Old Fashioned On Purpose

104. How I'd Boost our Food Security if I had NO Homestead

• Jill Winger

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During uncertain times, basic survival needs like food security become a topic of daily discussion.  While I realize homesteading is essentially preparing us for times like these, not everyone that listens to this podcast are on a homestead.  Many of you live in a city or in suburbs and don’t have a ton of extra space.  Today I’m here to lay out what I’d do if I had to start over in the suburbs.  Learn the essential vegetables to grow, why you need to own a grain mill, and how I’d stock my pantry.  Find out why one of the most important things you can do to boost your food security is developing and maintaining relationships with local farmers and food producers.   

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. So this current situation we all find ourselves in has got me to thinking now. As you probably know, we have been accidentally preparing for this sort of situation for quite a while with you know, the milk cow and the chickens and the garden and the canning and all this stuff. But I can't help but think and ponder what if we had taken a different path? Like what if we have just found ourself at this point in history, like your typical American living in town, in a little neighborhood with a little backyard in the suburbs. What would I do? Or what could I do if I was in that situation to boost our food security to increase our food supply and just to help everything be a little more stable. So just for fun, I've put together my action list. If I was in that situation, if I was starting from scratch with zero homestead, here is how I would increase our personal food security. I'm your host Jill Winger and this is the podcast for the trailblazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers. And the backyard farmers. If you've ever found yourself disenchanted with conformity and you like to swim upstream while the rest of the world rides the river, at least resistance. Well, you have found your tribe. Okay. So I'm really excited for this episode. So here is the setting what we're going to have to set some boundaries or I don't know what the word rules for the scenario, right? So I'm going to pretend like I'm, I live in town, we have a backyard, but not a monster backyard, right? It's not like it's an acre backyard, just a regular backyard. And I'm going to say that the town I live in is fairly, or maybe my home homeowners association is somewhat, uh, liberal in their rules. Like they still have rules, but they're, they're allowing some things to go on. So that is my scenario. Okay. And obviously if you're listening to this, you may have that scenario. You may have a different scenario that you are living in this moment. So you kinda gotta take some of these ideas and tailor them to your situation. But here's my encouragement for you in that there is always something you can do. And on the flip side of that, there is always something you can use as an excuse if you're looking for an excuse. So I would encourage you to look at the obstacles in your way, whether they're a homeowners association or maybe you live in an apartment and you don't have a backyard or whatever it may be, and choose to see those roadblocks as not necessarily a roadblock, but just an obstacle that you will overcome and will make you more creative and more ingenious in the process. Okay? So that's a mindset shift to start off this challenge. But okay, here's what would do step one. Now remember I'm, I, I'm not a homesteader, so this is, this is the scenario. The first thing I would do, I would start some sort of garden. Okay. And there is some vegetables, you know, that grow pretty darn quick. I mean, you can have them ready to roll pretty quick. So I would start with greens. And I would dig up a spot in the backyard, maybe a big spot if I have the potential, maybe a little spot. And I would plant spinach, kale, mustard greens, chard, arugula, all t his stuff, right? That will come up quickly. Oh, lettuce, obviously d uh. Those come up quickly and they're nutritious. And in the meantime, while those are coming up, I would sprout some seeds in my kitchen, i n Mason jars and then I could have those vitamins in the sprouts. They're so good for you. They taste good on all the sandwiches and the wraps and the eggs and all the things and that way that would keep us sustained with green stuff while the garden outside was growing. And so I'm assuming obviously in this scenario it's not the dead of winter and there's not five feet of snow on the ground. But if it, you know, this would work in spring, summer and fall because greens are pretty tolerant of cool weather. Um, so that would be what I would do. And then as those greens are coming up outside, if it's still too cold for me to plant other vegetables, I would start the seeds in my window. Or if I could set up some sort of grow lights, you know, get a light from the hardware store with a shelf and set that up, I would start growing some vegetable starts in my house. Tomatoes obviously cause that's everybody's favorite. You can do cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli. There's a lot you can do in a window sill if you have good Southern light. And you could also do things like herbs, that you could use in your cooking right away or throughout the garden season. O kay. So that'd be the first thing cause it takes a little more time to get that rolling. But there's a lot of f ood security to be had with a garden or just sticking some vegetables in your landscaping. Right. If you're in a place like, let's say you have a big front yard and your h omeowners association won't let you dig it all up and put an actual garden in the front yard. Well, they don't know the difference between a vegetable and a f lower or some sort of ornamental p lant. So stick some vegetables in your beautiful landscaping and g row s ome food alongside the ornamental stuff. Right? There's lots of ways around it. Okay. The step two, step two would be I would get a grain mill, something that would grind wheat and I would buy wheat berries in bulk. Now obviously if you are gluten free, skip this step for obvious reasons, but for the rest of you who are buying all the flour at the store right now, or trying buy the flour and you can't find it, this is the answer. There is a small investment in a grain mill. I'm pretty sure it will be the best investment you've ever made because you know, as we've gone to town, like I still can't find all purpose flour in the stores here. I don't really care a whole lot though because I have no word of a lie. 200 pounds of wheat berries in my basement. And actually it stocked up on those a good number of years ago when I was really in kind of this prepping phase that I feel like I, I shipped it out of a little bit and I was going to give that, that wheat Berry, the buckets to the chickens, last year and I just never got around to it. And now I'm kind of kind of really glad I didn't give them to the chickens. So we had been using those wheat berries and my grain mill, I have a Nutra mill and I've been grinding all the flour, our little hearts desire. And the cool thing is with wheat berries, they're a whole grain, right? Obviously you can story whole grain for a very long time if you have them in a nice container where the mice can't get them and they're not going to get wet, they'll last a while friends and you don't have to worry about them going rancid and you don't have to worry about, um, you know, keeping them in the refrigerator. Cause once you grind wheat, it starts to degrade really, really quickly. And so that's why I always advise people against buying whole wheat flour at the store because you just don't know how long it's been sitting on the shelf and it can go rancid and it can get stale way faster than all purpose flour. So if you have those wheat berries in those buckets though, they will last years and you just pull them out and grind them up whenever you need them. So get a grain mill, get the wheat berries. You don't need to have 200 pounds like Jill, you can have 20 pounds, but just have some on hand. Okay. Number three, I was stock the pantry. Even if I'm in like, you know, suburban house, no farmhouse, doesn't matter. I would stock my pantry with staples and this is what I do now. And you can do this. I don't care where you live in an apartment in New York city, the middle of the Midwest and in a suburb. This is possible for everyone. And I have done other episodes. I think there's one called my everyday preparedness pantry where I go into the details of what I just keep around. Things like rolled oats, honey, coconut oil, dry beans, rice, um, stuff like that. Basics, right? But those are the things that we eat anyway. And I just keep a bigger than normal supply and no, I'm not hoarding cause I keep it all the time. So it's not like I went in and rushed out and bought extra amounts when this whole thing started. Um, but that really carries us through. That carries us through when we have blizzards that carries us through when I'm just not able to get to the store. And when everyone else started rushing to the grocery aisles to get all the things I just didn't need to because I already had a good supply of that stuff. The basics in the pantries and in the basement. All right. Number four, I would learn how to can things like fruits and tomato sauce and homemade broths and you can can meat and I have all these tutorials on the blog, the Prairie homestead.com just go over there and use the search tool. Like right now, you know, we haven't gone to town. I haven't gone to the grocery store in at least 10 days, two weeks. And we're really leaning heavily on the canned food that I put up last year and the year before, and we're pulling out the tomato sauce. And this morning we had baked oatmeal with home canned peaches and you know, even the other day the kids were looking for some fruit, to put in a recipe and they had the choice of home canned peaches or home canned Apple slices or home canned cherries or Apple sauce. And just having that selection that we can ourselves, I know it's organic, I know it's healthy. Like that is gold. That just feels so good. And the thing with canning is, this is maybe one of the things on this list. You're probably not going to be able to go out and just stock your pantry with$200 of home canned food overnight, right? It takes a little bit of time, but if you can just start squirreling away seven jars at a time, 14 jars at a time, whenever you find the fruit on sale, whenever you get, some extra from a friend or you grow it in your garden, it adds up. And in addition to produce, like I said, you can can things like broth. So when you have that big Thanksgiving Turkey, you cook it down into broth, you, I usually get like two gallons from a Turkey. It's insane. And I will can all that broth and then I don't have to go to the store and buy broth. And the same goes for beef or chicken. You go get a sale on, on meats, or maybe you buy a quarter of a cow from a local farmer and then you put some in your freezer and you can can some of the stew meats or things like that. So it's shelf stable, it's freeing up space in the freezer and it's stuck in that pantry. So I think canning is an extremely worthwhile skill. For situations like what we find ourselves in right now and just every day pantry preparedness it, it really helps. Okay. So this one, number five, this is maybe one that isn't going to fit for every person situation, but if it works for you, I would suggest getting a couple chickens. Right? One of the things we're seeing right now is eggs are missing off the shelves. People are buying eggs faster than anything else. Well maybe not faster than toilet paper, but eggs are one of the top items. Right? And I was reading an article this morning that talked about this a egg shortage, for lack of a better word. And they said that it's really hard for the egg industry just to, you know, increase the egg supply in a short amount of time because you have to wait for the chickens to get mature. It's not like, you know, there's a finite number of chickens that are laying and to get more, you have to increase your flock size for these big commercial egg operations. So it's kind of a slow process. And you don't have to be dependent on that system. If you have your own chickens and you don't need 52 chickens like me, but even if you just have three or four or whatever your town or your ordinances will allow, it'll help. It will help. In their prime, a chicken will lay about an egg a day. So unless you have 29 kids, you know a handful of chickens is probably going to do you just fine and you can feed them your table scraps, your kitchen scraps. You kinda got this little self-sustaining system going on and it's a beautiful thing. Okay. And lastly, number six, if you're living in the suburbs, you know, obviously you probably aren't going to have a dairy goat or a milk cow. If you can pull that off though more power to ya. I am rooting for you, but if it's not possible, I would suggest that right now, and this is something you can do today, get to know your local farmers and your local ranchers and your local producers. You know, I've said this for years and I believed this for years, but more than ever, I am seeing the value of a localized food system. It's important and you can bet that from here on out, I'm going to be preaching this so much more passionately even than I did before because as I see our food system, our industrialized food system have some holes in it and not work super great and leave some people hanging. You know, you know who's coming through for people. It's the local farmers, it's the local ranchers. They're the ones stepping up to make sure their communities have food. So what I would suggest when this is all said and done in the grocery stores are full of all the things. Once again, I'm going to encourage you to stay loyal to your local producers because they were here for you when the grocery stores weren't able to keep up. And when you can support that local food economy, things like really cool things happen and you're supporting families in your community and it's creating more vibrant food scene. And let me just tell you, we, we've always homesteaded and produced food for ourselves, right? Just our own food supply, and I've mentioned it a few times, but over the last two or three we have started to get into commercial beef, which means we bought some cows and we've been growing them up and we are, we just sent our first batch to be processed a couple months ago. So we have beef now available. We've got a commercial freezer, the whole nine yards. And Oh my goodness, I underestimated how amazing it is to be able to sell beef to folks and hand beef to them,, who are desperate because they can't get it at any store in town. And like, I don't know, I just didn't expect it to be this fulfilling. I, I figured it would be a little fulfilling. But this is unreal and I am obsessed and that's part of the reason we bought a whole bunch more chickens because we want to be able to start selling eggs. And I've always kind of steered away from that cause I thought, Oh, it's a lot of work. And there's not a huge profit margin there and we have so many other things going on. But you guys, I am so passionate about being able to share food with the community. And even right now there's a local grocery store in our little town and they can't get eggs. And so I'm working out a deal with them to take our egg excess from our little homestead flock and drive it up to them so they can have eggs in their store. And I just want to make sure that when, when this is all over, I'm going to continue to seek out and find our local producers and we, and honestly we don't have a ton of them just because Wyoming is a tough place to grow food. They don't have big orchards. We don't have big a vegetable farms for the most part. But you know what, I'm going to do whatever I can to encourage that and keep it going from here on out. And I hope you do too. So if you are feeling excited and inspired to do this homestead thing and maybe we don't even call it homesteading, we just call it increasing your, your self sufficiency or boosting your food security. But you kind of want to do with some of the things on the list that I mentioned, but you're not quite sure how to start. Well, the good news is that is my specialty and I happen to have an entire library of resources I put together for homesteaders or suburban backyard folks who are trying to master their pantry. And you can get complimentary access to the whole thing over theprairiehomestead.com/grow and that is it for today. Don't forget to hit subscribe. So all the new episodes will show up automatically in your podcast player. And if you found this episode helpful, I would love it if you could just pop over and leave a quick rating or review. Thanks so much for listening. I always enjoy hanging out here on the podcasts and I'll catch up with you next time.