Packing Grain and Beans for Food Storage (The way I do it)



 

As part of my prepping plan I practice what I wrote about in my book "Poverty Prepping: How to Stock up for Tomorrow When You Can't Afford to Eat Today" (Click here to see the book).  I buy one or two 'extra' of something every month, even if it's just a one dollar bottle of a spice. 

 

In times when I have a little more money to spend I buy things like a big bag of rice, beans, flour, or sugar.  This month we were able to buy a 50-lb. bag of wheat and a 50-lb. bag of oatmeal (rolled oats).

 

Our wonderful acquisitions!

(I don't know why both bags are upside down)

 

We've been lucky in being able to get buckets with tight-fitting lids from a grocery store bakery where one of our adult children works.  Most of them are about 2 1/2 gallons, which is a good size for me.  I have a hard time carrying full five-gallon buckets, so these smaller buckets are great.  We do have a few five-gallon buckets but I need the wheel barrow to move them from the shed to the house.

 

Scooping oatmeal into a bucket.

 

These buckets have been used over and over.  When I empty them I wash them and stack them in the shed until I have something to put in them again. I keep a bag nearby for lids but somehow I always seem to have more buckets than lids. 

 

I set the bucket on a stool and then I sat on a chair and scooped oatmeal with a 6-cup plastic measuring cup until the bucket was full.  But wait.... was the bucket really full?

Holding a plate on top of the oatmeal in a bucket.

 

Some foods compress better than others, but no matter what grain or bean I'm packing into buckets, I tap on the sides to help it "settle".  If you've ever bought things like cold cereal or potato chips at a grocery store you'll see that the bags or boxes appear to be half empty when you open them.  This is because the food settles in shipping.  When you first put foods like oatmeal or flour into a bucket there is a lot of air in with them.  By tapping on the side of the bucket you can jiggle it enough that the food settles and there will be more room at the top.  Then you can add more of whatever you're putting in the bucket.

 

I like to place a plate on top and hold it down while I tap the sides of the bucket.  This helps keep the oatmeal, or whatever food, from shaking out of the bucket, but more importantly, it helps push the food down as you tap on the sides.

 

There are two reasons I like to get as much air out and pack as much into the bucket as I can.  One reason is that the more I can fit into the buckets, the fewer I need and therefore I have more buckets available when I have food to put in them.

 

The second reason is that air oxidizes food and reduces it's storage life.  Some people buy oxygen absorbers or Co2 packets to put in the buckets when they pack them.  I figure the best I can do is to get out as much air as I can by packing the food as tightly as I can into the bucket.  This works especially good with foods like flour and oatmeal.  If I'm patient I can pack an amazing amount of flour into a bucket by tapping and by tamping it down with a plate.  Hard grains like wheat are harder to compress this way, but you can still tap on them to jiggle them as snugly together as possible, and reduce the amount of air in the buckets.

 

Being smaller it's easy for us to use the food in the buckets quickly and keep them rotated.  If you're packing five-gallon buckets for long-term storage you might want to buy oxygen absorbers to place inside the buckets.  Here's some available on amazon so you can see what they look like and get an idea of price: Oxygen absorbers .  This pack is $9.99 for 100 ct.



Six buckets of oatmeal, ready to be moved out to the shed.

 

The buckets have wonderful things on the labels, like donut glaze and pink icing and cream cheese frosting!  But inside they have oatmeal.  We also have wheat, whole corn, barley, rice, pinto beans, black beans, and kidney beans in similar buckets.

I date the buckets so I can keep them rotated.

This is the wheat being scooped into a bucket.

 

Recently I also put rice in buckets.

 

I have some of these buckets stored in the house in various places where they're not in the way, but most of them are in our sheds.  I try to put them near the ground on the north side of the shed, and cover them with old blankets to make sure they stay dark.  I don't like to set them right on the floor so I put a pallet in the shed and I set the buckets on that.  The air can then circulate under the buckets and help keep frost or condensation off of them.  I've never had moisture get inside one of these buckets, but it's still unnerving to go out on a winter morning and see frost on the outsides of the buckets. 

 

The storage life of all foods is lengthened by being kept cool and dark, in addition to removing or reducing the oxygen.  Wide swings in temperature are hard on foods, including grains and beans.  Daily swings are harder than seasonal swings, but to some extent we can't do anything about that.  I cover mine with several old blankets and then stack other things on or around the buckets.

 

It helps to have a master sheet of what you packed into buckets and when you did so.  It's constantly changing in our case, since we actively eat out of our buckets, so I keep my master list on the computer where changes and updates are easy to make.  But if my computer goes down I will lose my list, so I am planning to start printing it up a few times a year so I at least have a somewhat-recent copy of what we have stored in buckets.

 

Many stores with bakeries will give away or sell the buckets that frosting and other food comes in.  Check with stores near you.  Wal-Mart and other stores sell food-grade buckets, usually in bigger sizes such as 5-gallon. 

 

In addition to oxygen absorbers some people line their buckets with mylar bags to further extend the storage life. They usually come with oxygen absorbers as well.  These inside a bucket with a good seal can give you many years of storage life, often in excess of ten years.

 

Please leave comments or questions below or email them to:

povertyprepping@yahoo.com

 

Thanks! 

 

Susan

 

Growing wheat and other grains on the small scale

 


 


Wheat, ready for harvest.

 

 

About five years ago we decided to try our hand at growing wheat.  We had an old corral that was rich with composted horse manure.  My husband tilled it up and I scattered wheat across the ground.  I used a 5-lb. bag of organic hard white wheat, and I planted it on Mother's Day, hoping it would ripen by fall.  In our climate that's always an iffy proposition.

 

After tossing the wheat out by handfuls we walked around scuffing our feet on the ground and using a rake to cover as much of the wheat as we could.  A week later it looked like the corral had been planted in thick, lush dark green grass.  During July and August, our dry months, we watered it.  In the fall the wheat heads formed.  Antsy to follow it's progress I broke off some kernals and they were green and soft.  As time passed they turned yellow and then brown, and became hard.

 

I didn't know what to expect or when to harvest them, so I almost waited too long.  The wheat kernals had begun falling from the heads.  We decided it was time for harvest.

 

 



 



The first thing we thought of was to have my husband cut it with the weed-eater.

He carefully edged the weed-eater into the stalks near the ground, but they flew everywhere and were a disorganized tangle of stalks. 

He next tried a scythe and it left them a little more organized but still difficult to sort out.

 
I finally ended up just breaking the heads off the stalks one at a time and putting them in buckets.  It was slow work but I enjoyed being in the fall sunshine, and I spread it out over about a week.  I went out and broke off wheat heads for half an hour to an hour, a couple times a day.

I tried scissors and while it did work, it wasn't any faster or easier than breaking the wheat heads off by hand.  It made me think of the cotton-pickers of old, carrying a big sack and picking the cotton, one head at a time.

 Over the fall I threshed the wheat by hand.  The middle bucket in the picture has the whole wheat heads.  The one my hands are over is the one I was 'squishing' the wheat kernals into.  The bucket around the side of my legs is where I tossed the empty wheat head after all the kernals were out.

 

 

When I had a bucket full of them done I spread them on an old cookie sheet to clean them.  There was a lot of "chaff" mixed with the kernals.  The chaff is light-weight and easily blown away, leaving just the heavier wheat kernals.  This is often done outside.  One way is to spread a tarp and pour the threshed wheat onto it.  This is best done with at least two people and on a breezy day.  Hold onto both sides of the tarp and toss the wheat and chaff into the air, just enough for the breeze to blow away the chaff.  You'll probably still have to do some cleaning by hand but it blows away a great deal of the chaff.

 

Regarding threshing, I've seen several homemade threshers, including one that uses a five-gallon bucket.  There's a hole drilled in the center of the lid and a drill on the outside is attached to a chain on the inside, through that hole.  When the drill is turned on, the chain whips in a circle inside the bucket and threshes the wheat.

We have an electric grain grinder that makes a fast job of milling the wheat into flour.  This one has several setting from 'fine' to 'coarse', but even the coarsest setting is finer than our hand-cranked grinder.  Here's a quick-link to electric grain grinders in case you're interested in seeing what's available and how much they cost:  http://amzn.to/19NqZAC

Our grandson loves to pour the whole grains into the hopper on our hand-cranked grinder.  This grinder is a heavy iron one that we picked up at a second-hand store about twenty years ago.  We have a lighter steel hand-cranked grinder too, but prefer to use this one because it's more heavy-duty.

Here's a link to hand-cranked grinders for those interested in browsing:

http://amzn.to/14SuRBU

 

  We grind not only grains for our own use, but also for the chickens and whatever other livestock we have at the time.  Right now it's just laying hens, but we've had goats, pigs, ducks, turkeys, and rabbits. 

Just for an experiment I found a large flat stone and a smaller stone and tried hand-grinding some grains.  Grains like wheat are hard-shelled and it was a lot of work to grind even a little.  I tried some dried corn and it worked very well and it was easy to grind a lot in a short time.  Unfortunately we can't grow corn in our cold, short growing season, but for those of you who can, if you ever find yourself needing to grow and grind your own grain, especially by homemade means like stones, corn is the best grain.

This is the ground wheat when I finally got it all smashed and ground around on the stone. 

 

 

The following year after we first planted wheat, it came up on it's own, reseeded by the kernals that fell to the ground before we harvested it.  The third year it was sparse.  We tilled it up and I divided the corral into three parts and planted wheat, rye, and hulled oats.  This time I used hard red wheat out of a 50-lb. bag of non-organic wheat.  There were bare patches that didn't come up, and what did come up grew poorly and never produced mature wheat heads.  I can't say it was just because it was non-organic.  Maybe the hard red wheat has different needs than hard white wheat. 

 

Later in the summer I tried to sprout some of the wheat still in the bag, and it would not sprout.  Now before I plant, I test a small handful of kernals from the batch I want to use as seed, and if it sprouts, I plant it.  If it doesn't, I get different wheat or other grain.

 

I had ordered the rye and oats from Johnny's seed company and it grew well.  The rye was much like the wheat.  We ordered hulled oats to make harvest and threshing easier.  The oats were wonderful.  They grew well and were very tasty.  We ground some into flour, but I also put some on my big cutting board and rolled them with a rolling pin to make 'oatmeal'.  I haven't tried to grind oats on a stone, by hand, but they flatten easily with a rolling pin, so they must not be as hard of a grain as wheat.  Some day I hope to have an oat roller, but in the mean while, it does work this way.  Here's an oat roller if any of you want to look at them to see what they are, or to order one:

http://amzn.to/19Nruuy

 

I've a notion to try and make a hopper for my pasta roller and see if it could double as an oat roller.