Thrift Stores

Recently, on my weekly visit to the Salvation Army Thrift Store, they were having a $5.00 Bag of Books sale on.  I was able to pick up some useful books about gardening in my area, plus some other interesting tomes I had previously considered buying such as a book of poetry by Robert Service.  I particularly love "The Cremation of Sam McGee" which my grandfather used to recite from memory.

I think that most of us who are prepping take full advantage of our thrift stores as someone else's trash just might turn out to be a treasure that helps us become more self-reliant.  Just the other day, I found a hand cranked meat grinder with all the attachments on a mounting board for a fraction of the cost of new.  I have also seen a hand-operated knitting machine, treadle sewing machines, and other manual treasures discarded in favour of electric devices; also paper plates and plastic cutlery, canning jars and sealing lids still in the boxes unopened, hand tools of good quality, real wool woolens, kerosene lamps, oil lamps, camp stoves, a wide variety of camping gear, backpacks, and all at reasonable prices compared to buying new. 

Another great source for prepper items is yard sales, and even dumpsters.  Right now, I have professional pizza pans that were rescued from the dumpster behind a pizza shop in town.  Some elbow grease and they were as good as new.

In my town, every spring we have a weekend "swap" event, where folks put out things they no longer have a use for at the curb, and other folks cruise around and pick up stuff they think they could use.  After the two day event, the "unswapped" items are collected by the city and donated to a local charity.  Check in the papers, or the city's web site to find out if there are events like this where you live.

Remember, prepping doesn't mean going out and spending big bucks on special gear.  It means developing the survival mindset that enables you to see the value in someone else's junk and re-using, recyling, re-inventing.  It means seeing opportunities where other people see none.  It means reaching out and grabbing opportunities to do for yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.  And sometimes it means climbing over obstacles nay-sayers might put in your path. 

A great many sites out there are very focused on selling you things to prep with, but really, do you really need to spend a great deal of money in order to be prepared?  No, I don't believe so.  Rather, if you are frugal, and use your money wisely, you can be prepared for many of the "negative events" that life and the universe can throw at you without spending a great deal more than you did before you realized that you need to become more self-reliant.  Rather, you will be spending your money differently.

For this reason, I do recommend that you look not just at prepper sites, but also at sites about how to make your dollar stretch further, on how to simplify your life, and live frugally.  Read the blogs by people who can foods for fun, and tell you how to do it.  Check out the blogs of folks who camp, and hunt, and fish for fun.  These folks don't think of themselves as preppers, but really, many of these folks have a survival mindset. 

For example, one fellow who hikes and blogs about his various treks posted about how he started using socks to house a lot of his smaller pack items which allowed him to move more quietly when he wished to be able to photograph wildlife.  He also found that socks provided cushioning for delicate gear such as the lens of his cameras; and at need, he also had additional extra socks for his feet, to use as oven mitts, and to carry found items.

Food, Canning and Other Ruminations

Recently, I was at the second hand emporium and I came across a great find, a pressure canner with all the bits and pieces intact, including a new (still in the package) gasket and a replacement safety valve.  Wow!  I immediately bought it even though hubby complained that I already had one.  If one is good, two is great.

Today, I tested it to make sure that the gasket made a good fit, and to determine what heat level I need to put the burner at once I have pressure up.  I am pleased to report that it worked well, and being one of the weight style canners, I didn't have to worry about getting a gauge calibrated.

I have been reading up on canning things I've never tried canning before, such as bread, cake or butter.  Yes, I know that the experts say don't do it.  For example, at the University of Georgia, some experts did a study on canning cake.  They took some bacteria that they knew isn't killed by high temperatures, deliberately introduced it to the cake batter, baked and sealed it, unsealed and tested it.  The report does not actually state that the cake was subsequently processed in a pressure canner.  Naturally, the heat-resistant bacteria survived the experience. 

And yet, you can buy canned bread!

Similarly, the experts advise against canning butter because of botulism.  For example, you can read the material from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia on this topic.  However, they do not address the matter of those who recommend processing the canned butter in a pressure canner with the same directions one would use for any fatty meat/fish product.  No actual research has been done on canning butter.



So, what it boils down to is that you have to decide whether or not you will take a chance with these canning practices, keeping in mind that some botulism cases have actually been caused by commercially canned goods.  Back in the day, people were aware that there were dangers inherent in the canning process.  Nevertheless, before the advent of electricity and freezers, it was the best method available for storing foods.  So, people took their chances.

Before canning, a lot of the methods of storing foods over the winter involved caching food in a cellar, or a hole in the ground, or a cave, or an unheated building.  A lot of this food suffered from the depredations of rodents, who not only nibbled on the foods, but left behind disease-ridden calling cards, and fleas (which also carried diseases).  They frequently didn't have clean water to drink, and didn't know why they got sick.

We do know about these disease vectors, and so we can work to overcome them, but the bottom line is, life is not really safe.

My personal take?  I think I'm going to try pressure canning butter like it was a nice fatty bit of meat, 75 minutes per pint, 90 minutes per quart at 10 lbs pressure.  Update:  After reading this post by Bonny of Opportunity Farm on Safe Survival Canning over at the Survivalist Blog.net, I'll only try canning stuff that I know is tested.  Like most, I have an aversion to dying, or seeing someone I love die.  After all, preparedness is all about 'better safe than sorry', isn't it.

Update:  May 2011 - after doing more research, I'm looking into making and storing ghee.  Once the milk solids have been removed from butter, clarified butter or ghee, can be stored for a significantly longer time.  Check out this article here (a .doc file). 

But I'm also still going to look at getting in some commercially canned butter or butter powder:















Or butter powder:

Survival Mom

I was very excited to learn that Survival Mom is writing a book on basically the same things she writes in her blog.  She is one of my favourite bloggers, and when I grow up, I want to be just like her.  Congratulations!

Water Supply, more words of wisdom from M.G. Kains

Chapter 15, of Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management, is about the water supply.  M.G. starts by talking about his experiences with a variety of cisterns that he'd lived with over the years, and in one paragraph, he encapsulates all the mistakes one can make with putting in a cistern to harvest rain:

"At various times I have lived in houses where the primitive rain barrel furnished family needs and reared mosquitoes; where the shallow cistern provoked profanity every winter because holes had to be chopped in the ice and from which the water had to be lifted by a "sweep", "the old oaken bucket," or hauled, hand over hand, by rope and pail; a "chain-pump"; where a deep, unprotected cistern was built without provision for drainage and had to be cleaned of noisom sludge, dead toads, mice and other gruesome ingredients every summer; where there was a "filter cistern" which could not be cleaned (!) because of inaccessibility; where an attic tank filled direct from the roof collected leaves, soot, dirt and bird droppings; and where, in several houses, the water had to be pumped by hand either to a tank in the garret or a pressure tank in the cellar."

I have read a number of blogs where the authors planned to use a cistern to harvest rainwater, and this paragraph brought these folks to mind.  I've also seen some neat instructables from those who have actually made working rain collection systems.  Here are a couple of links to some manuals about creating rainwater catchment systems:


The Texas Manual of Rainwater Harvesting
Rainwater Harvesting Systems for Montana
Harvesting Rainwater for Landscape Use, University of Arizona
Rainwater Harvesting, Practical Action Organization

This interesting page details one family's experiences with using rain barrels:

http://www.kidsfromkanata.ca/files/rainbarrels.html

And here's another page from a fellow building a custom tank in his father's garden:

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Water/WooTank/wootank.htm

In fact, visit Instructables and do a search for rain barrels.  There are lots of ideas for those that are handy.  In conclusion, there are some books that come highly recommended for those that are looking to build a water supply system based on rainwater:























































Art Ludwig has also written some great books on re-use of "greywater":















This particular blog entry also points out some of the pitfalls of gathering rain from a roof:

Blogs and Blooms

Here on my island, we've been complaining about how much rain we've had over the holidays.  Ironic really, as we will undoubtedly suffer a shortage of rain in July, and August.  We so rarely have freezing weather, it seems positively wasteful to watch the water that got away flowing off into the little swale behind the house.