There are a lot of crazy and misguided ideas about food security floating around, so I thought I would post pictures here of what true food security is:
A larder full of dried (dehydrated) foods is a mighty safe way to preserve the bounty of the harvest:
A trailer full of canned tomatoes headed for the shelves in our basement:
Corn growing in your front yard and headed for the freezer!
A place to process chickens and good friends to lend a hand!
What does your food security look like? If it’s loads of .22 ammo and piles of freeze dried food, think again. If it’s the empty statement that “I’ll let God take care of that kind of a disaster,” check your Bible. God has given us an indescribable gift in the land; the very surface that we trod on each day is just waiting for a gentle hand to cultivate and husband it into a prosperous bounty of harvestable, storable, delicious, healthful food to nourish our bodies, our families, and our communities. Think twice before we demand that God supply us with food when the grocery store runs out when He has already given us a means to do that ourselves! Does your city have country roads?
Do you dry everything in a dehydrator or do you dry some naturally outside? My mothe-in-law said she remembers her mom drying beans and that she called them “leather britches.” I can remember my grandmother drying apples out on screens covered with cheese cloth! Would love to hear more about how you go about drying your veggies. I would also like to hear more about your bee keeping. I can remember watching my great- grandfather working with his honey bees. He believed eating honey everyday was good for your health. Now we know more about its health benefits. I can also remember getting too close to a hive onetime and getting a few hung on my at that time long hair. Lol. Enjoy your blog.
Hey Denise! We do some drying out in the sunshine as well as some in our small greenhouse on the south side of our house. I would like to utilize these methods more often, but I need to build more trays and have cheese cloth ready to go as you suggested to cover and protect from bugs. Our only trouble is every time we get ready to dry something the clouds roll in and the sun seems to hide! People used to dry so much more of their food, especially when you consider that salt-curing meat is really just dehydrating too – the salt just makes it possible to dry something as sopping wet as a ham or any meat for that matter. Most any veggie can be dried (however you can get it dry – sunshine, greenhouse, commercial dehydrator, homemade drying racks for your south facing windows, etc.) and then just dropped into the crockpot or soup pot for the best winter-time, warm-you-up-on-the-inside meal you’ve ever had!
I’ve been super busy of late and my bees have taken a backseat; we did just rob our honey though so I’ll have to do a post about that soon – bees are amazing! Thanks for reading.