trips to the farm stand.

From the old shutters Bruce  used to make a curing shed for squash and potaotes to tc the cobbled together  hot boxes, experimentation and innovation makes most small farms work.

 

spring greens

Although it is only 30 degrees out this morning, we are already harvesting spring greens. The greenhouse provides early lettuce, parsley, bak choi and tat soi but we are feasting on wild lambsquarters, ramps and sorrel as well. My yarrow is up and I see the first signs of peppermint.  The fiddlehead are just poking up. I am going on my first of the season mushroom walk next Saturday. If I had been a bit less cautious I would be eating pea sprouts too. I never get my peas in as early as everyone else and I hate to eat the shoots. I am always afraid I wont have enough peas.

I froze a lot of fiddleheads last year and didn’t eat all of them. The question is, does it make sense to eat frozen fiddles when ther are fresh ones just waiting to be picked? I know I am probably going to compost the frozen ones.

I usually get up in the morning and watch CNBC while I do my post and check my email. I am pretty optimistic by nature but it s getting harder to see an end to the economic woes we face. Every week with 600,000 plus more people filing for unemployment translates into more families who will be unable to heat their homes and put food on the table. It translates into the human costs of kids who can’t go to their proms and parents who can’t go to the doctor. The talking heads are joking right now about the cost of tin going up because people are hoarding food in their basements. I wonder if it occurs to them that some of those laid off workers may eat better this week because they thought to store some food when times were good.

 

dehydrating for storage

We have had a couple of cold, rainy days so I got to a few things I wouldn’t have done when the sun was shining. I did some more inventory update. I am vowing to be better about keeping track of what we grow and consume. I know I did very well with tomato sauce. I will not run out before the next tomato run. I am however, nearly out of applesauce. We eat a lot of it and I usually cut the amount of oil in quick bread in half and replace it with an equal amount of applesauce. With the amount of quick bread we eat, the sauce goes very fast. I have too much jelly and jam and not enough canned berries. I did go too heavy on the spiced pears. I will end up giving some of them away.  The peaches are finally winding down.

The other thing I did was to watch a video series on dehydrating. It was so inspiring that I am now inclined not to can any vegetables. My family really does not like them and they are very energy intensive to pressure can. They also use up a lot of jars which are pretty expensive. In a post oil world, we are going to have to preserve food using as little in the way of fossil fuels as possible. I can run a full dehydrator for a quarter a day and don’t have to babysit it the way I would a canner. I will still pressure can meat although I plan to give jerky a try.

I also cleaned out my cookbook collection and got a dedicated folder for the recipes I downloaded last year using foraged foods. I have a lot of fiddleheads, elderberries and mushrooms to use up. The recipes are useless if I can’t lay my hands on them. I advoacted the OAR system in my book and I have to sure to use my own advice.

My final job is to finish my freezer and fridge clean up. The girls are on spring break right now and I have put them to work. Right now, I have a break in the rain so I will put everything else aside and head out to the greenhouse to talk nicely to my seedlings for a bit.

I am going to order some oxygen absorber packets today. Combined with vacuum sealing, this provides a nearly oxygen free environment for dried foods. I should have no trouble keeping stored food for the year I want. There were some recipes for mixes in this video. When vacuum packed, they provide a just add water meal, a real help when the power is out.

 

new cars

 The feds just announced that they will be purchasing 17,500 new hybrid cars from the big three to replace an aging fleet of cars. The funds will come from TARP.

I applaud the sentiment. Fuel efficient vehicles are a good thing. Buying from an American company is a good thing. So why does the idea bother me so much?

I think it is because the program so clearly defines what I see as a huge problem in this world which is that, if you have a problem, you can buy and spend your way out of it. The idea of fuel efficiency is a false one. It will take far more energy to make and ship those cars than will be saved by their use. And what happens to the old cars? Somebody will either have to buy them (no fuel savings there) or crush them. A better policy decision would be to cut down the amount of miles driven by the current cars or to cut the overall number of cars they keep on the road. As for supporting American auto makers, 17,500 cars sounds like a lot of cars but it is a drop in the bucket, certainly not enough to stave off bankruptcy.

I think this is the way we approach a lot of problems. We assume that there is a consumption based solution before we look for a free/inexpensive/simple one. Take gardening. If you want to expand your current gardening space to include a blackberry patch, the consumption based solution would be to purchase a roto-tiller and break up the sod, purchase a load of compost to enrich the soil, then purchase  two dozen blackberry canes form a company located halfway across the country. The other solution would be to cover the existing grass with a piece of black plastic. We actually used a discarded pool cover to kill grass. After a season of no sun, the grass is gone and the soil ready to till. Now we get blackberry plants for free from a neighbor who is thinning hers. We give her some of our honey in exchange. We add lawn clippings, leaves, chicken sh… oops, manure and our own compost to the soil and plant the canes. We mulch with lawn clippings all summer and in the fall, enjoy blackberry jam on our breakfast toast.

This method takes a little longer. It’s messier and more work but the results are the same with little environmental impact and no cash outlay. In fact, it puts to good use some things that might otherwise wind up in the landfill.

I have seen any number of garden cloches for sale. They are mini green houses for tender, heat loving plants like tomatoes but I have good luck using recycled milk jugs. They last for many seasons, are free, work just fine and now we have a pile of jugs that do not end up in China for recycling. Win, win, win.

I’ll bet everybody has their own favorite tip for making do. As we face real challenges with energy and the economy in the future, the ability to find solutions for everyday problems that do not require a trip to a garden center or big box store may spell the difference between doing well and doing without.

 

what my time is worth

This a preparedness site but obviously, I write about other things. One of my favorite topics is frugal living. I know a lot of people who think they can’t afford to buy food in bulk so there is one connection to preparedness. The other is that it is important to prepare for an uncertain economic future and living below your means is a necessary component of this. One thing I often hear when I talk about how it saves money to garden, preserve food, cook from scratch and mend our clothing is that I have not considered what my time is worth in my calculations. “If you factored in the hours you spend, you will probably find you are working for a couple of dollars an hour,” is the most common remark.

Silly! First, the implication is that if I wasn’t gardening or cooking I would be doing something that earned a wage. I might have to pick up a part time job to help make ends meet but I would probably be stuck doing something I didn’t enjoy to earn money so I didn’t have to do something I do enjoy. Anyone else see a problem with this logic? And if I was working, I would have expenses like taxes, clothing, meals out and transportaion.  Much of my productivity would be leaving me to benefit others. If I grow tomatoes, I feed my family and have excess product to donate to others if I chose but it won’t be taken from me.

The next problem I have is with the concept of worth. I am not sure why so many people can only think of worth as having a dollar sign attached to it. What is it worth to sit on my deck on a summer morning and sip tea made from the mint I grew and sweetened with honey from my own hives? What is it worth to knead a loaf of bread while listening to a Radio Free Earth CD and watching my kids dance around the kitchen? What is it worth for Bruce to present me with a cedar chest he has built himself? I suppose he could haved worked for several weeks to earn the money to buy an artisan chest and given that to me. Would that have been more valuable? What is time spent with friends worth? Time in nature? Time with each other?