What to store

[opsec]

This will keep all your bases covered nutritionally. You can add other stuff to it to suit your taste but this list provides the backbone for any food storage program. I purposely left out quantities because that can be calculated based on how long of a duration you want. The important thing to notice is the variety. The only thing listed in order of priority is water (#1) the rest of the list is not in any specific order. The other thing to note is that everything on this list is shelf stable for several years, the only exception being any kind of flour which has a shelf life of about 2 years.

1) Water (lots) - assume this to mean a bare minimum of two gallons per day per person. One is just for drinking, the other for cooking and hygiene. 1 year of water = at least 730 gallons (that's fourteen 55 gallon drums)
2) Rice
3) Beans: Mostly black beans and pinto beans, but also other kinds to add to soups
4) Carbohydrates: Pasta/Flour/Wheat/Cereal/Pancake batter (just add water type)
5) Cooking oils (extra virgin olive oil, canola oil, crisco)
6) Canned/dehydrated fruit
7) Canned/dehydrated meat (spam is good) and/or protein powders (MetRx), plan on
using 120 grams of protein per day minimum
8) Canned/dehydrated vegetables
9) Nutritional suplements: multi-vitamin/mineral pills, EFA capsules, Bioflavinoid pills,
L-lysine capsules as beans and legumes are short on this amino acid and
your bodyneeds it to make a complete protein
10) Spices (garlic and pepper at least), salt (real-salt is better than table salt), sauce
mixes pre-packaged soup mixes, any other shelf-stable sundries (dehydrated egg
mixes, dry milk, cake/brownie/muffin mix)

[Atash Hagmahani]

Good list, Opsec. It looks very much like what I've got stored...including the supplements because I was afraid we might get scurvy if we tried to live on beans and rice (no vitamin C, which humans can neither store nor synthesize). I'll take a 2nd look at it when my mind clears (it's been a long week).

[opsec]

Here's a primitive survival technique for obtaining vitamin C: Make evergreen tea. Boil your water first and let it cool a bit, then drop in a bunch of chopped up pine needles. It doesn't matter what species of evergreen tree you use, they all have vitamin C in the needles. Steep for a few minutes and then drink. One good sized handful of needles will yield about 10 mg of vitamin C. It's not a lot but certainly enough to ward off scurvy. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from mincing an entire gallon jug full of needles and using the whole thing in one day. You can safely take up to 10,000 mg of vitamin C daily.

Important note: don't add the needles to the water when it is boiling. That much heat will destroy the vitamin C.

[rh58]

@Opsec, The idea of pine needle steeped tea actually sounds kind of tasty.  I am not an expert in any of this but have heard in the past that the Hemlock tree bark is poisonous.  Are you absolutely sure that the hemlock pine tree needles would be safe?

I'm a newbie here but see that your posts are very informative.

Thanks.
RH58

[Atash Hagmahani]

Beware that "Hemlock" refers to 2 different plants that are not at all closely-related. One is a coniferous tree, and one is an herb, I think in the poisonous herb is in the family Umbellaceae, which by the way is the same one that a great many vegetables and culinary herbs happen to belong to.

But Hemlock, the herb, is what killed Socrates. It is quite poisonous. I don't know what the active principal is. So beware eating Umbellifers you don't recognize.

Here it is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conium

Wow, that looks a LOT like a lot of common herbs.

I am not sure about all of the conifers, but the ones I know to be quite poisonous (so don't confuse them with others) are Yews--Taxus. Yews are called "conifers", but they do not really have cones! In late summer they have a beautiful, distinctive red berry (technically, an "aril"), which is edible, BUT THE SEED IS NOT. Well, heck, they're full of chemo drugs like Taxinol!

[opsec]

http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Tsuga+heterophylla

Edible Parts: Inner bark.
Edible Uses: Condiment; Gum; Tea.

Inner bark - raw or cooked[213, 257]. It can be dried, ground into a powder and then used as a thickening in soups etc or mixed with cereals when making bread[161]. It has also been used as a sweetener for other foods[257]. The inner bark was often cooked and then dried for use in the winter[256]. At its best in spring[172], it was one of the staple foods of the Alaskan Indians[82]. An emergency food, it is only used when all else fails[183]. The leaves and twigs yield 'spruce oil', used commercially to flavour chewing gum, soft drinks, ice cream etc[183]. Pitch, obtained from crevices in the bark, has been chewed as a gum[257]. The leaves and young shoots have been chewed as an emergency food to keep one alive when lost in the woods[257]. A herbal tea is made from the leaves and shoot tips[172, 183]. These tips are also an ingredient of 'spruce beer'[183].

http://www.gregs.outdoor.page.20m.com/TNT/kitchen/mark_hammar's_edible_wild.htm

Pine needles - any pine needle, when boiled in water, will make a tea which is a good source of vitamin C.  They also smell nice and taste pretty good.  My favorite is made from the needles of the Eastern Hemlock tree.  Just break a stick from the tree with needles and boil the whole thing in the pot of water until it is coloured and tastes to your liking.

Atash,
    Thanks for the heads up on the Yew trees. I didn't know the needles were toxic. I would have avoided it just because the berries are red, but if the tree didn't have any berries on it at the time, I could have been a casualty of ignorance. I keep meaning to learn more about edible plants. I have some books, but I am far from proficient at recognizing edible vs. poisonous. Needless to say, my gear has two edible plant books in it and I don't eat anything that I can't positively identify first. A couple of basic rules that I have learned however is: never eat any mushrooms, experts on mushrooms have been nearly killed by lookalikes like the false morel, and those were experts. Second, stay away from red or white berries as they are usually toxic though not always. Black or blue berries are usually safe, though not always.
    A book recommendation for anybody who's interested: "Botany in a Day" by Thomas J. Elpel teaches how to recognize plants by the common features that define the family they are in. That goes a long way towards identifying edible vs. toxic. It's been sitting on my shelf, all I have to do now is read it...and about 20 other books that are stacked up with it.

[Dame]

Vitamin C:

Rose hips have very concentrated vitamin C and the bushes are ornamental.  I have in the past prepared homecanned Vit. C supplements from these hips and found it very palitable.  Picking the hips, sence mine are wild was labour intensive, however, with the recent availability of very cost effective berry pickers I am intending to do this again in comming years.

[Atash Hagmahani]

Yeah, I harvest rose-hips too. Roses are surprisingly useful, for something that seems like the quintessential fru-fru plant. The petals are useful for any of several purposes (well, if they are scented, anyway).

You can make a very old-fashioned jelly out of the hips too. It seems that if you strained out the seeds, it should make a decent preserve. I am not terribly fond of jellies, liking to see bits of fruit so that I know it's the real thing.

[liberty404]

May I suggest adding honey to your storage list.  Refrigeration is not needed.  If the container remains sealed, shelf life is about 10 years.  If not sealed, the honey absorbs moisture for the atmosphere and eventually ferments but remains edible - with a zing.  Honey that looks slushy has partially crystalized.  It remains edible and can be re-liquified by heating to about 130 degrees fahrenheit for 30 minutes or til clear.  To get larger quantities cheaply, talk to a local hobby beekeeper.

[The Future]

Regading pine needles, be aware that these contain significant concentrations of arsenic.  With that said, you may be surprised to know that in very limited amounts, arsenic actually has nutritional value to the body.  Amazing but true.  Check out the works of Charles Walters (Minerals for the Genetic Code) and he reveals how the pine needle tea is indicated to avoid miscarriage among other things...

As for vitamin C in concentration, it may be of little you to those in colder climates but there are a few plants that hyperconcentrate vitamin C.  In particular the West Indian Cherry and the Camu Camu plant have mind blowing amounts - upwards of 3000mg of vitamin C per 100g of fruit.

On that grounds, the cherry shrub may be a candidate for a greenhouse/container plant worthy of moving indoors as needed.

Other exceptional items to consider are kiwi vines, jujube and guava.

[Dame]

Kiwi, designed for growing conditions as cold as 2b, at least according to the nurseries, may be a real alternative in my colder climate.  I would need to figure out how I repeatedly kill them off and research whether or not the cold resistance has eliminated or substantially reduced the Vit C concentrations in the fruits.

[Horsea]

I read that sprouting beans causes Vitamin C to develop in the sprout.  Because then it's no longer a starchy seed, but a vegetable.  I find that mung & those tiny, olive-coloured mungshaped beans (moth beans - they pronounce it 'mote')you get from the Asian Indian stores sprout remarkably well.  Of course, it does depend on their freshness, but nevertheless, some beans sprout more easily than others. 

It is true that .346 mg/gram of Vitamin C in fresh sprouts is not much, but it is in my judgment probably very well assimilated, more so than anything from a bottle, tho that is just my opinion.  Enough to ward off scurvy in any event.

[opsec]

Good point. I'll have to get my hands on some mung beans and moth beans.

[Atash Hagmahani]

Dame, there are two extremely cold-hardy Kiwis that I know of, Actinidia kolomitka, and A. arguta.

They might even pollinate each other. You need at least 1 male for every 8 or so females.

A. kolomitka is gorgeous. Especially the male plants have attractively variegated leaves in the spring, although they darken later in the year. The females are pretty too. It has a rather small, narrow fruit, but sweeter than that of the fuzzy kiwi. Because of the pretty leaves, the males are much commoner in cultivation, but you should be able to find the females mail-order as "female Arctic Beauty". It is not the name of a variety, just a trade name for the whole species because they sell better when they have common names. The Russians have some named varieties but any will do.

A. arguta is not as pretty, but blooms and bears precociously, and the fruits are a little fatter than those of the Arctic Kiwi.

A word of caution: they are both from climates that turn decisively from cold to warm. So they do not deal well with climates where it can be warm, then turn frosty, then turn warm again, etc. Wrecks their blossoms. I would not have known that, had I not gotten flamed for recommending them by a grumpy old man back east, who flamed me for it. In my climate, there are virtually no frost when they bloom and if there were, they would be too mild to destroy the blossoms, so it is never a problem here. If your climate is distinctly "continental", and stays warm once the warm fronts hit, it should be fine. They take down to something like 40 below (C or F, take your pick). Probably survive even lower than that.

[Dame]

Tks Atash, those are the varieties I repeatedly kill, long before there are any blossoms to worry about getting frosted.
A detailed talk with the local nursery between now and Xmas, when they are not frantically busy is going on my to-do list.
I will post their suggestions when I get them.