Preparedness for when

Kitchen_Garden

Have been reading the OS threads with much interest and got great tips from them:j.

My take on the whole preparedness thing is to be as self sufficient as possible. There is only so much food that can be stockpiled and eventually supplies with run out and folks will have to return to buying from supermarkets etc. So turning your garden/balcony/window box/patio over to growing your own food is more likely to be beneficial in the long run if prices go through the roof or supplies become scarce,... as well as having a good stockcupboard of course. It is amazing what you can grow in a small space. For example, it is very easy to be self sufficient in salad leaves (outside in the summer, in pots on the windowcill in the winter).

Energy is a little more tricky for some people. I'd love a wind turbine but the neighbours would moan:o

Alison_Funnell

What on earth is going through governments minds?

Don't grow potatoes! What a load of balony! I remember all the colorado beetle scares from when I was a kid, that stemmed from imports and I suspect that may not be far from the truth today. All fresh fruit and veg arrive with microbes of some for or another, unless you irradiate them.

Bluebag and princesstippytoes not every thread works for every person, variety being the spice of life.

So I will be actively storing rainwater, growing potatoes, veg, fruit, herbs and even wrangling seahorses if that is what it takes to ride this out.

*awaits the potato police*

Surely anything people produce at home takes the strain off some of the system I mean look at WWII! They dug up the London parks to grow food.

How long do people have supplies for? I have no idea how long mine will last me I really need to stock take and seriously look at nutritional minimums.

On a minor success I made a huge stew at the weekend that has covered everyone going down with horrendous colds and chest infections. Left over chicken from the freezer today. Which then makes me think about how to cope again if we are all terribly ill.

[Deleted User]

Morning preppers and guests, I store most things in the spare room upstairs, we are not in a flood risk area but with the extreme weather events we have been experiencing over the past few years I don't think we can ever be sure of it NOT happening where we live. Better safe than lost!

Preparing for me personally comes from being retired and on a not huge pension, so it only makes sense to store whatever we can foodwise, most of which is home grown, and buy in cleaning materials,loo rolls,decent footware when found at reasonable prices, a replacement waterproof again found in a sale. For me it is about being ready for any eventuality that I have any control over. Having said that if we had really bad flooding, a hurricane (not unknown!), an industrial accident (we love fairly close to a large oil refinery), an act of terrorism etc. all the prep in the world would be to no avail if we were evacuated at short notice, except the Run Bag which is always ready to grab and go.

I prepare to ensure that we are NOT part of the problem, whatever it may be. If we can look after ourselves safely through the event we would not then need to take the emergency services time for us but free them up to help others with bigger problems. It is a little bit of self sufficiency that is so easy to set in place. It does however call down the coals of derision upon our heads with boring regularity and usually with considerable calculated rudeness which we try to ride out without responding in kind. There is always the need for new contrubutors to this thread to spread the base of knowledge and ideas to help us all and to use any knowledge that is already here but we could really do without the spite that is sometimes displayed towards us - each to his own I think!!!!

The Zombie theme really is only a light hearted ongoing joke, if folks would just take that fact on board and read round the tongue in cheek banter that is on here they would find a working knowledge of many survival skills and a great deal of common sense together with some wonderful support from a whole bunch of really nice people. We love it when new folks join in on the thread with a will to be friendly but there is an ignore button to use should anyone post venom!!!!!

Have a good day all, Cheers Lyn x.

GreyQueen

wondercollie wrote: »

Hey, enough of the Nokia bashing! I love my C3. I've done everything but drown it or drive over it and its still works!

Nokia's will make it through the zombie wars!

Too right. No dissing the Nokia, I get enough of that in the RW form my pals. My 2610 lasted nearly 6 years and I now have another Nokia. It's simple and basic (just like me:p)

lillibet_dripping wrote: »

I just happened to be on this thread whilst listening to the Radio 4 news and am so gobsmacked at what I've just heard that I'm not sure which thread to put it on..

Apparently the Govt. are blaming allotment holders who grow their own potatoes for causing the potato shortage. It seems we allotment growers are responsible for spreading the same type of blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine. They recommend that everybody buys potatoes from farm shops/supermarkets rather than growing their own.
How does that work then???!!!!!
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at Ca-moron's stupidity...

:mad: OOOOOOOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhh fighting talk. I'm an allotmenteer in the city suburbs. I'm also on BlightWatch, with automated alerts to my inbox.. The blight came from the s.w. direction INTO the city over a period of weeks. I buy certified seed potaotes each year from a reputable company. If I have blight (and I did) I got it from the commerical growers, not vice versa. One of my lottie pals is a retired farmworker and still in regular touch with his old farm pals. He told me that the blight was everywhere and that they were spraying for weeks against it before it hit our lottie site (miles from the nearest farmland, btw).

I don't buy potatoes at all for my personal consumption, I am self-sufficient, and half my crop went to my family (3 adults) and they were eating them from mid-July to last week. Otherwise, they buy theirs a sack at a time from the farm gate.

I was always taught that blight is endemic in the UK and Ireland and arises from the soil when you get a Full Smith period and is borne across the country on the prevailing south-westerly winds.

Regarding that article, insofar as I am aware, there is only one kind of potato blight (phytopthera infestans). This is what caused the 1845 Irish potato famine and is belived to have been brough by ship from USA and Canada where it struck a couple of years earlier. There is another kind of blight, the so-called early blight, but what is the main problem and is always has been phytopthera (late blight).

All potatoes are clones. I grew Kestrel. Everyone else who grew that variety was growing clones, ditto for any other you care to name. As clones with no genetic variation, potatoes are highly-suseptible to disease. They are also non-natives, coming as they do from the Americas, so it's not overly-surprising that our damp and cool climate isn't their best place to grow.

The blight-proof potato is the Holy Grail of plant scientists and there has been some progress with blight-resistance in more modern potato varieties, but we're a long way from blight-proofing our stable food crop.

Unfortunately for the blinking politicians, there are several million gardeners in the UK who know different. If they wanted to protect potato prices in the shops they'd think about banning the turning of them into snack foods. Honestly, they must think we all came down with the last shower of rain .....!

Caterina

fuddle wrote: »

The government want us to spend. I'd hate to see Cameron being in charge in a War!

As far as I know Churchill was against a lot of what went on in terms of food saving, he was dead against rationing for example. I have read somewhere that he kept guzzling his expensive booze and did not pay any attention to rationing (unlike the Royal Family from what I understand, who went all frugal during the war with their own ration books!).

There is a certain type of person in charge of countries who keeps repeating the same careless and nonchalant behaviour over and over again, war, peace, that's all the same for them, stomp on the little people, I'm all right Jack!

For a second or two, after having witness the destruction and havoc that the last Labour government has created, I was almost glad to see the Torys to go in power, but it did not last long. The only Tory that I quite like, though, is Boris, as Mayor of London he has done good things, I was really pleased that he reintroduced free travel for over 60s here. Otherwise they are all, Left, Right and Centre, a bunch of thieves and liars.

End of rant!

GreyQueen wrote: »

Too right. No dissing the Nokia, I get enough of that in the RW form my pals. My 2610 lasted nearly 6 years and I now have another Nokia. It's simple and basic (just like me:p)

I LUUUUUURVE my old metal brick Nokia, I have a 2310 model, no camera, no fancy stuff, does what it says on the tin, calls and texts. Dreading the moment it breaks, as it is impossible to replace with the same model, I must have had it for nearly 10 years and has never let me down!

fuddle

Where did all the really good government advice come from during WWII? I am amazed by the canniness of things I learn about in that time, much of it seemed to be from official advice.

To read that our leader, during a time that showed just how good a nation at coping we are/were, was greedy, selfish and 'not in it together' makes me quite cross. Conservative wasn't he?

GreyQueen

Oh, how very rude of me, forgot to welcome in Mrs Christmas and Kitchen Garden. Looking forward to your contributions and hopefully some others will step out of lurkdom, too. The more we share our skills, the better we'll be.

I like to think of OS as a collective organism with brains in lots of separate bodies, all churning away independantly then bringing their findings to the board.

KG, if I may abbreviate you, I live in a titchy flat and most of my very limited kitchen cupboards are occupied with pots and pans etc. I keep a small amount of food in there and replenish from the stores stashed here and there.

Regarding tins, I would say anywhere dry (so they won't rust) and cool (in case temp fluctuations affect the contents) would be suitable. I don't have heat in my bedroom and the floors throughout the flat are tile-over-concrete. Bedroom window is ajar for about 18 in every 24 hours. It would be 24/24 but due to the ambient noise of the city centre, I wouldn't sleep if the d.g. was open at night.

I have a pine bedstead with rolling trollies under it each with a single layer of tinned goods. I eat from the kitchen cupboard, reload cupboard from trollies and restock trollies. I write the month and year of purchase on the top of the tin as well as the month and year of its BB. I have a written inventory so that I can check what aI have in seconds.

I'd prefer a proper larder, but we each have to work with what we've got, not waste too much time yearning for what we don't. There is a valance on the bed so that all this stuff isn't on view.

I think an understair area would be great for tinned goods, as well as things like t.p. I'd extend more wariness to dry goods esp the various forms of flour which can get infested by biscuit beetles. I have pulses in glass jars, the kind with the hinged lid and the replacable rubber flange thingy. I get mine at bootsales or c.s. for 50p-£1 each but they're not overly-expensive new.

You could re-purpose coffee/ jam jars but some pests are known to be able to walk around the screw-thread on glass jars *eek* so for those who think this may be a problem (perhaps if you have an older home or one covered with creepers or are out in the country) this may be a consideration.

The metal-and-canvas wardrobe combo sounds very useful and I would certainly use it myself.

Oh, and I have my stash of teabags on a high shelf at the top of a cupboard on an interior wall, nice and dry in there. HTH.

rosieben

mardatha wrote: »

That's true fuddle, they want us to spend them out of this depression, and also to help their rich pals who have big estates with organic farming. I'm actually quite worried about this news as they often seem to copy America and hope this isn't a test to see if they would get away with it
If you got seed potatoes now, would they last until planting time? Anybody know? Just in case they vanish mysteriously?

are we heading for the same situation in US, too, where big growers are growing gm crops and if any gm crops appear in the neighbouring farms that farmer is fined huge amounts; big companies bankrupting small farmers and getting their land.

Its big businesses that run countries not political parties

GreyQueen

fuddle wrote: »

Where did all the really good government advice come from during WWII? I am amazed by the canniness of things I learn about in that time, much of it seemed to be from official advice.

To read that our leader, during a time that showed just how good a nation at coping we are/were, was greedy, selfish and 'not in it together' makes me quite cross. Conservative wasn't he?

The Government of the day was drafting in expert advice from all fields, Fuddle, not so much that they were any savvier than the current shower, but they (or I expect their civil servants) were wise enough to know where to look.

Churchill has a rep as the hero of the war and I don't think it's possible to hear some of those speeches even today without getting a shiver of awe up your spine. But he and the conservatives were widely-disliked and when they wanted to return society to business-as-it-was-in-the-1930s (hunger and destitution for many), after the war, people wouldn't have it.

You've mentioned that you come from a mining family; a lot of miners who saw how differently things were done in various European countries (pit-head baths, anyone?) were astounded at how badly they were being treated by their employers.

Wars shake things up in more ways than the obvious, such as the popular song in America about how will you keep them (meaning black people) down on the farm now that they've seen Paris?

MrsChristmas

Thanks for the welcome, I'm sure I'm going to become a regular around here & those other threads related to this one. It's great to be able to chat to like minded people, however close or far apart our opinions may be. I've been reading about storing/prepping for about a year and a half now but have only started thinking about it seriously the last few weeks ...... far behind many of you I know but now have a starting point at least. I really don't understand why more people aren't taking this seriously? With all that is happening in the world & rumours of what might happen, climate change, food waste, food prices rising, throw away society, population increasing ect, the world can't keep going on as it does.
I am one of these who need to be able to sleep at night knowing that if something happened, I could take care of my family in the short term at least..... would love to be self sufficient.... I agree people have forgotten how to live without heating, electric, running water & supermarkets. 2 generations ago, all housewives knew how to use up leftovers, run a stock cupboard, bake bread , cook & freeze meals ect me included to an extent but I feel I need to spend more time learning again how to now.
Aldi is my supermarket of choice for tins & packets & I've decided to turn my canvas wardrobe into a storage area for now & will turn off radiator in bedroom to keep it at a constant temp. When thats full, I'll move it down under the stairs when hubby has finished putting up shelves!
I'll be looking out for all the offers,I could kick myself cause last time we went to Aldi they had mushy peas on at 4p... 4p!!.... you can't buy anything for 4p anymore & I should have brought up the shelf but instead came away with about 10.
I've already pick apart last months shopping reciept and have worked out what I'm going to be getting on payday. It's on an excel spreadsheet so if I notice price rises, I'll be stocking up & be sure to let you know.... going for tinned potatoes & carrots if you believe all you hear & read in the news. I haven't worked out a water supply either so bottled water is on the list too.
Anyway, I have to get ready for work just thought I'd introduce myself a bit more! ...... be sure to point me in the direction of an Aldi shopping money off voucher if you come across one!

Ps... love the thought of growing my own but the past 2yrs attempts have proven more expensive than what I got back. I have a large conservatory if anyone has any ideas?!