A Few New Links and $10 Gift Card to Emergency Essentials!

Hey all, I'm adding a couple of new links to the sidebar for some friendly folks who contacted me about links--Look like good sites to me, so here they are:

Food Storage Depot

Off Grid Survival

And until Sept. 30th, Emergency Essentials is offering a $10 gift card to their store for putting up a button to their blog site, Preparedness Pantry, so of course I'm doing that and letting you all know about it also! Just follow the instructions on their post here to claim your $10 gift card. :)

Still working like mad with the garden/yard/etc.--I have a serious backlog of posts that will get on here eventually! And if you're not preserving something, ask around your neighborhood/town/church if anybody has any excess anything you can can/freeze/dehydrate and get busy! :)

Preparedness Enrichment Night

A few months ago I was asked if I would do an Enrichment night for the ladies at church about preparedness. Of course I said yes. Now, for those who don't know, the LDS church has a program for the ladies called Relief Society, and part of that is having activities or meetings called Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment meetings where we get together and learn things or go places or have a dinner or whatever the local Relief Society decides we need to do. So our Relief Society decided they wanted a night to talk about preparedness, and I got the call to teach it. Well, the night is supposed to be about 1-1 1/2 hours long and I was asked in the spring and didn't do it until last week, leaving me about 4 months to wonder how to teach preparedness in 90 minutes or less without having the sweet ladies falling asleep on me or scaring them into the preparedness overload coma. So here's what I came up with, and maybe it can help some of you all also.

I decorated with random preparedness items, like canned goods, flashlights, radios, etc. I brought my grinder, dehydrator, a few of my favorite preparedness books, my emergency kit, my son's kit, my car kit, and prizes!

I started by asking a few questions about preparedness in general: Why should we prepare? and What are we preparing for? Got some good answers from the ladies, and some good discussion. There are some great quotes and scriptures for this section.

When I was first starting, I gave them all a little piece of colored paper. I used three different colors--we had about 20 people show up. After the discussion about why we were preparing, I had them gather in "families" by color WITHOUT TALKING. Now, a couple of them didn't get the no talking memo, but it worked okay anyway. The first group together was supposed to get a prize, but I couldn't tell which group got together fastest, and some were disadvantaged due to physical limitations of some of the ladies there, so I just gave everybody Waterproof Matches for their emergency kits.

Then we had a discussion about making plans like evacuation plans and meeting place plans and how important it is that everybody in the family knows the plans.

For the next activity, I gave each "family" a piece of paper and pencil and gave them 2 minutes to write down everything they could think of to put in a 72 hour/emergency kit. The group with the most things on their list won lightsticks for their kits.

Then we had a discussion about emergency kits, evacuation kits, car kits, etc. Why they're a good idea, generally what to put in them, etc. I could only cover the basics--not enough time! I could have talked for the whole 90 minutes on ONE aspect of preparedness! Ugh.

The third activity was a wheat grinding race. I had brought my Country Living hand crank grain mill, and set it up on the counter. Each family chose a representative and they had 30 seconds to grind wheat into flour. The winning lady ground almost 1/2 cup in 30 seconds! When she was done, she said, "I decided I don't like bread all that much." Even with a nice mill, hand grinding grain is work! The winning family got energy bars and the losers got hydration drink mix packets for their kits. And I got a little over a cup of flour to take home that I didn't have to grind! :)

Then we discussed what we should store like 3 months of easy, normal foods, water, money, and longer term storage of staples like wheat, rice, beans, etc. Also the tools to use the food you have stored--like a way to grind your wheat or cook your meals if there was no power/gas/etc.

The final activity was a tasting game. I made chocolate chip cookies with bean flour in them. What? I haven't told you all about bean flour? You can grind white beans and use the flour as a substitute for up to 1/4 of any recipe's flour. If I do the full 1/4 of the recipe's flour in bean flour, I can taste the beans a little, so I go a little less than 1/4 of the flour total. Anyway, more about bean flour another time. I had made these cookies with bean flour in them and they each took a cookie and had to guess the secret ingredient. One of the ladies had heard me talk about bean flour before, so she guessed what it was although she couldn't taste it in the cookie. Fun.

Everybody got one of my famous dryer lint firestarters as a prize. I had to explain what it was, I will admit they look a little strange if you don't know what they are.

Then we talked about the importance of knowing what you have and how to use it. This includes your food stuffs and your gear. It is not okay to say that your husband knows how to load and fire the rifle or light the stove, YOU need to learn how to use your equipment. What if he's not there? What if you're not there? The best time for experimenting and learning is now, when there is no emergency.

Finally, I practically begged them NOT to go home, file the handouts and do nothing! Inventory your stuff, buy stuff, learn something new, etc. Do something--ANYTHING! Just get doing.

I gave them handouts with the general outline of what we had discussed as well as sample lists for an emergency kit, a car kit, what to grab to evacuate, and long term storage.

I cooked up an MRE for them to sample and also had pieces of the survival bars they could taste. Some of the ladies had brought homemade bread and jam, so there was some good food there also. I've had a few ladies comment since the activity that they went home and inventoried their food supplies or gathered gear for their emergency kits. Hooray for progress!

Homemade Powdered Laundry Detergent

I'm trying out some homemade laundry soap. Laundry soap is one of the items I was afraid I'd run out of on the 2 week no shopping experiment, so I thought it would be nice to be able to stock ingredients and make me some laundry soap whenever I needed it. Turns out it takes up a lot less space than standard laundry detergent, which is a bonus in our little house.

Here's the recipe:

1/3 bar Fels Naptha Soap grated (approx. 1 Cup grated soap)
1/2 cup Washing Soda
1/2 cup Borax

You might have to hunt for these ingredients, but they should be on the laundry aisle of your supermarket. Washing Soda is not the same as baking soda. Fels Naptha is a bar soap, but it's made for laundry. And borax is a laundry "booster", so even though you think they might be elsewhere in the store, they really should be on the laundry aisle. Check near the top or bottom shelves, and if all else fails, call your friend who bought the same stuff a while back at the same store. Okay, if you don't have a friend like that, just ask someone at the store. Here's what the ingredients look like so you kind of know what you're looking for. This is actually an older box of borax, the new box was shorter and fatter but with the same design.
I tripled the recipe. Why not just grate the whole bar of soap? And we do a lot of laundry anyway.

You could grate your soap in your food processor if you want--I just used a hand grater on the small side since I still have the scary dangerous food processor.

After you've got the soap grated (it should come to about 1 cup of grated soap per 1/3 bar of soap, so 3 cups for the whole bar), add your Washing Soda and Borax and mix it together. The whole triple recipe fit in a largish cheapo gladware-type container.

Now, here's the kicker. You only need to use 1-2 tablespoons of the soap per load. ?????? says me. Is that for real? Yep. We have super hard water here, so I've been using an old "crystal light" style cup from the 2 qt. mixes that holds about 2 tablespoons as my scoop. The stuff doesn't suds up in the machine, but the suds aren't what clean your clothes. It is not miracle laundry soap--if I don't pretreat the koolaid, grass, etc. it won't wash out--just like any other detergent. But it has worked well at general cleaning of the clothes. We have a bed wetter and it does get the pee smell out of the sheets and jammies we're always washing, so I know stuff is getting clean with it. The soap is pretty much unscented, so if you want your laundry to "smell," you can mix some regular powdered laundry detergent in to get the scent you like, or use dryer sheets.

It took all of about 10 minutes to mix it all up, it's seriously cheap compared to regular detergent, and it's EASY to store a bunch since you use so little when you wash. Can't beat that.

Dehydrating Peppers

I put up a post on the Utah Preppers site on Dehydrating Peppers. Check it out--pretty easy and totally useful, especially if you like peppers or planted way too many of them ;-)

I promise I'll be back for some regular posting after the harvest season slows down a bit!