Earlier someone posted about the mistakes made in preparing for Y2K. Well how about what you did that really worked. We live on a farm, raise 90% of our food. We can several hundred cans of food each year last year it was over a thousand cans of meat and vegetables and almost 200 quarts of fruit juice, I have to have that. We raise fish in the pond in the front of the house, hunt deer here on the farm. We never shoot anything that will not be eaten, or canned. We store grain in five gallon buckets filled with nitrigen, do this even with the grain we raise, keeps the bug problem away. We do not have Airconditioning, if we don't have it we won't miss it when the rolling black outs come. We keep gas lanterns and extra parts on hand. We don't expect to be able to keep the current lifestyles if something like the Y2K joke really did happen but with wood cook stoves and a supply of canning lids we can make it for a good while. Our water comes from a spring, if no electicity the pump will not run but heck people toted water from that spring for almost a hundred and fifty years up to a house that was here in 1837. If they could me and the wife can. We stored paper product in Plastic pickle barrels and the wife told me last week to get the last barrel out of storage. When that is gone back to walmart. By the way toliet paper stored in pickled pepper barrels does have a powerful smell of pickled peppers but thank God they weren't hot.

-- David (bluewaterfarm@mindspring.com), June 04, 2001

Answers

My hand cranked washing machine, a Harbor Freight buy, about half of what Cumberlands wanted. An old avid gardner moved into a retirement home and I bought 50 cases of jars for 20$. Finding the wholesale food club in our area where my scurvy dreams finally left, with the purchase of freeze dried fruits in bulk. My husbands water platform, with gravity flow water from the hand pump. In finding storage in my husbands shop, the find of the old grinder we had bought originally because it was quaint, now much loved and used. The Keeper. My biggest find was the wonderful goat folks I have met with like minds, through selling anything that could be bred and in milk for housemilk Jan.1, 2001 :) The wonderful idea that when the TP finally was going to run out that you could crochet/knit/sew little squares and soak them. The gals who begged for a cooking class to make tortillas, and though I did store yeast, realising that corn bread and/ or tortillas could take breads place in anything. Becky who taught me to make quick and easy cheeses. Finding my old cook book to reinforce my KNOWING that my Mom canned raw meats all my life! My Country Beans recipe book!! Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), June 04, 2001.

My gamma seals (like I posted on the other post mentioned) are wonderful. I also love my hand washer. It has come in very handy as last year our water situation was so bad it was about the only way I could wash clothes. You just don't want to wash very large items in it. I'm thrilled with just about every thing I did or bought. My hand grinder is not necessarily fun but it does the job. I haven't used my TVP much but I would if I had to. The potato pearls we bought were wonderful. In fact, several people in my extended family are addicted to them. lol! They are extremely easy to use and can be eaten without being cooked if you had to. We bought those and hot cocoa mix, along with some other things at a LDS storehouse. You don't have to be LDS to buy. They have some great stuff at good prices. Also a carpet sweeper is great if you have carpet and kids. Especially if there's no electricity. My favorite foods that we stored and use all the time are wheat berries, oats and dried potatoes (in slices and dices). I could go on even more but you get the drift.

-- Deena in GA (dsmj55@aol.com), June 04, 2001.

Yesterday we had yet another band of violent thunderstorms in north Alabama causing us to loose electricity for about 90 minutes. So I just hauled out my little propane stove and cooked supper like nothing was wrong...

Husband began asking lots of questions about solar power and other alternative power after that. He is a licensed electrician and I think he could really get into building some systems for us if he'd ever get his "have to be on the grid" mentality straightened out.

We're planting more and more stuff in our garden each year and striving to be as self-sufficient as possible.

We have air conditioning but haven't turned it on yet this year (and it does get hot and humid in north Alabama!) My mama acts like it's almost a sin because when our drier conked out we didn't fix it, just continued to hang clothes on the line! She also thinks it's awful that we don't have the air conditioning on!

When did those kind of things start making a person weird. I'd much rather pay a lower electric bill than one of $200 per month!

-- Suzy in Bama (slgt@yahoo.com), June 04, 2001.

We've been using a well stocked pantry for years,and people have thought I was weird, until we had a medical emergency with our daughter. We had to travel to and from Salt Lake City each month for a year, and with all the medical bills rolling in we couldn't have survived without our pantry. We literally went for four month without having to shop for groceries, and when we did it was for paper products, and cleaning supplies. We ate wonderful meals and even had people over for meals. The money we saved in not having to buy groceries helped to pay our bills. We added alittle more to our pantry for Y2K but it was all things we can use on an everyday basis, IE: windup/ solar powered radio, water barrels, batteries, lanterns and oil, dehydrated foods and canning supplies and seeds. We had installed our woodstove a year earlier so had no worries about heating our home. I can all our garden produce( that is what we don't eat) and my husband and son are hunters so we eat venison, elk and moose. We have chickens for eggs as well as meat. We are in the process of searching for land so as to have a more sufficient lifestyle. Don't let people ridicule you about a pantry, it's been a life saver for us, our grocery bill averages $ 50 - $60 a month and I'm working on cutting that by making my own cleaning supplies and laundry soap.

-- Kelle in MT. (kvent1729@aol.com), June 04, 2001.

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or concieted, its not meant to . I gave this a bit of thought and would have to say that everything I have learned and tried in our quest for self sufficiency has worked. True some aspects and ventures have worked better than others. Some have even become upgrades and improvements over previous processes. However, all have improved our self sufficient lifestyle if only as a stepping stone or bridge to things we do today. I guess thats what appeals to me of this lifestyle quest, there are no successes or failures, just learning experiences, which are all successes in their own way.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), June 04, 2001.

Compared to all of you, we are much less self sufficient, especially Jay! (I think my husband has read everything you've ever posted, and then told me, even thought I'd read them. Makes me wish I'd never mentioned worms...)

We keep chickens (eggs and meat), rabbits (meat), and are expecting some ducks anyday in the mail (dual purpose). We keep gardens for our food, and for profit (or trade). I fish. We'll try hunting for deer again this winter. We keep some heritage varities, and save seed from one year to the next in the fridge. We to use a composting toilet, and all of our water goes out to an old 1000+ gallon fish pond, and then we water plants. (Try putting water hyacinth into your grey water, or sewage pond, they clean the water , and bloom besides)

Putting in a wood stove this summer (partially in the old fireplace), to help heat this ol' house, because I can't afford another cold winter with propane!!

-- Marty (Mrs.Puck@Excite.com), June 04, 2001.

My husband and I have been working towards self-sufficiency for our entire married life. While we have different ideas about the direction in which the USA is headed, we do agree that being prepared is more than just a good Boy Scout motto.

We live in the Northeast where winters can be long and cold. We heat our 80 year old house with a large woodburning stove in the cellar and a smaller stove in our addition over the garage. We go through less than 6 cord of firewood during a season and a cord goes for about $110/cord. The house also has electric baseboard heat but the cost of electricity to heat the house is approximately $500 per month with is way too much.

We are on town water and sewer, but we also have a well in the cellar which was probably the original water source. We check the quality of the water about once a year and it's just as good as town water.

We have a decent size garden and a dozen hens for eggs which I barter for produce we don't grow. I've always kept our pantry stocked with at least 6 months of food but only what we will eat and almost always when it's on sale. I bake all our bread and cook just about everything from scratch.

Russ is teaching himself black-smithing. I sew, make baskets and am learning many other "forgotten arts".

We have a generator to handle the freezer should we lose electricity.

But, the best thing we've done to be self-sufficient is to get out of debt. We started doubling up on the house payments about 10 years ago and made our last payment a year ago. Since that time, we've continued to put the amount of the housepayment into a money-market account. We had gotten quite used to living without that money and had no reason not to save it. We just had to replace one of our vehicles and we able to pay cash. We don't charge very often and never more than we can pay off each month. To date, we are debt- free!

I not only stock up on groceries, but also clothes and other things we use on a regular basis. Just recently bought both of us enough underwear and sweatshirts to last for several years when K-Mart had a good sale.

I'm not anticpating an end of the world as we know it, but I find being frugal and living a simple life style works well for us. It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that if Russ lost his job today, we could continue with our current lifestyle for a very long time with no inconvenince.

Thanks for reading.

-- Dianne in Mass (dianne.bone@usa.net), June 05, 2001.

Something that I have been working on for years and continue to try and learn is foraging skills. If I have those kind of skills I do not need to worry about whether someone is going to "take" my stockpile, as some have talked about on other threads, and I can share with others my knowledge freely. This "process" of learning to be able to function without being so dependent on "industrialized" society gives me a feeling of security and peace that I would not exchange for "stuff".

-- diane (gardiacaprine@yahoo.com), June 05, 2001.