Prepped Living Blog

This week I started some of our garden plants indoors. This got me thinking about garden seeds and their importance for food security - both for preparedness and for self-sufficiency. During WWI and WWII in Britain, Canada, and the United States, people were encouraged to plant home gardens. Gardening seemed to fall out of favor for a number of years, but interest is growing once again. The COVID Era shutdowns showed us how quickly our supply chain can become disrupted. Even today I see signs in stores warning customers that supply chain issues are making it difficult to stock certain items. With this in mind, it might be a good time for more people to think about putting in a garden or at the very least investing in some quality garden seeds. When choosing seeds for your garden, especially if you are choosing seeds with self-sufficiency or preparedness in mind, it is important to choose non-GMO, non-hybrid, open-pollenated, heirloom seeds so that they can produce seed for you to use t

A while back, my mother dehydrated onions to gift to our family. She put them in a gallon size plastic Ziploc and gave them to us. My husband recently bought me a jar vacuum sealer, so I decided to move the onions to a glass container and vacuum seal them to lengthen their shelf life. When my mom dehydrated the onions, she left them in rings to cut down on the work required to prepare them for dehydration. This is my preferred method as well, but I haven't bothered to do anything else with them so each time we have used them, I had to mince them. Since I was planning to vacuum seal them, I knew I could store more and save myself some time later down the road if I turned them all into minced onions prior to vacuum sealing them. I took the dehydrated onion rings and put them in our food processor.  I blended them for a couple of minutes, and voila - minced onions! Once I had a full jar, I folded a paper towel over the top of minced onions as a precaution. Since I had never used a va

We planted our garden in-ground for years. When we moved to a property on a shady hillside in the mountains, we decided to put in raised beds for a variety of reasons. If you are considering a raised bed garden, keep on reading to see what our experience has been. As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section. Our first garden beds with easy-up fencing Note: This blog post contains affiliate links. Purchasing through these links helps support our website and blog at no cost to you. We are grateful to all our readers and we thank you in advance for your support. Reasons We Installed Raised Beds 1) We have a lot of pests - snails, moles, voles, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, deer, etc. Putting in raised beds helps to keep the plants off the ground and out of reach of the snails. Lining the bottom helps to deter moles and voles. We can cover or enclose a small area to help deter deer, chipmunks, and the like. We use easy-up fencing around our beds. I