Brad was gone all last week, so I really didn't get much food drying done. Ok, I didn't get any done LOL. But I am thawing out a bunch more beef to do my drying this week. We are having a problem keeping the jerky on the shelf because we keep eating it! It's a good snack and I really can't complain because with all the running around the kids need the protein and salt for sweating.
Also looking at how much food we have int he freezer and deciding how to organize it better. A deep freeze is nice but in a power outage we would lose a LOT of the cold if we had to open it once and get things out.
Its been really warm here, almost time to redo the 72 hour go bags with spring/summer clothing. a couple of months early, but what we have in there now will work either way!
Summer is fast approaching and we are trying to figure out how to raise a good garden. In years past we have planted in our back yard but 2 growing trees back there have now made it a shade garden and we haven't found too many vegetables that enjoy quite that much shade. We are thinking of barrel gardening to see how that works, or even buckets. I am hoping to grow a bunch more herbs again this year as well, we rain out of spaghetti seasoning and buying organic herbs at the store is expensive! Inever knew how much money I was saving with my nice little herb gardens.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
This week in review
Well we managed not to eat all the jerky we made last week. I am still not sealing it though because we are steadily enjoying it. Have 5 lbs more in the dehydrator right now, I plan on sealing that up to start the stash and rotation. I think the time to dry fruits and such will be in the summer and when they are in saeson. Right now fruit is far to expensive in quantity.
We also got our medical supplies more organized into some jump kits and extras. It helps being a medic for the first aid stuff, we know exactly what we need and the best way to put it into bags and storage. We even are putting some basic medicines in our 72 hour kit, Aspirin, Motrin and Benadryl. We will have to see if anything else would help. Plus we are emergency medical trained already and we can start training the kids while they are young. Funny thing is Pierce doesn't do well with blood, so we need to figure out a way to work around that and get him more used to it.
As a side note we discovered raw honey is excellent for skin wounds, we used it on some of Pierce's scratches and they healed up in a matter of days and the scars are less than usual. There is even some special honey you can buy for it called Manuka honey but it is like 20 bucks a pound so for now we are sticking with our local raw honey. Plus honey is good for thousands of years so storage is not a problem! Mercola.com had a great write up on it last week.
I think the biggest thing I am learning is that couponing concepts work really well for storing up items, buy stuff when it is cheap and rotate it in when it is expensive. This may actually help our grocery budget as well as making us prepared for emergencies. The start-up costs are done, now it is just coming out of our regular grocery budget. Bonus for learning to be more self sufficient!
We also got our medical supplies more organized into some jump kits and extras. It helps being a medic for the first aid stuff, we know exactly what we need and the best way to put it into bags and storage. We even are putting some basic medicines in our 72 hour kit, Aspirin, Motrin and Benadryl. We will have to see if anything else would help. Plus we are emergency medical trained already and we can start training the kids while they are young. Funny thing is Pierce doesn't do well with blood, so we need to figure out a way to work around that and get him more used to it.
As a side note we discovered raw honey is excellent for skin wounds, we used it on some of Pierce's scratches and they healed up in a matter of days and the scars are less than usual. There is even some special honey you can buy for it called Manuka honey but it is like 20 bucks a pound so for now we are sticking with our local raw honey. Plus honey is good for thousands of years so storage is not a problem! Mercola.com had a great write up on it last week.
I think the biggest thing I am learning is that couponing concepts work really well for storing up items, buy stuff when it is cheap and rotate it in when it is expensive. This may actually help our grocery budget as well as making us prepared for emergencies. The start-up costs are done, now it is just coming out of our regular grocery budget. Bonus for learning to be more self sufficient!
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