The Prudent & Prepared Homemaker

Last week we had a cord of firewood delivered. We don't heat with firewood, but use it for cozy enjoyment all autumn and winter. We do, however, count the fireplace as a backup heat source. Because we live in an area with a long winter, this is important. David has started stacking the wood and will slowly finish it over the next several days as …

If you have children, you will want to think through how you are going to handle these topics of pantry building and emergency preparedness with them. This is especially true if doing things like this is a big departure from what is normal in your home and/or you have children prone to anxiety about the unknown. That said, I do think there are a …

Although most people will build a pantry over time by shopping at their local grocery store, sometimes it makes sense to purchase a food supply or food storage pack. In this post, let's look at what kinds of emergency foods are available and who might benefit from investing in emergency supply pack. When I originally wrote this post several …

Unsafe water and waterborne disease kill more people worldwide than anything else – violence, war, etc. We won’t get into all the statistics here, but they are grim in a way that’s hard for people in a first world country to begin to comprehend. Walking miles each day for safe water is so far out of our frame of reference it almost doesn’t compute. …

There are many kinds of emergencies that we actually know about in advance such as storms. Our local meteorologist recently said that they can now forecast the weather more accurately five days out than they could two days out when he started decades ago. So with current technology, we usually know about coming storms such as hurricanes, blizzards, …

There are zillions of articles about emergency preparedness. However, I have three different pieces of advice that I rarely see mentioned. Why is that? I think many of the people who write such articles are interested in either selling you a product or are hyper-focused on accumulating "stuff" to survive the apocalypse. I'm taking a different …

Understanding and preparing for emergencies is a key part of being a prudent and prepared homemaker. What follows in this post was originally written several months ago and posted in my forum. I'm moving all of this content to blog posts to make them easier to find and so they will reach a wider audience. I've decided not to update the content …

How people deal with the unknown and their level of anxiety related to emergencies can be thought of as a continuum. At one end, you have people who need to be fully and thoroughly informed to feel comfortable with life around them. They read, discuss, and think a lot in order to fully understand as many aspects of a situation as they can to the …

When you see posts on Pinterest or videos on YouTube about prepping, there are lots of “20 First Things to Store” or “25 Must Have Items for Prepping” type articles. The problem is that the lists make no sense for the short term and are therefore worthless for most families. The lists have lots of important food stuffs on them, but if you really …

As you work on creating and stocking your pantry as a prudent and prepared homemaker, you'll have to make all kinds of decisions about what to buy. I have three important tips I'd like to share with you. You may have heard of these pantry tips before, but just in case you haven't I'm going to share them. The first one is actually my favorite and …

We recently read Farmer Boy aloud with Caroline. Have you ever noticed how a significant portion of books like this revolve around food? Throughout the entire book, the Wilder family is planting it, caring for it, protecting it, harvesting it, storing it, selling it, and buying it. Creating and stocking a pantry is a central part of their …