Freeze dried meats are one of the top items I recommend storing for potential long-term emergencies. Even if you hunt or currently raise animals for meat, their continued availability in a bad situation is not guaranteed. During the Great Depression last century, for example, there wasn't a fish in a stream or a deer in the woods for many miles around cities and towns during the worst years. Thus it makes … [Read more...]
My February preps have included adding bulk Redmond Clay and Real Salt to our long-term storage/ survival preps. While I've used RealSalt for years, I only recently learned through a friend about the clay products. After the photo below, I explain what I added to my preps, how much I bought, and why. (This is NOT a sponsored post and I am not affiliated with the company or products -- all opinions are my own … [Read more...]
Thanks to a great tip from All Things Target, I made a beeline for the Sporting Goods section at 8 am this morning when my local Tar-get opened (I was already in town and had some items to return anyway...). Well, I found some great survival kit/ bug out bag items at amazing prices: Here's what I got, all at 70% off original prices: Two 2-pack Coleman mini LED EPod lights ($9.98 paid $2.98 each). These … [Read more...]
We're planning a larger garden in 2013, with fruits and vegetables and herbs and squash and onions and potatoes galore. We want to eat better, save money, avoid GMO's and beat rising grocery prices. And so we will garden and grow our own, to eat throughout the spring and summer and fall, and hopefully have enough bounty to preserve for the winter. The seed, gardening and poultry catalogs I ordered are trickling … [Read more...]
Reports are out that the cost of food will likely rise 2-4 percent in 2013, about double the reported inflation rate. This will be felt first in the fresh meat department, on dairy shelves and produce sections. Within a few months, the cost of processed and packaged foods will also rise. While last summer's droughts are blamed for much of the predicted price increases, with the USDA stating that "most of the … [Read more...]
After our hogs hung for two nights and a day, they were ready for the primal cuts. Rather than re-invent the wheel and explain how we did it, I'll share here an exceptionally good video series on hog butchering. Part 1: Primal Cuts of the Midsection Part 2: Shoulder and Front Leg Part 3: Rear Leg We are still learning and honing our skills. Ours looked like this: And here's the front … [Read more...]
As part of our work to become more self-sufficient, we've learned how to raise pigs and butcher and process them at home. In a true survival situation, it would likely be much more difficult and expensive to get piglets, but we have friends with several sows and a boar and could hopefully continue to buy or barter with them. This year, we bought two black Tamworth mixes. A few weeks ago, we turned our hogs … [Read more...]
Long-term food storage refers to the shelf life of pantry edibles, not the amount of time you can survive on them (unless you've got 10 years' worth of wheat and #10 cans in your root cellar, and really, who does?). I suggest storing food for emergencies that may last a day, a week, months or even a year, and because you never know when that need will arise, it's important to stock foods with a long shelf … [Read more...]
Last winter, thousands of commuters on the East Coast became stranded on roads overnight in the freezing cold when a massive storm system moved over the region during rush hour, blanketing the area with snow and ice and rendering roadways impassable. Many ran out of gas, were not dressed for the overnight lows and had no food or supplies with them. They were unprepared, en masse. Every year, blizzard and … [Read more...]
I started this post months ago, somewhere in the middle of what appeared to be a very uneventful hurricane season here on the East Coast. As often happens, it stayed unfinished for quite some time (as did my own hurricane preparedness plans). And then one of the largest and most destructive hurricanes of all time made landfall in late October -- our now-infamous Hurricane Sandy. On October 29, 2012, tropical … [Read more...]
