Do It Yourself For Yourself

Do you ever stop and think about how much money you spend on some things?  Relatively small (or large) purchases add up over time.  A gallon of milk is a little less than $3 unless you live on a farm.  Eggs are about $2/dozen, again, unless you live on a farm.  Beer and wine can be anything from almost trivial to very expensive.  But none of this sounds like a lot, until you look at consumption over time. 

A family may go through 3-4 gallons of milk a week and that's $500 per year!  Say you drink 1-2 bottles of wine per week at $12 each.  That's not much for 2 people, and $12 can be getting off pretty cheap.  Still, that adds up to about $1000 per year in wine.  And that's not counting house gifts or dinner parties.

We had a trip to the South last year and visited a winery.  They didn't do much with grapes because the climate there wasn't good for grapes.  But they did a whole lot with fruit of all kinds, most of grown locally and in some cases sustainably.  This gave us some ideas.  So this summer we started home winemaking.  This was done mostly for the flavors we enjoyed but cannot obtain locally.  Sure, we can get 6 bottles of whatever we wanted delivered to our door for the low-low price of $240 (not!), but we really like to provide for ourselves.  We especially like to tailor our things to our tastes.

It was a trip to our local discount food store that really put us over the edge.  We picked up 3 flats of strawberries (8 quarts each) for $10.  Next stop, the home brewing store for a one time purchase of enough hardware to get us started (about $150, including some special equipment for fruit wines, but if we knew then what we know now, it would have been under $100).  That plus sugar and we were off to the races.  Total cost per bottle excluding durable goods, including the sugar and glass will be around $3 for strawberry wine.  Same thing happened the next week when we found 56 LBS of plums for $10.  Yield on these two batches will be around 2 cases of wine, per batch.

Added bonus: not this Chirstmas but next, a lot of people will be getting homemade wine for gifts.  They like that because they don't really want more stuff, it's something truly unique, and they can use it up.  Double-added preparedness bonus: if something awful happened to our economy, I can think of worse things to have to trade than 15 cases of wine.

Is processing fruit for wine time consuming?  Yes, but so it watching TV.  Is there risk?  Yes, we don't know how these will turn out.  They may be awful, and we know people that had bad experiences making wine.  But we also know people that routinely have very good experiences making wine, and don't shop in liquor stores anymore.  There are easier ways to do this; you can buy kits that are essentially everything but the water and yeast.  But what is there to learn in that?  If we rely on a pre-mixed product, did we really gain much other than a price break?

The best thing is to really learn a skill and understand a process.  It's been done for thousands of years.  Sure, biblical wine wasn't as good as we have today, and chemistry from the 19th century improved the process, but now we understand it at a fundamental level.  We can take what we learned and start over anywhere with some very rudimentary equipment if we had too.  We can also pay it forward by helping others to understand that modern conveniences, no matter what they are, can be learned and done at home with some good old fashioned learning and elbow grease. 

Freedom lives where there is independence, and little is more independent than providing your own shelter, food, security, and best yet, luxury items.  That is a statement of real personal power, so what can you do to be more independent?

You're Not Gonna Die From This

S.D. and I have been playing with the idea of making sauerkraut at home.  While this could conceivably be the stinkiest idea we've ever come up with, it could also be very rewarding.  

One of the things I kept hearing about on homemade sauerkraut was the possibility of botulism in your handmade product.  I had to find out, as how can you survive the ZA only to fall to botulism poisoning from your own preparedness?  Not a good idea!  So I looked.  And looked.  And searched.  

And came up with nothing.  No scientific proof of botulism from properly made sauerkraut.  na-da.  Oh, there were second hand accounts and "heard once upon a time" storied aplenty, but no actual scientific research, mention or proof.  This also jives with my chemistry background, (and micro and food science) as the pH of sauerkraut is at least one point more acid than botulism can survive and thrive.

The warning I did run into is to never make pickles with homemade and untested vinegar of unknown pH lever.  This is a far cry from "botulism from sauerkraut ate my baby" scare tactics that were going around all over the internet.  There is, by the way, a litmus test for pH of vinegar using, well, litmus paper that is easily acquired off the internet of from a science supply store.  And then you know.  Funny how things can get carried to an extreme simply by word of mouth and not by critical thinking.

In any case, I will be buying cabbage to do this experiment, as my cabbage did less than nothing this year, unless you count a dramatic death-scene that would've been good for a freshman in high school drama class.

I'll keep you posted on the fermenting news as it comes along.  In the meantime, don't get bit, know your exits, grown your own when you can, and stay prepared!

What if We Didn't Notice?

S.D. and I went on our annual state fair date, and among the shuffling hordes, shuffling along, were likely plenty of zombies.  These zombies were easily placated by fried foodstuffs on a stick, but it brought my attention up sharp!  If we were at a populous event and the ZA broke out, would we even notice until it was too late?

Unlike most (S.D. included), I have a strong mental map of the fairgrounds, so escape would not be difficult if necessary, but many other there would become brainy appetizers.  It also occurred to me that perhaps zombies would be easily distracted by shiny 4H displays and crop art, it seemed so at the time.

So, the next day, at home, we took a few more steps to make the house secure, lay in more provisions, and recuperate.  Most people won't understand or "get" the preparedness, so I just don't explain, I just let them think we're nuts.  It's a strategy that works.

Do you know your escape plan for when the time comes?  It could be mighty important!

Dehydrating the Excess

As much as S.D. and I love canning, some things are just better off dehydrated, especially when there is simply NO freezer space left.  The great advantage to dehydrated foods is the compact and permanent nature of the product.  The disadvantage is needing water to rehydrate your product for usage and that they are all very hydrophilic in nature, they need to be in an airtight storage container, or several smaller airtight storage containers to keep the product good for a longer period of time.

Like canning, there is an original energy expenditure for creating the stored form of the product, but then will stay stored without power or energy until used.  Our latest adventures in dehydrating have involved Scotch Bonnet peppers (1/4 bushel will dehydrate and pulverize down to a 4oz dry storage jar), and even more recently, celery.  Today we are venturing into the world of dehydrated onions.

We have a store nearby, and it is a discount grocer who sells almost expired produce at a mighty discount.  Last week, my dear friend, YAM and I took a trip there and I purchased #50 of onions for $15.00.  I felt pretty good about this and feel as though I can be justified in experimenting again.  It is my hope to convert the mass of onions into a lilliputian stored product.

Hang tight as we figure this one out.

Another Reason to Eliminate Your Yard

In the Midwestern city we live in, the Japanese Beetle is starting to encroach on our lands and way of life.  I may or may not battle the JB, I may continue to change our way of life, so to make our land, home and garden as inhospitable as possible, and thus minimize their effect on what I hold to be really important.  I wish to make the nurseries for their young small and undesirable.

Now, the GOONS have come up with a bacteria that kills them, but it takes 1-5 years to take hold and thrive in your garden, and a side-result is that you will likely have to hand-pollinate your flowers.  The drift I get from that is that Paenibacillus (formerly Bacillus) popilliae is going to kill much more than the JB, it will likely kill most everything else, although I do need to perform more research on this to be certain, the research coming out of Ohio State is that it is not terribly effective anyway.

I think instead of putting milky spore on my lawn, I will simply continue to eliminate my lawn.  Lawns as we know them are urban deserts and wastelands that suck resources that really ought not be sucked.  As our neighbors have gifted us with our very own batch of rapidly spreading creeping charlie, the side lawn will fall this autumn to the raised garden bed plan.  Very likely the front yard will get terraced and garden-ized when there are funds to do so.

With no grass to have larvae in, I hypothesize that I can minimize the JB right here and right now.  The neighbors to the west are turning their lawn over to garden, and the neighbor to the east is all thistles.  It is the expansive neighbor to the south that is the most concern, and for that, I shall increase my garden totals of garlic, kale, nasturtium, and anything else I can find that they do not like.

As though we needed another reason to eliminate the urban wastelands of lawns, I encourage everyone to start taking away their habitat, creating a friendlier habitat for all else concerned.

Loss of Freedom

Loss of freedom is the major theme of all science fiction.  This is a literary thing explained to me years ago in lit/comp class.  Reflect on various science fiction movies, where the government has been abolished, and now "the company" or some all-powerful entity is now in charge of everything, got there in the most corrupt way, and now small pockets of resistance fight against it.  Now reflect on the state of things in America today and tell me who is getting their way...

-food is already addictive and nutrient-poor

-Big Ag is making it more and more difficult to NOT eat GMO foods

-Big Pharma is teaching MDs and CDEs it is okay to have an unhealthy physique, as one can medicate the unhealthy situation as needed

-Big Pharma and Big Ag are in bed together

-the media creates a terrifying situation for parents, making them not wish to have their kids go outside and play (thus getting inadequate physical activity and staying unhealthy)

-GOONS are threatening to remove obese children from the home to "educate" them in healthy lifestyle

Let's see what gateways are being opened by allowing the GOONS to take children out of the home, shall we?  That's just the beginning excuse, will kids be taken out of all homes eventually?  What will the kids be "taught"?  Will kids be returned to the home?  What happens if they are not?

I'm connecting the dots, and I refuse to see what the pattern is forming into, as it is too unspeakably horrifying.  I find myself in a small pocket of resistance already.  Where are you?

Putting Together Some Little Pieces

Our mother in law loves jigsaw puzzles, how tiny pieces come together to create a bigger picture.  In a general sense, I'm not a huge fan of jigsaw puzzles, but will concede that the state of affairs in the United States is looking more and more like a jigsaw puzzle that is slowly coming together to show us (who care to look) the larger picture of what is happening.  

Recently, I read an article about a proposal to take obese children out of the home and put them into foster homes, as their own parents are not fit to keep them healthy.  A proposal to take children out of the home because of a weight issue.  Wait.

We're going to back up the bus right now and review some things that are going on in America right now because of BigAg and the GOONS: food is chemically designed now to make it addictive and basically nutritionally void.  Our packaged food is based off of a GMO science that is not tested and has dubious safety implications.  We are being placated by false bread and media circuses, being turned into obese, sedentary, easily controlled zombies.  With all this going on, unless you keep your child "healthy" (read: are complacent to the state) the GOONS will take your child away.

All this while taking away self-sufficiency in droves.  

There's never a complete loss of hope, though, but the GOONS don't want you to realize it: turn off the TV, limit your screen time in all forms, get you and your family off their duffs, plant a garden, raise your own food, learn to preserve it and reject the system.  Reject the system that has created the addictive, poisonous atmosphere that would make you and yours unhealthy and obese, dependent on drugs and toxic foods, along with your family.  Reject the system that does these horrible things to TAKE YOUR FREEDOM AWAY.  Reject they system that would take your children away.  Be strong and self-sufficient on your own.

Go on, turn the computer off, take the kids, go for a walk, make a plan.

Stop reading.
Go.

Check back with us later.