Permaculture Kitchen: Managing a Pantry

Herbs III

Originally uploaded by nodigio

In America, at least judging by the many homes I’ve toured and the floor plans I’ve pored over, the pantry has shrunk from a root cellar or other room of its own to a small cabinet and an appliance. Most homes have only a week or two of food available and most of that is perishable. At least a third of it gets thrown away as inedible.

The pantry used to be a respected room of the house. In truly large households, large enough to hire servants, a pantler was an important person. The pantler held the keys to the pantry and kept it inventoried and stocked for a year’s worth of food for the entire household – servants, family members, guests, and enough extras to feed the indigent who came to the back door. They consulted with the gardeners about the kitchen gardens and the cook for putting up the food that was stored there and may have shopped the farmer’s markets to add to the stores.

And now, our “pantry” is a cabinet and a refrigerator.

As part of the ongoing theme of the permacultured kitchen, managing a pantry is essential. A pantry is where our preserved and root cellared foods are stored for the year. This makes it sound as if there is a massive annual undertaking to stock the pantry. Truth is, stocking the pantry is a year round effort as you preserve and store what’s in season so it will be available all year round, restocking as new crops come around. Depending on where you live, stocking the pantry may be a weekly endeavor during the harvest season or a bi-weekly to monthly endeavor all year around.

We can talk about stocking the pantry in many other posts, this one is about how to set up and manage your pantry.

Given that many homes – and precious few apartments – come with adequate pantries, we have to all make do with what we have. If you own your own home, you could build in ceiling cupboards to store pantry items. Barring that, we need to find other ways to get creative. Take your dishes out of the cabinets and nestle them ornamentally (or stack with practical precision) on shelves. Use the cabinets for food storage. Buy or build low boxes you can easily slide under beds and the sofa to hold jarred or canned goods. Use canned goods as book ends or stacked ornamentally among your books, movies, and music. Build door top shelves to hold more stored foods. Stack milk crates full of stored foods in a corner of the laundry room or by the hot water heater or along the floor of closets. I’m sure you get the idea and will look around your dwelling with fresh vision aimed at maximizing your food storage.

Managing a scattered pantry like that will take coordination. Since you’re reading this on a computer (you are, right?), you have a tool that will save you time and grief – the computer. You don’t even need a special program, a word processor or a spreadsheet program works just fine. I prefer the spreadsheet program. Make a form for each room in which you are storing food (Living room, master bedroom, back bedroom, laundry room, kitchen – egads! We actually store some food in the kitchen!). In each room’s page, list what foods you are storing there and how much of each. When you use the food, make sure you subtract it in your form. When you add more food, add it in your forms, too. When you are pondering dinner, you won’t have to wander from room to room, pulling out underbed boxes or opening cabinets. You can just open your spreadsheet and glance down the list (spreadsheets allow you to also add images which can make it much more fun to browse through), making your selections. You can also store a file of favorite recipes using the foods you most commonly store.

What do you keep in your pantry? That depends entirely on your own food preferences and habits. My pantry is a blend of store-bought canned goods, boxed and bagged goods, herbs and spices, and foods I’ve put up myself either from things I grew or foods bought at the farmer’s market. I have home canned jars sitting alongside tin cans of commercial foods and my spice cabinet is a blend of store bought and home grown. You may start out with a pantry of nothing but store bought foods and eventually augment it with home canned (yours or a friend’s!), or even replace the store bought eventually with only home canned. I’m not a purist; I’ll always have a blend of store bought and home-made.

I only keep foods I will actually eat. It makes no sense to me to buy or put up food I have no intention of ever eating. It’s a waste of food and space, and if you have limited space, don’t fill it with food you’ll never eat. Of course, I like a huge variety of foods, so I have a very varied pantry with food from a wide selection of ethnicities and countries. I also happen to have a dedicated pantry room so I have the space to store a big variety of foods.

The best way to find out what foods you rely upon and prefer is to spend some time documenting what you really eat. That spread sheet can come in handy for this, too. What foods do you cook, how much do you have left over, what restaurant meals do you gravitate towards, what foods do you really like eating – write those in your spreadsheet and how often you eat them. Meat counts, as do candy and beverages. Don’t forget to include the seasonings you use most.

Then you need to calculate quantities. How many pounds of potatoes do you eat a year? Carrots? Tomatoes (as sauce, canned, in soups…fresh is only for in season)? Beans? How many quarts of tea, coffee, fruit juice, etc. do you drink? Add it up, figure out how you’ll store them, then inventory and store them to use throughout the year.

Be sure to add in extra for feeding guests and planning for emergencies and disasters.

I’ve posted before about organizing dry pantries, refrigerators, freezers, and spice cabinets. There are also a number of good books about organizing these spaces. Check them out and decide how you want to organize and store your foods.

To give you a rough example: I love potatoes. Baked, boiled, mashed, fried, au gratined, creamed, potato salad… my family eats about 200 pounds of potatoes a year. We grow most of our potatoes in huge plastic trash bags – approximately 30 pounds per bag, about 8 bags a year. We keep them in the bags outside covered up in straw throughout the winter and dig out what we need all year long. 60 pounds of peas, green beans, whole corn off the cob, and carrots, canned up into pint jars (or 55 store bought cans of each) lasts a year. If you’re buying the canned goods, you don’t have to buy them all at once, but you can save by knowing how much you’ll need for a year and buying in bulk. You can even buy those huge cans of vegetables and recan them into smaller jars. Or you buy the frozen in huge bags and rebag them into serving sizes.

Now that you’ve determined what you eat, how much you eat of them in a year, when you’ll buy them or put them up, and where you’re going to store it all, now we get to the meat of the post: managing it all.

Setting up the pantry actually prepares you for managing it. What you’ll buy and what you’ll grow or can yourself determines somewhat the timetable on which you will replenish your pantry, and so determines how much you purchase or put up at a time. On a calendar (a paper one or a computer one, it doesn’t matter), mark out the dates you’ll shop for the food, the harvest dates for your home grown foods, and the dates you’ll put up the different foods (assuming you grow and put up food). If you raise animals for eggs, milk, or meat, or hunt for your larder, be sure to mark the hunting seasons and slaughtering dates. If you don’t have the equipment to slaughter and butcher your meat, you can take them to processors who will do it for you. If you buy shares in a dairy cow or purchase quarters or sides of cows or pigs or venison or buffalo or ostrich or buy free-range poultry, mark the dates your rancher slaughters them for your pick-up (and mark the payment dates if you pay in installments). If you buy shares in a CSA, mark both the payment dates and the pick-up dates for your produce.

Then, on the marked dates, perform the actions you marked: shop, pay, pick up, hunt, butcher, put up.

If you’re already in the kitchen butchering and putting up food, you might as well make a few prepared foods, too, to put up for later convenient eating. If you’ve invested in a pressure canner, you can put up your own soups and chilis and spaghetti sauces and such. If not, you can make and freeze them. A good freezer is a good investment for annual food storage and eating.

This takes care of the provisioning of the pantry. Mark what you have and where they are located in your inventory spreadsheet.

If you are an advocate of the once-a-month-cooking method, use the spreadsheet to mark what meals you’ve prepared ahead and where you’ve put them. It doesn’t have to be frozen meals, although most once-a-month methods rely on freezers. You can also can meals like stews, chilis, and casseroles,and I’ve known people who layer “meals” in a jar to can for later – all they need to do is add a salad or fruit and bread for a ready-to-eat meal that blows TV dinners away..

When you plan your meals, consider first what you have in your pantry. Make meals that use what you have on hand. Done right, you should only need to shop for perishables like milk once every week or two. If you only use milk as an ingredient and not as a beverage or for cereals, then you can freeze the milk in portion sizes and only have to buy it once every three months. Most firm cheese can be frozen, too, reducing the number of times you have to shop for it. The goal is to eat as much out of your pantry as possible.

Mark your spreadsheet when you use food from your pantry so you know what to replace and when. Your calendar will be useful for planning shopping trips. Coordinate your inventory spreadsheet with your provisioning calendar so you always know what you have on hand.

Before computers, the pantler had to remember all this in their head, or handwritten in notebooks. Today, we can use calendar programs with reminders and spreadsheets a faster and more reliable way to manage a pantry and keep it stocked – and a more flexible way to accommodate taste changes, seasonal specials, and lifestyle changes.

 

On Being Adult

Daffodils

Originally uploaded by nodigio

This blog isn’t all about disasters and surviving them. It’s certainly not about The End Of The World As We Know It/We’re All Gonna Die! It is a survival blog, and while it’s about all kinds of survival, mostly it’s about being an adult in a world that can sometimes be hostile.

There was a time when the majority of people knew who the adults were, and it was pretty clear when a person passed from childhood to adulthood. The responsibilities and skills were self-evident. Those who didn’t get them were cared for by those who did, or they died. Life was fairly cut and dried in that way.

Nowadays, we have thousands of people who should be adults who are still acting like and being treated like teenagers (or younger!). Most of us don’t know how to live as adults, although we continue to age and take on some appearances of being adult: marriage, jobs, living away from our parents, purchasing big dollar items by ourselves. Most of our daily needs are met by other people, though. We abuse ERs and 911 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/29/ap/strange/main5048176.shtml) for minor issues we should – as adults – be able to handle reasonably ourselves. We buy the bulk of our food prepared by someone else and an amazing number of adults have no clue how to provide for their own basic needs. We don’t know how to civilly handle disputes, how to resolve conflicts, to compromise so everyone is content if not happy, how to shop responsibly, how to budget, how to anticipate and save, and it doesn’t matter if we do know how to drop and roll in case of a house fire. Housefires don’t happen as often as conflicts.

So this blog is about survival – living in this world as an adult. I try to cover as many situations as I can think of, from civilized driving to doing your own laundry to cooking to handling a botched food order to knowing when and how to use an emergency room as well as the Big Things: tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, biological warfare, living in a war zone, or nuclear winter.

There’s a lot to being an adult. All of childhood is meant to be spent laying the groundwork for becoming an adult. The teen years are when we are supposed to be trying on adult behaviors with a safety net of adults guiding us along the way. And then, at some point, close to or even within the teen years, we get to be actual adults. Maybe not wise ones, but still acknowledged as adults and allowed to be adults.

Somewhere along the way, that progress from infant to adult stopped. We kept going through the biological processes, but we no longer acquired the skills or had the experiences that would allow us to properly become adults. Childhood was glorified and we became locked into it until we reached an age where we felt we could claim adulthood, then we jealously guarded that territory from all comers – forcing the teens into an artificial infancy, hedged with restrictions and severe punishments for daring to attempt to gain the skills and experiences they would need to join us as adults. We can’t be bothered to teach them, so we force them to be less than they should be.

Granted, this doesn’t happen to everyone or we’d really be screwed as a society and world, but it happens to enough people that we need someone to show others how to be an adult. So far, I’ve just been imparting random adult skills. I’m not sure I should be the one who shows the steps to achieving adulthood, but I don’t see too many other people stepping up to do this, so I’ll make my attempt.

Ideally, we’d have started this learning process as toddlers, when we desperately wanted to mimic what our parents did – playing “cook”, “maid”, “mail carrier”, “lawn carer”, and so on. This is why so many old fashioned toys were smaller versions of adult tools and why the most popular toys remain ones that resemble adult tools. As we grew up, we wanted to copy what we saw adults doing, and since we were divorced from what the adults actually were doing, we emulated what we saw them doing – their leisure activities, and assumed that was what it meant to be adult – drugs, drinks, smokes, dancing, racing, traveling, parties – having fun. That’s what we grew up thinking adulthood was like.

And when it wasn’t, we felt angry and cheated. We imposed a dual standard on our children: they had to be carefree, happy children and at the same time they weren’t allowed to anything which might threaten our perception of that idyllic childhood. And if they broke our arbitrary rules, we punished them with the most stringent adult punishments.

Small wonder we have so many grown ups who don’t feel as if they are adults unless they break a rule. It was the only way to learn if they qualified for adult punishments, which meant they were indeed adults.

Those who don’t break rules spend their lives wondering if they really are grown up.

Recently there have been lists and articles written on how to tell if you’ve become an adult. They’ll include things like getting married, having babies, buying a house – but these aren’t the real hallmarks of being an adult. They are just the trappings, the visible stuff that isn’t as limited to “adult” as some people would like to think.

So I thought, as a first step towards achieving adulthood, I’d join them in making my own list. It’s not organized in a progressive growing-up stages way because, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already grown up age wise and giving it to you as “toddlers learn this, this, and this; preschoolers that, that, and that; primary schoolers all this, middle schoolers all that” and so on is irrelevant. What you want is a list of traits and characteristics that will help you determine what you’ve already accomplished towards becoming an adult and where your gaps might be.

So, in no particular order, here are the things I think are defining traits of adulthood:

+ Adults understand their actions have consequences.
+ Adults either know or can reasonably predict what those consequences are.
+ Adults are prepared to deal with the consequences arising from their actions no matter how hard it is, how expensive it may be, or how long it takes to deal with them.
+ Adults accept responsibility for what they did or didn’t do.
+ Adults have the ability to plan their lives and the adaptability to alter those plans at need: employment, job loss, health issues, disasters, death (theirs and family members’), care of property and reputation.
+ Adults have acquired the skills needed to provide for their basic needs and make their lives comfortable, from household management and budgeting to employment to leisure activities.
+ Adults take an active part in their governance, regardless of how time consuming or expensive it may seem, because how they are governed controls almost everything else they do.
+ Adults take an active part in caring for their community – from maintaining public areas to helping those who need it to planning for the needs of the entire community.
+ Adults understand the importance of manners and will deploy them frequently.

Yes, I know some of this will take away form your fun times, but that’s what being an adult is. It’s doing what needs to be done and dealing with the consequences. It means spending time planning so things don’t go drastically out of hand. It means sometimes sacrificing your fun for the greater good.

We are fortunate that we have such marvelous tools available to us. We can use those tools to reduce the amount of time we might otherwise have spent on adult things so we have more time for personal pleasures. The internet with its many applications can allow us to know who are elected employees are, when they’ll be up for re-election, who the campaigning candidates are and what they offer, what’s happening in City Hall, the police department, the fire department, and the community centers and agencies that affect us. We can keep track of pending legislation and act on it quickly with a few clicks of our keyboards. This is awesome. We need to encourage more of our government to move into the internet age so we can interact with and keep tabs on our elected employees and know what’s going on that will affect us directly or indirectly.

We can also keep tabs via the internet on our communities and families and friends. We can use the internet to plan special events and locate scarce resources in our area. We can use it to do all manner of adult things of this nature.

If a disaster comes and we don’t have access to the internet, we still need to develop the off-line skills of contacting and connecting with our communities – telephones, snail mail, telegrams, community meetings, and so on.

And we’ll need the physical skills of caring for ourselves: housekeeping, clothing repair, laundry, cookery, transportation and its upkeep, tool use, basic healthcare, conflict resolution, and more.

A lot of conflicts can be avoided through the use of good manners, and if a conflict still arises, manners can help show the way to resolving that conflict.

Customer service is one of the few areas where manners may not stand you in good stead. Even though the representative who answers the call can do a lot to help you, there will be issues that exceed their training and what they are legally allowed to do for you. They may know the answer and they may desperately want to help you, but their actions are monitored (and yours, too, don’t forget), and they can’t break the law to help you no matter how mannerly and polite you are. Most of them are trained to help you 95% of the time. If your customer service need is outside what they are allowed to do – say you’re calling ISP Indie because your computer won’t boot – no matter how polite and mannerly you are, ISP Indie can’t help you. They don’t service computers, they aren’t trained to troubleshoot computer issues, and neither repeating a polite request or screaming like a banshee will change that. If, on the other hand, your issue is that your computer keeps getting knocked off line or you can’t get signed on at all, that’s exactly what ISP Indi is there to help you with. Bottom line – when you contact Customer Service, be sure you’re calling the right Customer Service for your issue.

And whatever you do, it’s so not adult to whine to 911 if you don’t get the orange juice you ordered or if the overworked cashier wasn’t charmingly sweet to you.

Here’s a partial list of things adults don’t do:

+ call 911 for every little problem. You call 911 only if something’s burning, someone’s so seriously hurt they can’t be moved, you suspect a crime is in immediate progress (like a breaking and entering, not like you didn’t get all of your fast food order), or something where emergency personnel are required by law to respond.
+ go to the ER for anything not immediately life-threatening. A walk-in clinic is much faster and cheaper.
+ indulge in road rage. We’re all trying to get somewhere as quickly and safely as possible, and playing speed up and slow down games and blocking games is childish and can cause even greater delays.
+ scream at the cashier, waiter, customer service representative – they did nothing to earn your ire, although the company for whom they work might have. Reserve your anger for those who deserve it. Write a nasty letter to the CEO instead of yelling at the person on the front lines.
+ drop contact with your child(ren) after a divorce. You engendered them, they deserve your care and attention no matter how difficult it may be, or how costly. Once you’ve brought a child into the world, they are your responsibility for so long as you or they live. That responsibility changes as they age, obviously, but they will always need you. Dropping out of their lives is a childish thing to do.
+kidnapping your child from a spouse, former spouse, ex-lover. There are very rare circumstances where a child needs to be rescued from an abusive parent – and those are best handled through agencies and authorities that should be able to sort matters out and help the child. Adults should be able to take care of themselves and ought to be taking care of the child, but childish grown-ups won’t.

I’m sure you can think of many more incidents that demonstrate the lack of maturity in a person of a legally adult age. The news is full of it.

 

Time in a Bottle

Blackberry Jelly

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/dining/27cann.html?_r=1&hpw

“People want to take back their food and their skills from the industrial giants.”

People are also looking for thrifty, crafty ways to eat well.

There are many, many excellent books out there on home canning, and I’ll provide links to a few of my favorites at the end. Because there are such excellent resources available, I won’t go into detail here on the how-to’s. I will, however, talk a bit about the “why”.

Why can your own food? In days gone by, when farm wives put up enough food to feed large numbers of people (family, farm hands, neighbors, guests…) because there were no convenient grocery stores nearby, canning was a huge undertaking; hot, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous. We still have memories of those days inside us – the huge cauldrons of bubbling fruits over an open flame or atop the stove, clouds of steam, rows of heated jars. It’s a primitive, fascinating scene etched into our memories and it’s not accurate anymore. With small batch canning, what was once a summer-long undertaking is now done in an hour or two here and there. Canning in small batches allows you to tinker more with the recipes until you get exactly the taste you want, and you control all the ingredients.

You can still do the big batch days long canning and some people make it a community event, some to preserve the gleanings from commercial farms as food for the hungry and homeless, others because their CSA hosts weekend canning events to preserve their huge bountiful harvests, and still others because they like it.

For the rest of us, small batch canning is our preferred method. We can harvest our fruits, herbs, and veggies from the local farmer’s market or pick-your-own patch, or even from the grocery store. We can make just our favorite jellies and jams, or we can preserve as much of our food as possible. Those who live alone or have small families benefit from being able to preserve just a bit, here and there, as both the season and the whim strike.

Small batch canning doesn’t require acres of counter space, either, something those who live in small apartments or houses lack. Nor do we need huge pressure canners – sometimes an ordinary pressure cooker is enough. There are a few useful gadgets – tongs for lifting up hot jars, a magnetic lid lifter for handling sterilized jar lids, a rack to hold the jars inside the water bath or pressure cooker/canner and obviously canning jars and lids – you’ll need http://tinyurl.com/panzea . Other than those items, you’re likely to have the rest of the equipment already or can acquire it easily enough.

Now, I’m not a person who insists there is one right true and only way to go about doing something and if you want to use pectin in your jellies instead of rendering your own pectin from little green apples, I say go for it! The goal isn’t to be a purist, it’s to can food you love eating so you’ll have it on hand to eat. Once you can your own produce (whether harvested off the shelves at the produce stand or from your patio), you may never go back to commercially canned. In the here and now, canning your own food means getting food that tastes marvelous to you.

Canning your own food goes beyond taste, if you need more reasons. By canning your own food, not only do you create recipes you love, you know exactly what’s in the jar because you put it there. You can be a bit fanatical (like me) and know exactly where your tomatoes grew and by whom, but maybe it’s just enough to know tomatoes were on sale at the farmer’s market and the family manning the booth looked like they knew all about their tomatoes. You won’t be blindsided by salmonella outbreaks in the peanut butter because you canned your own. And if you have food sensitivities or allergies, you won’t have to worry if the food manufacturer slipped soy into your peanut butter or gluten into your strawberry jelly. If you’re on a low-salt diet, you won’t have to worry about the salt content of your canned peas. And you don’t have to wonder if your food is spoiled. Commercially canned foods may look good and harbor botulism or salmonella or more inside them, but home-canned spoiled food looks spoiled. You can tell at a glance if the food is bad – the lid leaks, the lid is bulging, the jar looks crusty, it’s bubbling, or it looks a funny color. It may even have a noticeable unpleasant aroma if it spoiled enough.

Most known food spoilers – mold, bacteria, yeasts, enzymes – can’t survive heat for long so questionable food can be poured into a pot and boiled up again for 10 minutes. It will be safe to eat then, but it may not be pretty or tasty anymore. Food ‘s food, and if you’re hungry enough, looks and taste won’t matter as much as a full belly. Keep this tip in mind in case of serious food shortages or disaster.

The canning process is much easier when you’re actually doing it than it seems by the description in the books. For jams, jellies, and pickles, a water bath http://tinyurl.com/pce3xe method is the easiest to do – simply cook your jam or jelly; pour them into hot, clean jars; put on the lids; put the jars into a pot of boiling water deep enough to completely cover the jars; boil the recommended amount of time; then remove the jars from the pot and set on a towel on your kitchen counter or table to cool.

There are two low-tech tests to make sure your home-canned jars are well sealed: lifting the jar by the lid, and pressing the lid to make sure the center is sucked down. If you can hear, you’ll also hear the lids popping as they seal. Should a jar fail to seal right out of the processing, you can re-process it right away. If a jar fails the sealed test later on, either boil the food for 10 minutes before eating it (it should reach an interior temperature of 165ºF) or discard it. You can keep the jar and lid ring, though, and sterilize them. Just buy new lids.

If you want to can vegetables and meats, you’ll need a pressure canner/cooker as they lack the necessary acids, sugars, or salts that would inhibit spoilers. If you don’t plan to do a lot of this type of canning, and cost is a concern, start out with an inexpensive canner http://tinyurl.com/qyl6c2 or http://tinyurl.com/ov5jj2 but if you plan to can a lot, invest in a better http://tinyurl.com/owkmr7 quality canner

“Putting Food By,” by Janet Greene , Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan (Plume, 1992) http://tinyurl.com/pypn2o ;

“The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving,” by Judy Kingry and Lauren Devine (Robert Rose, 2006) http://tinyurl.com/odepk4 ;

“Preserving the Taste,” by Edon Waycott (Hearst Books, 1996) http://tinyurl.com/oq49u7 ;

“Well-Preserved,” by Eugenia Bone (Clarkson Potter, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/r3gzlf ,

“Joy of Pickling” by Linda Ziedrich (Harvard Common Press, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/o6guxo ;

“Joy of Jams” by Linda Ziedrich (Harvard Common Press, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/px4tph ;

“Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving” by the USDA (Dover Publications, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/o79eht ;

www.uga.edu/nchfp/
www.freshpreserving.com
www.pickyourown.org

 

Provident Gourmet: Sodas

My First Raspberry

Originally uploaded by nodigio

Home made sodas are delicious and much simpler than people think. Like baking, you will need a few pieces of specialized equipment, some ingredients, a bit of creativity, a bit of time, and the results are beverages that are tasty with ingredients you can trust. They are often less sweet, and if you want to play with yeast-based carbonation, more nutritious, too. You can customize home made sodas in ways you could never get from commercial sodas.

Before we discuss equipment, let’s talk about the different types of sodas you can easily make and some of the methods for making them.

Still Sodas. These are non-carbonated fruit or herb based beverages, like ades and orgeats and still meads. These are simple, uncarbonated, non-sparkling beverages.

Sparkling or Carbonated Sodas. These fizz and foam and bubble. There are several methods to getting a carbonated soda: 1. through lacto-fermentation (the cheapest, healthiest, and tastiest, but most time-consuming), 2. through forced carbonation with carbon dioxide, 3. through the use of carbonation powders, and 4. by adding flavored syrups to seltzer water.

Lemonade is probably the most familiar still “soda” we know. Cool-ades are another form of still soda. These are quick to make and can also be converted easily to our more familiar fizzy sodas by adding the syrups to seltzer water or by force carbonating with a carbonation machine.

You’re probably more interested in the bubbly sodas and how to make them.

My personal preferred method is through lacto-fermentation – using yeast to create a natural carbonation in the drink. There is a trick to fermenting the beverage so it lacks alcohol (feeding sugar to yeast creates alcohol), a matter of timing more than anything. Both under and over-fermentation can lead to a measurable alcohol content, but that will still be less than the alcohol in any of the so-called “alcohol-free” beers like O’Doul’s. In the event of an apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it or a complete breakdown of society, this may be the only viable method of creating carbonated, fizzy beverages.

Lacto-fermentation involves using champagne or ale yeast ad stopping the fermentation after it carbonates and before it creates alcohol. The method is very similar to brewing except for the timing, and you’ll use much the same equipment.

Equipment

You’ll need bottles. You can recycle and use plastic soda bottles. At events and parties where 2 liter bottles of soda or club soda are used, collect the empty bottles, sterilize them, and you’re good to go. Don’t get plastic bottles out of recycle bins – they may be contaminated and some contaminants don’t wash out. Be sure the only thing they contained was soda and that they were placed in a bin with no other trash. These 2 liter soda bottles will last a longer time than the caps, so replace the caps periodically. When the soda bottles are wrinkled and worn and won’t hold a seal anymore, put them in a recycling bin. Plastic bottles are safer to use when you’re first getting started because over-carbonation can cause the soda bottles to explode – and exploding plastic, while messy, won’t hurt you the way an exploding glass bottle could. Once you’ve got the knack of carbonating, you can switch to glass bottles.

If you use glass bottles, use beer or wine bottles – either recycled or new from a beer supply store. These bottles are designed to withstand the fermenting pressures of carbonation and are less likely to break. Don’t get the screw cap ones, get the crown capped ones or the flipper topped bottles. If you get the crown-capped bottles, you’ll need a bottle capper. I prefer the bench capper because I can exert more leverage in capping the bottles. Hand cappers require a bit more hand strength than I have. Get the one you like best.

You’ll also need:
a primary fermenter bucket,
a siphon kit,
measuring spoons,
funnels,
a large 5 gallon stock pot (non-reactive),
cheesecloth,
a non-reactive spoon large enough for the stockpot,
Straight A Cleanser or chlorine bleach for sterilizing your equipment,
a bottle brush,
candy thermometer, and
labels. That’s the equipment list.

You’ll need ingredients: mostly fruits and herbs, but you can also make the ever-popular celery soda, or other vegetable or grain good sodas, yeast (champagne and ale yeasts dissolve well and don’t clump, plus they’ll carbonate your sodas without over-carbonating or turning to alcohol too fast), and sweetener.

When you make your own sodas, you can experiment around with sweeteners and flavor combinations. Consider honey, molasses, and even stevia for sweetening. You can make “diet” sodas with stevia and sugar. You need real sugar or honey to feed the yeast to produce carbonation, so the trick to making diet sodas is to use just enough real sweetener to feed the yeast without using so much you get a non-diet product. Try half real sweetener and half low-cal/no cal sweetener.

Soda Issues

The two biggest problems with home made sodas are too fizzy and not fizzy enough. For not fizzy enough, you can let the soda ferment a bit longer, or you can “feed” it with a pinch of sugar and yeast and let it eat a bit to release carbon and make it fizzier. Use a livelier yeast on the next batch. Baking yeast can carbonate a soda, but it tends to be a slow carbonator. Champagne and ale yeasts, meant for fizziness over alcohol content. Nutritional yeast is a dead yeast, it won’t produce carbonation at all.

Too fizzy can lead to exploding bottles. Store unopened bottles in the refrigerator to halt fermentation and reduce fizziness. Open the bottles slowly to release carbonation pressure. On the next batch, use less yeast or switch types of yeast. Lager yeasts will always over-carbonate. If you’re storing your sodas in a warm environment, consider halving the yeast. Warmth makes yeast go crazy with carbonation.

Let’s Get Fizzy

If you choose not to use commercial yeasts, you can make your own soda starter:

Create a Soda Culture with Commercial Yeast

Dissolve 1/8 teaspoon of yeast (champagne or ale yeast) in a coffee cup of warm water for about 5 minutes. The yeast should be fresh and the water should be wrist warm (98-106º F). Too little yeast will not yield enough carbonation, too much will give the soda a “yeasty” taste and might burst your soda bottles. Water too hot or too cold will have the same effect as not enough yeast because in cold water it will stay dormant or even die if the water’s too cold and yeast dies quickly in hot water.

Then mix 2 ¼ cups of white sugar, 1 cup filtered water and the dissolved yeast. Let it stand until bubbly – this can happen very quickly, so don’t expect it to be hours and walk off and leave it. Over-bubbled yeast dies, and you’ll have to start over again.

Diet Soda Culture

Use 5 tablespoons of real sugar and the equivalent of 2 cups of sugar substitute (I don’t do artificial sugar substitutes; you’re on your own here.) The yeast will consume the real sugar when fermentation is complete so white sugar is just as good a choice as anything else. The flavor of the soda and its sweetness isn’t affected by the sugars converted to carbonation. It’s the unconsumed sugars that sweeten and flavor the soda, and that’s where you ca get picky about

Create Your Own Wild Captured Soda Culture

To do so you will need:

A 2 to 3 inch piece of ginger root, grated or chopped
About a half a cup of sugar (white sugar is fine or you can use maple syrup or honey…)
Filtered water
Quart sized mason jar
Fill the mason jar 3/4 full with filtered or de-chlorinated water
Add 1 tablespoon of grated or chopped ginger and 2 teaspoons of sugar.
Stir well.

Cover it with cheese cloth fastened on with a rubber band and allow it to sit out for 24 hours. Each morning, add 2 teaspoons of ginger and 2 teaspoons of sugar and stir well. If possible stir 2 or 3 times per day.

After a week, it should become slightly bubbly and pleasant smelling. At this point it is ready to be used in your soda making. If you are not going to use it all right away, you can cap it and keep it in your refrigerator until you are ready to use it. It should stay usable for a month. When you go to use it again, warm it up and feed it for a day before using – remove ½ cup of water and replace it with fresh filtered water, then add 1 teaspoon of ginger and 1/3 teaspoon of sugar and leave it out, covered with cheesecloth, for 24 hours or until it gets bubbly again.

It’s kind of like creating a sourdough culture, except you’ll use this one for sodas. You can use up the entire quart of culture – that’s 4 gallons of soda – or use part and keep the rest as a starter for the next batch. Each time you make soda, replace the water in the starter and feed it – 1 teaspoon of ginger and 1/3 teaspoon of sugar/honey per cup of filtered water.

Use this culture in place of champagne or ale yeast when carbonating your sodas. You’ll use 1 cup of soda culture per gallon of soda.

The Yeasty Method of Making Fizzy Sodas With Flavor Extracts

I don’t recommend using flavor extracts for a huge variety of reasons, but if you like them, go for it. You’ll want 4 teaspoons of flavoring extract per gallon of filtered water. Always use filtered, de-chlorinated water for yeast carbonated sodas because the chlorine kills the yeast and you’ll get a cloudy, nasty fluid instead of a sparkly delicious soda.

Pour the soda culture (1 cup per gallon of finished soda) and the flavor extract in a gallon jug and top it off with filtered water. Shake to mix and pour into 2 liter plastic bottles. Cap tightly. Wait 4 – 6 days for the yeast to make carbonation. Squeeze the bottles a couple of times a day to check on them. If they get too firm, slowly open the cap to release a little pressure. Once they are nicely carbonated, store them in the refrigerator so they don’t continue to eat up your sugars and get over-carbonated.

The Yeasty Method of Making Fizzy Sodas with Home Made Syrups

Here is where your creativity can shine. Make syrups of fruits, vegetables, herbs, or grains and mix and match to make sodas for meals and pleasure sipping.

Pour 1 cup of the soda culture into a gallon jar, add your combination of home made syrups (not to exceed 2/3 of the gallon jar – any more and the flavor will be too strong), top with filtered water, cover lightly with cheesecloth, and let the jar sit out for 3 – 7 days, stirring 2 or 3 times a day. The less time it sits, the sweeter the final soda will be.

Once the soda reaches your preferred degree of sweetness, it’s time to bottle it up. Siphon the soda into plastic 2 liter bottles, leaving any cloudy dregs behind, cap tightly, and let it sit for another 3 – 7 days, checking for carbonation by squeezing the bottles. If the bottles get too firm, release the pressure by slowly opening the bottles. When it reaches the degree of carbonation you want, refrigerate the soda to slow the carbonation process. It’s drinkable as soon as you decide the carbonation is done.

Commercial Carbonators

If you want a faster method that requires available technology, the fastest way to create awesome and delicious sodas is through forced carbonation. You can invest in a carbonation machine like Soda Club, Soda Stream, the Penguin Carbonator, or similar carbonators. These carbonators are pricey to begin with, but if you make a lot of sodas, over time they become economical. I don’t recommend using their soda flavorings simply because they use far too much sugar and HFCS. They also have very limited flavors. You can make your own syrups for flavoring your sodas and have a better quality soda – and that’s the point of making your own, isn’t it.

Follow their directions for making your sodas, using either commercial syrups like Torani or home made concentrated syrups.

Build Your Own Carbonator

You can also build your own Carbonator. Since Richard went to so much trouble to create this lovely detailed site, I’ll link to it. My own experience is similar, but he has photos! And he gets wonderfully technical! This is far less expensive that the commercial carbonators even if it is a bit time-consuming and requires some skills to make yourself. I think it’s worth the effort if you prefer forced carbonation over lacto-fermentation.

Once you’ve built your carbonator, you can use either commercial or home made syrups to make your sodas.

Powdered Carbonation

To be honest with you, I have never used the powdered carbonation method. Alka-Seltzer tablets leaves the beverage too salty and with poor carbonation. I suppose if you’re desperate, you could do this, but I’d rather drink the beverage without carbonation than adulterate it with Alka-Seltzer. On the other hand, if you’re taking Alka-Seltzer anyway, why not jazz up the flavor with soda ingredients?

Using Commercial Carbonation

The final method is by far the easiest method of all, and the most expensive. Seltzer water, carbonated water, fizzy mineral water, club soda, etc. all cost about $2.00 (currently) for a 2 liter bottle, then when you add in your flavored syrups, it costs even more. But – it’s really fast and if you’re away from home, you can make your own sodas in a pinch – if you make your own carbonated water from a carbonator at home and run out when you’re at work or away from home, for example. And if you have children, teaching them to make their own sodas this way will help them make healthier beverage choices, especially if you pack containers of syrups for them to use.

You can use either commercial syrups like Torani or make your own concentrated syrup.

Syrup Recipes:

You can make and use these syrups right away or make them up in advance and process them for later use (say winter, when the fruits aren’t ripe), freeze them, or keep them in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

My Fruit Soda

About 6 cups of fruit (fresh or frozen)
1 gallon of filtered water
1 1/2 cups of sugar (or honey, or maple syrup, or other sweetener equivalent)
a gallon jar and a large pot
Put 1/2 gallon of filtered water in a large pot. Bring the water to a boil. Stir in your sugar or other sweetener.
Remember that the yeast beasties in your soda culture or champagne or ale yeast are going to consume this sugar during the process of fermentation and transform it into carbonation. This is what creates the soda’s fizz, so white sugar is not as bad a choice as it is for non-fermented foods. But if you feel better using honey or some other sweetener, go for it. This is your soda and you get to make it with your ingredients and to your taste.

Add your fruit to the pot. These can be fresh or frozen – blueberries, peaches, blackberries, apple slices, either single fruits or your favorite blend of fruits and bring the water back to a boil. Allow them to simmer in the water for about 10 minutes.

Taste what you’ve created. Does it taste fruity enough? If not maybe you want to add more berries or simmer a bit longer. This is not an absolute process and you get to make it taste the way you want it to taste.

Root Beer

The next step is to create your syrup. For this root beer syrup you will need:
2 tablespoons sassafras root
2 teaspoons sarsaparilla root
2 teaspoons burdock root
2 teaspoons licorice root
1 gallon of filtered water
1 1/2 cups of brown sugar
a gallon jar and a large pot

Put 1⁄2 gallon of filtered water in a large pot. Add your roots. Feel free to add different roots or omit any of these you don’t enjoy. This is just a recipe to get you started. I like sticking a vanilla bean into the sugar and letting it sit for a week before using it, it adds a subtle depth to the final root beer. Sarsaparilla and sassafras root are difficult to buy, but possible. Make sure you buy culinary grade root and get the cut and shifted, not the powdered, version. If you buy the whole root (or wildcraft it), you’ll need to be able to mince, chop, or grate the roots.
Bring the water to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and allow it to simmer for about 20 minutes.

Stir in your sugar or other sweetener.

Continue to steep for about 4 hours.

Taste what you’ve created. Does the root beer taste seem strong enough? If not maybe you want to make and add another root decoction or steep bit longer. This is the best part – you can define how you want your root beer to taste. Do you want to add a decoction of birch bark? Would a strong mint tea make your root beer better? How about a strong tea of tarragon or woodruff or thyme? You decide. It’s your soda!

Strain.

Elderberry

1 cup of fresh Elderberries or a half a cup of dried berries.
3 cups of water
1 cup of honey

Place the berries in a saucepan and cover them with the 3 cups of water. Then, bring it to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for a half hour.

Smash up the berries. Then, strain the mixture through a mesh strainer.

Add the honey.

Rosehip

4 cups fresh rosehips or 2 cups dried
2 cups water
1 cup honey

Gather rose hips after they have developed and turned red. Some herbalists recommend waiting until after the first frost for improved flavor. (These fruits are commonly found on bushes well into winter.)

Rinse rose hips well. Remove any stems or flower remnants.

Bring two cups of water to a boil and add four cups of rose hips. Simmer for 20 minutes or until the water has been reduced by half.

Allow to cool slightly and then strain through a jelly bag.

Stir in one cup of honey, or to taste.

Celery I

1 pound Chinese celery, coarse chopped
2 tablespoons crushed but not ground celery seed
½ pound celery root (celeriac), peeled and chopped
3 carrots, chopped
1 quart filtered water
2 cups sugar or honey
1 tablespoon fresh squeezed lemon juice

Dissolve the sugar in the water over medium heat. Remove from the heat and add the celeries and carrots and step for 2 hours. Strain and add the lemon juice.

Celery II

1 pound Chinese celery, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons crushed but not ground celery seed
1 cucumber, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon fresh dill weed
1 quart filtered water
2 cups sugar or honey

Dissolve the sugar in the water over medium heat. Remove from the heat and add the celery, seeds, cucumber, and dill. Steep for 2 hours. Strain.

Celery III

1 pound Chinese celery, coarsely chopped
1 pound juicy apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
1 cup fresh parsley
1 quart filtered water
2 cups sugar or honey

Dissolve the sugar in the water over medium heat. Remove from the heat and steep the celery, apples, and parsley for 2 hours. Strain through a cheesecloth. This will be a bit cloudy from the apple pulp. If you don’t want it cloudy, use the well washed apple peels instead.

 

Garden Progress

Wading Pool Gardens 5 17

Originally uploaded by nodigio

Here’s a picture of the wading pool gardens – the tomatoes have set their first fruits, I’ve been harvesting half a dozen radishes a day, the Brussels Sprouts are setting up stalks and will soon be forming heads. I’ve been harvesting pineapple sage for tea and making dessert sauces and as an accompaniment for salads and ham. The cornflowers are sending up buds, The peas have lovely runners and tendrils, the cucumber had tiny fruits, the carrots are growing nicely, the basils are up and going, the bell pepper has tiny fruits.

I will need to start watering them as we’re now entering a week or two of no rain, and I will also need to top dress the tomatoes as they require more fertilizer in containers, even if they are very large containers.

The potatoes are growing very rapidly. I’ve long since passed the adding soil stage to the straw stage. The soil anchors the potatoes and provides nutrition, the straw allows the potatoes to grow larger. I find I harvest more and bigger potatoes when I use straw on top of the soil – probably 1/4 of the bags are filled with soils and growing potato roots. All the rest is straw. When I pull the potatoes out later this year, the straw goes into compost and the soil gets refreshed and recycled for next year’s use.

Now that the cold weather has passed, I’ll be setting out my onions and garlic. Tomorrow, I get a new wading pool for them, and possibly a second one for my strawberries. Where the strawberries are now is nice, but the roly polies have found them and it’s a race to harvest strawberries before the roly polies get them. I never knew just how attracted roly polies were to fresh, ripe strawberries. I think a raised bed that has no connection the yard soil will do much to prevent another invasion of roly polies.

 

Provident Gourmet: Convenience Foods

Broccoli Beef Roll-Up

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30747767/

“Processed food firms increasingly unable to ensure items are pathogen-free”

All the more reason to prepare your own foods from known sources. The problem with food manufacturers is that they buy food in bulk through food brokers who have combined foods from many sources. It only takes one contaminated crop from one small farm to contaminate an entire bulk order. Food manufacturers don’t want the responsibility of knowing where their food sources, and they don’t want to spend the funds to source their food purchases or to take the steps to check the food before they buy it or to decontaminate it before producing whatever products they make like pot pies, TV Dinners, or frozen entrees or sides.

Fortunately for us, making our own pot pies and frozen dinners, entrees, and sides is a lot easier than food manufacturers would have us believe. It does entail a small investment of time to make our own convenience foods, but that loss in making our own foods is more than made up in the time we save by not getting sick and by having meals we really like eating instead of ones we settle for because that’s what was available.

There’s a how-to on making pot pies in canning jars that’s very yummy and easy (http://www.instructables.com/id/Pie-in-a-Jar/). You can’t cook the pies in a microwave and obviously not on a stove-top, open flame, or up against any direct heat source, but they do quite well in a conventional or convection oven to cook. Pot pies in jars are very simple to make, simple to store, and simple to prepare.

Now, this instructable doesn’t specify clearly a few things (unless it’s been updated since I saw it). Use wide mouthed 8 ounce canning jars. A 2 crust recipe will make enough crust for 6 – 8 pies (depending on how thick you like your crust). Drier fillings work best and don’t boil over. Take the lid off before baking and place the pie on a baking sheet before putting it in the oven. Bake at 375ºF for 60 minutes – cover the edges of the pie with foil for the 1st 45 minutes and without the foil for the last 15 so you don’t burn the crust. If you bake more than 1 pie at a time, add 5 – 10 minutes’ baking time per additional pie. I tend to make thinner crusts for entrée pies than for dessert pies.

Making your own TV dinners is equally simple. You’ll need a container that can go from freezer to oven. When I don’t mind the foods mingling, I use a flat, square 2 – 4 cup container with a lid – plastic or glass. The square shape helps re-heat the meal faster in a microwave. When I use the microwave (at work), either glass or plastic works fine. At home, I prefer to use the glass containers. You can make a traditional dinner – entrée, 2 sides, a bread and a dessert – this way and freeze it all in a single container to reheat later, or you can make casseroles, soups, or stews and freeze them. You can get divided plates for making TV dinners, too and these are really nice. The round ones go through a dishwasher without warping better than the rectangular ones, but if you handwash, the rectangular ones stack better in the freezer and take up less space so you can make more of them.

If you are a single person or part of a couple, most recipes are designed for 4 people. Putting up the extra servings as TV dinners makes sense. That way you don’t have to worry about leftovers – instead, you have lunches or quick dinners ready to go. If you have a larger family, simply double or triple the meal and portion out the extras into freezer meals for later. They say that you can keep the meals in the freezer for a month, but I’ve had them do well for up to a year, the flavor and appearance don’t seem to degrade very much at all.

Meatloaf, smothered steaks, lasagna, spaghetti, chili, pot roast, pork chops (deboned), ham steaks, deboned chicken (thigh or breast), and grilled kabobs or steaks make great focal points for a TV dinner (assuming you’re omnivorous), adding your favorite veggies (mashed potatoes, au gratin veggies, green beans, mixed vegetables, peas, carrots, corn, etc.) or mac and cheese as sides. If you’re a vegetarian/vegan, substitute a protein entrée of legumes and grains and add a side or two with it. Bean loaves make great loaf or smothered “steak” type entrées.

Always label and date your freezer meals because they’ll all look the same in the freezer. Use a sharpie pen and freezer tape because other types of pens and tapes can’t hold up to freezing temperatures as well – and you want it to be readable.

When you first start making your freezer dishes, you’ll have to spend time planning and preparing them, but once you have a store of them, it gets easier because you won’t be cooking as often – perhaps only once or twice a week. The rest of your meals will be reheating your extras.

You’ll need to buy enough containers to give you at least a month’s worth of meals and I prefer to have 3 months’ worth on hand. Each time you cook, make more than you will eat and when you plate the meal, plate the extras into freezable containers. After you’re done eating, the freezer meals will be cool enough to freeze, so label and date them and put them in the freezer. . You’ll have good, inexpensive lunches for work and quick meals to eat at home on busy nights. You’ll have a variety of meals for unexpected guests, too.

For TV Dinner ideas, check out cookbooks like Emeril Lagasse’s Prime Time With Emeril, http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Time-Emeril-Americas-Favorite/dp/0060185368/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242417217&sr=1-4 , Emeril’s TV Dinners http://www.amazon.com/Emerils-TV-Dinners-Recipes-Essence/dp/0061871699/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242417217&sr=1-3 , Buxton’s Dinner is Ready http://www.amazon.com/Dinner-Ready-Meals-One-Day/dp/097877650X/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242417745&sr=1-6 , Azzolini’s There’s a Chef in Your Freezer http://www.amazon.com/Theres-Chef-Your-Freezer-Mediterranean-Inspired/dp/1581126549/ref=pd_sim_b_50, and Taylor-Hough’s Frozen Assets http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Assets-Lite-Easy-Month/dp/1402218605/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242418464&sr=1-2 , which contains a section on preparing freezer meals for vegetarians.

There’s no reason to give up convenience for safety, and no reason to keep supporting a food industry that doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Food shouldn’t be a Russian Roulette game and that’s what food manufacturers are turning it into.

 

Wading Pools Growing

Pool One Sprouting

Originally uploaded by nodigio

Here is a picture of the wading pools 2 weeks after planting them. This front pool has radishes, carrots, snow peas, basil, pineapple sage, bell peppers, yellow pear tomatoes, and cornflowers sprouting up and leafing out.

The pineapple sage is ready to harvest now.

In another 2 weeks, I should be harvesting radishes and possibly tiny baby carrots. In another 2 weeks, the peas and cornflowers will be flowering and the tomatoes hanging with little green spheres. The basil will be large enough to consider harvesting.

 

Potatoes

Potatoes

Originally uploaded by nodigio

Here’s an update photo of my potatoes growing in trash bags. This is the third time I’ve added soil so far. After this, I will be topping them up with straw so the bags aren’t so heavy. That and straw is much cheaper than bags of purchased soil (for those who live in apartments and have no access to good garden soil and compost from their yards.

There are tiny potatoes forming and I expect to have about 40 pounds of potatoes from these 2 bags. These aren’t the only bags of potatoes I’m growing. I have enough bags to feed my family for a year, which means I have 12 giant trash bags of potatoes growing. Each bag should produce about 20 – 30 pounds of potatoes, and I’m estimating the lower amount, pessimist that I am.

The recent high winds blew down my ornamental little fence, and I put it back up after taking these photos. Since I live in a suburban neighborhood, appearances are important to keep from upsetting the neighbors and incurring non-compliance fines.

 

Time Enough to Die

North View from Mother’s Grave

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518213,00.html

It usually only takes about 6 minutes for an ambulance to get to the scene

In 6 minutes, you can die if you’re not breathing. Your lifeblood can pump out. A stopped heart can never restart. If you live where the average response time for an ambulance is more than 3 minutes, it is critical that you and those about you know emergency first aid; enough to keep someone in critical condition alive for either a drive to the nearest ER or the arrival of an ambulance.

The two most important emergency techniques you need to know are CPR and how to staunch severe bleeding. These two techniques will keep you breathing, keep your heart bleeding, and prevent you from losing so much blood you bleed out and die because all your organs fail from severe blood loss. Heart attacks fall in this category and often take less physical means of stabilizing, but could at any moment require CPR.

A close third is how to treat severe burns. Kitchen and cookery burns and burns from hot tap water are far too common an injury. Knowing how to treat them the moment they occur will reduce scarring and speed healing. Burns from a house fire or grass fire are less common, but given the frequency of wildfires lately, that could change. Knowing what to do in the event of a serious burn is important and you don’t want to wait 6 or more minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

Then you need to know how to stabilize a broken bone. You don’t necessarily need to know how to actually set the bone because we are presuming an ambulance will eventually arrive to cart you off to experts. But until that ambulance arrives, you want to keep that bone stable so it doesn’t get worse.

Then you need to know how to deal with someone on a bad drug trip or experiencing an overdose or sever allergy reaction. These all fall into pretty much the same category even if the methods are slightly different.

After these, you need to know what to do for severe pain that isn’t related to obvious bleeding, breaks, heart attacks, or burns, like the pain from an infected appendix or kidney stones.

There are a host of other things we need to think of as well – gunshot wounds if you live where a drive-by shooting could happen, stab wounds, dislocated joints, chemical burns in addition to the aforementioned fire and boiling water burns, bite wounds from people or animals (dog attacks are becoming distressingly common, often egged on by the dog owner if what we read in the news is correct), corneal abrasions, electric shocks, hypo- and hyperthermia, and poisoning. And, apparently also distressingly on the increase, is taser abuse. We need to learn how to treat people who’ve been over-tasered and I don’t think that information is widely disseminated. Most of the people who are over-tasered are people who are panicked, frightened, already wounded, mentally unstable, or are children who shouldn’t be tasered at all. Perhaps a combination of the knowledge of treating a drug overdose and heart attack could help someone who was over-tasered.

If you are involved in or at the scene of an accident with injury, you need to know what to do to both reduce further injuries and save the life of someone while waiting on that ambulance. It’s a tough call here. The law is on your side if you choose to do nothing at all, and against you if you do anything at all and the person decides to blame you instead of the one who caused the accident.

Unless the ambulance is right there, 6 minutes or more is a very long time to wait. In those six minutes, you can save your life or someone else’s. Learn what you need to know and refresh those skills at least annually. You can learn much of it through places like your local fire and police departments or the Red Cross. Some are free, some cost, but the price of the class is far less than the price of a life.

 

Local Survival

New Strawberries!

Originally uploaded by nodigio

You survive best on the land that you know. That’s why my focus here has been on “bugging in”: creating a safe and secure place right where you currently live. For me, that’s in a dense suburban area. I’ve lived in apartments, too, so I share how to do things from an apartment. I’ve never lived in a densely populated and compacted city like New York or Chicago so I can only speculate on survival in places like that.

It’s easy to create a safe and secure place for survival in a rural setting. It’s no challenge at all and almost all the survival guides are directed towards that easy way. I mean, really, even in spacious suburbs, who has room for horses, cows, pigs, chickens, a full orchard, a fenced military-style compound, a separate bomb shelter, a smoke shed, a root cellar, and cropland? No apartments and few suburban houses have even basements, let alone root cellars and smoke sheds!

Surviving disasters and emergencies in a city or suburb is challenging. There are ways to have dwarf orchards, to have a smoker grill in place of a smoke shed, to buff up a home to make it more bomb-proof, to add layers of safety and security even from the hazards of city life (drive-by shootings, anyone?), and to creatively find room for stockpiled food and water.

That said, here are some suggestions for making your home in a city or suburb more survivable. Not all of these suggestions will work in every situation. Remember, the most important attributes of survivability are flexibility and improvisation.

Plant fruit trees and bushes, dwarf or standard depending on the space you have available – apples are versatile, but don’t necessarily limit yourself to apples. If you live in an apartment complex, work with management and the owners to re-landscape the property with fruit and nut trees – it’s a bonus for the residents to be able to harvest them. I have a mulberry, redbud, 4 dwarf apples, 2 dwarf apricots, 2 dwarf plums, and a fruiting hedge of Nanking cherries, elderberries, blueberries, raspberries, and lemons. You can also plant nut trees if you’ve room enough. I have a pecan tree, a hazelnut, and a burr oak, and plan to add an almond.

Plant flower beds and mingle vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers among them. Leafy lettuces, kale, cabbages, basil, rosemary, sage, carrots, radishes, daylilies, borage, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, potatoes, peanuts, cornflowers, and more. Put in “ornamental” stands of wheat or other grains. Plan on what you can grow during the winter, too, like cabbages, beets, parsnips, carrots, etc.

Consider some form of backyard barnyarding – chickens, guinea hens, ducks, rabbits, bees, goats, or mini cows, depending on your lot size and city ordinances. Even deeply urban cities like New York allow chickens, for now.

Consider installing a koi pond close to a downspout but far enough away from the foundation to avoid damaging it. This is a pretty feature that also collects rainwater and can do multiple duty – the koi are as edible as they are pretty, and if you plant edible lotuses and cattails with them, you have more food, it’s a water source, and you can add catfish for more good eating. If you’ve got the room to expand it out a bit, you could even grow rice there.

Do put in barrels to collect water at all your downspouts. If you add a pump to them, it will be easier to access. A manual hand pump is sufficient and will need fewer repairs and no excess power to use. Use this water for watering gardens when times are good and peaceful. It will save your water bill.

Install a fireplace as an alternate heat/cooking source. It should be a fireplace that burns fuel to which you will have easy access even in a disaster. Since you’ve planted fruit and nut trees, you’ll have plenty of trimmings and prunings for a woodburning fireplace. A mass rocket fireplace will burn more efficiently and is smaller so if you don’t have a lot of room or a lot of trees, that’s a good way to go.

Find out where the water table is on your land (even in the small plots of a city house, you can still find that out). In a seriously long term End of the World Scenario, you can drill a well and install a handpump. For anything else, it would be useful to know in case of flooding, drought, or digging an underground root cellar or bomb shelter.

Invest in at least one non-gasoline powered form of transportation. A bicycle is the most common, so get one that is sturdy, simple to repair, and capable of pulling a small trailer and buy the trailer when you buy the bike so you’ll have it in case of need. Use the trailer to go shopping and run local errands. Make sure you buy a repair kit and spare parts, too. You don’t have to buy these right away, but do plan on getting them in case of need. Sport bikes may be fun, but you want a workhorse of a bike.

Spend some time accumulating manual hand tools as well as power tools – drills, saws, hammers, and their accessory nails and screws and bolts and such. Practice using the manual tools in case you need to use them when the power goes out long term. Otherwise, take joy in using the power tools while you can.

Have materials ready to reinforce windows and doors in case of serious storms. Those in hurricane-prone areas know what I mean and probably already do this because it makes sense. But in case of a long term disaster, you may need to barricade your home for safety reasons against home invasions. If you already have the supplies on hand, you’re that much farther ahead.

I know a lot of survivalists swear by generators, and that may be a good idea if your area is prone to storm-created short term power outages. Me, I prefer solar panels and solar storage batteries. Using solar all year round means you save on electricity and never have to worry about power grid outages. In fact, if you do it right, the electric company may buy your surplus energy and you’ll get paid to have solar power. You could use a combination of generator and solar power.

Pay off as many bills as you can, including your house if you’re buying. It’s easier to come up with taxes than a mortgage, and the fewer bills you have, the more secure you are. No debt collectors hounding you, no one showing up at your door threatening you or repossessing your things. If you own everything you have, you are that much more secure and safe. I don’t know if it would be worth it to refinance your house, but with mortgage rates falling, it might be worth checking out – you might be able to save thousands of dollars in interest and be able to pay down the principle that much faster.

If you do have to “bug out”, have at least 3 exit routes and a bug out bag ready for you and each family member, including pets and livestock (if any). And always make bug out plans even if you expect and intend to bug in. If you don’t need a Plan B, C, or D, all the better for you, but if you do need them it’s good to have them.

Spend some time getting to know your neighbors – what skills do they have, what’s their lifestyle, would they be valuable in case of a disaster, can you share responsibilities with them, who do you have to be wary of? Survival is possible alone, but it’s much easier in a group. Your neighbors make the most logical starting place because what they do could have an impact on you and your survivability (and you on theirs).

And remember – survival in a city or suburban area requires a lot of flexibility and improvisation. If one method or path doesn’t work for you find another one. Use what you have – and you have far more than you think you do.