Prepped Living Blog

Have you seen the headlines claiming food shortages are looming as inflation is rising? Are you wondering what steps you can take to help protect yourself and your family? After the Covid-era shutdowns and shortages, many people have taken the idea of preparedness more seriously and have at least made some preliminary efforts towards this end. If you have not yet done so, don't worry, you can get a start today with a quick visit to the grocery store. First, let me say that as Christians, we are called to have faith in God, so we should not allow ourselves to become paralyzed by fear. Nonetheless, God has gifted us with both a brain and a variety of abilities so it only makes sense to put those gifts to use. With this in mind, I am writing this post is to give you a few resources and ideas to help you take action to become a bit more prepared to weather a disaster.   What should be your main focus? Well, if you read any beginning survival or prepper post, they all recommend foc...

Some of you may have seen my earlier post on edible flowers.  I just put up new article on the website listing five edible flowers you can forage.  The post contains links to recipes and other useful information, so head over to the website and check it out here . To help pique your interest, here is a small visual preview for the article  -- The past week has been less fruitful than I anticipated due to health issues. Nonetheless, each day is a blessing and an opportunity to learn something useful.  Have a great week!

Wherever you live in the country, there seems to be a joke about locking your car during late summer to keep the neighbors from leaving zucchini on the seat of your vehicle. While I personally love to have a lot of zucchini and am grateful when our friends gift us with their extra bounty, not everyone loves this versatile vegetable. Even if you do not love the flavor of zucchini, there are so many ways to use it...and so many ways to disguise its flavor. Due to the prolific nature of the plant and the relative ease with which it seems to grow, it is often considered to be a perfect addition to a homestead, prepper, or survival garden. As a kid, I always thought that zucchini was limited to summer time eating and thus not a great option for preserving. Not so, my friend! Zucchini can be preserved and enjoyed throughout the year by freezing, dehydrating, and even canning, thereby reinforcing its candidacy for a survival garden. Check out our latest website article Three Ways to Preserve ...

This week the girls and I hosted a small tea party for a friend who is moving halfway across the country. We wanted an opportunity to say goodbye and to express our gratitude for her friendship by putting together a gathering in her honor.     Though I have little natural decorating ability, I like to try and make the house look nice when we have friends over for tea, so I got out our lovely teapot and teacups, our nice dishes, and our candlesticks.  I then went outside to see if there was anything left in the garden with which I could make a small floral arrangement.  Don't look too closely at the picture. I am certainly no florist. I did manage, however, to put together something with a bit of color (and a lot of fragrance - I used tarragon in the greenery - ha ha!).  We served scones with homemade plum jam and serviceberry sauce. The girls brought fresh fruit and coffee cake. A meat and cheese tray completed our snack assortment.  It was simple, but...

Hello, Everyone! Our girls and I went peach picking with a friend late last week and have been busy canning.  The girls made regular canned peaches while we canned peach pie jam, peach salsa, and peach barbecue sauce. The peach pie jam is a favorite of our family. The peach salsa was a new recipe we tried this year. It was fabulous. We will definitely be adding this one to our recipe box! The peach barbecue sauce is tasty and I am happy to add variety to our pantry, but it wasn't as big a hit with the family as was the salsa. I may keep an eye out for a different recipe to try next year.      Speaking of canning barbecue sauce recipes, I put up a new article on the website titled   "Canning Sauces - Why it is a good idea ." I also put up an article titled "Why Grow and Forage Herbs?" . Head over to the website to check it out. What projects have you been working on this week? Let me know in the comment section! Have a great week!

As I have delved a bit more each year into local edibles, I have discovered an assortment of edible flowers.  Of course, we dry various herbs and flowers for tea, but there are those that are good for eating as well. What is so great about edible flowers?  These can add beauty to your garden while still being practical in that they are a source of food - a win-win for any survival situation. Some of these I have mentioned in previous posts, but for ease of reference, I am listing them again here. Here is a short list of blossoms we have tasted: Oxeye Daisy - These flowers are fabulous for adapting to the flavor of whatever dish you are preparing. We first tried these battered and fried.  While prepared this way they didn't seem to have a strong flavor of their own. Nevertheless, we enjoyed eating them both with a savory and with a semi-sweet batter. One of my good friends and favorite foragers, Mary Banducci, has a paleo-friendly daisy fritter recipe on her page. Click...

 Is anyone else wondering how it is already August? And not just the beginning of August, but we are already over a week in!  Perhaps it is my age, but time seems to fly by faster and faster each year. We had a beautiful Tuesday morning this week - cool weather with mist rising over the lake. It was definitely one of those mornings when I would like to be sitting on the porch enjoying the fresh air for a spell. Instead, I watered the garden and then drove to pick up my order of pickling cucumbers. I had a lovely visit with a dear friend, then returned home for work and followed that with the first round of pickle canning. We had a last-minute dinner invitation, so the boys helped me finish up the pickles so my husband and I could drive into town for dinner. Plans for the remainder of the week: finish pickling the cucumbers and pick blueberries to freeze.