Apocalypse Watch

[shudder] Note to self: do not store in storage locker.

I like the crackers and peanut butter cups idea, though.

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Having lived several years where Out Go exceeded Incomeā€¦ one can survive for a long time on peanut butter and crackers if need be.

I think the last time she was in the mood to prep, we got some of the ā€œgood for five yearā€ emergency kits off of Amazon and then bought the biggest damn food dehydrator Iā€™d ever seen. Weā€™ve used itā€¦ a couple of times.

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Harmony House also has some of the best TVP ā€œbeefā€ Iā€™ve ever eaten (not better than the stuff you can get in Chinatown but good.) And if you donā€™t open the jars theyā€™re good for years. About 6months to a year once opened. (I have also bought some Thrive #10 cans, cuz they were on sale, and I wanted to try them. Dehydrated beans are fun. No soaking, just straight to cooking!) Harmony House has sampler packs of just ingredients, which made me very happy. I hate process foods, I donā€™t eat them in my daily life, and I have my own bouillon cubes and spices, I donā€™t need to buy someoneā€™s mostly-salt mix thank you very much!

And Iā€™m not going to lie, I feel a little bit like a witch making a potion making a soup from scratch by just putting a little bit of dried everything into a pot and adding water. Its a bit like magic. Also delicious! :slight_smile:

@CleverEmi - it took me so long to find the hippies! LOL - the preppers are all so violent and aggressive! Give me the goat cheese making homesteaders every day!

This is like my version of the xmas toy catalogueā€¦ I spend a lot of time day dreaming about purchases here:

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Have people seen

Runs the gamut from charming old hippies to, well, the grandpa-of-mixed-race-grandkid who was apparently teaching his dog to attack black men while the show was filming. Gotta wonder what was going on there.

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If you have thousands of dollars to flush down the toilet, by all means, buy Bitcoin or Aetherium. Ride the penny stock. I donā€™t see a top of the market. Itā€™s the perfect blend of bubble commodity and criminal Ponzi schemes.

If all you have is loans to bet though, be righteous about your abilty to exit the market and know when to do so.

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Even if theyā€™re those special loans that canā€™t readily be discharged through bankruptcy and which can cause the IRS can yoink away your tax refunds for years?

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Youā€™re the fool who dared to value education, which as we all know gets in the way of Making America ā€˜Greatā€™ Again.

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Funny, my takeaway is that if you donā€™t have money to shitcan on a penny stock, donā€™t enter the market. A lack of higher education without signing up for servitude is a different problem, also related to scams run by the grasping and idiotic rich.

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I have seen that!
Most of those people are nuts! Which is why I was always quiet about my ā€œpreppingā€ stuff cuz Iā€™m not a kook, I just want to be able to eat if there is a disaster of any sortā€¦

Also I hate the structure of the show where they give a rating to the peopleā€¦ thats just odd.

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On our tiny .11 acre city parcel, we grow a shocking amount of food. I have 3 flats of peppers and four flats of tomatoes started for this year, and plan on doing cabbage, beans, beets, herbs and cucumbers (for pickles). One side of our house is all strawberries, and we have two cherry trees. We can all kinds of stuff, and Mr. Kidd got a small anearobic fermenter in the fall. We donā€™t have a dehydrator, but it seems like we look at buying one every fall.

We donā€™t really do any of this for doomsday reasons. We like fresh food, but both grew up in food insecure households. Amazing how fresh properly canned foods can taste two years later.

In a decade or less, weā€™ll be moving out of the city, and will start farming more seriously in the sticks. Because 60-ish quarts of whole tomatoes isnā€™t enough for a whole year. Weā€™re no hippies, though, but we donā€™t fit in with the guns-n-jeebus crowd either.

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THIS.
I grow cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, peas, chard and lettuces, chives, basil, oregano, fucking mint. Two tiny 6ā€™x9ā€™ plots, both south facing tho. And we have raspberries, blueberries, grapes, currants and strawberries in the front yard.

The tomatoes and tomatillos get sauced. Cukes pickled. Beans and peas eaten green and then later dried and stored. Everything eaten as it comes in.

Do you save seeds? I only save beans/peas cuz thats easy. Everything else almost self propagates now. Even the tomatillos. I always just throw the slug eaten rotten bits into the plots so I get lots and lots of self starting seeds. I donā€™t grow enough to dehydrate, we just eat it all. :slight_smile:

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We save pepper seeds and sometimes beans. If my tomatoes are good this year, Iā€™ll save some seeds. Tomatillos are a little too good at volunteering. We grew them one year, and took another 3 years to fully eradicate them. Like morning glories, be careful how/where you plant them.

New for this year: onions and potatoes. And the blueberry bushes have had a year to set roots, time to force them to flower.

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THANK YOU.

This is basically how my parents did things while I was growing up. If I hadnā€™t chosen to live in an apartment, Iā€™d be doing the same.

Iā€™ve had a lot of people say, ā€œoh, so your parents are hippiesā€ when I tell them I always had home-made jam as a kid. It makes me really angry, not just because itā€™s inaccurate, but because neither hippies nor preppers invented any of this stuff. Where my parents grew up, this was just what you did. And given how fun gardening is, and how yummy the rewards, why not keep it up?

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Donā€™t even need a natural disaster for it to be an advantage. Fresh fruit and vegetables are set to get expensive, thanks to a certain unnatural disaster.

Turns out that the commercial harvest doesnā€™t go so well when thereā€™s too much ICE.

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That unnatural disaster is going to mean my backyard is set to become vulnerable to thieves and vandals of the two-legged sort.

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to be fair, i think it was the hippies that brought the idea mainstream. before that, it was only farmers who did that, and before them, everyone did out of necessity. modernization was killing the widespread knowledge of HOW to do it. i value the hippies for helping carry the knowledge into the last 20th century.

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Totally disagree. If anything, it was the war efforts 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (plus the 30s because of the global economic depression, plus the 50s due to rebuilding after the war) that really made it both a tradition and a habit. Both my parents are from countries that were invaded and occupied during both wars. Lots of people kept vegetable gardens to save money and ensure a steady supply. Lots of people kept some chickens too ā€“ if my dad had had his way, we would have had chickens and rabbits too (my mum said no because when she was a kid she had to clean up after the chickens).

1950s post-war immigration to the US and the British Commonwealth countries, and the habit spreads (though thanks to victory gardens it was already a thing). Then the hippies latched onto it.

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thatā€™s in line with what iā€™m saying, though. all that knowledge and habits formed through the 50s wouldā€™ve been lost to industrialization, which picked up steam post-war. if hippies in the 60s and 70s hadnā€™t had strong ā€œback to the landā€ aesthetic, and had just sat back and embraced commercialization and industrialization, that wouldā€™ve been lost.

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I have to disagree.
Most of the hippies that tried the whole ā€œback to the earthā€ thing failed miserably.
While all the non-urban people (of which there are a lot) were always growing their own food and canning and preserving.

The hippie thing was city folk only.
Like hipsters now. ā€œDiscoveringā€ fermenting.
It was never lost, it was always there, it just wasnā€™t ā€œhipā€.

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