Wheat buckets or flour buckets

The Amazing Wheat Book is one of the first ones I got.  Then I just picked up recipes here and there and started playing.  Try internet searching things like “wheat berry recipes” or “cracked wheat recipes” or “bulgur recipes”–all are easy to do with a lot less work than grinding into flour.  We still do that of course, but these are a nice trick too.  My friend even makes toasted wheat berry snacks–a little like you’d eat popcorn, she puts spices on them and that’s what her kids eat for snacks instead of popcorn or nuts or something.

OH, yeah.  We strive to keep a year’s food, and we are always working on improving what we have, since we started out with mostly wheat, oats, rice and not a lot else.  One thing to consider is it’s a lot cheaper to get bulk of things at once.  But you do also want to have “stuff” so you could make a number of things.  We began with water, a mill, then added wheat, oats, and some rice.  Then we quickly decided that would get boring.  LOL  We looked at nutritional profiles and what we could afford.  Freeze-dried fruits and vegetables are very expensive.  We buy cans but have to rotate those as they don’t keep forever.  We also decided to get some sprouting materials to add vitamins for long-term.  We try to add three different things every year:  Basic foods (wheat, oats, rice, beans, perhaps milk powder, etc.)  Every day foods–canned fruits and vegetables, etc.  And the necessary go-alongs so we can actually MAKE things.  One thing I did is I culled a short list of several recipes to make with our long-term storage.  THEN I periodically buy some of the things necessary to fill out so we can make those recipes with ease.  That includes things like baking powder/soda, honey, spices, more expensive items like egg powder, etc.  We also looked at what nutrients we were still not covering enough of, and decided to do a little more work to add in some items with vitamin C and A, for example, so we are working on that this year.  We do a check-up as a family each year, decide what our goals are, and go from there.  I also have a friend who regularly sends out a bulletin of what to get each week to get a year’s supply for $10 a week, but she overuses very prepared foods, I think.  I can probably send you to some websites that have things like that.  I have a huge notebook I printed off the net years ago with food storage times, nutrient levels of foods, etc. 

I had to laugh at the balance.  Once when we were just getting started, we had only some water, and cans we’d dry-pack canned ourselves with wheat, milk powder, rice and oats.  We decided to have a “trial run week” to see if we could live off of what we had.  Um.  It was very interesting.  For one thing, our can opener was so wimpy it wouldn’t even open a #10 can.  And we got REALLY REALLY tired of rice and boiled wheat by the end of the week!  We were really quick then to add salt, baking powder and soda and some other items!!!!!  I remember dh saying if we had to do this for a year, he thought he’d rather go ahead and return Home.  LOL  WE’ve tried to improve it a lot since then so he won’t feel like that anymore!  We even keep a secret stash of chocolate chips and chocolate pudding mix in the bottom of the freezer for emergencies, because everything seems easier after a little chocolate, doesn’t it?

Linda,

I just use the buckets with gamma lids or regular lids with the seal. You don’t need mylar bags if you’re rotating. I’ve had my grain in buckets without mylar bags or oxygen packets for three years. They are always totally fine. My basement is very damp, and the food is never damp. We even had a sewer overflow down there and just cleaned the bottom of the buckets after–food’s fine. I just got the mylar bags in the buckets this last time because I couldn’t get it any other way. We called and they wouldn’t sell it to us in paper bags. I never checked, but if you need mylar bags, maybe Emergency Essentials has big ones for the buckets.

I agree with pretty much everything everyone has said here thus far.  I’ll throw my had it for an electric grinder.  I do have a manual one (Country Living mill which is one of the best and rather spendy).  We did an experiment with my boys one day and were able to grind enough wheat to make a few loaves of bread in around 4 hours.  I can grind enough to make 6 loaves in under 10 minutes with my electric one.  We had to take turns on the manual because we’d get so tired.  And here’s the kicker – I have 4 boys plus a husband….I wanted to see if we’d be able to make bread (or whatever) in an emergency.  And we can.  But for daily/weekly use it’s just not practical and if you’re older and don’t have lots of young boys to turn the crank it will be much, much harder.  (If you are going to get a hand mill though I’d recommend the Country Living one.)

I have a stash of chocolate chips too!  And for years I had enough brownie mix on hand to have make them weekly.  

Hey, look on the bright side:

if we have to grind by hand by necessity, at least we don’t have to use a coffee grinder like MA Ingalls and the girls had to do in The Long Winter of 1880-1881

ps-you can grind coffee beans in the Family Grain Mill, too; it just stains the plastic parts, so you don’t need a separate hand crank coffee mill.