When the WHO declared the global pandemic, I knew right away that things were going to get ugly. As of March 13th 2020, I have decided that my family needs to go into a bug in situation. This was always the plan, the proverbial trigger has been pulled! Here is a daily update on what we face.
Day 16 –
We are finding that there are 2 types of plans to make. There are the plans for the next few days, and there are the plans for the next few months. Each has their own unique challenges. While some things seem simple enough, we may not be able to get them done while still trying to put in a Monday to Friday work week from home. In many ways, the weekends are still when we have to get our stuff done.
As an example, we save up pork meat in the freezer for large batches of sausage meet. Sure, the weekend is a great time to get it all ground, seasoned, and stuffed but that kind of thing needs to be thought out ahead of time as it can take a couple days to thaw out the meet. While we usually do huge loads at a time, we’ve decided to do smaller batches of around 20 lbs at a time.
Other plans are longer term, such as the garden. While we had planned on starting some blueberry bushes, and a nice strawberry patch this spring, it’s looking like we won’t be able to get our hands on the starter plants for these. Now we have to decide what we will be putting in their places. rust me, there’s no shortage of options as we are growing more this year than we have in the past several seasons.
Speaking of longer term plans, it’s already time to start thinking about the harvest, more specifically how we plan on preserving it. Normally we would put the majority in the freezer, with some being home canned, and the bumper crops going into dehydrating. The problem is we are not sure we will be able to get all the canning lids we need. Of course that is a lesson to be learned, but we will have to adjust and put most of the produce into the freezer and through the dehydrator and save the canning lids that we do have for other things. It promises to be a tricky plan to make as freezer space is finite, while home canning storage can be expanded as needed pretty much endlessly.
More news tomorrow…
