down to earth

Showing posts with label Being prepared. Show all posts

I thought it would take a couple of weeks and in the end it was five long, cold weeks of using our main toilet and bathroom instead of the ensuite. What a nightmare. All the way through I just hoped it would all be worth it. And guess what - it was! We both love the new bathroom. It's very simple, easy to clean, we have our toiletries organised in the drawers and behind the mirrors and it's a real delight bathing in there. It feels contemporary without losing a warm and comforting feeling.

Not his and hers sinks, because we don't need them, but we each have our own side of the mirror cupboards and the drawers. Hanno has his shaving and tooth gear on his side, I have deodorant, spare soap and shampoo, tooth brush and paste on my side.

And you can see here that the wonderful Mr Fox has moved in with us. We also have a bamboo chair for hanging clothes while we're in the shower and a seat on which to sit if needed. The little step is for me to dry my feet. I got into the habit of using the step on the side of the spa so this replaces that.

An overhead shower as well as a hand shower. I only use the overhead when I wash my hair but it feels like standing under a waterfall. There's no shower stall, just a shower screen on one side with a walk in shower. We thought this would grow old with us and will be suitable if one of us has to sit down in the shower or use a wheel chair.

I love this toilet because it has a really quiet flush. Great for old bladders when we have our middle of the night trips. ;- ) The drawers are for odds and ends on Hanno's side and makeup and a hair dryer on my side. Below in the deep drawers we have towels on my side and toilet rolls and cleaning gear on Hanno's.

When we moved into this house in 1997 we extended the house to include another large bedroom and ensuite. That is the bathroom we just renovated. Bathrooms are always costly, both when new and when they're renovated. This was no different. We had a budget of $6,000 and although that's much less than the average cost of a bathroom renovation, I was pleased that it came in on cost.

Some of the things that helped us keep the costs down were:

We used the existing plumbing outlets, so the toilet, vanity and shower are all in the same place.
We removed an 18 year old spa bath and didn't replace the bath.
We sourced all our own building materials, fixtures and fittings. We bought the tiles from a place called cheap tiles online and if you're in Brisbane, or close to it, it's worth a visit to the website to see their stock. Many of their tiles are current stock in places like Harvey Norman and are half their price.
Look for non-slip tiles.
The vanity, vanity taps, mirror, bamboo chair and step are from Ikea, the shower, shower screen and toilet are from Bunnings. Mr Fox towels from Bed, Bath and Beyond; they have a July sale on now. All the towel rails, the shower mixer, toilet roll holder and venetian blind were recycled from the old bathroom.
We are passed the stage when we can do the work ourselves so we got a quote from the man who has been doing our general home maintenance and repairs. He did the work with his son. If you can do some of the work yourself, it will save a lot of money. At the very least you can carefully remove the old bathroom.
Ask for quotes from all the people who will do work - the builder, plumber, electrician, waterproofer, and ask for an itemised list of what work they'll carry out. The cheapest quote may not be the best value for money.
After work is done for the day, clean up and make sure the workers always come in to a clean space. Having to clean up before they start or when they finish, adds to the cost.
Make sure you know how long you have to wait before stepping on the tiles, grouting, waterproofing etc. If you stand on anything before it's set, it might have to be done again.
Be absolutely sure of your design and colours before starting. Making changes during the work will increase the cost of the project and the time it takes to complete it.

This bathroom renovation is the last major project we'll do here. We've been working our way through our upgrades for the past few years as energy and funds allow and we're very happy to have all the major work done. That will help us live well in our own home in the years ahead and when we die, our home will be in reasonable shape for the kids to sell.

I love how our homes can evolve slowly with us as we age. It takes forethought and a realistic plan but it does help with the ageing process if you make slight and not so slight adjustments when or before they're needed. Do you have a plan for your home to reflect the changes you go through as you grow older?

As you know, we like giving our chickens apple cider vinegar in their water. It boosts their immunity and has a mild antibiotic effect and therefore the ability to clear up minor infections. The dosage is 25 mls per litre or 2 - 3 tablespoons per quart. They don't need it all the time. If you clean out their drinking water every couple of days, put it in every second time. About half the month they should have it in their water and half the month, just plain water.

The type of vinegar you use should be an unpasteurised and unfiltered vinegar. These are most likely going to be apple cider vinegars and usually they contain mother of vinegar. Mother of vinegar is a jelly-like susbstance made up of yeasts and bacteria called Acetobacter. The vinegar most often used is Braggs but here in Australia, in addition to Braggs, you can use Melrose. Both are expensive because it is fermented the traditional way and not mass produced like salad or cleaning vinegar. Melrose unpasteurised vinegar is currently $6.37 for 500ml at my local IGA.

So how do we frugal folk get around that high cost? We make our own. In the unpasteurised bottles of vinegar you often find mother of vinegar and if you have a piece of it, you're on your way to making your own raw vinegar. If you don't have mother of vinegar, I did a post about making pineapple vinegar years ago, it's here, and you can use those instructions to make fruit vinegar. You don't need the mother for that process but your success will depend on the floating yeasts in your home, and maybe a passing vinegar fly - the ones most people call fruit fly that colonise rotting fruit. Vinegar flies carry tiny bits of mother on their feet. Doesn't that sound lovely. ;- )

Yesterday I started making raw vinegar to use in our chicken water. To lessen the risk of the wrong yeast invading the liquid, you must use sterilised one litre or quart jars or crocks. Take the lids off the washed and clean jars, put your jars or crock into the oven on 150C/300F for about 15 - 20 minutes.

This gelatinous mass is the mother I got out of the Melrose vinegar bottle.

To make fruit vinegar using mother:

Decide on the fruit you'll use, wash it thoroughly and place it all in the sterilised jar. If you have organic fruit or fruit from the backyard, a quick rinse will do just to remove any dust. Most soft skin fruit is okay - pear, apple, plums, grapes, or take the skin and core from a pineapple and use that.
Add one litre/quart of filtered or distilled water, or tap water that has stood in a bowl for 24 hours to allow the chlorine to evaporate off.
Add ¼ cup of sugar or slightly less than ¼ cup of honey. Stir.
Add the mother, to the jar, cover with a clean cloth and leave it in a dark cupboard.

I started two different type of vinegar yesterday. My second darker liquid is old white wine that I've added mother to in the hope of making white wine vinegar.

Above: the mother added to the pear liquid.

Below: the mother added to white wine.

Please note that fermenting is an aerobic process - it must have air to thrive. Never put an air tight lid on the jar. Stir the liquid at least once a day to incorporate air into the liquid.

Fermenting works best in darkness so either store the jar in a dark cupboard, use a stoneware crock, or tape brown paper around the outside of the jar if it's to sit on the kitchen bench.

The ideal temperature for this process is between 15C - 25C/60F - 80F degrees. It may take two weeks, it may take six months. You'll have better vinegar if it takes a few weeks rather than a few months. The liquid may turn brownish and become clear again, it may develop yeasts on the top. If it's simple grey yeast, simply remove it with a clean spoon. If it's pink mould, throw the vinegar out and start again. Cleanliness is important in this process - start with sterilised jars, wash your hands before and after touching the vinegar, and always use clean utensils and cloths.

After a couple of weeks, taste the vinegar and if it tastes like weak vinegar, you've been successful. Remove the fruit from the liquid and put it in the compost. Keep the jar of liquid going in darkness with the cloth cover until the flavours develop more. If the liquid doesn't taste like vinegar, keep stirring every day, keep it in the dark with the cover over the top and taste it again in a week or so.

I can't tell you how long it will take to make vinegar. I can't even say you'll be successful, it will depend on the yeasts and bacteria in your home. I can tell you that if you use anti-bacterial wipes or clean with bleach, you've got little chance of the beneficial yeast and bacteria being there. But if it does work for you, you'll have a cheap but very good raw vinegar to give your chickens.

Good luck my friends.

Food security ✔︎

Self-reliance ✔︎

FURTHER READING

Vinegar information
Pink mould

Wiki defines food security as: the availability of food and one's access to it.

Food security is being able to access enough food to feed yourself and your family. The lower your income, the more you're at risk of not being food secure and while you would think the higher one's income is the less likely they'd be threatened, that's not the case. If there was a food emergency, war, national disaster or weather catastrophe, the rich and the poor would suffer. The people who would have the least concern are those who produced their own food or prepared enough food to live through the disaster. No matter what group you fall into, planning for food security is an important task that we should all take seriously, particularly those of us who are homemakers, mothers, fathers or caregivers. If one of your responsibilities is to provide food for yourself and others, you need to think about this.

When thinking about your own personal food security, the first thing you have to know is how many people are you feeding on a regular basis and, if there was a food shortage in the shops for any reason, would that number of people change. None of us know whether we'll be lucky enough to never experience food shortages so you'll have to work on guesstimates and the likelihood of you having to provide for more people. I look at it this way. We have Kerry, Sunny, Jamie, Jens and Cathy living within a 15 minute drive from us. If something happened to the food chain, I know we'd pool our resources. Don't think about food only. You also have to consider water, for drinking and personal hygiene. We are fortunate to have tanks that hold 15,000 litres of fresh rain water, but a catastrophe could happen at any time and if it happened during a dry season, we wouldn't have very much water in the tanks. So not only should you consider what would happen if disaster strikes and you're fully prepared with ample water and food, you also need to think about what happens if you're not so fully resourced when the disaster happens.

I doubt it's possible to write a guide that would suit the wide variations in lifestyle, climate and ability of the people who read here. All I can do is to write about what we do, it will be similar for many of you, and encourage you to think about your own situation and work out a plan.

We've all seen it. On trips to the supermarket to stock up, more and more food is being imported from foreign countries. When food comes from a place far away I believe there are two main problems. One, you have no idea how that food was grown and even if our laws prohibit certain practises, our laws don't apply in any other country. Two, we have no control over the food until we buy it. The supply of food could stop at any moment and for a variety of reasons such as weather problems - either drought or floods, war, or political reasons.

Our solution to both those problems is to grow as much fresh food as we can here and get whatever else we need from local markets. Of the products that come from from further away - olive oil, salt, rice, spices etc, we keep backups. It's worthwhile to work out where all your food comes from so you have something to work with when any of your products are in short supply or stop. We can buy local beef, chicken, pork and fish. Our lamb comes from Victoria. If the supply chain was compromised, we'd stop eating lamb.

We get our milk from the local dairy, and from that milk I've taught myself to make cheese. I don't make cheese often because we have many local cheese makers, but I know how to do it if I need to. In an emergency situation, if there was a problem keeping up the supply of milk, or if the power went off and we couldn't store it, I'd make cheese. That's one of the things you need to think about too - what could you live without? We could live without lamb long-term, but not milk, therefore I've made sure that I could make cheese. We also have backups in the cupboard in the form of powdered milk, condensed milk and evaporated milk.

Today I've written about emergency food supplies. I know there are many of you who have huge food stocks in case of an emergency. I would use my stockpile as our emergency food, along with any food we had growing at that time and what was in the freezer. I tend to think of emergency food in terms of the nutrients they contain. So instead of thinking I have 50 jars of beans, I think of the food pyramid instead and make sure I have protein, carbohydrates and fats - the ingredients to make nourishing food. It's not enough to have the ingredients though, you also have to know how to cook it and you'll need somewhere to cook if the gas and electricity are out - so have means to start a fire and cook on it.

Know where you can forage for food too. In most areas there are local foods growing that are there for the picking. Here where I live avocados, macadamias and mangos are often grown in parks or along the street. I know that at certain times of the year, I can go and pick them. I know there are wild apple trees and blackberries growing on the outskirts of Armidale. I live 15 minutes away from the Pacific Ocean. We have fishing lines. These are the things you should think about in your own area - what is available for the taking? If you don't know, ask around. One day, it might save your life.

I hope this has encouraged you to think about your emergency food supplies and if you have none, to start thinking about who you need to feed and how to do it in an emergency. If an emergency doesn't happen, you can keep the food rotating by using it as you would your stockpiled food. Keep adding to it at the back and take it from the front. Later in the week I want to write about day-to-day food, about growing food to eat fresh, and how to store food to eat later. I'd love to know what you're doing with your emergency food. Do you have any, what is it, where is it and how do you rotate it so it doesn't go off after a few years?

When I was a young girl it was common for suburban backyards to have a vegetable garden and fruit trees; my grandma grew peaches in her backyard and my parents grew plums. They all lived in Sydney. Occasionally there would be a flock of chickens kept for eggs and meat, and maybe a meat rabbits or pigeons. I was born in the late 1940s so the second world war was still a fresh memory and the majority of people had lived through the Great Depression. People were much more self-reliant then; they had to be. There were still shortages in food after the war, and for many people, providing for themselves was just a continuation of what they'd always done. These were the days before supermarkets, people shopped for food either every day or every second day and very little food was wasted. Now, if something happened in the food chain that supplies supermarkets, most people wouldn't know how to feed themselves. Sudden unemployment also has the potential to impact on food security. We should all be learning as much as we can about our food, where it comes from, and if that source of food stopped, how we could replace it.

Climate change, peak oil, water shortages and population increases have all played a part in increasing the price of food. Unemployment, natural disasters, wars and terrorist attacks also impact on food security. No one knows what the future holds but I can't see any imminent improvements in the weather, oil prices, water supplies or population figures. I think things will get worse before they get better; but food security is something we should all be dealing with now. I have no doubt that eventually we'll learn how to live in a more sustainable way. We have no choice. The trick will be to live well during the transition and not, when food becomes much more expensive, get dragged into the changes, resenting every step along the way.

Most countries have a food security policy and while I think that's a good thing, I like the idea of being responsible for ourselves, being prepared for anything and, if possible, helping others in our communities.

As you know, we changed how we live over a decade ago and have not had one moment's regret. I can't say all of it was easy, but as a whole, the change was fairly trouble-free and straight-forward and I wish we'd done it much earlier. Our decision to simplify life also gave us the chance to learn about our food and water supply and to reduce the risk of food insecurity by learning about small scale food production, cooking, food hygiene, food storage, heirloom seeds, pure breed chickens, aquaponics, bees, water harvesting and many other concepts that make up the huge topic of food security.

Our path took us back to backyard vegetable gardening, chickens and stockpiling - all things we'd done on a small scale in the past and then stopped for some reason. But this isn't the only way to go. Community gardens, allotments, farmers markets, bartering, eating seasonly and locally can all play a big part in a transition towards food security. We still rely on our community to supply things like milk, honey, fruit and vegetables, depending on the season, and we shop at supermarkets for things such as tea, coffee, oil, sugar, salt. Our system is heavily reliant on the work we do for ourselves to produce food but as we age, I can see us becoming more reliant on our community when less comes from our own efforts in our backyard. I hope we can be a bigger part of the community system then and teach others what we know.

I guess the best way to move towards a more sustainable future and food security, is to assess what we can do right now and what we'll be capable of in five or ten years. You may need to learn how to grow some food at home while you're still doing all your shopping in the community. What you learn now can help sustain you and your family in the future. And its not all about growing and buying local food, it's also about cooking from scratch, harvesting water, saving seeds, keeping pure breed chickens and doing it all as cheaply as we can. And if you can do nothing, being okay with that and relying on your family and government to support you. Hopefully your situation will change in the future and you'll be able to do more.

Over the next week or two, I'd like to start off with the two systems of food security I know well - the backyard model and the community model. I'd also like you to discuss what your experience is and hopefully we can all help and learn along the way. I believe this collaborative approach will be the way of the future. I hope we can start right here to reduce vulnerability in our own homes and to work towards sustainability and building resilient and strong communities.

Further Reading

Australia' National Food Plan

Food insecurity in Melbourne'

Giant underground water reserves found in Kenya

Dwindling water supplies in US