Posted on 02/26/2018 12:12:20 PM PST by CottonBall
I’ve been missing the vast amount of information on prepping, survival, camping, simple cooking, the old ways of doing just about everything – all the things nw_arizona_granny knew so much about and shared with us, along with numerous other posters with a vast array of skills and knowledge.
We have our various related-threads here, a recipe thread, a gardening thread, and even a prepper thread. They are all great and I don’t mean to take anything away from those and the hard work their owners put in.
But I was missing a place to talk about ALL those things, to get the camaraderie that we used to have on granny’s thread.
I learned how to can on those threads! The pressure canner was not my friend, I thought, but I bought one and stared at it for a month, intimidated. Then I read the directions for another month. But with the help and encouragement of posters on granny’s threads, I jumped in and now have my very own food storage room in the basement with lovely jars of shelf-stable meats, vegetables, and fruit. When we moved, I fashioned my food storage room – and insisted upon having a basement – from what I learned on her threads. Getting started gardening was from her threads. Making my own cleaning products….the list is endless.
So I thought I would take the chance and start another comprehensive prepper thread and see how it goes. I used to have granny’s ping list since I made one of the threads for her, but alas, with numerous computer changes, I cannot find it. So please pass this onto any posters you think might be interested.
We’ll just keep it running until..whenever. Granny created a new thread at 10,000 posts or so. I do like the idea of having ONE thread to go to – because often I cannot find or keep track of the weekly threads. I won’t be posting lots of recipes or tidbits myself – to any mods concerned about the size of this thread. I’d just like a place to chat, post questions, post ideas, make new prepping friends.
Here are granny’s threads, if anyone wants to peruse them:
nw_arizona_granny’s Thread #1
To drain your house lines, put containers under all the faucets and turn them on. Same process as winterizing a house.
Blue plastic barrels MUST be food grade. Need to be careful. DuPont used blue barrels to ship hydrogen peroxide. I remember seeing hundreds in a storage facility. They couldn’t get any takers, not even recyclers.
That sort of depends on your situation.
If you’re stuck in the city with a bunch of other desparate, thirsty people you might be in trouble.
I have a ~half million gallons pond in my front yard and a creek down the hill.
When I was a little kid there was a cistern at my grandparents house that had a hand pump. Want a drink? Three cranks on the handle and there it is.
I have a walk in closet. He cleans up and just stuffs any thing and everything into the closet. I have walnuts on top of cardboard in the upstairs dining room.
I just had him take the chainsaw out of the room with the weight machine. He said he wanted to leave it there temporarily—that was 3 weeks ago—On the bed downstairs he has a bunch of tools and equipment—drill, bits, nails, screws etc. It’s awful. If you have an empty space, he will fill it up, unless you actively move it—daily and hourly.
Still working on this. We have a well, but need electricity for the pump. What we do have:
We have an above ground swimming pool with water from the roof being collected. It’s 4000 gallons. We have a spigot on it with a hose and use it to water the gardens during our dry season-gravity. We live on a hill and the pool is uphill from all the gardens. This water can be treated/filtered.
We have big Berkey with extra filters—these also work for radiation. We have tablets for water treatment as well as portable water filter bottles we got from LDS on-line store with extra filters enough to filter 600 gallons.
In addition, we have dry powder to make bleach. We have stored in the 5 gallon jugs and some gallon jugs water purchased for immediate drinking/use about 50 gallons.
Plans for the future: Standby generator to run the well pump. Solar and or Wind power for the well pump. Depends on how expensive.
Also looking into options for using manual effort. Last ditch effort—will get one of those narrow “rocket” buckets to lower into the well for water.
We have 20 acres north of town with a creek that has water year round. This could be treated as well.
If your water table is high enough or if your geology permits it, you can have a shallow well dug and an old fashioned hand pump on it. I think your local well people can drill a test hole for you and check it. Not sure what that costs but if you think SHTF is moderately possible it might be worth a few phone calls.
One of the things I keep wanting to experiment with involves ways to harvest water from the air. There are several ways to condense humidity, but I’m hoping to find one that can be built with easily-available parts, and that doesn’t require electricity. I may have stumbled on one, but I won’t know for sure until I test it. Google the term “fog harp” to see what I mean.
This summer, I’ll be building a few fog harps, with different materials for the strands, to see which is the most practical. I’m hoping UV-resistant thread works well enough, since it’s cheap enough to make a lot of harps with. But I’ll be testing with metal wire as well.
My grandparents had a cistern at a couple of the different places they lived. Their cistern was not considered safe to drink.
We had to walk across the street and Pump water from the neighbor’s well.
Our drinking water was in a bucket with a dipper located next to the kitchen stove.
When our electric goes off, that first thing I do is put buckets or pitchers under the faucets and drain the lines. That’s in case someone forgets and flushes the toilets.
We actually have 4 toilets, so if we had to restrict flushes to one a day or so—could last a while. Plus it only takes about 2 gallons to get a good flush—we have that in rain barrels and swimming pool if push comes to shove.
Interestingly, with the exception of one major storm, we have never had to use more than the water we drained from the faucets—several gallons—could have collected more, but usually don’t need it.
We have drained our water heater before—that had a spout at the bottom and was pretty easy to drain.
Have you seen those bath tub bobs—plastic container that fits right inside the bathtub.
I live in a gravity fed community. I watched my parents well pump crap out in the middle of the winter. What a pain in the ass that was.
That is a problem. We have had several people whose wells went dry. Fortunately, Hubby asked the drillers to make ours extra deep.
We are very conservative with our water usage always and especially during dry periods or longer periods of drought.
Last time we had some extreme lack of rain, and the county banned any burning, we had to let our garden burn up, because we wouldn’t risk using the well water. We did haul water for the fruit trees from our daughter’s house-city water. That’s also when we bought an above ground swimming pool —end of summer sale — to collect rain water from the roof.
I couldn’t believe that our neighbor was wasting water cleaning out his downspouts and watering his lawn. I went over and asked him if he was aware that several of our neighbors in the past, had wells that went dry.
That’s the problem with our so called subdivision. Every one here is on a well and your neighbor’s use has an impact on the water table.
Oh, my! I love this idea! For veggie stock, I toss the scraps into a freezer bag until there’s enough to make stock. For chicken, I use the bones of a rotisserie from Sam’s. But you just taught me a good way to make beef stock! Thank you!
Please add me to your list. I am very new to prepping but have started my prepper pantry, make my own dry laundry detergent (which works well!),and still learning more skills. So happy I found this thread!
I just happened to be looking at those beautiful steaks and thinking what a shame it was to waste all that beef and fat on the end when the idea hit me.
The flavor is in the fat anyways, so why not use it?
That would be great for bone in rib eyes, too. They’d come out to about the same price as the boned ones when you take the bone out and you get the use out of the bones then instead of just throwing it out.
I hate wasting ANYTHING.
I like the Ball jars and love the wide mouth.
They are so much easier to clean.
Good find there.
I use canning jars for almost everything, even for sugar and stuff in my pantry.
Beats having mice eat holes in bags.
I put my spices in canning jars and put them in the freezer. THey are hermetically sealed and never get freezer burn or pick up any nasty freezer aftertaste.
A friend told me recently that she heard you shouldn’t freeze canning jars as it make them more prone to breaking, but I never noticed a problem.
I use canning jars when we buy maple syrup.
I pour the syrup into a pot and bring it to a boil.
I heat the jars in the oven to 200F and bring the lids to a boil and then turn it off, and then when the jars are up to temp, fill the jars, put the lid on, screw down the band and set aside to cool. No processing needed.
The syrup never gets moldy and never crystallizes; it keeps indefinitely. I’ve seen the stuff in plastic bottles get moldy and the stuff in cans de-tin the cans, ruining the syrup.
I can everything possible as then I don't have to worry about losing it all if there's a power outage long enough to compromise the freezer.
And should that unfortunate event happen, I have my pressure canner and will press that into service pressure canning everything that I can to save it.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one using 6 year old canned food.
:)
I found some old applesauce and just reprocessed it as apple butter and canned it up *fresh*.
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