Off Grid Living: The Importance Of A Homestead Pantry - YouTube

so many people have been coming to my channel who are really serious about

going off grid in starting their own homestead

but one of the things that I haven't addressed yet is the importance

of any successful homestead is having a pantry

when you talk about being self sufficient and controlling your own food

be it if you're hunting and fishing or using food from your garden

or even buying things in bulk storing them in a pantry is really going to be

homestead in really really important

When we started preparing for the pantry many many years before we

even move of great here

home and we did a lot to research and we learned a lot of things

do's and don'ts so I will take you into my pantry today

and show you what works for us and hopefully

I hope you get a couple tips that you could take home with you

before you start your off-grid homestead setup

come along and in well see. So in my pantry the number one thing you're

probably going to see is

a lot of these I'm food grade containers and I've got a lotta beans

and I also store alot rice now we choose beans because we love bean

low in fat their low-cost

and dried beans actually do last indefinitely we did a lot a research on

this

and we store them most to them in their regular

containers that they came in which is the bags, and we don't put them

in from any type of mylar bags

but what I do do is when I start getting a lot a bulk beans

you know probably about a hundred pounds a whatever beans I have

then I'll go to my "canning a lot of it and you've seen my videos before I've

got whit beans Ive got kidney beans

I've got my black beans I just did a whole buncha

pinto beans to so that way its easily

access to my pantry and when I wanna do a real quick meal you know when its

garden season

I I throw those beans in and its a good source of protein

so for storage long-term beans really are awesome

the other thing a store in the pantry is rice the some the rice are in my

five gallon buckets when we started off

we start doing our research we bought Mylar bags

we just threw in the oxygen absorbers and we sucked the air out with

our shop vac and we seal that with our own iron

and back to Wisconsin um we did a lot of her flour and rice

dried potatoes in the Myler bags they are great

they're cheap they're economical for longs terms storage

they really do work but after we did more research we started to learn that

rice actaully to can store

a long time in their own containers anywhere for white rice five years

rice can be good in their original package

and rice also in and airtight

container will last will twenty to twenty-five years so

the one thing you can do is buy those oxygen absorbers

and I believe like in a five-gallon pail you throw in

a I think it's a 1500 to 2000 cubic centimeter

oxygen absorber in your pail put your lid on

the rice is going to last a long long time

so five-gallon pails they

keep a lotta your stuff you can keep in in their original containers

I'm you know about our canning and then the other thing I want to point out my

pantry to

is when we first started out getting prepared

to to come off-grid we did buy a lot of these augason farms

cans they're really nice

but they're really really expensive and

as we learned I'm kinda regretting

buying them now because you see we have long grain

um brown rice i buy this stuff in Bulk you twenty-five to fifty pounds

and it doesn't need to be sealed in little cans like this this was kind of a

waste to buy because

I'm as you can see now I just got my rice

in the five gallon buckets if I'm concerned about it not lasting

and the other stuff I just keep in its original package

never had a problem with my rice going bad but again

your pantry has to be cool and that moisture

no moisture in your pantry is very very important for long-term storage

so do you really need to buy all these prepping type of cans

well if you're on a budget I'd say NO

you know we bought some specialty items like the scramble egg mix

probably not bad to have the margine powder I'm actually canning in my own

so I you don't need it anymore honey Powder, we actually found a local source

when we moved out here

love our honey local source great source so

we really don't need um the honey powder anymore

a but it's nice to have , like I said

if you're starting a pantry forget about those products go buy yourself

some BULK rice

white brown wild whatever your lentil your beans

white brown what ever that'll be the basis for your pantry and those items really do stay

a good for EVER! Dehydrated foods, when we did live in Wisconsin we had full

electricity

I dehydrated a lot of stuff for it have apples in my banana chips used to do a lot a

banana chips and my mushrooms

um onions I you name it and I would throw it

in the Excalibur if you do live on grid and you've got

arm a lotta stuff that you can get cheap at the store or you grow yourself

dehydrated and you can store in a

a canning jar which really works good or Myler bags

also works good i've seen that jars are really getting expensive

really expensive like pint jars now between ten and twelve dollars in there

and at least here on the offseason they're getting harder to find I have been

hitting

the Goodwill stores and Buying in our local grocery store

which has the smallmouth ones but they don't have the big ones

so before we moved buy the things you might wanna

stock up on canning jars if you know that you're going to be going off

grid

and you want to start up preparing now and that's what we did

many many years ago I'd go and i'd watch for sales

and I would just go wipe out the canning jars I would come home with the

with you know carload

um so we we've pre bought a lot of stuff before we started our

our pantry we pre bought a lot of the mylar bags pre brought

canning jars we tried to get as many food great containers as possible we had

a friend

who actually worked for company that on hold food

so we used him as a resource find a resource or go to a restaurant

or use a supermarket that make some you know these are

these are cake and donut icing containers

try to find those resources before you move

you can stock up and bring the stuff with you

it's a long process you don't wanna be moving

onto your homestead without any supplies so make sure

your stock up okay one last thing

as you can see I don't have a lot of store-bought canned goods and

we started buying a lot a store boughten canned goods many many years ago and

this is kind of the living and learning thing

store bought canned goods are great to have

but since I do my own canning I really don't

have a need for them anymore but just know

that when you buy your canned goods you know they all have an expiration date

and this one is actually from 2011

these last for ever don't pay attention to the expiration dates

in you know maybe some of you are gonna freak out when I say that

but this is from 2011 I open up those green beans and they're fine

so I use go to on outlet store

and buy outdated food nothing wrong with outdated food I'm sure a lot of you

already know that

so if you do if you are going with with store-bought canned goods

don't worry about the dates you're probably get a a good buy

and the ones that are outdated because once they are canned

they really are gonna last for a long okay the other

thing about storing your foods is

when you talk about the setup of your pantry you gonna have to remember

moisture is really bad

for food items so make sure your pantry is moisture free

the other thing is the temperature now it's cool in here

on this is part of our house the wall here is cemented

I don't know if you can see it but its a cement wall

and back here because we have our a house that is butted

up to the the mountain and dirt it's nice and cool in here so even though

this is part of our house

we just keep that door shut and

it gets it gets its cool in here ! Alright that was it in a nutshell

and I hope you enjoyed the tour the pantry

I may have missed some things but I just want to get you guys in overview quickly

and some other things that you need to be looking for so hopefully

you will start stocking up on all these things before you move

and really getting a plan before you really

unplug yourself or take the leap and go off grid

and start your own homestead alright I thank you guys for watching and

subscribing

and I hope this little tutorial on my pantry

i helped