Leanna1017

I am dehydrating celery this week. I have a large shallow plastic container that I am using to "root" the bottoms so I can plant them later.

Just finished 4 qts of strawberry lemonade concentrate. Next up - pickles.

The British series "Tales from the Green Valley" is very informative. It is the show that launched the "Farm" series.

The new place sounds terrific - congrats on your big move!

This is timely for me - I just found a case of unlabled jam in my pantry.

I am having issues too. Getting a pop up when I try to view new items asking if I want to leave the page. Something is also trying to redirect me to a page called plus find dot com. Everything on my netbook is up to date, McAfee, etc. No issues at any other website.

I dehydrated 8 lbs of cherries this week. Pitting them all was a huge pain (I have GOT to get a better pitter) but I couldn't pass them up at 99 cents a pound.

When cooking over a fire you can coat the bottom and sides of the pot lightly with dish washing liquid. The burn marks wash right off. I've been worried about how to can meat from my freezer in the event of a long power failure. All we had was a small camp stove that uses the little bottles of propane. I ended up buying the Camp Chef 2 burner range. It's sturdy and I can use the 5 gallon propane tanks from my stove. If you wait for a sale you can get it for $99.

That's a pretty good price. Cascade Fixation goes for 6-7 dollars a ball here. I am a size 7 1/2 shoe and from one ball I can get a pair of anklets with 1 1/2 inch ribbing at the top. There is usually a small amount left over. If you're making socks that will go up over your calf, 2 balls would do it. Unless you inherit your sock yarn, find a big bargain at a yard sale, or repurpose old sweaters - you're not going to save money making your own socks. However, I find it's worth it for the fit, the fabulous colors and most important - the stress relief that knitting brings me.

Adding elastic isn't going to make the socks stretch any more, but it will make them tighter once they are on your foot. Cascade Yarn makes a brand called Fixation which is 98% cotton and 2% elastic. As long as you are careful not to pull it as you knit it makes wonderful stretchy socks and footie socks. It's also my favorite yarn for fingerless gloves.

Thanks for these recipes. My oven arrived a week ago. The weather has been cloudy, rainy, and snowey at times. The oven is still in the box. My wheat grinder is still in the box too. Once I get the kitchen cleared up, I will be baking bread. Organization is a big issue for me. I have a lot to discard and sort. Which solar oven did you get? I have the SOS Sport and I love it.

Well now that I think about it you can see ours too. So yes, you are right, might not to be best way to have something everyone will be wanting sitting right out there? I was quite shocked when I saw the latest photo of my house of Google Earth. Not only can you pick out my gardens in the yard - you can see my DH standing next to our biggest raised bed. Big Brother is watching! LOL!

I was a die hard raised bed gardener until I saw my yard on Google Earth. Thanks to satellite views you can pick out everyone in the neighborhood with a vegetable garden. Probably not a good thing unless you don't mind everyone descending on you when the SHTF. Now I am mixing things up. I am planting in irregular beds, in 5 gallon buckets for portability, and we put a few asparagus plants in among the weeds. We also have lettuce and radishes mixed in the the weeds. The front yard landscape has veggies too. I am always adding compost to my nasty desert clay that passes for soil around here. Having hens is a huge benefit. Their water pans gets dumped into the gardens for fertilizer and we compost the straw and bedding from the coops. All egg shells are dried, ground up and added back to the soil since we lack calcium. If (or probably *when*) the SHTF, we are screwed when it comes to water since we live in the desert. Right now we have lots of sturdy buckets that we use to collect rainwater and condensation from the a/c (about 4 gallons a day off the a/c in the summer). If things get bad we'll be hauing the buckets down the street to the canal to get water for the plants. FYI - I get 4 and 5 gallon buckets from a friend who manages a restaurant. Begs me to tell people to come and get them since they just get thrown out. So - if you need buckets for food storage, water hauling or growing plants - please call your local restaurant, sandwich shop, caterer etc. They'll probably be thrilled to have you take them off their hands.

Oxo makes a great can opener, tough as nails, comfortable to use. It's larger than a traditionsl manual can opener due to the rubber grips so it's not something you'll want in a bug out bag, but for daily kitchen use it's great.

Does anyone know if it makes a difference if you use sweet onions vs regular yellow or white onions?