Can Your Food Supply Beat The Heat?

First, allow me a little SHTF gardening pontification:

Many preparedness-minded people have a pack of "survival seeds" socked away for TEOTWAWKI, thinking, "If SHTF, I'll just start gardening."

First of all, you can't just throw a random can of survival seeds in your fridge and expect to be able to produce enough food to survive, much less thrive, post-SHTF. We've been gardening in one way or another for 6 years and we are by no means experts. We are making remarkable strides in our skills and knowledge, but I wouldn't want to depend solely on our garden's production.

Second of all, are you sure your seed stockpile is full of varieties that will thrive in your area? Do you have good tools? How about ways to maintain your soil's fertility and to manage pest problems without petrochemicals? Are you physically capable of the labor it takes to turn virgin ground into a thriving garden? You had better know the answers to all those questions before you have to rely on your "Garden in a Can".

Hot, hot, hot

With that out of the way, let's bring this summer's heatwave and drought into the picture. Let's say SHTF has happened. Unless you are located in the Pacific Northwest or Antarctica, chances are your summer has been brutally hot. At the Harried Homemaker Acres, we have had TWENTY ONE days where the high has been over 100 degrees. This is great for using your car as a solar oven, but not much else.



Extreme Heat Warnings and Watches, July 20, 2011

Our garden has suffered, with the corn taking the brunt of nature's furnace . Keep in mind that this is with daily watering. What would have happened if we could not irrigate? Could we live on only our garden produce?

The answer, obviously, is no. Not even if we had a much larger garden and were master gardeners. We would be struggling and would be thanking the Lord that we had our food storage in place.

POINT #1: You've got to have food storage as a back-up.

If you look at the information available from the National Weather Service, you'll find some interesting charts and graphs. This July ranked in the top ten of hottest summers ever recorded in our state. When were the other ten?

A cluster of years in the early 1900s
A cluster in the 1930s
A small cluster in the 1950s
1980

Hot and dry weather seems to come in clusters, which brings me to point number two.

POINT#2: It would be best to have enough food storage in place to account for multiple years of poor harvests.

And don't forget this -

POINT #3: In hot, dry weather, your gardening technique matters.

I will always sing the praises of Square Foot Gardening, but it is a more intensive cultivation that requires additional water and soil fertility. In a drought, giving your crops extra space is extremely useful. Two books that I own that address this issue are Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times and The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times.

I particularly find the latter book inspirational. The author, Carol Deppe, promotes corn, bean, squash, potatoes and eggs as the basis for a survival diet and gives extremely detailed information on how to grow these crops/products. If you maintain a gluten-free diet, you'll especially appreciate her book. We aren't gluten-free, but still found a lot of useful information. It is one of those books that makes you think.

Even if you are a die-hard SFGer, it makes sense to tuck these books into your survival library and learn these techniques as a option.

How is your garden growing in all this heat? How drought-proof is your garden?

Ask the readers: Your Favorite Can Opener

If you are a prepper, chances are you store a lot of canned food, be it from the Piggly Wiggly or an LDS Cannery. If the only can opener you own is electric or a dinky one attached to a faux Swiss Army knife, you need a good manual can opener, stat!

Can you imagine if TSHTF and you didn't have a way to open your cans? You'd be a little frustrated, just like the cat in this video.





Sesame Street was so much better back in the day. "Elmo's World", which seems to take up most of the current incarnation of the show, makes me want to gack.

Oxo Good Grips Can Opener. Image from Amazon.com

I own a pretty decent manual can opener that I use all the time, an Oxo Good Grips Can Opener. It is very easy to turn and cans open smoothly. I have noticed that the plastic around the handle appears to be breaking down a little bit after a year of continual use. I definitely need to develop some redundancy in this area. I think we should have three manual can openers, minimum, to be safe.

So, I'm asking my readers: do you have a favorite, rock star manual can opener? What's your go-to device for opening TEOTWAWKI eats?

Sew... What?

Since Hubby Dear and I became parents eight years ago, our home has grown to resemble less a place where civilized people live and more a daycare center. Some of that is to be expected when you have more kids than adults in the family. It doesn't help, though, that our kids' grandparents lavish them with more toys, gewgaws, and plain ol' plastic junk than we know what to do with. Our once spacious-seeming house is becoming overloaded. A garage sale or giant donation to the Salvation Army definitely needs to be in the works.

So when my mom emailed and told me that she was giving The Thinker a sewing machine, my first reaction was less than pleased. The Thinker loves craft projects and has been learning how to sew with Grandma over the past few months, so it wasn't totally out of the blue, but still! Something else to take up MORE space!

When I related my frustration to Hubby Dear, he gave me a wicked grin and said, "Don't you want to learn how to sew? Won't that be good for when the SHTWXYZ?" (He loves to tease me with his own creative prepper acronyms.)

I stopped mid-complaint. He had a point. Perhaps this sewing machine wouldn't be such a bad idea. Maybe I should learn sewing basics along with The Thinker.

Now, if you knew my mom, you'd know that she's not going to just go off and buy some plastic piddly kid's sewing machine. Nor is she going to get a brand new adult sewing machine. My mom owns an antique store and estate sale service and spends untold hours at auctions. That is where she came across our family's newest preparedness tool. (Not that Mom knows I prep or even what prepping is. I'm still strictly on the down-low.)

My The Thinker's new sewing machine was made about 1951. Mom assured me that it works fabulously, even better than her own sewing machine (which is a young'un made in the late 60s).

She had a brand new electrical cord installed on it and it came complete with instruction manuals and with a bunch of gadgets that I can't identify. When we're not using it, the machine slips right inside and we can use it as a desk.

The only problem is that I don't have a clue how to use it. I can sew on a button and do some basic mending, but the sewing gene seems to have skipped me. The manuals that come with the machine are pretty easy to understand, though, so I think I can figure this out.

It didn't take me long to come up with a candidate for my first sewing project. This project is definitely something I would NOT have considered a year ago. You'll never believe that I am getting so excited about sewing....... (wait for it....) .......



my own menstrual pads.



(I can hear all of my male readers clicking their browsers in a panic and finding something else very manly to read. I know I have a few guys that read my blog. Sorry dudes. This topic had to come up sometime.)

Cloth pad from Instructables.com

You can try to store a lot of feminine hygiene products, but in a SHTF situation, they will run out sooner or later. My journey toward self-reliance has also made me more aware of how much I'm spending on plastic crud that will sit in a landfill forever. I have also read testimonies from many women that say their periods became lighter, shorter in duration, and they experienced fewer cramps when they started using cloth pads.
You can buy cloth pads in several different places -Amazon, Ebay, Etsy are a few of them - but they are expensive. That's what started the whole train of thought that led me here. Things are about to get interesting.

Now I need to:   

A) figure out how to use this sewing machine
B) find a pattern for cloth pads that is easy for a beginner like me with an ancient sewing machine and
C) get brave, buy the materials and get started.

Wish me luck!

Do you sew? Do you use cloth pads? Have you sewn your own cloth pads and have some tips for me? Have I lost my mind?

And now for something completely different...

"SHTF" is one of the most common prepper/survivalist acronyms. It stands for "stuff" hitting the fan, an apt description of something crazy like a societal collapse.

Do you want to know what real "stuff" hitting the fan would be like? If so, tune in to Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel at 9 pm Eastern on Wednesday, October 20th. The episode summary on http://www.discovery.com/ reads in part:

When the poop hits the fan, does everyone get covered in the ensuing chaos?

I'll be watching!

*If you don't know who the Mythbusters are, read this.

A Generation of Nincompoops Meets the GPS

The Harried Homemaker et al. hit the road!

This week we enjoyed one of the fringe benefits of homeschooling - an off-season mini vacation. Hubby Dear arranges his vacation time around family birthdays, so we were able to celebrate the anniversary of Mini Me's birth with a trip to the big city. We looked a little bit like the Beverly Hillbillies, all six of us stuffed into our burgeoning vehicle, the kids' noses glued to the window as they checked out the sights.

As I have noted before, Hubby Dear is more or less anti-prepping, though he has come to tolerate it as time goes by. He may be against preparedness, but he is firmly for technology. He's into gadgets like I'm into bulk supplies of hard winter wheat. It's remarkable we're as happily married as we are.

On this vacation, Hubby Dear decided to utilize the GPS on his Droid which, for the technophobes in the audience, is a "smartphone". He used the voice search function, selected our destination with a simple touch of the screen, and loaded the instructions. I should mention that we're well-acquainted with the particular metropolis we were visiting. But Hubby Dear loves his gadgets and enjoys watching the GPS work its magic. He practically rubbed his hands with glee.  

Hubby Dear's true love, the GPS on his Droid

"Honey, you know we should really look up the directions before we go,"  I said before we left the Harried Homemaker Acres. After all, we were visiting a couple of attractions that were new to us.

"Why bother? We have the GPS," he answered blithely.

To cut a long story short, the GPS would have led us astray twice if we didn't already have first hand knowledge of the area. One of those miscues would have been very unfortunate and we would have likely never found our destination.

The irony in this is that I had just finished reading an article from the AP entitled "Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?". You can read the article here, but the main idea is that kids today are so used to technology that they can't do simple tasks like use a manual can opener. Back in my public school teacher days, I was always surprised at how difficult my high school students found reading maps. What do they teach kids these days? Apparently not map skills. Why bother? You have the GPS!

Technology is great. I may not be as into gadgets and gizmos as Hubby Dear, but I do enjoy sitting in my air-conditioned house, sipping an ice-cold Coke Zero and munching a cookie baked in one of my dual electric ovens. I also like writing this blog on my computer while listening to music on my iPod. The problem is that we have chosen to cripple ourselves by an over-dependence on technology.  If that technology is all of a sudden gone, we could very likely find ourselves as lost as that GPS would have led us.

I don't know that TEOTWAWKI will ever happen in my lifetime. What I do know is that my family is very vulnerable should something of a SHTF nature occur. Do I have the knowledge, skills and means to keep us warm in the winter? How about feeding my children without easy access to a fully-stocked grocery store? Could we grow all we needed to eat and then preserve the surplus? What about medicine? Clothing? Everything else that is essential to life?

Heavy questions indeed.