Destiny Survival

With the growing interest in simpler, back to basics living, there’s a thirst for knowledge about canning and making things like bread and cheese. Wilson and his wife Chaya saw that need. A couple of years ago they started Pantry Paratus to help you build your survival pantry.

For yesterday’s DestinySurvival Radio I interviewed Wilson to find out more about Pantry Paratus and bring them to your attention. Whether you’re new to prepping or have been at it a while, consider Pantry Paratus as a helpful resource.

 

What’s in a name? One of my first questions was where the name came from. We all know what a pantry is, but what about that word “paratus”? It so happens it’s latin for “ready” or “prepared”. By the way, paratus is pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable, which has the short a sound.

 

Who is Pantry Paratus? They’re a small family owned and operated company with a desire to see you and me think seriously about what our families are eating, where that food comes from, and how we can preserve any surplus we may have. The goal is to prepare our pantries for the lean times, whether you go through unemployment or we experience a catastrophic crash.

Wilson says customer service is important because they want you to be able to get the help you need. If you buy a pressure cooker at a big box store, that store likely won’t be able to answer your canning questions. Why not be in touch with people who can walk you through your journey?

With much knowledge lost over the generations, Pantry Paratus offers beginner kits and supplies for skills like canning, bread baking and cheese making. They also sell heirloom seeds and encourage you to grow your own food wherever you live.

 

What do you need to know for survival? Pantry Paratus puts their focus on four core competencies for homesteading.

Wilson and Chaya strive to offer you survival supplies they’ve used and can believe in. Also, if you want items that will work when there’s no electricity, they have hand cranked grain mills and grinders, as well as gravity fed Berkey water filters.

 

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What about ready-made storage food? Have it in your survival pantgry, but be careful to buy food that doesn’t have GMO products in it. You don’t want to eat something in times of stress that would make you ill.

If you know how to grow or raise your own food, you’ll have an ongoing supply. You’ll also put greater value on what you produce yourself.

 

What about a traditional food diet? Wilson and Chaya are very careful about what their family eats. They avoid foods with long lists of ingredients no one can pronounce. They eat meat, so they’re not vegetarians. They also enjoy whole wheat bread with no worries about gluten or bad carbs.

 

What about special needs diets? If you’re diabetic or have other dietary concerns, the best thing is to avoid as much processed food as possible.

 

Find out more. Hear my interview with Wilson when you listen to DestinySurvival Radio for May 9, 2013. Check out what the company has to offer at www.pantryparatus.com.

 

For further reading… Two books you may find of interest are:

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve recently become affiliated with Pantry Paratus because I like what they have to offer you. . That means when you buy products from them, DestinySurvival gets a small commission. And that helps keep the site going. Click on their link above or find their ad on the Food Storage & Preserving page in the Prep Mart.

Your thoughts? I’d love to know what you have to say concerning what you’ve read here or what you’ve heard in my interview with Wilson. Share any comments you have with me and other readers.

Spring has been slow to come to much of the country this year. If you’re in such an area, as I am, you probably haven’t been able to do much gardening until now.

When you finally do get outdoors, you’ll want to beware of garden injuries. The March/April, 2013 issue of “Backwoods Home Magazine” (Issue #140) includes an article on how to handle it when you hurt yourself while you’re in your survival garden. It’s by Joseph Alton, aka Dr. Bones of Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy fame.

No, this isn’t about being bruised by a berserk broccoli, punched out by a pompous potato or tortured by a tense tomato. Read the whole article to get helpful advice on real injuries like…

There’s more to come on garden injuries in the May/June “Backwoods Home Magazine.” And, of course, you can get plenty of useful info on many other kinds of injuries and medical situations in The Doom and Bloom(tm) Survival Medicine Handbook, by Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy.

How do you deal with those survival gardening occupational hazards when they happen to you? Leave a comment below and share your words of wisdom with other survival gardeners.

I’ve written posts in the past about square foot gardening and my experiences with it. I’m a big fan of it. Perhaps you’ve read Mel Bartholomew’s book, All New Square Foot Gardening and have done your own square foot gardening.

But when Wise Food Storage sent me the following article to pass along to you with a square foot gardening overview, I thought it was time to revisit the subject.. Do anything you can do to make gardening easier so you can produce more of your own food.

I’m a fan of raised bed gardening. It’s always interesting to discover what others do to make their gardens successful for them. That’s especially true if an idea or technique is inexpensive.

The March/April 2013 “Backwoods Home Magazine” (Issue #140) includes an article about making low cost raised beds. An excerpt follows, and you can read the whole thing by clicking on the link below.

One of the goals of survival gardening is low maintenance gardening. The least work for the most food. It’s not about being lazy. It’s about being resourceful and having food.

A couple of my favorite crops are Swiss chard and multiplier onions. Chard is cut-and-come-again, which means you cut it and it grows back all season long. Multiplier onions divide underground or produce above ground bulblets to give you an ongoing supply.

Jerusalem artichokes are considered a weed by most people, but one thing’s for sure. You’ll always have a source of their tuberous roots to cook up or eat raw in salads.

And I can testify to the ongoing productiveness of chives. I planted some in a 5 gallon bucket over 20 years ago, and I’ve had them in abundance every year since.

There are other crops which you can plant once and have food for years to come. That’s the topic of an article by Jackie Clay-Atkinson in Issue #140, March/April, 2013, of “Backwoods Home Magazine.” She covers…

Survival gardening means you grow food you and your family could survive on. Ideally, you want to do the least amount of work for the most amount of food. And what if you could conceal it so thieves won’t steal from it.

Now picture this. You could plant a survival garden that you…

It sounds fascinating and enticing, doesn’t it? But does it sound too good to be true?

Rick Austin has been doing it for years and has been teaching others to garden that way. In fact, he’s written Secret Garden of Survival-How to grow a camouflaged food-forest to show you and me how to do it, too.

Rick Austin refers to himself as the Survivalist Gardener, and he was my guest yesterday on DestinySurvival Radio. He took a half-acre southern slope in North Carolina and turned it from red clay into a “food forest” in one year. He has proven his method of survival gardening to be the essential prepper food source that can provide you with all the fruit, vegetables, nuts and berries, that you and your family can consume in a year.

To quote from Rick’s info, he “is a long time survival expert, and has been using sustainable living and home building practices for 30 years. He is a permaculture gardening, solar, and off-grid living expert and has been a guest speaker to architectural, agricultural, sustainable building, and survival preparedness conferences. His presentations contain real life examples, photos, and anecdotes.”

I can tell you from our interview that he’s the real deal. He’s been prepping long before prepping became fashionable.

The contents includes…

Reviewers on Amazon agree Secret Garden of Survival is easy to read and gives you all the step by step info you need. It’s based on Rick’s years of growing experience using permaculture. It’s not theory, and he made it a point to include plenty of pictures to prove it.

Rick says it’s simply the way nature does things. This method of permaculture gardening relies heavily on companion planting. You grow plants that grow well together.

Keep pests away. For example, planting onions around fruit trees keeps mice away in winter. Catnip near tomatoes keeps tomato hornworms away. Attract beneficial insects by growing plants that will attract them.

Plants are grown in concentric circles around fruit and nut trees to achieve the food forest, camouflaged look. Space is saved when you grow vines up the trees. And plants are interplanted. This is both stealth gardening and intensive gardening.

Each tree with its surrounding plants is called a guild. Trees are planted 40 feet apart, but plants growing out around each tree will take up enough space so the guilds touch one another.

Rick has about 20 fruit and nut trees. He grows as many fruits as he can for his region in North Carolina, including numerous kinds of berries. He grows grapes, too.

From their first year of gardening this way, Rick and his wife grew more fruits and vegetables than they could consume. This was all done without fertilizers or pesticides. Even Rick is amazed by how well it all works.

It takes careful planning to make this system work. You must consider the space you have and select carefully for the varieties of plants that do well in your area. Rick says the best way to get started is to get his book and follow the step by step directions. Pictures demonstrate more than many words could explain adequately. It’s his goal to make it simple to understand.

This is truly low maintenance gardening. In fact, Rick doesn’t even worry about weeds. He says the most work comes at harvest time. Fortunately, crops are harvested at different times.

But the key is to work with nature, rather than against it.

First, listen to my interview with Rick Austin when you hear DestinySurvival Radio for February 28, 2013 because we talked about more than I have space to share here. Then check out Rick’s site at www.SecretGardenOfSurvival.com. Buy his book there at a discount, or click on the image below and buy it from Amazon and support DestinySurvival at the same time.

No matter where you get the book, you may want to get the paperback version so you can take notes to refer to later. And you’ll have a hard copy for the future when we find ourselves in the proverbial off grid situation.

What do you think? Does Rick Austin’s secret garden of survival sound too good to be true? Or is it the way survival gardening was meant to be? Is this something you’ll try? Would you grow this way at a bug out location? I’d love to know your thoughts in a comment below.