Don't wait until the SHTF...

The process of becoming prepared is an interesting journey. 

If you have practiced a skill; you won't be learning all the steps while you are in an emergency situation or when your life depends on it. ~Perky Prepping Gramma~

We started the journey last year. The process began with buying "stuff" from the store, learning to dehydrate fresh food from the store.
Figuring out how to pressure can my own meat. Learning to practice my skills. Which lead to growing an heirloom garden.
Each step has involved a learning curve. That is what I am going to talk about today.
When we first started preparing, we understood the importance of being self-sustaining in food production. We purchased a shelf stable can of seeds. Over the winter we decided to start a garden this year.
I knew from the beginning I was going to keep it simple the first year:
1. Using the raised planter system (our ground is red clay), ala square foot garden and "Back to Eden" methods. No chemicals. All heirloom, non-GMO seeds.
2. Grow what we like to eat
3. Not grow too many things (since I was learning about each plant I was growing)
4. I expected some failures, which is simply a learning process for the next time.
5. Hoping that I would be able to eat some food from my garden & even possibly be able to can fresh "good" food.

I have learned a lot & I am grateful that we didn't wait to start a garden in a SHTF scenario. If we had waited to start our garden, we would have not been in great shape & still would have been dependent upon what we already have stored.
1. Using the square foot garden & "Back to Eden" process worked really well for us. This is how we will continue to garden.
2. Looking back at that can of seeds we have stored, makes me realize that we need to store more (seeds) of what we eat. This is another basic principle that needs repeating.Store (grow) what you eat. There are several vegetables in "the can" we don't like to eat, so why bother trying to grow them or even have them stored. Soon, I will need to learn how to save the seeds.   
3. We planted asparagus, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, snap peas, sweet peas, green beans, yellow squash & carrots. 
4. The things that didn't work for various reasons are the tomatoes, both peas, carrots & maybe the cantaloupe.
5. We have eaten corn, squash & green beans. We will have multiple watermelons soon. 
Ta! Da!  I even got enough of a harvest to pressure can a small batch of greens beans yesterday.

There will still be more, but I am pretty tickled so far. 

Special Note for Newbies: Are there things you still need to learn? Are you willing to step out and give it a try? There are many posts here on the blog to help you & back on Perky Prepping Gramma Facebook page itself; there are a lot of photo albums for various things like canning, dehydrating, storage and more. If you have questions, read through and then post question on the front page of the facebook page. We are here to help you on your journey.

Dehydrating cabbage...

The first batch: Chopped up into pieces, steamed them for about 5 minutes, allowed them dry some, them placed on the trays to dehydrate. 
Afterwards I had to pick through the pieces because some were thicker and weren't done, and dehydrated them some more.
Second batch of cabbage: I sorted the thinner pieces from the chunkier pieces (the thick ones with the veins etc.), since the chunky pieces take longer to dehydrate.
The temperature was set at 125 degrees F., until the pieces were crispy. So far, I have about two heads of cabbage dehydrated. Plus, I have the crock of sauerkraut fermenting.
These dehydrated batches were vacuum sealed with my Food Saver in canning jars.

Newbie gardener...

Our first year gardening. We have tried to grow a plant or two over the years with resoundingly sad results.

But, with all we have been doing to prepare for any emergency & increasing our self sufficiency;  we decided to plant our heirloom garden. 

I started small, to see how it went & I had to learn about each plant. LOL. And we only grew things we really like to eat. The planting was late due to the really long & cool spring. But, I am pleased & grateful with everything I have growing. I am waiting for them to explode.

The squash seem to be doing well. Harvested one squash and have multiple blossoms growing. 

These would be my greens beans, Had a small harvest so far. I have a sneaky suspicion that one of my dogs is getting in the garden and eating them.
The snap peas (between the green beans & the corn), sort of fizzled & dried up. Maybe planted to closely?

The corn is tasseling and I have harvested sevreal ears. I learned how to tell when to pick them.

The asparagus seems to be doing well for it's first year..

My raspberries are producing berries, just not ripe yet. They seem to have some holes in the leaves. ??? We simply planted them. Need to give them some better soil for next year.

My watermelon plant is growing like wildfire. Currently I am draping the vines out of the box to give them expansion room.

The cantaloupes a progressing a little slower.

And the tomatoes? I didn't start them inside, but actually planted seeds and surrounded them with little cardboard rolls to protect the seedlings...well...that silly dog again! She likes to chew on cardboard tubes & managed to pop the seedlings out of the ground.

Did the same thing a couple weeks later with my grandbabies garden and their tomatoes are doing great!

We are already talking about our expansion plans. I am such a newbie, I have to even find out which plants are annuals & which are perennials.

Starting to compost, preparing more ground & actually building a more solid fence (to keep the smarty pants dog out).
My first dinner with non-GMO & heirloom veggies fresh from my garden. Yum! Both the squash and the green beans are sauteed with Adobo, one of my favorite spices.

Safety; Avoiding cross contamination...

I am an absolute stickler about cleanliness, sterilization and cross contamination. It may seem to be common knowledge, but it is always good to be reminded of safety procedures.
First: Always cleaners on hand. Clean your preparation surfaces & your sink. I also do my stove.

Insure your sink is super clean & wash your hands often.

Sterilize ALL your equipment you use. I always have two sets of various items prepped (sterilized), just in case. Yesterday, I was pressure canning some ground sausage and my funnel became contaminated by making contact with raw pork. So, I tossed it in my contaminated pile in the sink and used my second funnel, which was already sterilized.

When I am canning, my sink it set up something like this:

I have a spot to place utensils that are being used and are in contact with raw meat.

I have container that holds items that have only been in contact with cooked meat.

Then I have a bag, to place items that have been cross contaminated. 

Probably the most important things to remember is ALWAYS avoid cross contamination between raw meat and cooked meat. Hope this reminder is helpful. 

Financial Stability & Money (part 2)

There are just a couple of points that I didn't cover in the initial post that I thought I would clarify.

I failed to mention that our "emergency fund" is NOT kept in a bank. I don't trust any bank's solvency. In fact on payday, I take what is left from my previous pay (yes, sometimes I actually have money left over) and pull it out and put it in the "fund".

With the “fund”, we also work on increasing our "hard commodities", which are items that we know there is a market for.

While we are at it, I will also bring up precious metals. What we have we keep. What we find (in change etc.) we keep.
On our “team” we have differing opinions on precious metal and junk silver. DH & I, have strongly differing opinions. We have spent a lot of time discussing the issue. We worked out a compromise that works for us. He is more in favor of precious metals. I am old fashioned. He is my husband and he is the main bread winner and I trust him. Together, we established guidelines to follow. He is a good man and respected my opinion in these guidelines.
I am more in favor of increasing our “hard commodities”. While we still always discuss large purchases, we use a carte blanche approach to adding certain commodities.

Over the years, DH & I have had different opinions about the paying down the mortgage, I think he is finally starting to understand what I have been talking about and is now willing to apply more money to paying off the mortgage.

I also failed to mention, I do have one credit card. I use it for specific online purchases. As soon as I place on order, I immediately do to my bank online and pay that amount off. There is never a balance on the card.
Lastly, Peter Bendal Kear  had some excellent suggestions I wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to read his thoughts.

"A couple things I would like to add. A bank is not a good place to store all of it keep an emergency fund on hand. Along these lines realize that paper and even hard currency will lose it's monetary value when the system crashes. One words about debt and bills which comes in 2 types IMO. Things like electricity, phone, food, etc. which are either the same or variable monthly charges can be budgeted for but hey if you don't pay and something is shut off be able to do without are not something to worry much about. Budget for them and well if you can't afford them or the system goes down be ready to do without. Other things like mortgages, car loans, credit cards, etc have a set monthly payment on a debt you owe. All of these things can be paid with 10% added to the payment (less or more is okay I make 20% on our vehicle) in order to pay them off and get out of debt quicker. This also has the advantage in some cases depending on your financial institution of being ahead in payments so that if you say had to stop paying for a time you would be covered. Now keep in mind secured loans are ones that they will take the collateral (home, vehicle) so in my mind part of prepping is making sure that does not happen thus the extra payments. Thing is if the system crashes who is to say I owe this and force payment as well so I guess I could put that same 10% into a savings but then what do I know my house is paid for and I am about a year ahead on my only vehicle loan."

If you missed the first part of the discussion click here -> Financial Stability & Money

Thank you all for your contribution!

Financial Stability & Money

Honestly, I don't believe a lot of people will read this post. So, yes that is sort of a challenge. No pictures, just me talking to you about money & prepping. This is a topic that I don't usually go into a lot of detail about. I tend to be very straight forward and matter of fact. But, what is really interesting I have had 5 conversations with various people this week about developing financial stability.

Early this week I posted about “coming out” of the closet with my mom about our being prepared for various emergencies. She asked my about the bills, like electricity and the mortgage. I told her we have a plan. A couple people asked what my answer to the question really was...

Our primary reason to start preparing for emergencies was, we don't have a lot of faith in the current stability of the economy. Personally, I don't believe that social security will even be available to me (possibly my DH, he is about 10 years older). We have held this belief for several years. In the beginning, we just had a simple plan.
Initially we got out of a rather huge amount of debt. Personally, being in debt had bothered me for a very long time. I really believe that we should “owe no man anything”. This took some strict tightening of our belts and lifestyle changes, but we managed to eliminate our debt, except for the mortgage.

As we began to understand “prepping”, we started creating our “store” of foods.

Almost from the beginning we planned what I call “depth” (sustainability) into our process.

A simple example:

We have water stored.

We have rain barrels to replenish our water supply.

We have high rated water filtration systems to filter water, if we need to transport it from a local creek. We also have our bug out location that has a spring fed water system and more...

Applying that process to the things that would be “bills” and cost money.

With our preparations, we have thought most everything out to include the possibility of not having electricity.

The cars are paid off and my husband is equipped to handle any necessary maintenance & repairs.

The only things that are not completely accounted for would be taxes, etc. and the mortgage.

What I want you to understand, we don't have high paying jobs. We are simple people. We are thankful that we have jobs. We have multiply ways of earning income and everything is handled with a loose budget.

We firmly dedicate a portion of our income for large purchases & “emergencies”. It isn't in savings.

We keep about 2 months worth of cash on hand. When I say dedicated, I mean dedicated. One of my husbands jobs goes to that “fund” & 10% of my money goes to the “fund”.

If the monetary system crashes; we have items, what I call “hard commodities”, that we would be able to barter with... We also have skills to barter with and work on increasing our skills.

We hope to sell our home in three years (retirement LOL), and purchase another home with only the equity. Completely debt free. This will be more of a self sustainable homestead, which will still be close to our bug out location.

This isn't perfect. But, it is what has worked for us. It took a lot of hard work.

I have shared before, on payday (for me): I set aside 10% cash for my tithe, 10% for the “fund”. I recently went through a “Twisted $250 Challenge” where I could only spend $250 for one month. It really was a tough challenge & I learned a lot about my spending habits, which honestly were pretty good. After the challenge I was able to increase my “prepping money fund” from 10% to over 20%. When you think about it, this is what my great-grandparents did. They didn't have credit cards, they paid cash, when they ran out of money, they stopped spending.

If I could give people any advise is don't go into to debt, live within your means & start budgeting from the beginning.

If you are in debt. Get rid of credit cards immediately. Budget & get out of debt. I know it may seem insurmountable, but you CAN do it. It is simply one of those things you decide to do or not. I know some are without jobs, some are getting assistance, some are on social security here. Don't tell me what you can't do, tell me what you CAN do!

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.” (attributed to Henry Ford)

There you have it. Have you made it to the end? If so, go back to Facebook and respond with a $ sign. Tell me what you you think you CAN do. Hee, hee..

Financial Stability & Money (part 2)

In the Beginning...(part 3)

By the summer of 2012, I had stored canned foods from the store & various dehydrated and freeze dried foods from East Coast Food Storage. 

I had purchased a small three tray Oster dehydrator. I had already started dehydrating various veggies that I knew we would use. Cabbage, corn, green beans, squash, sweet potatoes, potatoes, celery & mushrooms... just basics for us.

BASIC TIP: “Store what you use & use what you store”. By using what I store on a regular basis, I know what to store more off. One thing I didn't realize was, I use A LOT of mushrooms. But by using my storage I was able to see that, so I dehydrated A LOT of mushrooms. This will also key into my garden & sustainability planning. I am starting to learn the basics of growing mushrooms & probably will start that next year.

The only storage I used was vacuum sealing with our Food Saver & storing canned food items from the store (in banana boxes).

I was also using PET jars with oxygen absorbers for dry goods. Which I later repackaged, when I started focusing on the shelf life of the various foods I was storing.

It would probably be accurate to say part 3 of our journey began when we found out about “Doomsday Preppers”.

We watched two seasons of Doomsday, which included the one with Kellene Bishop of Preparedness Pro blog. Over all we would glean some information from each show; but what it really did, was get us talking about various means of preparing ourselves. We don't really plan to watch it anymore.

I took the time (two weeks) and read 95% of Preparedness Pro's blog posts. All the various things I was learning were starting to converge. As I was expanding my knowledge and deciding what I wanted to store next. Pressure canned meat. In part 2, I discussed Vonda showing me her canned chicken. I asked my friend to teach me how to pressure can. I knew she canned, but she had never done meat.

It was so funny, she was so very concerned about canning MEAT!!! I just gently coerced (forced) her to do it. LOL.

That was early October 2012, my first canning experience was ground beef.

That is when I started my Perky Prepping Gramma Facebook page. I really started the page to simply be able to comment on other “prepping” type Facebook pages without being exposed on my personal fb page. To share what I was learning and doing as I was doing it.

Honestly, I had no clue at that point in time what this would lead to...

In case you missed parts 1 & 2:
In the Beginning (part 1)
In the Beginning (part 2)