Ooh, here I am! Preparing, Budgetting, Getting Your House in Order.

It has been soooo long since I wrote here, therefore expect a bit of a ramble!

To be totally honest I have taken to Instagram like I never thought I would, to the point that I have to have a little break here and there, but that is the only social media I use so I guess that's ok, or that it what I'm telling myself.

I have time to write this blog post just now as the boys are on an inset day and, obviously, still in bed at 8am!

So, I read a post of IG this morning about how a person came to cook, preserve and in turn prepare for life's situations and it made me think about why I do what I do now.

When we moved to Wales nearly 8 years ago I definitely wanted a garden to grow our own and we have one. I dreamed about a polytunnel/hoop greenhouse after seeing the landscape around us peppered with them - and we finally got ours in May 2020 after the first lockdown. 

Whilst at home with my parents I learned to make random things like bread sauce from scratch but really can't remember being in the kitchen with my mother teaching me to make or bake much, for various reasons.

Then when I was living in my first flat I started baking and cooking more. Flash forward a good few years to when I married Jon and we had our boys. I use to bake still and enjoyed making the baby food, I rarely bought it.

When we came to Wales life just required me to live my kitchen life differently; that may sound really daft but I came to the house with expectations of cooking and baking on the Rayburn we were lucky enough to have in the house, a country style, open kitchen demanded, yes, demanded I changed the way I cooked, made and baked!

My mum always made chutney but I never saw her water bath it to make it shelf stable; I now make that recipe, with a few tweaks, in the Autumn months.

I can remember always loving seeing pantrys full of lovely edibles but had no concept of how they got onto the shelves. I even remember seeing an episode of A Woman of Substance YEARS ago where there was a scene in a shop which sold fresh baked and made things, a vision I love to this day! 

I wanted a pantry like that and gradually I practised the technique of water bathing to get some things on my shelves. In the back of my mind I sort of knew about pressure canning and then learned more after I had read about it during WW2 and found wonderful #womenwhoprep on IG with all the skills I wish I had.

With the onset of the pandemic I began being more prepared for life situations that might occur and in October 2020 I started to keep extra things in at home, not just food but toiletries, day to day stuff. It is normally the woman of the house who is the #keeperofthefood and #keeperofthehome so do this for your family but get everybody else on board. When my husband and I started talking about this I didn't realise he was on the same page already! Around this time I began thinking about pressure canning myself as with water bathing you can't can meat or many vegetables. IG is full of glorious photos of lovely stocked pantries of home grown or preserved food and I SO wanted to be a member of the canning club.

I finally bought my Presto 23 pressure canner in April of this year and I 💓💓💓 it. After folowing YouTube videos asking for advice etc, including my bestie Tracy over at Our Smallholding Adventure , I am finally getting very comfortable with it and have canned meat and complete meals; I still water bath food such as some rhubarb I acquired with apples for pie filling; I just LOVE going down to the cellar and looking, sometimes stroking, my jars - I know!

All this is part of the being #preparednotscared scenario, which I have talked about before, but with the end of the pandemic came the economic crisis we are now experiencing. Food security is something which is very important just now, but also the war in Ukraine has brought issues with food supplies AND energy prices and along with the cap, of course, things are very difficult for a lot of people.

We are lucky that our energy tarrif is fixed until August next year but I will put some money aside for when it changes as it is likely to be quite high. We are lucky that with the Rayburn we spend less on warming the house and heating water in the winter as it does both things for us - an emersion can apparently cost approx. £300 a year - and we have two log burners. We are currently re stocking the woodpile for when the fires are lit in around October.

In the garden and polytunnel we grow vegetables and some fruit and i'm really trying to use things from there and not buy where I can. I don't have anywhere near as much space at Tracy, check out her set up, but I'm not buying potatoes, onoins or salad at the moment. We have tomatoes coming along with peas, beans and some other things as well as crops that won't be ready for a few months yet. My IG account - livingthegoodlifeinwales will show you MY set up!

We hope to start raising some of our own meat soon with turkeys on the agenda, and hopefully pork and lamb, as these are the most expensive part of our food budget but we recently lost our chickens to a fox attack so I am unfortunately buying eggs just now,😡 something Tracy is DEFINTELY not doing just now.😂

So, people often ask is it too late to start preparing, stocking up, changing habits whatever you want to call it and the answer is no. Start making small changes now, buy one extra of things you and your family eat when you go shopping - and that it is something you eat is the important thing to remember, if you don't eat tinned tuna DON'T stock up on it. Try to think about unnecesary spending, we can waste money on lots of weekend coffees and snacks when we need to go to town, so we try and go early before lunch or after so we are not tempted.

There are so many people out there doing their best for their families and sometimes it is the little things that help. I have my banking on my phone, wish I had done it earlier but never thought I would do, but it tells me my bank balance when all the expected bills have gone out so then you can budget with the remaining funds, I find it is starting to help me. Check out Tracy's stories for ideas other people are sharing on this subject.

There are loads of other things I could have included here but would hate to bore, get in touch if you want to chat. 

So remember, be #preparednotscared, #getyourhouseinorder and #tightenyourapronstrings and if you've stayed to the end of this, 👊, well done!

Lou. x