What I've Done Lately To Prep 6/5/12

As you can see, it's been a while.  Insert usual excuses here.

Since I last posted, we have done a few things to continue our preparations.  We've continued to grow our food storage.  There have been lot's of canned food sales lately in our area.  Most of the sales have been driven by the fact that Safeway just opened a brand new store and QFC has decided to compete for business head to head with them.  That's to our benefit and we are taking full advantage.  We've grown our canned stock of food quite a bit in the last month, all with items that we regularly eat anyway.  We've started paying much closer attention to the sales ads for the grocery stores, and simply circling the deals we want from each.  We also have been paying much more attention to coupons lately.  We make a list of the items we are going to by and then we just make the rounds of the stores during the week.

In conjunction with paying more attention to sales and coupons, Barb has created an inventory spreadsheet which she and I have been adding pricing information to as well.  We've stored the document on what was formerly Google Documents, but now is called Google Drive.  This allows us both to access the spreadsheet from our smart phones, Ipad, or home computers to see pricing.  We enter pricing as a price per unit from each store so that we are able to compare apples to apples and know when we are getting a good deal.  As you know, this is necessary to be able to judge Costco products against regular grocery store products.  We have found in 90% of the items we compare, Costco is hands down the cheapest source for a lot of the foods we use on a regular basis.

As we bring home the food and increase our storage capacity, I've been clearing off shelves in the garage to make room.  We've developed a habit of rotating the food immediately as we stock and marking the food with month and year with a Sharpie pen.  Our immediate goal is to get 6 months of food on the shelves.  I think we're probably at 2-3 months of food on the shelves right now (includes 30 days worth the freeze dried food we have for emergency rations).  I think this is a conservative estimate based on the rate at which we currently eat food.  There is certainly room for improvement by lowering our daily calorie intake.  Since we are aren't particularly storing food for SHTF, we will continue to base on our current intake rate.  We're mainly storing food to help leverage cheap costs of food when we can and also to act as a cushion for us if either Barb or I lost our job.  It also seems to us that huge inflation must be on the horizon based on the continually deteriorating economic conditions of the world.

I completed 2 fiction books ("Prepper Porn") in the last few weeks.  Both were EMP SHTF scenarios.  I intend to write a review on both of the books as a separate post.

Barb and I both applied for our CPL (Concealed Pistol License) in the State of Washington.  I intend to discuss in more detail in yet another separate post.

The biggest achievement of the last few weeks is that Barb and I got our garden plants into the ground.  Hopefully, we didn't put them into the ground to early.  We had unseasonably warm weather the first couple of weeks of May, which turned out to be deceptive in indicating the last few weeks of weather.  Although frost hasn't been occurring, the mornings here are still starting in the 45-50 deg F range and topping out around 65 deg F.  It's been cloudy a lot, but not as much rain as we might expect for this time of year.

We started by transplanting our strawberries that have been growing in pots on the front doorstep for the past 2 years into a new garden bed we've created along our fence line.  We divided 2 large pots into 4 plants.  We planted them along with 4 blueberry bushes we purchased at Costco, staggering strawberry then blueberry.  Our only logic in doing this was that we think the strawberries will fill in the ground around the blueberry bushes as time goes on.  In this same bed, we planted 2 asparagus starters, which won't be up to full production for at least 2 years.  We have more room in this bed, so we're considering adding raspberries and possibly rhubarb (I tasted rhubarb for the first time yesterday and I quite liked it).


We planted 2 zucchini and 2 straight neck yellow squash in our main raised beds.  Along with that, we've added pole beans and Romain lettuce.  We've still got an enormous parsley bush (only way I can describe it) surviving from last year in one of the raised boxes.  We've cut it way back.  Barb also took a large amount off of the bush and has dried it.  I think she will use it to make Tabouli, though we haven't tried yet.

We are trying something new with our tomatoes this year.  We haven't had much luck in our front flower bed in the past 2 years, despite the fact that they were getting full sun.  We think it pretty much has to do with the mild temperatures here.  We've elected to try the tomatoes in pots on the deck this year.  We've got 4 total plants and we are trying them in 2 different locations on the deck, up against 2 different walls to try and use the reflected and stored heat of the walls to keep the plants warmer longer.  To this, we've added 2 sweet pepper plants and 4 corn plants.

Finally on the discussion of the garden, we planted several different herbs in pots and raised containers.  We have cilantro, basil, peppermint, spearmint, and thyme.  I'm thinking that next fall/winter, I may bring in all of the pots of herbs and put them under grow lamps in our back room.  We're planning on having a new fire place insert installed this Aug for use this winter, so that room should stay very warm.  It would be nice to be able to have fresh herbs for cooking with year round.

Yesterday, we had a group of 16 people over to our house for a prepper meeting.  Our goal has been to get people together every 6 weeks or so, have a meal, catch up with friends, and then have some sort of "class" on prepping.  We started out by just hanging out and chatting about various subjects, both prepper and non-prepper related.  We then got the food going and continued our conversations.  This meeting, we had an Italian potluck, which I think turned out very well - no one went hungry anyway.  After our meal, Trace (http://tracemypreps.com/) gave us instruction on pressure dressings and tourniquets.  The training was about 45 minutes long and included hands on participation from the audience (learn by doing).  I thought it was excellent training - I learned several things I did not know and dispelled a few "myths" of things that I thought I did know.

I think it's important to "network" with like minded people as often as possible, not only for ideas, but just to confirm that what your doing makes sense and is worth doing.  It gives a sense of community and also allows you to develop some friendships with people you can turn to when times turn tough.