My Current Food Storage

Continued from here

It's taken quite a while to get this much extra food stored after getting completely rid of all of our original food storage.  This house isn't the smallest house overall that we've lived in but there just isn't much for storage of any kind.  No front door closet, no back door closet, no closet on the main floor at all and only 2 closets in 4 bedrooms upstairs. 

This is a little space that I managed to find in the kitchen.  The bottom and top cupboards have pots and pans and misc. stuff that I really have nowhere else to put.  Even with these cupboards, we had to add shelves as there were very few. 

This cupboard contains veggies (kernel corn, creamed corn, carrots, peas, green and yellow beans, mixed veggies), cherry pie filling, relish, beef and chicken soup powder, pork and beans, lots of different soups, tin foil etc., teas and a bit of coffee.

I'm amazed when I look at this cupboard at how much of it could be homemade.  I like canned soup but I really like homemade soup more.  It's a lot more work but worth it.  Home grown and home canned veggies, homemade relish and pork and beans - I'm amazed at how different this cupboard would look filled with all of those items.

These shelves are in the new laundry room (anywhere you can get space!) that we built into the garage and were taken from the original laundry room.  That room was in the front corner of the house, getting the wind from 2 different directions and, having no insulation and no heat, was very cold.  The hydro was inside the room instead of inside the walls, as was the plumbing.  I have no idea how the washer pipes didn't freeze. 

I had put my extra food storage in the back of an upstairs closet but it was super hot in summer and freezing in winter so the new laundry room makes more sense as it is heated.  It isn't finished but it is heated!

I see lots more things on these shelves that could be homegrown, homemade or home canned.  I do freeze some of these things but it would be nice to see these shelves filled with canning jars.  In the bottom photo, you can see the dreaded pineapple - yes, always with us!

My Christmas Wish List includes a pressure cooker, a dehydrator, a zoom lense for my camera.......!

Food Storage Interrupted

Continued from here

www.homestead-store.com

The way I'd like my canning shelves to look someday!

Things went along swimmingly well, the stock growing and shrinking, until we sold the farm in 2008 and did not have another farm to move into.  A farm needs to be bought in the spring so that the farmer can get a crop in for the summer in order to make mortgage payments.  Any later and he'll be making payments on the mortgage but not getting any income from the land.  The selling owner will try to rent the land out to a neighbor, just in case his farm doesn't sell that spring, as the farmer would like to recoup a bit of money for that year's mortgage payment.  Farm prices had risen drastically and try as we might, we couldn't find a farm that we could afford.

In the end, we knew that we were going to have to buy or rent a house in town (not an idea that we cared for!) until a farm came along.  Because we didn't want to sign a long term lease for renting, renting was no longer an option and we ended up having to buy a small house in town that was not fixed up.  It was built in the 50's and had a lot of character and although it was on the smaller side, by the time we had finished fixing it up (character left intact), the whole family was in agreement that if we could have just picked it up and taken it with us, we would have.

1.5 years later, we found a farm (this one) and were able, after some time, to sell the house in town.  The buyer, a young woman in her early 20's, wanted us out in 3 weeks!  Thank goodness saner heads prevailed (her parents and the real estate agent) and convinced her that this was impossible for anyone with children and she gave us a full 2 months.  But, of course, the farm would not be available for another 2 months after that so we needed to rent a place for that time.  This time, we were able to rent from DH's relatives who were moving into their house but not for a few more months.  This is the only time that the timing was perfect!

Confusing?  I know.  I knew ahead that it was going to be confusing and I tried to downsize as much as possible, throwing away, selling, giving away, donating but moving from a 190 acre farm to a .5 acre lot in town (that's being generous!) meant that there was a lot of stuff that had nowhere to go.  The problem was that we knew that we would need all of the kids' stuff still and all of the farm equipment, gardening supplies, etc. so there was a lot that we were stuck with but couldn't use at the time.

The one thing that I did not want to needlessly cart around with us, house after house, was box after box of canned, boxed and bagged food (such as rice).  I stopped buying food months before we moved and we ate up everything in the fridge and freezers except for DH's canned pineapple.  He had and still has, a fixation with them and if canned pineapples are on sale even now, we hide the grocery flyer from him!  We carted those pineapples around with us from house to house! 

We also had some leftover containers of hand lotion.  I thought I liked it then realized I didn't, no one did, and we were stuck with 7 or 8 of these large containers.  One of the downsides of food storage, I guess, is trying something new, buying multiples of it while it's on sale because if it's an unfamiliar item, you don't know when it'll be on sale again and then finding out that you don't like it, no one likes it and what do you do with it?

All of this moving meant the eventual death of my food storage.  I felt like I'd lost a friend (OK, a slight exageration) but I did lose something that I had worked hard on and I really had no idea, looking ahead down the road, when I would get the chance to do it again.  It wasn't as though someday I'd get to just carry on.  I had to start over completely - unless you consider unwanted hand lotion and oh-so-sick-of-it pineapple to be food storage!

Food Storage - Setting Up and Learning

My food storage in 1999 was not on par with the preppers of YouTube fame but then, that wasn't my goal.  My goal was simply to have enough on hand to outlast our normally severe winter weather and not be stuck in a house full of kids and no supplies.  That goal has never changed but I have maneuvered through some detours along the way. 

It took awhile to convince DH to build some shelves in the basement of our 2nd farmhouse.  We had a wet basement in a 7-year-old addition built onto the century-old log farmhouse by the previous owners.  The drains had not been put in around the foundation of the house properly and the water marks were over 2' high on the basement walls and the insulation and drywall were rotted.  This addition had been built for the previous owner's son who wanted his bedroom in the basement for his teenage privacy.  He never did sleep there.

Even with the sump pump going steadily, we still had a few 'incidents' every year.  DH was afraid of losing some or all of the food but in the end, the water never rose above 3-5 ".  Also, all he could see was $ signs for both the cost of the shelves themselves and the extra food.  He finally built them and it took a while but he slowly began to see the usefulness of having them stocked.  We used new pine boards for the upright sides and melamine boards leftover from a previous project for the shelves.  The pine worked great but the melanine was not strong enough to hold much and we had to constantly put more wood underneath to hold the melanine up.  Lesson learned - no melanine again for shelves.

I kept a list of everything down there but I did that, I guess, for fun, just to see how quickly or slowly we went through things.  At this point in time in 1999 here, as there was no YouTube, etc. or anyone that I knew of who was doing this food storage thing, I was completely winging it, totally flying by the seat of my pants.  I had no idea whether or not I needed a list or would ever use one but I didn't want to get months into buying food and regret not having one.  Keeping that list was a good idea in the end as I still have it and will refer to it again in the future.

I learned that some things just don't keep that well such as pickles.  Not for us, anyway.  They were soft after only a number of months.  I learned that we don't like peas much as they would sit on the shelves for forever when the kids were allowed to choose the veggies.  I used that knowledge to determine how many pea rows to plant in subsequent gardens and how to store them after.  I froze them in little snack baggies for a nice size to add to soups, stews and casseroles instead of in a sandwhich baggie or large freezer baggie to use as an actual veggie for a meal.  We went through a lot more ketchup and maple syrup than I'd expected and therefore still make sure that we have lots of both.

More later...

My Food Storage (and the Tightwad Gazette)

13 years ago after the birth of baby #6, I started storing food.  Those were the days before YouTube, universal prepping, bloggers sharing ideas, Twitter, Facebook, for the most part even the internet.  My ideas came from a wonderful teacher, author, mom, wife, newsletter producer, frugal pioneer named Amy Dacyczyn who inspired me to think long term.

 I bought my copy of her first book, The Tightwad Gazette, from a sale table in 1996 and her second book, The Tightwad Gazette #2, a short time later.  These books were printed in 1992 and 1995 respectively and are still not outdated.  I doubt they ever will be as there will always be people looking for a more frugal life.  I found her books approximately 2 months before she stopped her newsletter, unfortunately as I had been so looking forward to signing up for it so I considered myself lucky to have the books.  Now, her 3rd book, The Complete Tightwad Gazette, is calling my name!

Everyone has their own reasons for their choice of lifestyle and Amy was no different.  She and her husband wanted to have a large family and to be able to buy a special home - a pre-1900's New England house with barn attached and she didn't want to work away from the family in order to achieve this.  They became spendthrifts in order to save enough money while living on 1 income to be able to reach their dream.

 

While I was not looking for the same kind of home or the exact same dream, there was still plenty of information in Amy's books to help me.  One of her ideas was about buying items on sale in order to be able to afford extra of that item without going overboard with the spending.  Having extra parts for both indoor and outdoor equipment meant being able to walk to a neatly-organized shelf, pick up the part and fix the broken equipment - IMMEDIATELY. 

No down time and a full pantry of food meant a better life.  With 6 kids (9 and under) in an old farmhouse in an area where it snowed - a LOT - I was tired of living hand to mouth -sort of.  We always had food, especially meat.  There wasn't much choice of meat, mind you - all beef or all chicken or all pork and a few times, all lamb - but at least there were usually 2 freezers full of meat.  (The lack of variety gets really tedious after awhile, though).  I was tired of running out of other things like baby formula, diapers, condiments, canned foods such as tomatoes, beans, etc. to make dishes such as lasagna, spaghetti, shepherd's pie, chili, etc.  We usually were without hydro 4-5 times a year due to blizzards and even though we had a good generator, we couldn't get to town for days at a time.  If the snow ploughs refuse to go out, you're not going anywhere, either!

I'd visit farmer friends growing up and watch them go to the shelves in the basement to retrieve canned fruit for dessert whereas my mom always had to actually make the dessert for company - we didn't have that kind of thing 'on hand'.  I would follow them into their 'larder' or 'pantry' and even then wish that we had one.  It didn't seem practical in the city though, to store extra food as we were surrounded by grocery stores that we could walk to and, of course, dozens more that you could drive to plus our house was not that big and we had no basement.   That didn't stop me from thinking that those words - larder and pantry - were pretty cool words.  Talk about invoking pioneer images!

 www.pioneerfoodie.blogspot.com



More later...