Food abundance and preparation for Fall

Sustainability & Fall Gardening
I’ve been doing more reading on steps to take toward greater self sufficiency, sustainability, and off the grid living. I made a list of items to purchase in that direction. In all of your preparatory steps, do it a bit at a time. Purchase the goods and try them out so you are familiar with what’s needed, how it works, and what to do or not do the next time you use it. All of this helps you to educate yourself to be prepared when you need to be. To this end, I bought a dehydrator, a hand crank weather radio, a multi-fuel cook stove, and a toilet seat that sets on top of a 5 gallon bucket.

The dehydrator can be used to dehydrate: fruits, vegetables, fruit chews, jerky, soups, and sauces. Open Country is the brand I bought and it can be expanded with additional trays. The initial kit comes with four trays.

The heat settings are printed right on the top of the dehydrator with the accompanying knob to set the heating device to the temperature needed.

We bought strawberries, raspberries, and bananas to get started with this weekend. Plus with the wonderful vegetables that are growing in my fall garden, it won’t be long before we’ll have enough to dehydrate of them as well.

It’s interesting to note how much weight is reduced by taking the water out of the foods through the dehydration process. For example, fresh tomatoes starting at 16 ounces are reduced to 2 ounces. We have a Seal-a-Meal machine and plan to zip up the dried foods into tightly sealed packages. A pretty efficient way of food preservation. The good thing in addition to the weight and bulk being reduced is when you open the dehydrated food packages is you can eat them right out of the package, if needed or wanted, or you can rehydrate and use in cooking if you want to prepare food that way. Flexibility is a good thing.

The set also contains a jerky squirt gun with a couple of different heads to size the output. Since we’re not meat eaters, we’re more likely to use it for fruit jerky or even vegetable jerky.

I’ll have to add gelatin to my grocery list to use when making the fruit and vegetable jerkies…

Next, it was time to get a multi-fuel cook stove. When it’s unclear as to what fuels will be available, the more options you can use, the better off you’re chances of having it or getting it to use it becomes. The multi-fuel stove costs a bit more, but is well worth it. Dragonfly is a reliable brand and the cook stove folds down to fit into a very small space.

It was also recommended to have a hand crank weather radio. The radio I bought uses four different methods of getting electricity: hand crank, regular 120 household current AC, AA batteries, and the rechargeable AA batteries. There is also a USB connector to use for recharging your phone. You can use whichever power source that is available for recharging your phone. Now that’s a handy option. I’ve wondered about how am I going to keep my phone charged in certain emergency situations because one of the things of the preparedness checklists is always a full-charged phone. With this, if push comes to shove, you can use the hand crank to build up the charge in your phone. To me, that’s pretty efficient and useful.

Moving onto growing food… Many people these days really are out of touch with what different plants look like. We’ve heard comments from people who thought we had a yard full of flowers. By sprinkling in a few flowers along the way, it serves as a good way to disguise the vegetables that may be growing along side of them.

I was delighted to discover this past Saturday that the pole beans that struggled through the hot, hot summer, were now able to produce the green beans that they were meant to. I gathered a gallon of beans from the vines that made it through the record-breaking hot summer. The tomato plants have a zillion blossoms on them too and they are able to finally start making fruit as well. We could end up with hundreds of tomatoes yet. Good thing they were watered enough through the summer to keep them alive… they didn’t have enough energy left them to produce fruit, but they do now.

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The fall garden, which was planted about a month or less ago, is growing and growing. The broccoli plants look healthy. It’s interesting to see how many volunteers are coming up from the plants that were there in the last season. Broccoli is a cool-weather vegetable and will do well during these fall months.

Adjacent to the broccoli, I’m growing a new vegetable for the first time… bok choi. I’ve enjoyed buying and preparing them from my local Vietnamese grocery. I learned about growing them at an Extension Service class that I attended last February, so when I saw an organic seed packet of them, I thought I’d try growing them myself this year. Asian vegetables also have good resale value.

I’m also growing kale from seed this year for the first time. Last year, I purchased one potted seedling and planted it. That one plant produced so much kale, which was delightful to eat and prepare, that I decided a whole packet of organic kale would really be a good endeavor this year. If I have an abundance of it, I can just dehydrate it. I’ve seen it packaged at my local health food store—dehydrated with various seasoning flavors on it… and it’s not cheap to buy! I’m looking forward to adventures with kale this fall…

And I have beets, onions, spinach, swiss chard, arugula coming along nicely as well.

I noticed in the bed that have radishes and chives planted that the radishes are growing gung ho, but the chives have nary a sprout. This last spring when I planted an herb bed I didn’t get any of the herbs to grow there either. Now these were heirloom seeds that I had purchased on the Internet, but I’m finding that not all heirloom seeds live up to there claims. To prepare your seed bank, be sure to test the potency of the seeds to determine if what you have invested in is going to yield results or not. The time to test this is before there is an emergency.

I’ll have to look for other sources of heirloom or organic herb seeds… If you look closely you can see the red of the radish poking it head out of the ground…

Bon appetit!