Muffy1938 – Enjoyed reading your post and hearing how you’re doing!
Hieronyma Textor – If you haven’t already seen it, you might want to watch the video about storing potatoes using the clamping method that’s available on the “Modern Refugee” YouTube channel. It was quite interesting! Also, I imagine that the kind gentleman who owns that channel would be willing to answer questions about clamping.
Columbia River – As I recall, Cindy Miller, the author of the “Let’s Make Sense of Thermal Cooking Cookbook” and owner of the Thermal Cooking dot net website, has a helpful YouTube video about comparing the efficiency of different types of thermal cookers. If you haven’t already seen that, you might find it helpful.
Littlesister – A few days ago you asked how many months (or years) worth of food and other supplies other Forum members thought were necessary to have stockpiled – and why? The short answer is, of course, that it all depends on what type(s) of emergency(ies) you are preparing for. If you are preparing for a relatively short-term emergency such as a bad snowstorm, then having up to a few weeks’ worth of food, water, and supplies should be sufficient. If you’re preparing for a hurricane or flood, you may want to have a few months’ worth on hand. If you’re preparing for a possible job loss, you may want to stockpile a year’s worth of everything you think you’ll need. If you’re preparing for a “Black Swan” event, you would probably want to have two or more year’s worth stockpiled. In my case, when I first started prepping I lived near Washington, D.C., and was concerned about the possibility of a bioterror attack with weaponized Smallpox. After reading the book ” Living Terrors”, I decided I wanted to stockpile everything my family of 4 would need to be able to bug-in at home, without having any contact at all with anyone outside our home, for up to 4 months. I calculated that 4 month period based on the time the book’s author estimated that it would take for 3 successive “waves” of infection to pass through my community until everyone who was likely to get infected would have either recovered or passed on. In the years since then, I have gradually increased my stockpile to cover a longer period of time. Depending on the amount of storage space I have had available, I have had varying amounts of food, water, and supplies on hand. However, I try never to let it get below what I, and my loved ones, would need to bug-in for at least 4 months.