Add Your Harvest to Your Emergency Kit

If you’ve looked at a Facebook feed lately, or taken a drive through the countryside, you’re not oblivious to the fact that fall is on it’s way. In fact, although it’s still technically summer, for all the pumpkins you’re seeing everywhere, it might as well be fall already—right?

If you’ve dabbled in gardening, you know that fall means more than just pumpkins in your garden. Here in the South-West coast of Canada, a whole host of squash and gourd varieties become ripe in September and October, along with baskets of other foods—if you’ve planted them at the right time they should be ready for harvest. You could be harvesting peas, beans, tomatoes, corn, beets, greens, radishes, carrots, potatoes and much, much more! Often, if you have a garden, you’ll harvest too much food to know what to do with!

One option, of course, is to give food away to your friends and family, or donate your produce to a charity that makes daily meals for people living in poverty. Another option is to dehydrate!

You can dehydrate pretty much any food, but peas, beans and pumpkin seeds are truly perfect, nutrient-rich items to add to your kit. Of course, if you’re going to the effort of preparing your own food (after growing it!) for your kit, you’ll want to be extra certain that you check in on your kit at LEAST every six months to take out and eat any food that is expiring.

Depending on how much and what kinds of your own food you’re able to prepare, you may want to still purchase some ration bars and other freeze dried food that you’re missing.

It’s a good idea to create a strategy based on how many days your kit is meant to last, and then break it down into rations per day, per person, and sort out how much and what kind of food you will need from there.

It may seem like a lot of energy to put into something that may or may not pay off, but as long as you make sure you eat your rations before they go bad—even if an emergency hasn’t occurred—and then restock, you’ll find that your time hasn’t been wasted! In fact, you’ll probably be able to rest easier, knowing that you’re prepared.

-Article contributed by Sophie Wooding – Avid gardener and cyclist in Victoria, BC and Content Writer for Frontier.io