Laine's Letters: Food Insurance

Dear Sisters, We have car insurance in case we get into a car accident. We have life insurance should something happen to us and our daughter needs to be taken care of. We have house insurance should we have a fire or storm and need to rebuild. We have health insurance should we need to be hospitalized or see a doctor. But another insurance that is a necessity for us is food insurance. We have food insurance in case of sickness, unemployment, or a tough season. Both of my grandmothers always had food insurance living in N.H. with the threat of being snowed in for weeks at a time.

"She is like the merchants' ships; she brings her food from afar." Proverbs 31:14

Years ago when I began learning how to stock my pantry, I thought a lot about this verse as I shopped. I noticed that the Proverbs woman is likened to more than one ship when it comes to gathering food for her family. Also very large merchant ships at that! She seeks out food even from far away. So I suspected early on that if I was to take a look into her pantry or root cellar, it would be very well stocked. I also suspected that she would be doing the bulk of this gathering in the summer/early fall when the crops were plentiful. Food would have been stored in a multitude of ways. And I bet she took advantage of every opportunity to be ready for the winter months ahead.

So I got serious this past summer in building up my pantry. Instead of stocking my pantry for a few months' time, which I had been doing for many years, I decided to stock my pantry for six to twelve months. First, I made a list of all our most used grains/pastas/dried beans/flours. I looked at my supply on hand, figured out how much we would use in that time frame, and bought what I needed in bulk. I couldn't get everything in bulk, but I tried if I could as it was more cost efficient. I stored these items in large plastic containers in my pantry.

Oats Rice Wheat berries Bread flour White flour Rice Flour Gluten free 1 to 1 flour Gluten free grain flour Gluten free pastas Beans beans Navy beans Red Lentils

I wrote everything I bought in a notebook with prices and location so that I would have a better idea next year what I needed. How did we afford this? Well, that is another letter. 😊 But essentially, I did a "no spend year" in 2019 so that I could build up our savings. It was an amazing year.

Some other dry good items that I stored including nuts, tea, and coffee which I got in larger amounts, but not in bulk were:

Cornmeal Cocoa Brown rice Sugar Corn masa flour Brown sugar Powdered sugar Chocolate chips Pamela's Mix Cornstarch Baking powder Salt Baking soda Yeast Nuts Tea Coffee

My next food items to locate and buy were anything in cans. I can some things from our garden, but these were other items that I wanted to have on hand.

Tuna Salmon Tomato Products Pumpkin Black beans Hominy Green beans Garbanzo beans Pineapple Olives

After I got all the canned goods I thought we would need, I turned my attention to anything in jars. Here are those items:

Applesauce Maple Syrup Honey Artichoke hearts Hot Sauce Olive oil Grapeseed oil Apple Cider Vinegar Braggs Liquid Aminos Peanut Butter Tahini Pasta Sauce Mayonaise Herbs & Spices

It really helped me to go in order and to do it in the summer as I was not homeschooling. I could build my pantry more efficiently as I paid attention to each group of foods that my family eats. In the middle of all this pantry building, my garden and my daughter's garden started to really produce. I had three dehydrators going many days as I dried so many vegetables from the garden. I put my dried foods into glass jars on my pantry shelves. While fruit was on sale in the summer, I dried a lot of fruit as well. This helped to build up the vegetable and fruit part of my pantry, along with canning things from the garden, too. I have many butternut squash and delicata squash stored as well in my pantry.

Meat was a bit more difficult to figure out. So I pulled everything out of my freezer to see what I had on hand, wrote it all down, and then bought from each protein group where I needed. My freezer is in my pantry, so I consider it part of my pantry as well. (I also dried some ground beef and kept that in my fridge.) In my freezer I keep:

Lastly, I turned to toiletries and cleansers. I knew this was the last group of things I was dealing with, so it was kind of fun by this point. I had so much hard work behind me, for building a pantry is a lot of work. Especially as you are preserving things from your garden in the heat of the summer. But there is something so wonderful about watching your pantry grow all summer in time for the winter season. I remember my paternal grandmother having an amazing pantry. As a young girl, it always looked like a little store to me in her small walk-in closet off her kitchen. She never had a garden or canned anything, but she knew how to build a pantry that would take her through the harsh winters on the east coast. My maternal grandmother, who also lived on the east coast, had such a large pantry that when she died it was dispersed among five families as there was so much stored food. She, too, never canned or had a garden, but what an amazing pantry that was stored on those shelves in her cellar.

Bar Keepers Friend Clothing detergent Dish detergent Vinegar Glass Cleaner Baking Soda

When I got to September, I was pretty much done. So the whole project took me about 4 months. I've never enjoyed anything more. I love walking into my pantry, which is a walk-in closet off my kitchen. It is my food insurance.

Could you share with us your wheat growing experience?

Certainly.

I'm in south-central Wisconsin. If you look at the state as a giant mitten, I'm right near the wrist.

My first attempt at wheat was Kamut, an heirloom variety originally from Egypt. It's a soft amber wheat, good for biscuits and pastries, but might not rise as much as a hard wheat if used for yeast bread. I planted it the first week of May. My first 3 mistakes were not planting densely enough, planting a large block with no way to reach most of it, and planting in a way that left way too many seeds exposed. On that last point, my defense is that I had been working so long that my back started seizing up, and I decided to take shortcuts.

My wheat patch became a living example of a biblical proverb. The wheat grew, but there were so many weeds tangled in with them that there was no way to remove them without damaging the wheat. This also made it hard to tell when to harvest, because the seed heads blended in with the background.

The Kamut ripened about mid-to-late summer. For harvest, I used the sickle mower attachment on my lawn tractor, then tried to rake everything up by hand. The mass of weeds meant that for every ounce of wheat, I had to lift roughly 12 pounds of weeds. For someone with back and muscle problems is a bad idea! I only managed to rake up maybe half the patch, even with help. There was a week of rain and storms after that, so what didn't get raked was left to rot.

Back home, my family helped sort out the wheat from the weeds. All that work, and we found enough wheat that the seedheads filled half a paper grocery bag. And that's with the awns still attached!

I haven't threshed it yet, but I'd be surprised if it comes to half a cup.

At the same time I bought the Kamut seed, I also bought seed for a hard white winter wheat. That was planted in September, if I remember right. Dates keep blurring together, so it might have been early October. Anyway, this patch was planted very densely, and the seeds covered with the appropriate amount of soil. They were also planted in a long narrow bed, only 4 feet wide, so I can reach the whole thing easily. I forgot to check if it was a dwarf or standard variety, the Kamut was a standard one. I have an idea for something I can attach to my sickle mower to make it work more like a small combine. That should make the harvest a lot easier! I've also invested in a small hand-sickle, in case I need to harvest by hand. That hand-sickle came in really handy for harvesting and weed control in other parts of the garden. I wish I'd gotten one sooner!

I have been reading articles for years about growing your own wheat, but none of them really prepared me for it. They all made it sound so simple.

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