This is my main stockpile cupboard, just off the kitchen.
If you have a productive vegetable and fruit garden or if you stockpile for any reason, you would have had to think about how to store your food correctly. It is something I think about frequently and monitor from time to time. Recently I changed how I store some of our food. Our main food source is our backyard, supplemented by the stockpile cupboard. Generally we eat rice, pasta, lentils, beans or couscous with fresh vegies or eggs from the garden. I was having consistent problems with pantry moths. No matter what I did, every few months, they'd reappear. I froze new dried goods coming into the house, sealed them in airtight containers when packets were opened but somehow those moths kept reappearing.
But no more.
A couple of months ago I hit upon the idea of having a small cold room stockpile. I was regretting not being able to have a root cellar and thinking about how handy one would be. Then I thought about cold rooms, and voila! I realised I could have a small version if I bought a small chest freezer. We bought the freezer that had the highest energy we could find - 3.5 stars and bought it for just over $300. We eat no meat so it's only for the storage of dried goods. It's packed with big bags of flour, rice, pasta, all sorts of grains, nuts and everything that pantry moths love. I kept the freezer on medium for two days, now it's on it's lowest setting keeping those items just frozen.
This is the frozen stockpile.
So far it's been excellent, we've had no recent visits from the moth family and our food is safe and free of pests when we eat it. The good thing is that if the power goes off it won't matter as nothing in the frozen stockpile will deterioate, even if the power stays off for a week.
I'm addicted to your blog already and I've only been here 2 or 3 days...I'm thrilled to find so many wonderful, simple ideas that I can start using TODAY without having to spend money buying any more "stuff"...You're truly inspiring!
ReplyDeleteYour cool room/freezer idea is JUST what I needed - we have those little moths re-appearing in cycles here too and I've tried all the same things with the same lack of success.
And I've wanted to replace our chest freezer with something more efficient anyway but we didn't want to have to take the old one to the dump since it does still run (why throw it out if it works?) - will check my old one to see if it can run at a lower temp. and figure out what it would cost. What a great idea!
J in Canada
Finally someone who's as mad as me, why mad, because everyone I know thinks I'm mad, crazy etc for having so many dry goods in my freezer, and if they say its so, I must be.
ReplyDeleteThis was the single idea I heard of about 2yrs ago that changed the way I purchased and stored these goods, It finally enabled me to free up the linen cupboard after years of battleing with limited storage.