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By Angela
 Image by Ross I have something to admit. You know I tell you all to use your gear, right? Try it out now when there’s no stress so you know how to use it when you need to. This is a super important part of your survival plans. You don’t want your life depending on some piece of gear you’ve never used, because you know Murphy is going to show up when you really need him not to, and honestly, who has time for a learning curve during a disaster? Well, (now we’re about to get to know each other a bit better), I have a confession. I own preparedness gear I have never used.
There. I said it. It’s crazy, I know, but I actually have a pretty good notion that I’m not the only one.
I own two Volcano stoves. The original kind that don’t collapse. I’ve had them for a very long time, because they didn’t even make the collapsible ones when I bought mine and now I don’t think they make them that don’t collapse. One I spent really good money on at a big name outdoors store. The other I picked up at a yard sale for about a third that much. Neither of them have been out of the box. I even have some of the accessories, but don’t remember which ones. Ridiculous, I know.
I also own a kerosene heater that I was super excited to get, seeing how we have no really good method of heating our house when the power goes out. Well, it took two years to even get kerosene for it and we’ve still never used it.
Okay, I’m sure there are more things around here that I haven’t used, but enough about me. What about you? Fess up. What gear do you own that hasn’t seen the practice time it should? I’m sure there’s something, so share with our support group in the comment section.
By the way, if you have used every piece of survival gear you own, you are either absolutely amazing, or you don’t have enough gear!
By Angela
 As you’re accumulating your food storage and preparedness gear, it’s tough keeping track of what all you have. Have you ever purchased food thinking you were low on that particular item, then find out you had two more cases of it and you were actually low on something else? How about foods that hide in the corner of the food storage room or under the bed and don’t get used by their expiration date? Do you want an easy way to keep track of what supplies you have as well as when they expire and what you need to purchase? Well, there’s an app for that.
Prep and Pantry is an app for your apple device (iPhone, iPod, iPad) that makes inventorying your food storage super simple. Just scan the barcode and most items are in their database, so they’ll automatically be input into your inventory. You can also input items yourself. When you take food out to use it, just scan it again and Prep and Pantry subtracts it from your stores and adds it to your shopping list! It will even tell you which foods are expired and which are about to expire so you can use them before they go to waste.
And it’s not just food, you can also inventory your medical supplies or anything else you have a collection of. The new version 2.0 enables sharing of data between family members (so you can enlist all your kids with their ipods to inventory your food storage and get it done even faster!). And the entire Thrive line is in the system, so if you’re a Shelf Reliance customer, those items will be an easy input!
Doug from Prep and Pantry contacted me about a year ago to ask if I could test out his new app and unfortunately I was not that technologically advanced. I’m still not, although I may decide to confiscate my son’s iPod for just this app.
Prep and Pantry is also our newest advertiser, so if you’ve been looking for a system for keeping track of your preparedness supplies, head on over and check out Prep and Pantry.
By Angela
 I’m always on the lookout for new and useful preparedness products to share with you and at two of the preparedness fairs I have been to recently, there was a particularly interesting product for alternative lighting.
It’s a variety of reusable glowing products made by UVPaqlite. I had to pick up some of what they had to offer to test it out. They have a variety of shapes available. The super light weight Paqlite is a great area lighter. They also have a heavier duty mat, a variety of tubes and sticks, O-shaped necklaces, nightlights, and sticky dots.
Continue reading UVPaqlite Alternative Lighting Review
By Angela
 photo by WKHarmon So you are storing extra food for times of emergency, right? Unless you have all canned goods or MRE’s, that food will need to be cooked. Even canned meals and MRE’s taste better warmed up. However, in many emergency situations you are without power which means no microwave! Making a plan for powerless cooking as part of your prepping will help ensure you’re not eating all your food storage cold and raw. So here are eight great ways to cook when the power is off.
1. Fire. We’ll start with the most primitive. Build a fire in a fire pit, barrel, or other enclosure. Be careful, you don’t want to add a burning house, field, tree, etc. to your emergency! You also don’t want to cook your food over something that produces toxic fumes as it burns like tires. Roast your food on a stick or use metal to make a grate over your fire and cook in sturdy pots and pans.
To make it work you’ll need: a safe place to burn, fuel to burn, and matches or other fire starter.
Continue reading Eight Great Powerless Cooking Options
By Angela
I came across a great deal on strawberries the other day, and being down to only peach jam at our house (which nobody likes) I snatched up 3 flats of strawberries to make a lot of jam. I don’t like plain strawberry cooked jam–it tastes just like store bought strawberry jam to me, so I planned to make primarily strawberry freezer jam with these berries. And knowing I would be making a lot of jam, I wanted a little variety in the flavor rather than a bunch of jars of plain old strawberry. So I got out my handy freeze dried raspberries to add to some of my freezer jam. It was really easy and turned out great!
Freeze dried berries are flash frozen and then have the water evaporated out of them, so they’re like little crunchy berries. A lot of cereal you can buy at the store with berries in it use freeze dried berries. They’re light and crunchy, not chewy or hard.
 Continue reading Making Freezer Jam with Freeze Dried Fruit
By Angela
About a week after putting your new bees in their hive, you’ll want to check in on them to make sure everybody is happy. Well, they’re actually generally quite happy without visitors, but we need to know what’s going on in the hive, so get your bee suit on and let’s get out to the hive!
You’ll also want to bring your smoker. Smoke makes the bees think their hive is on fire so they focus on saving their home instead of watching and attacking you. We had paper, sticks, and burlap burning in our smoker.
Our sweet bee friend that let us watch him hive his new bees before doing our own also invited us out for his one-week hive check-ups, so that’s where these pictures came from. He had a couple of extra suits, but the bees were generally docile that day anyway, so we could have all hung around in our regular clothes and probably been fine, but I’m just not that brave yet.
The purpose of the one week hive checkup is to make sure your queen is alive and laying eggs. That’s pretty much it. We also placed our tenth frame in the hive while we had it open. Here’s us checking a frame for eggs:
 checking for eggs Continue reading New Bee Hive First Week Checkup
By Angela
 I am always looking for ways to earn a little extra money and ways to help people with their food storage and preparedness efforts. Rarely does an opportunity come along that fits both categories. I had been pretty sure that I didn’t have enough time to devote to anything more with the family and baby, home and church duties, yard work, and blog already. But the Shelf Reliance consultant opportunity came up and knowing I could help others and earn an income and get free and discounted food storage, well, I had to give it a try, right? It’s now been two months since I got started and let me tell you, I LOVE this company! Here is a short list of why.
1. Variety and quality. The number of different foods that are available through the Thrive line are simply unmatched by any other company. Products like freeze dried apricots, cherries, and grapes, green chiles, mushrooms, and red peppers. They also carry a large variety of freeze dried meats, cheeses, and even yogurt bites (my kids love these)! And they are strict about quality control. The food is picked fresh and freeze dried fast so you get the best tasting, freshest foods when you use Thrive foods. Plus they are constantly innovating and coming out with new products. This is not your grandma’s food storage. I promise you she didn’t have yogurt bites. ;)
Continue reading Why I Love Shelf Reliance and Thrive Food Storage
By Angela
Here are a few items of note for you:
I have added a Prepper Events page to the top menu bar of the site. On this page, I’ll have a listing of any fairs, expos, events, etc. related to self reliance, preparedness, outdoor skills, or survival. If you are organizing such an event or [...]
By Angela
Small me, XL bee suit
In all our short experience with bees, I’ve already learned a thing or two about bee suits. They are really a necessary part of having a hive, unless you want to be stung more or be paranoid about that tickling on your neck the whole time you’re checking [...]
By Angela
 April and May are the best months to start a new beehive, so here we are trying bees again. After last year’s bee swarming disaster, we did a little more studying and got some help from some local friends with bees. We cleaned out the old hive boxes by scraping the waxy stuff off with our hive tool and replaced all the frames since most of them were falling apart anyway. Gave everything a fresh coat of paint since we had a couple of new boxes plus the paint peeling off the old ones. Then the afternoon of the arrival of the new bees, we took our trusty guide, “Beekeeping For Dummies“, and our new little box of bees and headed out to where the hive is set up.
In case you’re wondering, this is still sweet husband and son’s project–I’m just here for moral support and painting boxes and placing orders for supplies and reading the instructions from the book so they know what to do and finding marshmallows, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
Continue reading Putting New Bees in the Hive
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