While I still have some hardy crops hanging on, basically my yearly food production, gathering and preservation is complete. I don’t have the money to buy large quantities of commercially dried food, so this is how I get my food reserves.
I’ve got 3.5 people to plan for, and at least 20 weeks before I can start early spring plantings. 20 weeks is my number, that’s an average time between the last of my large falls harvests and the first trickle of spring harvest. You keep harvest and weather records right? If you don’t I highly recommend it. Figure your own number for winter somehow, either using first/last frost dates or your own records, don’t short yourself a few weeks and end up eating grocery store dregs unintentionally. Here’s a brief rundown on my storage favorites and how I crunch the numbers to figure usage rates.
Onions – I have over 40 pounds of onions. We use a lot of onions. Divide by the 20 week estimate and I know I can use 2 pounds of onions a week and get most of the way through winter. In an emergency that could go up to 5 pounds a week and still last us a couple of months.
Potatoes – I have 30 pounds of potatoes. I’ve noticed that we go through potatoes like clock work. We eat the same couple of meals every week with potatoes and only rarely make the effort to cook something new. Creatures of habit I suppose. It does make it easy to plan for potatoes though. I know we need 3 pounds of potatoes every week, with one or two weeks where we’ll need 5 pounds. So, I know we’ll be close to running out of potatoes after 9 or 10 weeks. I can keep an eye out for cheap potato buys, maybe find a group order to get in on, or just go buy some 10 pound bags of Russets at the grocery store. After all, I’ve got 30 pounds of potatoes really cheaply, I can afford to buy a couple of bags of Russets. And if a potato shortage started tomorrow, I’ve still got 3 months worth of spuds.
Pumpkins/Squash – I don’t have a weight on the squash stored right now, but it’s a lot. I’ve got a half a dozen butternuts, one large hubbard and 9 pumpkins. Short of some SHTF event, we’ll never eat through them all before they go bad. We usually only get through 3 or 4 butternuts and 2 or 3 pumpkins. Right now I can fix them as side dishes, and we’ll slowly eat some of them, and the rest will get tossed when they become inedible. I consider it temporarily food insurance. They were practically free to grow, and require nothing more than cabinet space for storage. So what if we don’t make it through all of them most winters? At least they are there in the cabinet if we do need them, which makes me feel better. We could up our usage to 2 squash a week and have a couple of months worth easily.
Garlic and Sweet Potatoes make of the rest of my fresh veggie storage right now. But, those were hard to find this year, so I don’t have as many as I’d like. I have dried garlic to tide me over when I run out of fresh, and I’m hoping to substitute the over abundant pumpkins for many of the sweet potato meals.
This is only one part of the food storage puzzle, it has to integrate with the dried goods, grains, canned and frozen foods that make up the rest of your stores. I find it is helpful to figure out some of the numbers though, just to make sure I’m in the right ballpark. What about you? Do you count calories? Pounds? Or do you just wing it?
Winter Storage Calculations
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When it comes to food storage in our house it’s hard to estimate how much of anything will get used within the cold months time line. We already stocked the freezer with about 100 lbs. of meat, our pantry is filled to capacity with canned vegies and soups, and the kitchen cupboards are loaded with spices, and dried goods. The only fresh stock is the onions, which is about 5 lbs. and that will get us through the winter easy. Most of the stuff that is stocked, we will probably still be eating on come summer….it’s just the 2 of us, and if we eat one real meal a day its a miracle.
I was going through a mental bit of gymnastics on this subject a few days ago… though it was more like figuring out how much food you would have to try and grow per person in order to not only make it through the winter, but into the next harvest. Eventually, post SHTF you’d have to move on from just gardening to keep the food bill down, on to gardening to keep the family fed.
Yea, I’ve tried similar calculations, I have the numbers somewhere, but I think it was just me and hubby at that point, so I’d have to redo them. Basically I decided I don’t have the space to really keep my family fed 100%. Not if I try to count grains in there too. I have a lot of grains stored, but realistically as a renter I know I’m not going to be growing the replacement for that when it runs out. I figure with most SHTF events, food will still be available in my area. It may be expensive, and it may be limited to what was being grown in a 1-state radius around Iowa, but it would be really hard for any SHTF event to knock out all of the crops/animals in the midwest. So, I don’t know if I would ever need to grow 100% of my family’s food. Growing enough that we can avoid the highest prices and add variety to our diet would be sufficient in most instances. It’s a calculated risk, but that’s the balance I can maintain right now. Good luck with your calculations. :-)
Ohio, normally a strong agricultural state, had a very strange growing season. We had almost no onions or garlic, and only three pumpkins whereas I usually have enough to supply the neighborhood.
Our calculations are even more random because we don’t know how many people we will have to feed. Possibly up to 12-14, ages 60+ years to six months. I bought two cases of evaporated milk, Karo syrup and bottled water for the little ones. Probably need to triple that, although it’s hard to find an expiration date that far into the future.
We canned and dehydrated all summer, but I’m not sure what to do about meat. Our electrical supply is, at best, erratic here in very rural north-western Ohio, so am considering canning chicken and possibly hamburger soup. We have two cases of pumpkin for Vitamin “A”, and five BIG bottles (Sam’s Club) of both general vitamins and calcium and “C”. I have almost 200 quarts of canned tomatoes, but the amount of “C” left after canning is small. Ditto the same amount of canned green beans. Potato crop was small, but we have about 200 pounds. Too many for two people, not nearly enough for 12-14. Bought twelve, 4-pound bags of onions (at Sam’s) and am dehydrating those. Have lots of minced garlic and various spices. Flour, sugar and salt in mylar bags. Wheat, oats and corn meal in buckets.
Would also appreciate advice on storage. We live in a semi-earth berm house with a walk-out base-ment. The basement is very fancy and would be a nightmare to defend. The house was supposed to be solar but that’s not been effective since the positioning isn’t right, plus the sun doesn’t shine in Ohio in winter. We have central heat and air, but rely on our Vermont Castings “Defiant” for heat in winter, due to the erratic utilities. This makes the basement too warm and too light as there are 13 windows and two huge French doors all facing south. We store all our food in the south east bedroom (there is no north east bedroom) and pull the shades and close the vents to that room. It also opens into the laundry room which makes it hard to keep the area dry, even with a de-humidifier. I know, strange house plan, but we were desperate for housing when we were rather suddenly transferred here.
Calamity, how are you feeling?
Wow, I would have thought with a partially bermed house you’d have lots of storage space suitable for food. Crazy. Do you have a room in the upstairs that might be cooler and more humid?
Knowing how many people you’ll have to feed is always tricky. I find I always end up with multiple calculations. I run them for who lives in the house right now, then I run them again for who I think will likely be in the house in an emergency.
Oh, and I’m feeling ok, most days. Yesterday was bad, I couldn’t keep down anything. My abs hurt today, but at least everything is staying down.
Bravo, a subject I have yet to approach, but now as I have begun planning and preparing my first garden there are a few major considerations here, we do like onions and garlic alot so those hve been very helpful thoughts, thank you….. one must know where they are going so they know how to get there…
For your over abundance of pumpkins, have you considered canning them so you can make you stores go even farther? Pumpkin pies at the holidays are easily made from home canned pumpkin………just a suggestion. As a beggining canner, I started with apples which are plentiful around here. If your pumpkins are going to be tossed out when they go bad anyway and your not already versed on canning it seems to me that the extras would be good to practice with without giving up high value food.
:-) I might can some pumpkin. We usually only eat 1 pumpkin pie a year. Remember, home canning is not recommended for pumpkin butter or any mashed or pureed pumpkin. Cubed pumpkin can be safely canned though.
We’ll see if I find the motivation to get some canned. They aren’t our favorite foods, and I’m tired of canning for the year. :-D But, I can see having some canned pumpkin as being a good thing.
once we “threw out” a “bad” pumpkin into the compost bin… next thing we knew we had a vine. replanted it & had another crop – pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread… Right now you’ve had enough, but nice to know after shtf the “trash” keeps on giving. (Heard about Italian immigrants deliberately “throwing away” pepper & tomato scraps in their NYC front yard – to guarantee future food.)
Canning pumpkin is pretty easy to do. But, this year I was a slacker and just picked up a few extra cans of pumpkin at the store. Gleaning a few neighborhood fruit trees gave me and my sister a winter’s worth of canned apple sauce, we probably could have kept going and gotten much more.
I always wrestle with how much food to have on hand. I live by my self, but frequently feed nieces and nephews and love feeding people. I tend to over shoot my needs.
I count servings and calories and as well as pounds for things like rice and potatoes.
you are really missing out on pumpkin and squash soups. mashed, roasted, etc. is fine by me, but pumpkin soup with sage, bread crumbs or potatoes, and some prosciutto or bacon is about the closest to heaven you can get without your heart stopping. add some half and half and you can call it a fancy bisque.
for our food storage, i’m calculating calories only, which is probably lacking in completeness.
I actually have tried soups, I have an issue eating them. Most tend to be too thick, and it makes me gag. I have the same problem with creamed corn. I do have a new recipe I’m going to try that uses beans to texture the soup, if that one turns out good, I’ll report back.
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