What did you do in the garden today?

[WthrLady]

@Wee Farmer Sarah our main genny is propane too. It's so nice that it doesn't go bad like gas & it's extremely quiet.

What are you going to do with all the peaches? Canning? Gosh do I love the smell of peaches. I don't like eating them (the fuzz gets me), but the smell is probably the best smell ever.

I agree! I'm allergic to the monsters, but boy the smell is amazing.

 

[Elyrian1]

I googled it - it says they spray it on wheat, oats, flax, lentils, peas etc. to speed up the harvest & it's called desiccating. Sounds lovely, lol.

Note to self, learn how to grow oats...

 

[WthrLady]

Growing them is easy. Threshing is a pain in the butt.

 

[pennyJo1960]

We have rain it has been three months dry as bone.
Wooried about my tomato splitting on the vine

 

[Elyrian1]

Baker creek has a "hull less" variety that might help in that regard. Oats are apparently a heavy portion of my ancestral diet. The food my genetic ancestors ate for hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

[gtaus]

We have lots of generators & lots of fuel for them all! We'll be ok for at least 2 weeks. & we have a shared well that has generator backup, we may be under a boil advisory, but we'll have water. We don't drink that nasty water anyway.

Sounds like you can survive an extended power outage. As to water, years ago Dear Wife and I were stationed in Naples, Italy. You could not drink the public water. You could not even depend on the water always being there when you turned on the faucet. People there would have 500 and 1000 gallon tanks of holding water in the basement/utility rooms for expected water shortages.

Most of my life I have lived in areas with clean water and have taken that for granted. But after you live somewhere that the water is undrinkable and the water supply itself is optional, you never take clean water for granted again.

Running portable back up generators is not without expense. Gasoline is less expensive but I opted to use propane so I don’t have to worry about CO fumes. Propane doesn’t go bad either. But I’m just happy I’ll be ok. If I lose power I really only need power for the sump pump and the refrigerator and freezer. I have oil lamps and several other cooking options.

When I was a young kid in the 1960's and 1970's, my grandparents lake cabin did not have electricity or running water. We had a manual hand pump to get water, we used oil lanterns for light, our small refrigerator ran off propane, and we mainly cooked on a wood stove but we also had a small propane backup stove/oven. You have to change some of how you live without electricity and running water, but it never bothered me. We got by just fine and I have nothing but great memories with my grandparents out at the lake cabin.

We were preppers probably before the term was popular. Back then, having off grid cabins was not uncommon. It was like camping out but having a decent bed to sleep in and a good roof over your head.

 

[WthrLady]

Baker creek has a "hull less" variety that might help in that regard. Oats are apparently a heavy portion of my ancestral diet. The food my genetic ancestors ate for hundreds if not thousands of years.

We grew the hull-less variety last year, no the year before. They were easy but VERY prone to disease.

 

[Elyrian1]

We grew the hull-less variety last year, no the year before. They were easy but VERY prone to disease.

Oooh! Good to know, thank you! I'll be sure to account for that possibility.

We can't drink the well water here. It's got all manner of things in it. So we installed a ridiculously heavy duty RO and additional filtration system that handles all the things. The water that goes in smells like salt and tastes disgusting, the water that comes out tastes like expensive bottled water.

 

[Brooks_]

heavy duty RO and additional filtration system that handles all the things

RO, as in reverse osmosis? You should add minerals back in if that is your only source of water.

 

[WthrLady]

YA. Honestly though we do get enough of those through the balanced food we eat.
I was worried about that too, as we have a RO system in the house.