Preparations Update

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@UncleJoe if you lived near us we could have supplied you as we have 10 bee hives in our backyard and get honey free for having the hives here as payment :D . Bit of a long swim to Australia though and by the way your honey is cheaper than what we can buy per kg in our local supermarkets as well but if we took in currency conversion rates that would make your honey cost around $9.75kg.

Yeah I'm not sure I'm up to a 10,000 mile (16,000km) swim. I may be getting a little old for that. :)

I used to buy honey at the store like most folks do. It was around $14.00/lb. I found a relatively local beekeeper that sells in bulk. It runs about $3.50/lb from him. I buy 2 of those jugs at a time. This past summer was my third purchase from him in 10 years.
 
@UncleJoe that is a huge price disparity between the shops and what your beekeeper is selling it to you for, good on you for picking up a great bargain. Honey is getting expensive everywhere and it is almost what I call "gold leaf or gold plated" prices. It is the same here as the beekeepers usually sell the honey for a little over what they sell it to the honey manufacturers for.

A boat would be a better option and would be much easier on the arms and body I think :LOL:.
 
More preps purchased -
- 2 more pairs of combat leather and canvas work boots on eBay with a 10% off voucher, 1 pair for DH and 1 pair for me, this saved $189.10 over our local prices here.
- Heading out this afternoon to buy 2 more 20lt jerry cans for our fuel and fill up the 3 we have empty here + the other 2 we are buying too as petrol is supposed to go up to $1.50lt soon here.

@Tank-Girl if you need fuel get it now it is expected to shortly go up to $1.50lt, if you have it in your budget get a few more jerry cans (Bunnings have them for $18ea) and fill them too.
 
More preps purchased -
- 2 more pairs of combat leather and canvas work boots on eBay with a 10% off voucher, 1 pair for DH and 1 pair for me, this saved $189.10 over our local prices here.
- Heading out this afternoon to buy 2 more 20lt jerry cans for our fuel and fill up the 3 we have empty here + the other 2 we are buying too as petrol is supposed to go up to $1.50lt soon here.

@Tank-Girl if you need fuel get it now it is expected to shortly go up to $1.50lt, if you have it in your budget get a few more jerry cans (Bunnings have them for $18ea) and fill them too.

Thanks for the heads up.
I have a few sitting empty so I def. get them filled while prices are lower.
The lowest price in town atm is 129.30 per ltr.
Stocking up now will save a lot of hurt later.

I hope you are stocking up on warm clothing and blankets and tripling your firewood stores.
I expect the trend for bitter cold in the Northern hem. will repeat here in the Southern.
I'm going to the second hand stores to stock up now while winter is off everyone's radar.
Call me mad but I rather be too hot rather than too cold.
Too many years living in the tropics I guess.
 
@Tank-Girl yes we also follow the U.S weather patterns and we are expecting it also to be a bitterly cold winter this year. We have a good 2 years worth of firewood and kindling chopped, split and ready to go thanks to a friend letting us cut on his property and also the neighbour's real estate tree contractor cutting a huge 15mt high ironbark down on their property and giving us the wood cut into 1.5mt lengths. Gotta love when you don't even have to leave home to get firewood :D . I like warm and not cool too as I am fairly light weight myself, DH can walk around in shorts :rolleyes: . Stocked up on new warm lined and polyester puffer coats on clearance at $5 - $30 ea too as well as woollen socks galore so think we will be right all around. We can also cut more firewood at any time as we have open access to a large property.

Most welcome for the heads up on the fuel as I know you use a bit for travelling for medical appointments and fuel here looks a little higher $1.30lt.
 
Since we're expecting snow and ice soon, bought milk and Epic All Natural Meat Bars in bison at the whole food store. These various bars are new to me, so i'm not sure if it's good or not, but they looked interesting and it'll be a 'go to' if the electric goes out for a long time.
Epic Bars.png
 
Did our other half of our 6 weekly grocery shop today and topped up on 8kg more flour for the stockpile taking us to 7 months supply :D . Also got 2 nice pairs of dressy shorts with the appropriate length on me on special saving $99.90 on usual prices. There seems to be a trend here in Australia anyway that all pairs of shorts must look like the ones Kylie Minogue wears which is not indeed suitable for a 5'7 3/4 " woman as anything that is short on most women is super skimpy on a taller woman :eek: .
 
got a question about freezer bags. when you buy them ,do you leave them in the box and stored them or do you take them out and store them in a bucket ?
I understand your question now. I buy mine from Costco, so I usually get 4 boxes at a time. Like many people, I have a drawer in my kitchen where I keep all of this type of stuff: foil, waxed paper, parchment paper, various sized self closing bags, trash bags, etc. I keep it in the box it came in there. I put the extra boxes in with my other storage, on a shelf. I try to have extras. It is easy to see what I have by how many boxes I have of each.
 
Just ordered another 4,000 rounds of 9mm and 2,000 rounds of 5.56mm to replace what I will be shooting from my stored ammo in 2018. Some years I shoot it all, some years I don't. If I don't that just means more ammo in storage. Of course that does not count what I will be shooting from department ammo.

On a side note the Augason Farms food buckets that I used to buy every month for under $60 each are now regularly priced at twice that. Crazy stuff.
 
While at Costco today they had shelf stable milk in the juice box containers. I always keep whole milk in this form for Juju but they had 1%! I grabbed a package for Roo. I'd rather have it on the shelf than not. They seem to have a 6-9 month shelf life if you find them as soon as they hit the shelves. No biggie. I buy a package of the whole milk right before we visit my folks and keep it at their house and bring the old one home to use.

I also added a new book to our Classics library for when SHTF. You can never have too many good books to read on snowy nights.

I am also always on the look out for things to add to the girls' sewing kits for when they are older. Just added some needle threaders. I want them to know how to hand and machine sew neatly before they get married. Plus the kits can go in their hope chests.
 
Hello everyone and I hope your preps are all coming along well. We had to go into town and buy some corn seeds so we stocked up on 5 packets as we had run out of our saved ones and while we were at it I topped up on 12 more tins of sweet corn on 52.5 % off price special at Woolworths and coupled that with another 5% off discount using our roadside assist club gift cards bringing them in at only a titch under 80c per tin. Usually this our favourite brand of Aussie corn kernels is $1.77 per tin and they seem to be the only ones that have a low sodium variety which we like.
 
Today we purchased a combination of 56 vacuum storage bags for our clothing, sheets and blankets for the dressing room of the cottage. We have such a small home that it saves so much room to vacuum seal everything into a more confined space and also keeps our clothing good and away from moths in the off seasons we are not wearing them.
 
Today we purchased a combination of 56 vacuum storage bags for our clothing, sheets and blankets for the dressing room of the cottage. We have such a small home that it saves so much room to vacuum seal everything into a more confined space and also keeps our clothing good and away from moths in the off seasons we are not wearing them.
Those are fabulous. My daughter has used many of them to protect her clothing from moths as well.
 
Pretty obvious we’re having an extremely dry and warm winter here in Utah. Possibility of another summer of water rationing. I harvest water for my garden and the water level is pretty low. So I’ve started looking at ways to harvest gray water for the garden.
 
@timmie it is a never ending task to stock everything gradually and within at least our budget anyway, you are doing well.

@fteter we harvest grey water from our washing machine by putting an extension hose onto the existing hose and running it into a grey water barrel downstairs to use on the gardens and lawns and we also save all of our bath and shower water by putting in the plug of the bath and also empty that into our grey water barrel downstairs to use. It is fine to use on your gardens if you use no phosphorus biodegradable washing products as we do. You just have to alternate between that and fresh water and make sure you don't use the grey water on any crops where the fruits touch the ground or root crops such as carrots, beetroot etc. We also are in a small country town with permanent water restrictions which vary depending on how low the dam levels are here.
 
Over the last couple of days we have -
- Picked enough cherry tomatoes to make 11 meals which we have frozen and put in the freezer.
- Sorted out rosemary I had traditionally drying in the home making 23g more for our stocks and some for sale.
- At Aldi found tinned lychees on special for $1.68 a 567g tin (normally $2.75ea) and purchased 14 to replace stocks we had used and another 22 to add to our food storage saving $38.52 on usual prices.
 
There have been more grain, rice, bean and chick pea crop destruction across Asia, India and the Middle East due to bad weather.
Global spot prices for these food stuffs will go through the roof.
Time to once again do the weigh-up about what to purchase next.
It's going to have to be grain products - flours, beans, rolled oats, lentils and more bags of grain for the chickens.
My last bag of mixed grain which is normally excellent was pretty sparse on wheat and sunflowers and heavy on sorghum which the chickens hate.
They'll only eat it if I soak it and it sprouts for 5 days.
 
@Tank-Girl thanks for the heads up on the shortages and most likely price rises yet again coming up, sigh.

Re stocking I have heads up for you on how to get your groceries cheaper by 16.66%. On eBay there is a seller called wooworthssupermarkets which I imagine is Woolworths on Ebay at the moment offering $240 E Vouchers for $200 and another one $350 voucher for $300 (free delivery) valid to use till the 31/3/2018. Mark this seller in your favourites for future reference as they have these promotions once every 3 - 4 months from what I have been observing.

You buy it and they send you the E Voucher number online then you simply go and shop on line and enter the voucher number in the promotion code area and pay as usual.

Heard about the grain shortage so we did buy one of the $350 vouchers and just put in an order for the rest of the years supply of flour, oats. Will work on chickpeas, more rice and other beans next Tuesday when I go shopping.

Hope this helps you to save :D and make your budget go further.
 
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