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Have you ever wondered how life would be if you couldn’t go to the store for a month? Of course you have – you’re a prepper!
Well, I’m taking the month of January to test my preps. And if I post it here, then I’m accountable.
The rules:
- No shopping!. If we don’t have it, we have to live without it, substitute something else for it or figure out how to make it from supplies we already have.
- We are planning to do this not only for food, but for other supplies also – shampoo, soap, cleaning supplies, etc.
- If there are some amazing sales for stock-up items, those can be purchased but they must be put away and used after the challenge is over.
This is a great way to…
- Save money
- Test preps to be sure we don’t have any holes in our supplies
- Eat healthfully
- Practice scratch cooking skills
- Learn what we will want to add to our preparedness supplies
- Use our problem solving skills
- Use up some of the older items in our pantry before they expire
Of course, this will be a lot more fun if some of you would like to try it too. You have 3 days to pick up any last minute supplies – let me know in the comments if you’d like to join in!
Good article! For some, even doing this a week would be a challenge – and a great way to figure out where the weak spots are in the food supply at our houses…and more important, how willing are the family members to live off what’s been stored up without getting cranky. What else would they like to see in the pantry if a person really was unable to go to the store for a week, month or longer?
Thank you for continuing to inspire us!
I’ll take on this challenge and add one to it for myself – I have a large collection of from-the-pantry recipes that I haven’t tried out. I’m going to make as many of them as I can. This will be a fantastic test and also rotate some stock!!
Hooray! I’m so glad you’re in!!! 🙂
Daisy
im in! Found your site recently and love it! I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile on my own but it’ll be so much more fun together. Good luck!
Welcome, Jill! I’m hitting the store tomorrow – we have to go into the city to pick up my daughter’s friend, so we are going to make a trip of it and do a supply run as well! I’m pleased to say, I only have a half dozen things on my list! 🙂
Above photo shows supplies in glass jars. food in broken jars is unsafe to eat,those sulpplies are no better than no food at all.
What foods are stored in could save you from being hungery.
Very good point, Ray. 🙂 Thank you for bringing it up! Of course breakage is always a concern but much of our food is stored via canning, and there really is no other option than glass jars for that. I’m fortunate that I do not live in an earthquake-prone area and am able to do this fairly safely. If a person did reside in an area that got frequent earthquakes or was near a fault line, they would be wise to make their jars as secure as possible.
Daisy
I’ve been wanting to try this, too. We’ll see how long we can last. I’m a little nervous about using up what I’ve already got stored in my prepping closet. Maybe we will focus on some of the items in the freezer that wouldn’t last if there wasn’t any electricity. This will also get rid of anything that is nearing freezer burn city!
Hi CJ – Welcome to the challenge! 🙂
I am planning to use the money I save on groceries to make some bigger stockpile purchases this month – this will offset the items I’m using up – I, too, cringe everything I get something out of the stockpile!
Daisy
Good point CJ!! I just re-inventoried and reorganized my freezer and I have many meats and soups that need to be used up so I’m doing the same thing. But I also have quite a bit of canned goods coming up or a bit past their dates so I’m happy to be using them up and not tossing them out. Like Daisy said- I’ll use the $$ I save to restock.
I’m in! But with a couple of exceptions as I have to made a couple of trips & will have to eat on the road. I have just completed stock taking in my pantry & am in the process of putting it on a spread sheet. Will do stocktaking on kitchen cupboards next. It is good to know that I only have 4 pts. of red raspberries left but have 11 yellow raspberries & some frozen. I can ration out the raspberries till Aug. Must inventory the freezers too. I know I have enough of everything but milk & marg. for more than a month. I do have have 70 qts of powered milk so no problem in that area. I’m so glad I found this site a couple of days ago.
Awesome! I may have to take a road trip this month also, during which I will grab something on the road, like you!
I’m so glad that others are joining in the challenge! 🙂
Daisy
I will try it too, but there are a few things I was ready to stock up on.
I do not have as much food stored as I should. However, I had enough last week to share a large bag of food with an elderly neighbor who was almost out of food. We need to help others too.
I look upon God as my source, and so far what I need appears just in time.
What is weird is just today I was thinking of how long I could stay out of the stores this month, and then I found this article. 🙂
Welcome to the challenge, Carol! 🙂
I’m glad you were able to help out your neighbor. We try to help others as well, and it is nice to know that we can usually find the means to assist them as close as our pantry. It’s a good feeling in more ways than one.
Daisy
i’m in too,(although i’m 4 days late, and hubby just went to the store this evening) saw this on another home canner’s blog, and thought it was a great idea. in reality, traditionally speaking, maybe we ought to shoot for the whole winter, as i’m sure many of my amish neighbors are. but a month is a great start. and everyone taking on this challenge should be proud to know that most americans couldn’t do this. maybe some of the $ saved i’ll buy food for the local food pantry as well. canned goods from food pantries is how my stash started!
Anyone have suggestions on how to make canned veggies interesting to young kids? or recipe suggestions for coconut milk? bought a case while back and only have two recipes i like, both curries.
sadly though, a month from now food prices probably will have gone up again
I live through the winter in a remote mountain cabin from which the (unimproved) roads remain unusable (steep and icy) from early December until spring. I prep because that’s just the way to get through the snowy months in the West Virginia Alleghenies, if you happen to live up in the hills a ways.
As I write this, I’m eating a bowl of rice-and-beans soup, spiced with salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, onion powder, cumin, and tumeric, with a dash of olive oil. To go with it, I have pork roast, cooked slowly in a cast iron Dutch oven that sits on top of my wood stove after being salted, peppered, and doused in a mixture of A1 and habanero sauce.
In my bathroom, there’s a rubber tub with a load of my laundry soaking in detergent and water. It’s about time for me to wring it out, rinse it, wring it again, and hang it up on the clothes line to dry.
The toilet hasn’t worked since my house electric pump broke. I could get it fixed, but it suited me better to build an outhouse, which I’ve been using instead for the past several years. The final disposal of waste is done with a shovel. The main reason I prefer the outhouse to an indoor toilet is water conservation. Toilets use up about 20 gallons of water per day. Outhouses use none. A secondary benefit is that my house is entirely free of nasty bathroom odors, no chemical scents or electric fans required.
I have three shovels, three axes, several hatchets and machetes, lots of knives, screw drivers, wrenches, ratchets, pry bars, saws, hammers big and small. LED flashlights, solar panels, 12V batteries, extra wire and clamps, extra chargers for my 18650 Li-ion batteries, solar chargers for my AAA, AA, C, D, and 9V size NiMH batteries. Calculators.
My other hand tools exist in similar redundancy. I have three axes, several hatchets, several machetes, screw drivers, wrenches, ratchets, pry bars, saws, etc. Electronic gadgets are redundant, too. LED flashlights, solar panels (all but one boxed away in a dark place), 12V batteries, extra wire and clamps, extra chargers for my 18650 Li-ion batteries, solar chargers for my AAA, AA, C, and D size NiMH batteries. Calculators. Digital cameras. Some of my electronic stuff will still work well into the Apocalypse.
And I have lots of books. I happen to like fantasy and science fiction, so I keep about 2500 paperback books in 25 stackable Rubbermaid 18-gallon tubs. But I also have a selection of textbooks, in case I take a notion to improve my mind. And I have copies of books on herb lore and field guides plants, in case I need to pull up weeds, either to eat or to use for some other purpose.
So far the most severe test of my preps was the 10-day outage of electric power following the derecho storms in the eastern USA on 29 June 2012. I lost several hundred dollars’ worth of meat because, at the time, I wasn’t able to keep my freezer cold by occasionally running it from batteries through an inverter. I hope to have that problem solved soon. That’s one of the things my collection of 12V sealed lead-acid batteries is for.
Otherwise, I did very well. I cooked my first meal in my Global Sun Oven. It took all day to finish a batch of rice-and-beans, but the job got done. If it had been cloudy, I could have used the wood stove, but gathering wood is work, so I’d rather use solar power to cook with whenever possible.
I think that people should be prepped to endure not merely a few months of isolation, but for several years of it. The Great Depression lasted about a decade, and the coming Apocalypse may last even longer. After all, the globalists are trying to kill us, and they’ve undoubtedly fortified themselves with “preps” (high tech ones) that they think will let them outlast us. That’s why the elite does not want us to do any prepping. If many of us can get to the beyond point, when recovery begins, then those elites won’t have the world to themselves, nor will they be able to enslave the survivors as they hope to do. We might come out of it strong enough to beat them, and they don’t like that idea at all.