Great suggestion. Thanks for the link as well.

Oh and S&F.

S+F from me....there is absolutely TONS of useful stuff in the link that I will be reading for ages yet. Thank you very much!

Cait xxx

Forget long term storage. Here is what i do every single year.

I grow crops of various kinds. I allow some of them to go to seed and i then collect the seed. The seeds are stuck in paper envelopes and kept until the next time they need planting. I have been doing this for years and every year i have plenty of good crops. Potatoes are a little more difficult and something i have not yet gotten into. Producing seed potatoes is a difficult business.

Forget saving, stick to producing new crops every year and allowing some to seed. That will give you new seed every year and if something happens then you have brand new seed to use.

As for stored food, well my family is not paranoid, my mother and father are not of the opinion that the world is about to end. We buy food in bulk simply because it is cheaper and so we have developed a simple rotation system. The new stuff goes at the back, the old stuff is used up. We have around 2 months of food saved using this method (that is if we ate normally, without rationing).

I have however added extra to their supplies. We have maybe 40 KG of brown rice (goes bad faster than white rice), tons of dried beans, a shed load of spices, dried meats and well a few other things.

I hope this was helpful in some way.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
Forget long term storage. Here is what i do every single year.

I grow crops of various kinds. I allow some of them to go to seed and i then collect the seed. The seeds are stuck in paper envelopes and kept until the next time they need planting. I have been doing this for years and every year i have plenty of good crops. Potatoes are a little more difficult and something i have not yet gotten into. Producing seed potatoes is a difficult business.

Forget saving, stick to producing new crops every year and allowing some to seed. That will give you new seed every year and if something happens then you have brand new seed to use.

As for stored food, well my family is not paranoid, my mother and father are not of the opinion that the world is about to end. We buy food in bulk simply because it is cheaper and so we have developed a simple rotation system. The new stuff goes at the back, the old stuff is used up. We have around 2 months of food saved using this method (that is if we ate normally, without rationing).

I have however added extra to their supplies. We have maybe 40 KG of brown rice (goes bad faster than white rice), tons of dried beans, a shed load of spices, dried meats and well a few other things.

I hope this was helpful in some way.

I don't think you understand the value of long term storage.
It's just an aspect really but an important one as well.

The value of the rice I stored tripled in 2008 and is now it worth double what I paid for it.

I can only imagine what it will be worth in 5 more years.

We just had a poor growing year this year and Florida got hit with a cold snap.
If your yield is poor in your garden two years in a row, what happens to your seed supply ?
What if your crop's get invaded by GM's

It's still good to store some seeds as long as viability is accounted for.