Wheat Mills (Grinders)

Years ago I was introduced to whole wheat bread making from Toni, then owner of Bosch Kitchen Center in Las Vegas. Toni's little finger knew more about the benefits of baking with whole wheat bread than I will ever know. Anyway, Toni recommended the Whisper Mill for wheat grinding, so I bought one.

Well, I really don't know the difference in wheat grinders but I did have an old stone grinder with a huge motor that made a mess everytime I used it. I think it was called a Magic Mill. I still have it buried in my garage somewhere. Every so often I think I will try it again because I have heard that stone ground wheat is great. I just don't want the mess in the kitchen and my Whisper Mill is quick and easy.

While cruising around the Walton Feed site I found a comparison page in wheat grinders that you might find interesting (link below):

Here are some recipes using wheat: Wheat, more than just bread

Here is my way of using solar energy for making bread:

Cooking with wheat & food storage books: SFE Food Storage Page

Wheat Montana Farms & Bakery: I've used their grain for years (though I can't buy it locally any more) and I think it is the best ever!

Wheat Mills at Pleasant Hill Grain in Nebraska. Note: They have stopped carrying the Whisper Mill but have other great grain mills for sale.

Walton Feed: All About Grain Grinders


Hope you enjoy baking with whole wheat half as much as I do!!! Mike

Mother Earth News

In our continuing quest to deliver quality self reliance links we turn to a great resource: Mother Earth News.

I'm sure you've been to their site with hundreds of valuable articles. They cover such topics as; Home Building, Renewable Energy, Organic Gardening, DIY, Natural Health, Homesteading, Food and Cooking, Forums, Green Homes and a lot more.

Here's just a few links you might be interested in:

Choosing a Log Home
Super Solar Homes Everyone can Afford
Why Whole Wheat is Way Better
Breads Alive!
GROWING GRAINS
Uncommon Corn
Emergency Essentials: Heating, Cooking & Lighting
Assemble Your Emergency Kit
All About Insulation
Harvest the Rain
Harvest the Wind

I hope you enjoy the reading! Have a great day, Mike

Preparedness Discussion Group

Ok, it's a beginning, but let's start somewhere. I've created a MSN discussion group (forum) on what you (and America) are doing to prepare for emergencies.

After 911 the President started CitizenCorp but I really don't think that the general public has a clue as to what it is all about. It sounds great, but somehow the general public needs to get involved.

Listen, no amount of government preparedness can equal citizen preparedness. I don't care how many contingency plans there are or how many billions of dollars are spent.

So, instead of complaining, lets get some positive feedback going on what we can do, and what we as individuals and families are doing!

I have started a couple threads on the group site, but you will certainly want to start your own thread or topic of discussion - go ahead. Hey, this group site is public for now so that we can get a lot of different perspectives and ideas. All of us are different, with different needs and circumstances. All of us can learn from each other, and all of us have something that we can give to others.

Of course, if the site starts getting a lot of spam posts and advertising junk then we will have to put some restrictions on the site or make it private. Let's try it public for a while.

Please take a few moments to get this discussion moving ahead by visiting "Prepare America".

Thanks, and please let me know of any specific topics you want me to address on this site. I have a lot more topics on the table so check back for a moment each day to see if there is something you are interested in.

Have a safer day today than yesterday my friend!

Mike

Backwoods Home Magazine

This resource promises to be a wealth of reading on self-reliant living. Many articles from past issues of Backwoods Home Magazine are found free on their Article Index. Not all articles from past issues are listed for view. You have to buy their magazine to read everything, but a lot of good reading is online.

Topics include; Americana/History, Animals, Building Tools, Commentary, Country Living, Crafts, Energy, Farm & Garden, Firearms & Hunting, Food/Recipes, Health, Home Schooling, Just for Kids, Miscellanea, Making/Saving Money, The Natural World, People, Self Reliance, Small Town America.

Their current issue has pdf downloads for archiving or offline reading.

I hope you enjoy this important resource!

See ya, Mike

Food Storage Shelf Life

One of the biggest problems that I have found with food storage is properly rotating the can or box of food before it expires. A few years ago I stored some of my food storage improperly and several boxes of food stuffs got ruined. I threw out a small mountain of food & supplies because I did not rotate it and I stacked cases of liquid bleach, water, vinegar, syrup, etc. that LEAKED! Had I rotated the stuff I would not have ruined hundreds of dollars worth of supplies.

Ok, so I date the stuff with a marker when I buy it. That helps a lot, but I still don't know when the product was made at the factory. What if the item sat on the store/warehouse shelf for a year or two?

Well, Walton Feed has a great help for us. They have published a list of ways to decipher the codes on the can. Of course, some producers put a "best used by" date on the can or box, but some factories still use a code readable only to them, until now.

Check out the Canning Code page at Walton Feed. I know there are a lot of products not listed, but this list should help us understand a little more about product codes so we can readily identify the production dates of other products.

If you know of other ways to identify date codes on other products not listed, please let Walton know, or email me and we will publish it on this page. Also let me know if there are other lists on the web.

Have a good day.

Mike

CDC Preparedness & Bird Flu Sites

Key Links to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

CDC Home Page
CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response Site
Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)
Key Facts About Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) and Avian Influenza A (H5N1) Virus
Emergency Preparedness and Response Preparation & Planning
Emergency Preparedness and Response Training and Education
Emergency Preparedness and Response Preparing for a Terrorist Bombing: A Common Sense Approach
Emergency Preparedness and Response Disaster Mental Health Resources

In light of the many emergencies and disasters that this country and the world are facing we are bringing you key sites to help you with your emergency preparations. We will continually bring you information and links from many sources. We encourage you to search the listed sites for important information for the safety of your family. Please bookmark this page and return for future emergency preparedness updates. Visit solarprepared.com for more links and information.

Tell Us Your Survival Story

Please send us your survival story. We would like to put them on this blog and the SOLARprepared.com site. Sharing your stories will help others to prepare better for emergencies.

How did preparedness items help you?
How did the lack of preparedness affect your plight?
What could you have done to better prepare?
What do you recommend to others?
Did you have any solar items that helped?
Could you have used any solar preparedness items?
Did you have/use an evacuation kit (72-hour kit, mobility bag)?
What items would you put in your evacuation bag now, that you needed then?

Please email your thoughts, stories and comments to: michael@vegastrailer.com

Here are some links to archived stories from this blog:

Baking Bread with the Sun
Solar is Perfect for RV's!
Don't Use a Gas Generator for Emergencies!
Outdoor Solar Lighting
Sun Ovens & Solar Cooking
Comment on Floods in Dominican Republic and Haiti
Solar Products can Help for Disaster Aftermath
Looting in New Orleans didn’t have to happen.
More Options for Refrigerators on Solar
China - Energy Black Hole?
Dig out those old Y2k books
The End of Oil
Bread Making
Generators Cause Death During Disaster Recovery
Just wanting the people to be prepared is not enough
All must share in the Blame Game
We must learn from Hurricane Katrina

I'm sure there's more in the archives, but who wants to search? Anyway, I hope these comments will be of help to someone. Please contact me with any comments.

Have a safer day than yesterday! Mike

Thousands of Preparedness Sites

During my research of emergency preparedness web pages for the SOLARprepared.com web site I come across some pretty interesting sites. I wish I had more time to surf all of them. A few weeks ago I listed the CBS Emergency Links page on this blog. Several of the links are no good, but most of the links are filled with high quality emergency info. While visiting NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) I found a page that listed their most popular weather related web sites. Great stuff, and the Climate Prediction Center has a map of the drought areas of the country that is interesting.

I will post other governmental and commercial sites on this blog as I find them. You might want to bookmark this page and check back every once in a while, so you don't have to do a hundred searches for the stuff. Some of the more interesting pages will be linked on the web site for a more permanent resource.

Be safe my friend, Mike

Oh, I've de-activated the comments feature as I was constantly deleting spam advertising comments. Sheesh, they try everything! Email me if you want a comment posted. I will be glad to copy your comment and paste it in this blog. I really do want your comments, and I would be very interested in any survival stories you may wish to tell. There's gotta be a million, just from Katrina. I especially would like stories about solar, or the lack of it. How did you use solar? How could a solar product have helped in your situation? What did you learn from your survival ordeal? Let us know.

New Preparedness Pages

Three new pages to help you get prepared for emergencies have been added to the Solar for Emergencies web site.

Our preparedness books page has several books available for purchase. Special preparedness links will be added to the page soon.

Our food storage page has resource books about food storage, including storage grains. This page also has links to food storage information on related sites. Take some time to visit these sites and look around. Volumes of preparedness info is linked on these sites.

We've added a special page that may not be of interest to everyone, but a lot of people will like it. We've made a page with Tom Brown Jr. books and links with survival info. We've created this page because our Tom Brown page on our vegastrailer.com site is one of the most popular pages on the site. This page has links to Tom's Wilderness Survival School and several other sites, including some great articles from Mother Earth magazine. These articles are from the 80's but they are just as relevant today as 20 years ago when they were written. Too bad the participants on the TV show "Survivor" didn't read these articles!

We've also put in a link to "The Hunted" movie site because Tom was a consultant for the movie, and in fact, his hands are in the movie making fire with no matches.

I've enjoyed reading about tracking and wilderness survival in his books, but his views on spirituality are controversial to many people. Generally though, his books are a good read with a lot of valuable information that we can apply to our lives, even if we are not lost in the wilderness.

Hope you enjoy the new pages, even though they don't deal directly with solar power stuff.

All the best, Mike

Reasons to Prepare?

Tsunami, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Floods, Terrorism - Reasons to Prepare?

Yes, and SOLARprepared.com will help you do it! New links and pages are being added daily to our new "Solar for Emergencies" site with information and products to help you prepare for many types of disasters.

Millions of people are taking heed of the "signs of the times" and taking steps to get their family better prepared for disasters and emergencies. We will help you along your way, with new perspectives and good old fashioned advice.

Make sure you save this blog and the SOLARprepared.com website in your favorites, because we are publishing many new topics and links created to help you and your family live safer.

Oh, not interested in solar? That's ok, as we are publishing many topics besides solar that could greatly benefit you and your family.

All the best my friend, Mike

Revisit of Bird Flu of 1918?

I've been following the current bird flu situation a little over the past few months, but the story I heard in NPR today disturbed me more than in the past. A discussion of the good news and bad news about the virus is listed on the NPR site.

How does this topic relate to this site? Plenty!

If this thing takes off like many fear, millions will die. I don't want to be a purveyor of doom, but don't think for a minute that our lifestyle will be the same. With our modern transportation and contact with hundreds of people a day, we will spread this deadly flu to too many people. Huge sections of the world's population will need to be quarantined, including the US.

I don't like this one. If I am quarantined in my house for a month my family better have what they need to survive. If all commerce is stopped, what will that do to our economy? Will basic services like garbage collections, water and electricity be provided without employees to handle the operations?

The need for preparedness will be great, including solar products. I hope the Solar for Emergency site on http://solarprepared.com helps you "just in case" the bird flu or any other darn thing comes your way.

All the best my friend, Mike

EarthToys.com's Newsletter

EarthToys.com has published the past six articles on using solar for emergencies. You can find them on their October Newsletter page. These articles were re-published in light of the devastating hurricanes that have hit the Gulf. It is hoped that some of these ideas will help survivors and those who must live without power for the next weeks or months until utilities are hooked up.

I also hope that these thoughts can help many of the rest of us who may be in dangers' path in the future. I really believe that the power of the sun can give us a more self sufficient, independent and safer lifestyle, every day, and in case of an emergency or disaster. Coupled with sound emergency preparedness practices and "mindset" we can provide a new level of insurance for the safety and well being of our families.

Though not complete, the "Solar for Emergencies" and SOLARprepared web site is constantly changing and growing. There may be several items that could be of interest to you. We will constantly expand it in the future. We have a lot more to publish but, as you know, web sites take a lot of time (thank goodness for blogs) and are a "work in progress".

Have a good day my friend.

Michael