I know there are many preppers out there who are getting ready for "something" to happen.  While I think that listening/reading/watching them can be helpful, I don't know if something bad is coming at us or not.  However, I do think having a good supply of self safe food(s) available for 'just in case'.

Where I am living we get told at the beginning of 'storm season' (tornado season), we are told to have a emergency kit just in case we have one hit near us and there is no power what will you do for food and water?  So instead of just waiting for one instance of one season to hit you. Where I live in Missouri we could have a blizzard, if we do; and I live in a very rural area.  When would I receive help?  When would the roads be clear enough to get food from a store?  If the power went out after it thankfully I have a wood stove for heat.  However my cook stove is electric.

Look back at first Katrina, and then Sandy.  Both of them had issues with people getting food, Katrina was, pardon this; a clusterf###!  Then with Sandy parts of the cities were without access to food for a week.  What would you do in this situation?  The biggest problem for a city  is that 90% of your home is electric.  I know in the Chicago area most people have gas stoves and heat, unless you have matches what will you use to light your stove?

I would like to see people keeping some extra foods that are shelf stable that can be eaten without cooking, while I know this is very limited in scope for the people who are picky eaters.  But, let me ask you this.  What would you prefer?  Not having any food or having something you can eat though you do not like it?

When I go shopping I tend to buy an item or two that I am not planning on using right then.  It gets put in the pantry for later use, whenever I find tuna on sale or peanut butter I buy lots of it.  I don't like peanut butter, but if I had to I'd eat it.

Now with that said, I have a comment on something that has popped up all over the place.

#1 Buying MRE's for your emergency stash

#2 Buying tons of dried foods for your emergency stash

#3 forgetting to account for water

Lets start with #1... How many of you out there who think MRE's are a good idea have eaten them before?  I know I have only tried one type, Silver has tried many as he was in the military.  I was lucky the one I tried which I think was a chicken parma was good... not the best I'd ever had though.  I have been told by a few people (Silver included) that the tuna one is horrible, Silver thought it looked like and smelled like cat food.  Also each MRE is suppose to be 3,000 calories which for most people is the total calories you need.  The cost can go anywhere form $5-$12 a piece, which if you bought canned goods the MRE's would be more in cost.  You also need to check the dates on the MRE's as sometimes the ones you can buy are out of date... or they were rejected by the military.

#2 What good will dried anything do you if it needs to be re-hydrated with hot/warm water?  Or even cooked, if you have no way to heat or cook something?  I know dried fruits can be eaten as is, how long before you get ill from just eating fruits in an emergency situation?  Dried foods can be wonderful, but they need water to be edible aside from dried fruit... and sometimes the dried fruit needs water.  If you try to eat the dried foods dry, you will probably eat more than you should as they won't be very satisfying unless eaten in large quantities.  That said I do think they have their use, if you have the water available and the ability to cook the items that need cooking.

#3 I think this one is the most important, people don't tend to think of water when they store food for emergencies.  Now, I am the first person to say to not buy bottled water, however.  In the case of storing water for long term buy bottled water, you need about 3 gallons a person per day.  Which is a lot of water, and if the power is off there will be no water coming out of your taps, eventually in the cities the tanks where water is stored will run out.

Now some other things you should have for an emergency.  Extra blankets, if you have no heat you will need them to keep warm.  Also flashlights, WITH extra batteries; you'll need them at night and in dark corridors.  A fire extinguisher, a working one; also not a "kitchen sized" one as they don't put out anything  the average one lasts maybe 20-30 seconds.  What happens if you do manage to get your stove going and it catches on fire?  You'd need that extinguisher for that possibility.  I'd also suggest having something to entertain your kids if you have any, I know that when I was a kids power outages didn't bug me as I read like a book worm.  I know most kids are not like I was though.

You should also have a GOOD first aid kit, and I don't mean one of those under $20 ones at Wal-Mart.  They are not really helpful.  Ask your doctor what they'd recommend in one for emergencies.  Also maybe take a class on first aid, you never know when it might help.

Now please note... this is not a comprehensive list... nor is there any such things as a "magical list" that will work for everyone.  I am no expert on this stuff, but I know what makes sense to me; and what I have observed.  Make the decision for yourself.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...

 I know it's been a while since I have been on here.. over a year really. I thought it was about time I updated here as I have regular internet now. We tried out growing luffa gourds this last year and they did grow pretty good we got about 2 full sized sponges. One of the two had better seeds in it than the other. Funny thing about it was that the one with the better seeds is one I never noticed until we took the vines down once winter started. I did learn from it that it's a plant that while you need to thin some flowers the plant itself is pretty much self caring for. It is a voracious vine though, it tried to eat our electric pole.

We had tons of tomatoes this year and we have decided that the Cherokee orange purple smudge is the best for us. I have finally discovered why you need to trim the plants and cut back flowers. I have learned that if I don't understand why “they” say to do something I won't know until I figure it out myself.

I got my Tiger's eye beans to grow better than I thought, even though I didn't try to grow them. Odd how that the one I plant for “the heck of it” grew the best? Considering I can't find the seeds though I cannot eat them this year though, I have saved them all for next years planting. The “green bean” that I grew up growing.. well, it just didn't want to grow for me at all. I think we got maybe 20 beans and I planted ½ a pound of seeds. When I was a kid I could plant 10 seeds and get 10x's that.

My eggplants didn't do much of anything, as well as my bell peppers. The Rhubarb I ordered and planted grew a bit then quit on me. I hope they come back this year, we will see.

We have gotten the space for our house and our new chicken coop cleared fully. In 2 weeks we will be starting to buy the rebar to work on the house. We built a newer type of a barrel wood stove, we made it upright; and it takes up less than half the space. There is also no wasted space inside the stove, we also have the ability to cook on the top of it.

We also made an attempt at helping a friend out. A young man,who wants to be a woman who was living homeless. We invited her to live with us in exchange for being a “farm hand” to help me out with the day-to-day chores. It did -NOT- work out. I think it partly had to do with the person's age, and the desire of them to only play video games all the time. We just recently sent her to a place where she can spend tons of time playing video games with someone else 90% of the day.




So now I am hoping to keep this site up to date as my other blogs. Lets hope I do!




Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be....

 That lovely picture is of this morning’s harvest or if you will the product of my foraging, as I got them from a location I didn't plant intentionally. That is about 3/4's of a gallon of blackberries in one morning! They are being frozen until the season is over and I have some rose hips, then I am making some jam and maybe some syrup.

It made me think though, as I had help after I had gotten 2 pints already on my own by at first my youngest... then my oldest and then finally the middle child. I -LOVE- fresh blackberries, not as much as fresh strawberries; but hey nothing adds up to them.

To me there is nothing better than putting into my mouth a blackberry just off the bramble that has exploded into my hand from being sooo ripe. Sweet with a lite bitterness that comes from natural sugars. I did pause this morning when I tasted a particularly sweet one, with a moan escaping my lips. As oddly, considering modern life I prefer my sweets in the form of berries now. Don't get me wrong, I love chocolate... but it's just not the same.

I think many kids and adults miss something good when they don't eat something freshly picked, like fruit. It has it's own flavor and it's very unique. To me most of the processed sweets have all the same flavor, and it's missing something.

The other part that I was thinking on is how my kids pick berries. Had I handed them my berrying bucket and sent them out I'd have been lucky to get maybe a pint. ..and the thing is it would not be because they were eating while picking. Part of it is they don't seen them all on the brush. They also want to find the “perfect” berry. It really made me think when I realized that, as I just finished a book about primitive man(novel) and how they lived and that included gathering food.

If my kids had to rely on what we had found to eat.. they would wind up picking more of them. My youngest admitted that, so I told her then just think that way and we'll have tons of berries to make things with. One or two blemishes mean nothing, and partly dried out? Come on, people pay tons of money to buy dried fruits; pick them yourself. It'll do you some good to be out in the sun enjoying the fresh air... and grins getting covered in berry juice! It's an old family pastime, that I think needs to be revitalized.

People use to spend whole days going out “berrying”, and they'd bring a picnic lunch and the dessert would be the fresh berries with sometimes some home made cake. To me that sounds much better than going to the store and “foraging” for a nice looking package of berries. As that is what you are doing when you are in the store turning the berry packs all around to check every angle until you find just the right one that looks to be “perfect”. WOW.. I just realized where my kids' idea of perfection on berries comes from. As if you don't do “perfect” on ones in the store you are likely to have rotten berries.

I don't know if any of you remember seeing an older orange commercial a number of years ago from the orange growers. It had a woman explaining a ripe orange isn't always fully orange, which tech if it's green it's not ripe... but the point is most people have no clue what “ripe” is... I certainly don't know what a ripe wild blueberry looks like. So I am learning that, maybe true ripeness should be taught to all people; most of all children.

I hope everyone out there gets to experience the freshest of the season!

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...

This is half of my "horde" of green bush beans that I'm growing this year.  Aside from maybe 3 plants having slightly yellowed leaves everyone of them is very healthy and in flower.  I actually think they are putting out secondary flower stalks.

I am hoping to get lots of beans from them, I will try canning some.  I know I cannot eat commercial canned veggies as they make me ill, so Silver is hoping/thinking that home canned I could.   The thought is that maybe it's a preservative in them besides being too soft that is the reason for it.

I seem to have also issue(s) with over cooked ones as well so we are going to try raw packing them.  who knows maybe they will do well and I'll be able to eat them.  If I can't the kids and Silver certainly can.

Last year I had tried growing pole beans and I was sorely disappointed.  That's why I am doing bush beans this year.  I have grown "Blue Lake" bush beans for almost forever and I know they'll produce.  This year I am determined to have a good harvest from my garden.  As I said I do have my Tiger's Eye beans growing up front, we will see if I can get them to produce this year and if I can we will just go with those as they are also a dry bean.  Pinto style, which for us means chili.

This is one of the many cabbage plants I have growing, and this is one of the remaining three that I myself started.  I had started 6 of the Early Jersey Wakefield, but after some four-legged lawn mowers went through I only have maybe three of these and the red cabbages I bought.

These green ones are a tad behind my red cabbages, as the red ones have been heading for a few weeks and the greens have only been for about one week.  I am really hoping to be able to harvest them soon so we can have some cole slaw.  I love fresh cole slaw!

Oh pardon the picture quality as my camera is out of batteries and we keep forgetting to buy them so I used our phone to take these pics.

This is my volunteer squash, in flower (male flowers btw).  It has had I'd say about 8-10 flowers at this point and they have all been the "male" flowers.  I am waiting on the female ones to appears so I have a better idea as to what kind of squash it is.

Now like I said I think it's a Dark Star Zucchini, and next time I'll get a picture of those in flower as they are starting to get their flower buds now.  Which for me is a wonderful thing, I am hoping again that they produce lots of squashes for us.  

We got hooked our first year here eating for lunch a stir fry with two or more squashes in it and maybe some canned ham and a fresh herbs.  I really want to do that again, so because last year our squashes didn't do much past producing male flowers we didn't get any of those fun meals.

One other "Crop" that I am hopeful on is melons.  I love to eat melons and I have a wonderful recipe for a catulope jam that I made last year with half of a huge one that I bought.  I have some melons sprouting and .. considering I had tried some vine peach seeds, which at this point they all sprouted then withered.  I planted to see some of the melon seeds I bought last year.  I planted "Oran's melon" which is suppose to grow well in this state.

This is one of the two flowering heads on the one Elderberry that is blooming.  I do hope the other one blooms next year.  As you can see the flowers are starting to open up.  I am going to be watching this closely as I have no clue how long it takes for them to go from flower to ripe fruit.

I spent the early part of this morning doing the kids' early chores of feeding the animals (which in the summer they do).  I went out and took these pictures and I did a bit of pond digging.  Maybe I'll post some pond pictures next time.  A progression of what we have done so far.

I also checked my plants out and the Oran's melons are still very healthy, which is making me very happy.  i do hope they do well and we get melons, in some amount.  Even if we are overwhelmed by them.  I would not mind, because  if they do I'll just turn them into jam.

We've lost one of our chickens yesterday to I think a fox, and I'm wondering if maybe we've lost more than one.  As a number of days ago they had managed to get out under the fencing and there was tons of feathers all over their yard.  So after finding the dead one half pulled out of the fence and half eaten, I do wonder.

Well that's about ti for now.. I'm heading to wordpress and Blogger to put up updates there as well.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...