BETTER WAYS, WASHING CLOTHES, SEEDS, SPROUTS, DRINKS
Are we having fun yet?
Once one reads an idea/suggestion, it’s in one’s mind. I believe, if I counted right, this is subject post twenty-two. If you have read one or more of those, some of the ideas/suggestions are stuck in your mind and you will take action on those that are the most meaningful to you. That makes you better prepared than you were before and brings more peace of mind.
Maybe you think you can stop preparing, now. It doesn’t work that way – at least it doesn’t for me. As time/years went by, I would see holes in my preps and I’d find new products, and I kept reading and finding better ways to accomplish this or that, than I had thought of before. I also read fiction survival books – haven’t read any zombie books, however. I find a fiction survival book on Amazon, click the button to buy, and it magically flies through the air and lands on my Kindle. I always learn something from these books. The last one I read was, “Lights Out”, by David Crawford. He’ll have another out this summer, “Lost and Found”.
Yesterday, I found a faster, cheaper, better way to shut out light coming from a house. It’s on Amazon, “Redi Shade 1617201 Black Out Pleated Shade 36-by-72-Inch, 6-Pack” for $24.55 (about $4 per window), and there’s also 48 x 72 inch ones. It’s just heavy, pleated black paper. There’s sticky tape to stick them up, but that’s not great to stay there, so people used thumb tacks to quickly put them up. Another suggestion was turn the sticky tape down to the 4th pleat and stick it which creates a tube – then put a cheap tension rod through it and quickly put it up. During the day, gather the pleats up to let in light and use the included clips to keep them up, then just remove clips at night. These would take very little room to store and could be put up fast when they are needed. I also found reasonably priced, for what it is, window security film.
Washing Clothes
No power, no washing machine. If you don’t have many clothes to wash, use your two kitchen sinks for “tubs” (naturally stop them up to keep water in there). Don’t store clothes washing detergent like you use in your electric washing machine. The violent action of the washer is needed for that detergent to work. Your arms and your “new” washer will never swish clothes that violently. Buy a toilet plunger for your “new “ washer. I will use liquid dish washing soap, like you use now when you wash a dish at your sink. It only takes a small amount to have gobs of suds to wash away dirt. You could get fancy and buy Woolite or such, but don’t think jeans and shirts would know the difference. Maybe buy a bottle of Woolite for something fancy you might wash.
You could have warm or hot water if you have a camp shower bag or two, and heat it, or them, in the sun.
If you have a pair of kitchen rubber gloves, put them on (must keep hands nice looking). The clothes are in the sink. Add water and a bit (very small bit) of dishwashing liquid and put your “new” washer to work, pushing down over and over and moving it around in the sink to get the soap into the clothing. When you’re tired of doing that, wring out the clothing and put it in the rinse water in other sink. Get soap off your plunger, and use it to move clothes around in the rinse water. See, if you use too much dishwashing liquid, you’ll never get all the soap out. Now, you have gotten “most” of the soap out, wring the clothes well and hang them on your clothes line. Oh, wait, we don’t have a clothes line.
You can find a good one made by Coleman that is cheap and designed to tie to trees or posts or whatever you have outside, to made a tight clothes line. Also, look at Walmart for various type clotheslines, plus various kinds of clothespins, and they may have the Coleman clothesline in their sporting goods section. Buy whichever one is better for you, considering where you need to hang it and how many clothes you might need to wash at one time. I also have a wood folding clothes dryer in my house. It it’s raining or too cold to go outside, put the folding clothes dryer in your bathtub and hang the clothes there – it will not hold many clothes – if you’re really into washing in bad weather, you could have two folding ones if you have two bathtubs – don’t think two would go in regular tub. If you have a large area shower, not tub, two would probably fit.
If you have too many clothes for the kitchen sink tubs, you’ll need two larger tubs. They need to be sturdy to stand up to your plunger and not turn over. Metal tubs would be the best – found at hardware stores. Select the size your family needs. Set the tubs up on something so you don’t have to bend to the ground to use the plunger. Do the same thing with these two tubs that you did in the kitchen.
Don’t overfill your tubs if having water is a problem. Conserve water wherever you can.
When it rains, just send everyone out in the backyard to stand in the rain with soap and wash the clothes they have on – no, I’m kidding.
Have everyone strip off for a bath in the rain? Maybe not. Wash hair in the rain? I’d be tempted. I see rain coming down as fresh water to be used every way possible, as well as captured in water barrels or kiddy plastic pools.
Seeds
Don’t consider storing hybrid seeds; they only produce the true plant one time. You need “heirloom” seeds so you can collect seeds from your plants and plant those the next year. One can buy heirloom seeds from numerous growers, I use Terroir Seeds, Home of Underwood Gardens,
http://www.underwoodgardens.com/. I also have stored heirloom seeds from Walton. There are books to teach one how to collect the seeds and store them for the next year. Two of these, are, “Seed Sowing and Saving”, by Carole B.Turner, and “Seed to Seed”, by Suzanne Ashworth.
You can grow food in containers on your patio or balcony if you live in an apartment. The seeds want good growing soil and they don’t care where it is located. I tried an experiment last fall, but think it got cold too fast for it to work. I read about this, and it sounds right to me. A plastic bag of potting soil is a container of growing soil – right? Plants should grow in that container of soil. Punch some small holes in the bottom of the plastic bag for water drainage, and you have a container of soil with drainage. No need to buy pots or buckets, remove the soil out of bag and put it in them. I’ll try another bag this spring (if this cold ever goes away) and see what happens. Any container you have that will hold soil, will grow plants. Now, trying to grow tall corn in a small pot, is very likely to fail, so maybe you need a veggie gardening book to guide you. That will also give you information about soil and fertilizers.
If there’s no water in the pipes and rain fails to come to water plants, those 55 gal. barrels of water will feed them. The time we may be short of rain here, is usually July and August. That’s also in hurricane season, so we could have a tropical depression come in with plenty of rain or it could develop into a hurricane. No matter where one comes in, from anywhere on the coast of Texas through Louisiana, some of that disturbed weather will send rain to us. During July and August, we usually want a tropical depression to show up but not it’s mother, the hurricane.
Drinks
I didn’t cover drinks adequately in the food posts.
Coffee: If you are a coffee drinker, figure out how much coffee you use in a month and store enough cans (I’ve read cans store for two years at least, but it won’t be a problem to rotate those if you really drink coffee) for whatever length you want – a year is comforting to me. Use the Melitta single cup plastic filters and paper filters and/or the Melitta non-electric six or ten cup glass coffee maker and paper filters and keep it hot using a Sterno stove or a teapot warmer, which is a metal or porcelain stand with a tealight size candle under it. Teapot warmers can usually be found on Ebay and on tea company websites. I swear by the Melitta single cup plastic filters and your own cup. That single filter isn’t going to break and that means no fail, ever, coffee. They are so cheap, it makes sense to have them. The Melitta glass ones are also inexpensive (on Amazon), so, if you want, get both the larger filter with glass pot and plastic filter so you can make individual cups or a larger amount in the glass. Which you would use when depends on how much fuel you have to devote to coffee making and keeping it hot/warm.
Chocolate drink to flavor instant or powdered milk:
Nesquick chocolate powder: will dissolve easily in milk and it has a few extra vitamins in it.
Hot Chocolate: There are many brands of hot chocolate mix to mix with hot water. Some have sugar, some have no sugar.
Carnation Breakfast Essentials: This is not the old Carnation Instant Breakfast. Breakfast Essentials is a powerful mix of vitamins and chocolate powder. Comes in a large size can and I drink a delicious glass every day. The vitamins and nutrients are too many to list. Pick up a can at the grocery and read the list. You’ll put one in your grocery cart to try out. This is a good way to get more vitamins when using stored food, plus it will make instant or powdered milk taste just great.
Fizzy type coke drinks: Stored some of those one time – eventually they go flat, taste bad and/or leak out of the can – both happened. There’s no nutrition there, but if you can’t do without cokes, don’t expect them to last more than a few months – and they won’t be cold. Sure, I’ll miss my diet coke when they’re gone.
Next is recipes. Back when I was an associate school psychologist, every morning I put a simple recipe in every teacher’s box. One morning I missed doing that and an irate teacher came to my office, said she was using those recipes every day to cook for the family and what was she going to do that day? Well, she wasn’t as irate as she made it sound, and we worked through her mental problem for cooking that day. The recipes I post will mainly be those I’ve searched out for emergency situations. I can tell you this in advance, canned fruit pie filling is a blessing for dessert - just spoon it over everything.
