photo credit - Library of Congress
Most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." When you learn a new skill you preparing to "feed" yourself and your family for a lifetime.
In our church we often use the phrase provident living to describe preparedness. Many people are very busy acquiring supplies and food on their journey toward preparedness but this series will be focused on acquiring skills to allow you and your family to live providently.
What I plan to do in this series is to provide readers with a general plan of action to acquire those skills. I'll provide recommendations of written resources, online resources, and person-to-person learning opportunities to help you in your journey toward provident living. My goal is to provide a rudimentary plan of action to assist you in acquiring those skills.
The categories I have planned for the series so far are:
1. Gardening
2. Food Preservation
3. Cooking from Scratch
4. Farming & Raising Livestock
5. Slaughtering & Butchering
6. Solar Cooking
7. Foraging for Wild Foods
8. Hunting
9. Fishing
10. Trapping
11. Wilderness Survival
12. Shooting
13. Emergency Medical Skills
14. Emergency Communications
15. Emergency Childbirth
This is by no means a comprehensive listing of all of the skills a family would need in order to be prepared to live providently, but I feel it covers the basics and I'll add additional topics as I think of them.
I'm looking forward to this series. We're new to the prepping mindset. We have made efforts to put up some food and other supplies, but that's it so far. I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about canning. I want to learn the skill; hubby says it's not cost-effective and the products don't last as long as commercial canned goods and we'd be better putting our money in those. Also my FIL cautioned against canning meat because it's much harder to be sure it's bacteria-free, so I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about that, since I see you're working on canning up most of a deer.
ReplyDeleteI'm also getting more serious about gardening this year. I plan on starting a blog about it; I'll follow you there when I do.
Mrs. Mutz,
ReplyDeleteI hope the series is helpful. :)
As for the concerns your husband and FIL have those could easily be addressed with education. I will provide resources in the canning post that demonstrate the huge amount of research that land grant universities across the country have put into determining the safest and most accurate home canning process.
Pressure canning meat is extremely safe and if the correct procedures are utilized it is most certainly not only a health risk but can easily be healthier than commercially produced canned meats.
When home canning your meat you can select the base ingredients and have better control over the conditions in which the meat is processed.
I'll look forward to reading about your garden!
Take care :)
The main thing for me about home canning is it allows you to put the food by when you have a surplus or its in season locally. You can then store the food long term without electricity, so it doesn't fill up your freezer.
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