The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

annieb64

We could manage a couple of months. It would be easier in the summer as would have fresh fruit and veg from the garden. We freeze fruit but not a lot of veg although we always have frozen peas, spinach and peppers in the freezer.

Thriftygifty

In our case probably not that long! If we just ate whatever we had in the house probably a month (ish) which scares me however funds are limited and we are a family of 5 and our 2 small children seem to eat nearly the same amount as us, plus a baby on formula, so I guess I will go with slowly slowly catchy you get what I mean and hope for the best and not think of the other for a  moment. 
 

Onebrokelady

Si_Clist said:

If I may be excused for creating thread drift away from the gardening for a moment, I have a question.

If when you woke up this morning you found that with immediate effect all shops were closed and food deliveries suspended until further notice, how long could you realistically last with what you have in the house right now? 

About 4 days 🙀🙀🙀

DigForVictory

If everyone can cook & eat what they want when they want (as is more or less at present), I;d say days. Probably over a week but the food would get weird. (More weird, maybe.)

If we agreed on communal cooking & eating we could make everything work harder & last longer & it ought to be over 2 months, but those who do not eat chicken would have to man grow up & as for the don't like greens, mushrooms, onions-disagree-with-me etc - well, they might all have to learn to cope. As social animal is pals with a lass whose family have beehives I think we'd be trading year-before-last's damson jam for honey & other fresh comestibles. He & another pal teamed to give her a BB pistol for her birthday - I suspect she'd be putting meat on the family table in hours.

Si_Clist

Ref my last post about how long we might last here, I should have pointed out that we'd been building up stocks slowly over the last few years on the buy-two-when-you-need-to-replace-one principle, so we started this year relatively well placed.  Then, as soon as we saw the writing on the wall in January, literally every penny we could scrape together went on buying-in provisions before the panic-buying started.

Unfortunately that left us flat broke by the time we realised that for the space we have available outside, we'd be better off buying more smokeless fuel rather than more logs, 'cos you get more heat from a given volume of it than from the same volume of stacked logs.  That was when we discovered that the coalman wasn't planning on dropping his prices in June as usual, because in the current circumstances, he's no longer confident of being able to get what stocks he wants when he wants them.

And that is why we're still skint, having had to put 40 bags of smokeless on the credit card and then pay that off last week ...

Wraithlady

If we could still have the local veg box, then quite a while - otherwise, a couple of months? We might be subsisting on bread, homemade pasta and some strange combinations by the end of it, though. We just had 16 kg of bread flour delivered, and I'd have to try sourdough again but we'd cope. 

GreyQueen

I guess that we've all grown accustomed to anything in any season, and there would be some ruffled feathers if people had to lump it or go hungry, particularly if not long enough in the tooth to have memories of that as a child to refer back to.

Due to severe health problems 2020 was always going to be a sketchy year for me, do I have made no plans rather than surviving until surgery and have planted (with help) most of the allotments down to spuds. 16 kg of seeds, although we'll need the rain to make good on that investment. It's for me and the extended family, and is the most I've ever sown. Fortunately, I bought them as usual mid-Feb, before the world and its wife decided this was the year to Dig for Survival and it all went a bit bonkers.

Greenglockenspiel

Update from chez Greenglockenspiel: as of this morning we suddenly have one strawberry flower! 😁🎉

greenbee

Greenglockenspiel said:

Update from chez Greenglockenspiel: as of this morning we suddenly have one strawberry flower! 😁🎉

Congratulations I've got a few flowers now too. One lot are inside a cage, but the others aren't, so I need to sort out netting for both them and the raspberries.

I've almost finished filling the raised bed I started building yesterday. Before I do I need to sort out the soaker hose that is going into it. I want to put it in fairly deep to minimise moisture loss from evaporation and encourage roots downwards. I think i'm going to need to invest in some timers for the water butts at some point, so that watering can carry on while I'm away (I can refill the water butts from the tap using the hose if necessary). I also need to sort out watering for the planters - and do something about the fact that the compost has completely dried out, so water just drains straight through. I can't think of a solution that doesn't involve emptying them and mixing in new compost/topsoil/manure. 

For the moment I'm going to ignore all that and inspect my pile of pallets to see whether I can put a new compost system together. The pallets are all pretty ropey light-weight ones, most with bits missing, but I'm sure that I can come up with something, even if it has to involve a saw, hammer, nails and possibly some fencing wire and wire cutters... 

Rowan9

@Greenglockenspiel - great news! Strawberries will be on the menu. 

Loving reading about provisions and plans.  

@GreyQueen - didn’t know this was to be a tough year. Take care of yourself. Am wondering if you still have the soap stash. I seem to remember it was Knights Castille before they stopped the bigger packs? Or was it Imperial Leather? This was a few years ago though! 

I’ve added tinned fruit to my shopping list. Handy to have in. 

Defrosting the freezer today. Found some interesting items including a portion of ‘beany soup’. Tea is going to be a mix of things from the depths of the freezer.