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Preventing food shortages and being self sustainable.

 
steward
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Anna Bo wrote:What to do if you live in an apartment with no land access to grow? No available land for community garden and no basement for storage? Wish I could move, but it’s currently not an option.


While growing your own and storing it is my favored approach, in your case it might just be easiest to stock up on stuff that you eat currently.  

At the most basic level, keep a month or two worth of food in your apartment so that if there is a shortage you can handle it for a while.

Also consider changing your cooking/eating style to use more basic components.  This may or may not be applicable to you but it is for many...  Instead of using spaghetti-ohs in a can, learn to cook something similar from pasta, spices and tomatoes (dried/canned).  Then you can probably make twice the food for the same price.  And in many cases the components will last longer than the assembled, processed factory food.  Grains and legumes store for a very long time.  Much much much longer than bread/tortillas.  If you can grind the grain it will last even longer in the whole grain form.

If accumulating extra food is a challenge, I'd start with a combination of cheaper food constituents (pasta, spices, legumes, grains, oat meal, sugar, ground meat, etc) to save money and then buy as much of that as you can afford in order to start building a stockpile.

Eat your stockpile as if it was a grocery store.  Eat the oldest stuff first so that you goodies are rotated through.  Don't stock up on things that you don't normally eat because they'll just sit there and go bad.  I'm looking at you, canned beets...

And if you're worried about hoards of zombies, don't tell your friends or neighbors that you're doing this...
 
pollinator
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Generally if a pressure cooker doesn't have a labeled pressure gauge it is 5 pounds pressure. There are many foods which can be canned at 5 pounds. Generally meat can not processed at that low pressure for example. Also it is possible to do water bath canning in that type of pan and if it does not have a rack to hold jars off the pan bottom then it is fine to use a cloth pad or other cloth to hold jars off the bottom.
 
pollinator
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Alexa Ayers wrote:Kate said: You will need a pressure canner (not a pressure cooker or instapot)

Why not a pressure cooker? Is it just to volume capacity, or is there an actual difference? Having never pressure canned, I was excited to receive a smallish pressure cooker I figured I could experiment with. I'd rather make my learning mistakes with 3 quarts than 10!

One possible reason - the pressure bobble doesn't list a weight, and I'm at 5600 feet which I think qualifies as high altitude?

Thanks, Alexa.



The difference is the amount of pressure the canner is designed to run at.  In general stove top pressure cookers and electric pressure cookers cook around 5 psi.  Pressure canners cook at 10 to 15 psi.  The higher pressure levels are needed to get the contents of the canner to 242 degrees Fahrenheit.  This high temperature is needs to be maintained for a specific time frame to ensure the entire contents of the jars in the canner reach 240 degrees. This high temperature is what kills botulism and makes your home canned foods safe to store without refrigeration.

Pressure cookers do not get run at a high enough pressure to get hot enough to kill botulism  in food in jars that is low acid like meats and most vegetables.  
 
pollinator
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Protecting your home food supply: grow not recognized crops. Dahlia, canna lilys and apios americana tubors are all edible. Hungry people will swipe your melons but not dig up your dahlias. Got shade? Many of those spring ephemerals such as Trout Lilys tubors are edible *please plant, dont devastate the local wild before troubles even start*. Fucshias make edible berrys. Hawthorne, a weed tree in PNW USA, are tasteless but full of pectin for your canning when it gets harder to get commercial pectin. Hostas are an edible green and grow in shade to sun. Look outside the easily recognizable "foods". Have a lawn that you can't dig up (HOA etc)? Chufa looks like coarse grass. Acquiring space to grow: every county has a sale every year of land that went back to county for unpaid taxes. You have to go in and ask about it, they are not allowed to "advertise". These are often odd shapes that no one wants because you can't build on them, AND you buy them for only the back taxes
 
pollinator
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Blake Lenoir wrote: I'm taking about protecting food from thieves and crooks during the riots and unrest that lurk soon on this world. My potatoes and sweet potatoes always rot when I try to store them in a certain dark and lonely place, how can I store them right?


Sweet potatoes are a totally different plant than Irish potatoes.  Sweets like warmth and light, Irish potatoes need the total darkness to prevent sprouting.  If they get plenty of minerals while growing, they tend not to rot as easily.  Always store in a single layer up off the floor for good ventilation.   If sweet potatoes get chilled, they rot.  They don’t even have to freeze.
 
gardener
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Anna Bo wrote:What to do if you live in an apartment with no land access to grow? No available land for community garden and no basement for storage? Wish I could move, but it’s currently not an option.



Many cities have community gardens where you can rent a space for the year. There is also always foraging.   Also, many people have fruit trees that were there when they bought the house and obviously aren't taking care of it.  They will often let you take care of it.  There are organizations dedicated to this in most cities, for example, in my town, it is called Portland Fruit tree project.    If you befriend someone in your neighborhood, they might want to garden with you on their space, especially if they don't have much knowledge or time.

John S
PDX OR
 
Faye Streiff
pollinator
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When my daughter lived in a third floor apartment in the big city, she used her deck to grow all kinds of goodies in containers.  Lots of basil,  oregano, cucumbers on a small trellis and lettuce.  One tomato plant, maybe a pepper plant, I can’t remember.  She put her tiny breakfast table in the middle of her urban jungle and enjoyed it all so much.  Fortunately she has a home with a garden space now, but she made do quite well with her original tiny space.  She kidded with her friends about how she “had the market cornered” with all the basil, enough to share with everyone she knew.  
 
pollinator
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Blake, have you tried caching food underground? Here is a discussion of a method you could use:

permies.com/t/140268/Garbage-root-cellar-success

Similar to how native people would store food underground, but with modern materials.
 
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I currently live in the Midwest Great Lakes where it's cold and it gets tough to my electricity going without it being frozen. Any substanable ways without using propane or generator to keep the fridge and stove alive and going during the storm?
 
pollinator
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Blake Lenoir wrote: I currently live in the Midwest Great Lakes where it's cold and it gets tough to my electricity going without it being frozen. Any substanable ways without using propane or generator to keep the fridge and stove alive and going during the storm?



For the fridge, If the temperature outside is below freezing, turn it off and add blocks of ice/snow from outside, 2 liter soda bottles would be convenient and resistant to pressure so they won't burst when frozen. If it's not below freezing then still turn off the fridge but leave your fridge food outside or in a outbuilding.
 
Kate Muller
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Blake Lenoir wrote: I currently live in the Midwest Great Lakes where it's cold and it gets tough to my electricity going without it being frozen. Any substanable ways without using propane or generator to keep the fridge and stove alive and going during the storm?



If you have room in the freezer you can keep containers of water frozen in it to use in you refrigerator to keep things in the fridge  cold for a day or 2.

You can also use frozen food items in a well insulated cooler to keep fridge items cold as it slowly defrosts.  I do this for camping trips and the frozen foods are defrosted in a couple of days to cook later and keep the milk and other perishables cold.  

If you are in a less dense urban area with your own driveway you can use an invertor on your car and use it to run your fridge for a couple hours to cool it down.  We have done this in power outages that last 2 to 4 days with great results.  You will need to have the car running while you do this and have a heavy duty extension cord long enough to reach from the car to the fridge or freezer.  
 
Blake Lenoir
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On to jar and can storage. I'm trying to preserve and keep my food and harvest fresh for times to come. I wanna keep my jarred produce sugar and salt free and not too bitter or sour. Any ways to preserve my pickled produce without them being to sugary or salty for the good of my health?
 
                        
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Anna Bo wrote:What to do if you live in an apartment with no land access to grow? No available land for community garden and no basement for storage? Wish I could move, but it’s currently not an option.



Apartments are perfect for growing one of the most nutritious foods on the planet! Take little space, don't require lights and easy to grow in small very cheap 'equipment": SPROUTS. Seeds are easy to store, a little goes a very long way - they're quick and taste great. Do get a water purifying pitcher - better than straight tap water for rinsing/watering IMO.
You've got more possibilities than you might think. Use a top rated supplier for high germination seeds and equipment. Very easy to keep a year's supply in very little space - perfect for apartments.
Happy Gardening!
 
gardener
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I'm in the same urban situation as Anna Bo. Living in a condo.
I joined a local urban market garden, but so far we haven't produced much food. Anyways, in case of revolts, this won't do much good, as it would be most certainly stolen.

My first point is to get into proper weight. Some fat is ok, but we need to eat less, so whatever food we can get can last for longer.

As for food, you can stock on cereals and beans: rice, wheat flour, dry beans, lentils, etc. They last for long and don't take much space. Potatoes are fine to store for one or two months. Without this staple food, you can't survive.
Stock also on salt, sugar and vegetable oil, so you can cook.
Then you will need fresh nutrients. You can store seeds, sprout them and eat as microgreens. You don't need much space to store the seeds, however, you will need several jars, since they take some weeks each one to sprout, so it's better to have a few jars working at the same time so you can enjoy greens every week.

I don't see the point in preserving if you are not growing food. That's what you do when you can't eat your harvest fresh. If you aren't a grower, you probably will buy preserves directly when they are available. You may learn to grow things in pots, but it's not going to give substantial food for the first year. (Anyways, I like to have a few pots with culinary herbs).
Poultry is not practical in an appartment.

Foraging may be an option if your city has some wilderness around and it's not contaminated. But so will do others, so I wouldn't count on finding too much food, unless you are willing to eat the less tasty weeds. Mind you, this foraging will give fresh food, but it does not fill the belly.
 
Blake Lenoir
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What about storing up onions or garlic since they have strong health benefits? If anybody don't wanna forage mushrooms, then could they grow their own in the comfort of their own backyard?
 
pollinator
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Had this conversation with my hubs and he said being debt free means we'll be able to continue to afford to buy food. I will continue to try to grow things but I do a bad job.
 
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Thanks all for the pressure cooker feedback!
 
Kate Muller
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Blake Lenoir wrote: On to jar and can storage. I'm trying to preserve and keep my food and harvest fresh for times to come. I wanna keep my jarred produce sugar and salt free and not too bitter or sour. Any ways to preserve my pickled produce without them being to sugary or salty for the good of my health?



This is not a straight forward easy to answer question.  There are too many variables to consider.  

It may make sense to start a thread in the food preservation section so people can help you with your individual situation.  

What foods are you looking to preserve?
What prepared foods do you buy now that you could make yourself if you had the skills and equipment to do so?
Are you looking to preserve the food you already have on hand or are you working on your plan for this year's growing season?
Do you have any dietary restrictions that need to be followed?
How willing are you to increase your level of cooking, change how you eat those foods.
What resources do you have to acquire the tools and equipment to preserve the food.  
Also preserving food can take as much work or more work to preserve it.



 
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Squab could be a good fit

https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/how-to-raise-pigeons-zmaz70mazkin/

https://mdcreekmore.com/raising-pigeons-for-meat/
 
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I own a Presto brand pressure cooker, which I bought as a canner, and it specifically came with the label Pressure Canner and Cooker. Presto is a super respectable brand in pressure canning so... I figure it's safe enough. And most resources say many pressure cookers can be used as canners, though sometimes only water bath.

https://www.gopresto.com/product/presto-23-quart-pressure-canner-01781
 
Blake Lenoir
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How can we make our own oil from sunflower, etc? Oil will be most valuable in scarce times. Are there other plants out there that I could make oil from outta scratch?
 
Kate Muller
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Blake Lenoir wrote: How can we make our own oil from sunflower, etc? Oil will be most valuable in scarce times. Are there other plants out there that I could make oil from outta scratch?



You could just buy some longer shelf stable fats like Virgin coconut oil and just eat the sunflowers seeds.
 
Blake Lenoir
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Anybody check out underground farming before? I'd like to check out the history of it. Sound like growing from a black market to me.
 
Mk Neal
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Blake Lenoir wrote: On to jar and can storage. I'm trying to preserve and keep my food and harvest fresh for times to come. I wanna keep my jarred produce sugar and salt free and not too bitter or sour. Any ways to preserve my pickled produce without them being to sugary or salty for the good of my health?



You can soak salted foods in fresh water to low-salt them. Many old European recipes that include sauerkraut, for example, tell you to rinse the kraut first.

That way you get the value of preservation from the salt, but don't eat so much of it.
 
pollinator
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Mk Neal - that is particularly true of salted fish, I don't think I've ever heard of people eating salt cod without first soaking it.

Blake - the easiest source of fat to produce is animal fat, whether it's butter or rendered fat like lard, schmaltz or tallow. They can just be a byproduct of processing the animal.
 
Abraham Palma
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How can we make our own oil from sunflower, etc?  


I think you need a press. Not something you have in your backyard just in case.
But maybe you have some nearby mill that can process it for a fee. This makes sense if you are growing your own sunflower seeds, otherwise I'd rather pay the farmer who knows better than me how to grow them.
Sunflower oil has a long shelter time, a year or so, so you can stock on it while it is cheap.
 
Blake Lenoir
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I'm considering growing my own rice field or paddy if there's enough area available. Since grain will be universally expensive in the near future, should I grow my own grain field to create bread and other baked material? Speaking of creating bread, I'm looking for substainable ways to make some without using a blender or stove in case if I go off grid. Any ways for off grid baking?
 
pollinator
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Alexa Ayers wrote:Why not a pressure cooker? Is it just to volume capacity, or is there an actual difference? Having never pressure canned, I was excited to receive a smallish pressure cooker I figured I could experiment with. I'd rather make my learning mistakes with 3 quarts than 10!

One possible reason - the pressure bobble doesn't list a weight, and I'm at 5600 feet which I think qualifies as high altitude?

The older pressure cookers were also canners--until the 1960's they didn't differentiate between the two. One thing is that pressure canning is done at anywhere between 10 and 15 pounds--many of the new pressure "cookers" can't handle those pressures and may crush or deform. Check yours and see what pressure it is rated for. You may be able to find a gauge that fits your cooker.

Another is that, as you noticed, the new pressure cookers don't have pressure listed. It's assumed that you're cooking food for a short time and exact pressure isn't a big issue (a hazard of specialization). With pressure canning you must maintain a certain temperature and pressure (too high and you risk explosion, too low and the food won't be processed correctly). Without a meter or gauge of some kind you can't tell what the pressure is.

Your machine could probably function as a pressure canner if you needed it to, but you would be working blind as to safety.

My suggestion would be to start with a few pints. Really research your cooker and see what pressures are reached. Work within those limits. If your cooker doesn't consistently reach minimum pressure for your area (13 pounds at 5600 feet, I believe, with a bobble you would round up to 15) then I wouldn't use it as a canner but you might still use it as a water bath canner for fruits and such. If the information indicates it reaches the correct pressure and temperature, try it with a few pints. With your first tests you want something that is entirely liquid so you can really see any changes over time.

Watch the bottles. Once taken out they should continue to boil for a short time. This is because the process has created a vacuum inside the jars and liquid boils longer at lower pressure. The longer they boil, the stronger the vacuum. If they don't boil at all, set them aside--it probably didn't create a sufficient vacuum but might still have processed the food. Keep an eye on the bottles for a few weeks, watch for any sign of bacteria or unsealing. Pressure building up from bacterial growth will pop the seal. After a few weeks or a month, open one bottle and see what you have.

Smell test, taste test, if anything smells or tastes off throw it out. This is a standard safety precaution even when you're NOT experimenting. This is completely outside the USDA guidelines (which doesn't bother me, personally, but it does for many people) so do this at your own risk.
 
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Well, we have lots of variety planted on our farm for our own harvest but we prefer to determine who we share with at this point. One thing we do every year now is to host a Community Bareroot Fruit Tree Order. We use our nursery license to purchase trees wholesale and then sell them at our cost (including tax, gas, hotel, tags, bags) and tack on an extra dollar to each tree. This allows us to get our trees paid for by just donating our time. It does take organization!

It's a great community project, empowers the locals to plant more stuff plus each time they come to the farm they get to see what we are doing and get more education that way. We now have a contact/mailing list and have started the 'insider's club' who will get post cards letting them know when the next trees are ready to be spoken for AND we can mail to those who are already interested in edible plants for our fall plant sale. Our goal is to only pre-sell plants and dig the orders up about a month in advance to get them into pots so they are really healthy and ready to be planted.

To date we've been responsible for providing to our area 1147 fruit trees. I think that goes pretty far towards our farm goal of creating food security in our local area!
 
Kate Muller
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I think I may want to add a flower another flower bed to my garden and fill it with hostas, common daylily, Hemerocallis fulva, sunchokes, dandelions, asparagus  and sunflowers.  Tuck a bunch of herbs and pretty leafy greens like red kale and most people would have no idea that your landscaping was edible.  Clump the plants in a garden bed pattern like you find in Better Homes and Gardens and keep well mulched to deal with HOA departments of making you sad.

I am also a fan of using sour pie cherries, American hazelnuts, elderberries, and high bush cranberries because most people who see them in my front yard have no clue what they are and think they look nice.  
 
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Appt dwellers can store garlic, onions, sweet potatoes winter squash in places that are able to be kept cool.  Like, under a bed, under a stairwell,  or a box by a cold window.  This is for rootcellaring.  Garlic, onions, apples can be dried and stored in jars.  You'd be surprised where edibles can be planted in an urban environment.  Lots of plants tolerate shade, water may be harder to find.  
 
Blake Lenoir
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What's happening! Anybody used aquaponics to raise their own fish and stuff? Could we use our ponds as aquaponics to raise fish such as bluegill or others from the wild as long as they're edible? Never used one before.
 
pollinator
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I thought about doing fish, but if you cant also grow the fish feed, then you might as well just buy fish. Like all the other ideas that have been discussed, they can all be done, and will all be a lot of work.

Feeding one person takes something like a million calories. That is pretty generous, but leaves some wiggle room for stuff being lost in storage, for example. If you are serious about being self-sufficient on food, you should probably make a spreadsheet with calories/pound for the crops you are thinking of growing.

Figure about 1500 to 1600 calories per pound for grains and dry beans, 1000 to 1400 for meats, 350 for potatoes, 200 for fruit, and maybe 100 for most vegetables. So 1 million calories would mean

645 lbs of grain, or
833 lbs of meat, or
2850 lbs of potatoes, or
5,000 lbs of fruit, or
10,000 lbs of tomatoes and peppers and such.

You will likely want to mix and match so you dont wind up with scurvy, but you get the idea. Remember that this is just for one person. Growing your own food will not be something you do casually on weekends, but it is a very satisfying hobby. Someday I hope to make it to a million calories, but I have never gotten much over half despite putting a lot of time and energy into it. Still, if you want to be resilient, any little bit helps. I would probably suggest you budget about 5 to 10 years of hard work to get to that goal.
 
Stacy Witscher
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My calculations are more like half a million in a year per person. If you rely more heavily on animal products it's easier from a homesteading perspective, of course depending on your land. My land is well suited to animals and not well suited to conventional farming. My plan is to rely heavily on eggs and dairy, those being my preferences and always have some meat, veg and fruit to round things out. Honestly, I love stock and would never go vegetarian if for no other reason that when animals are culled they can be used to make stock. Waste not, want not.
 
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For those of you in apartments might want to try Barrina T5 lights.  On sale right now on Amazon 6 at 4' for 45 dollars.  A far far cry from florescents and a heck of a lot cheaper than leds specific for growing.  Working really well with lettuce and spinach as well as tomato starts.  Micros are doing well, and they seem to be working for the chestnut trees we started from seed.  
 
Blake Lenoir
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You mean we can use florisant lights to sun our plants indoors including in our apartments?
 
Carl Nystrom
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Stacy Witscher wrote:My calculations are more like half a million in a year per person.



Yeah, the million calorie number is a bit arbitrary. I was curious though, so I looked up a calculator.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/calorie-calculator/itt-20402304

For a mid 30s male who is 6'3" and 220lbs, you need around a million to be somewhat active. Half a million would be enough for a 65 year old woman who was 5'0", 110lbs and inactive. Diet research has made some strides lately in pinning down just how many calories a person is actually consuming, and my recollection is that it is generally more than was once thought. At any rate, my point was just that one should not underestimate how much food a person eats, because it is a LOT.

 
Skandi Rogers
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Carl Nystrom wrote:

Stacy Witscher wrote:My calculations are more like half a million in a year per person.



Yeah, the million calorie number is a bit arbitrary. I was curious though, so I looked up a calculator.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/calorie-calculator/itt-20402304

For a mid 30s male who is 6'3" and 220lbs, you need around a million to be somewhat active. Half a million would be enough for a 65 year old woman who was 5'0", 110lbs and inactive. Diet research has made some strides lately in pinning down just how many calories a person is actually consuming, and my recollection is that it is generally more than was once thought. At any rate, my point was just that one should not underestimate how much food a person eats, because it is a LOT.



I would think that in a emergency situation calorie usage would be at the high end of the scale as well, more activity less heat etc.
 
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