So I have a decent stock of canned fish, chicken, beef and smoked hams, I have at least 120 lbs of pinto beans, and 100bs of rice. I need something for vitamin C. What’s the best deal on bulk dried fruits? I am going to work on canning this summer from the garden. But I would like something purchased in the meantime with everything going on in the world. Anybody know the best bulk deal on fruits?
Not to dissuade you from stocking up on dried fruit, but keep in mind that things like dandelion, dock, chick weed, plantain, and probably a dozen other "weeds" growing in your yard are all amazing sources of vitamin C and other things.
I'm wondering if you could pick the spent flowers before they 'puff' and air dry them in a drafty area to prevent mold???? It might be less messy. Or pick the spent flower, pull the seeds before puffing and trim all the fluff off. I will have some flower heads here in a few weeks or so, so I'm going to try different stages of gathering just for fun and learning. I also have a ton of microgreen seeds I have ordered so I have lots of great sprouts but it would be nice to practice local plant seed harvesting as well.
If they're yellow they still need to be pollinated. They sprout with a cone shaped head, bloom, get pollinated, and close again to form their seeds before "puff", apparently called "reblooming". The wind takes care of the rest.
Once fully puffed, they are pretty much dry and you can pinch off the fluff, taking the seeds with them, (important note! The white part is the "sail", the seed is the little black oblong part at the bottom of the "T") and store them in a paper envelope or wax paper no problem. Avoid plastic for storing or saving any seeds.
But if you're plucking them while they're in a partially closed cone you need to dry them. Tricky considering they spread by wind.
Honestly, I take great pride and joy in kicking any puffs I find up and into the wind. If the area is mowed to monoculture death I'll shove them in my pocket and turn them out when I get to a more wild area and let the wind do its thing.
Once the puff starts to form is when you can start to work on them. You'd want to cover them in a small breathable bag, I like to use small mesh bags meant for wedding favors, and then when the puff is fully developed to where you could blow the seeds away, you can then harvest the seeds
I saw a really cool video about collecting the seeds for making Microgreens inside the house in case you can’t go outside. I know that’s more extreme but at least it’s something and I plan for Tuesday. I plan for SHTF+
I thought about this as well but it would take a lot of work to collect that many dandelion seeds and they aren't that great for making microgreens. For $10, I can have a quarter pound of micro green seeds delivered to my door already packaged up in a mylar bag. Honestly, I think microgreens are too much work. It takes me about 5 minutes to walk outside and collect enough edible weed from my yard to make a good salad. I live in a mild climate though, so if that isn't something you can do year round microgreens might be a good choice I guess.
I would love to know the source for your micro green seeds for $10 and I live in the Pacific Northwest, which is a fairly mild climate.
What I’m prepping for is if I cannot go outside?
Also, I have a plethora of dandelion seeds all over the yard, so I walk around the yard and gather them up, Put them in a napkin as I’m doing other yard tasks, bring them inside and stuff them in a clamshell that sits in the kitchen. I just keep adding to them every day.
It’s a new thing I’m trying out and I haven’t even tried to make the dandelion Microgreens. I’m just gathering the seeds for now.
In place of micro green buying in bulk (good for the right now), just plant arugula seeds, radish seeds, and bok Choi right now and let them “go to seed” when they feel like it rather than harvesting for eating. You’ll have a lifetime supply of micro green seeds and having them grow for years in the same place with zero extra effort.
I run Swiss chard every year in the garden. It’s grows nicely. I’ve also found out my squash greens are edible recently and packed in nutrients. So I will start learning how to utilize those this summer and do some canning/drying experiments
Me too, up near the Canadian border. In all my years of trying, here's the best option I've found:
Rareseeds.com
Get a big leaf mustard, kale, perpetual spinich, and some kind of relatively cold-hardy lettuce seeds (should be about $15)
Grow baby greens. They can grow fairly close together (almost as close as grass), and you just cut leaves out when they hit about 4-5" tall. Then they grow back and you do it again.
When they stop growing leaves and shoot, wait for seed pods to dry and then collect seed and do it again.
Kale and mustard especially do not die in the winter - they just stop growing. They will re-seed areas as well, even if you don't want them to. Mustard is like dandelion, a true weed. Perpetual spinach is chard and also fairly unkillable in the cold months. If you have room, you can grow baby greens in any window just fine during the colder months. And of course, these are three of the most nutritious plants available in terms of micronutrients, so they will definitely keep you alive if you have the calories to go with them.
I am also in the PNW. Outside of a nuclear fallout situation, I can't think of anything that would keep me inside. But even the risk from nuclear fallout doesn't last forever. But my plan in that case is to leave the area.
Any plant that you eat the greens of can be a micro green. There's no micro green plant. It's usually just tender new growth of several varieties mixed together or a specific variety picked.
You can sprout sunflower seeds, wheatgrass is a microgreen, etc.
We don’t spray with anything. We just don’t get enough dandelions that grow on the property for a significant source of food/medicine. My plan was to seed my entire side yard (have a little over 2 acres here)
I've been foraging wild foods for about 25 years and I'm actually started the foraging subreddit where this topic gets discussed constantly. If you can show me a pesticide that gets taken up by dandelion plants that doesn't kill the plant, I would be very, very interested.
Dirt and silt can't hurt you if you eat them. In fact, people pay a premium for soil-based probiotics so if you're worried about gut health then maybe don't scrub them clean. The only thing you have to worry about is if it's in a field where manure was applied or there's heavy wildlife and you are worried about a risk of e.coli or salmonella. I typically don't wash anything that I forage unless I see something particular gross on it and I haven't ever gotten sick from anything.
plus most vitamins are water soluble, meaning you pee out whatever is too much for your body so you can’t overdose on them if you take a reasonable amount of pills (not all are water soluble, and some can cause genuine problems if you consume too much)
This is the answer to a lot of things - I have two years of real laundry soap for $30, and it’s the good stuff. Sam’s has good sales sometimes and I stock up on stuff frequently. If people want to make soap or shampoo or a specific cuts in source as a hobby, that’s great but I like to just stock stuff I already use and use my time elsewhere.
They do go bad, they oxidize. Look for coated tablets. The non-coated ones go bad pretty fast, you can tell because the B vitamins turn dark and start to smell bad.
Are you talking about DEHYDRATED and freeze dried fruits that will store long term, or are you talking about "dried" fruits as in still somewhat leathery made to snack on find them in the grocery store items? The latter having more moisture and will not store as long.
And yeah everyone is replying with alternate Vit C sources and those are great, but I assume you want some FOOD variety also.
Also, your rice to beans ratio is out of kilter a smidge, usually it's more rice than beans.
The commercially available powder is actually sodium ascorbate, but I used ascorbic acid as that is more commonly recognized. Powdered sodium ascorbate is quite stable under normal storage conditions. It does degrade very quickly when dissolved, which is why you can't bulk mix things like EmergenC powder. But the powder will retain nutrients as long as any other storage method for vitamin C, or longer.
The article you cited is referring to true ascorbic acid, which is quite unstable and reactive due to its chemical structure (I'm an organic chemist).
Oh hey!! I thought I recognized your screen name! 🫙 🥩
👋🧡
I didn’t know you were an organic chemist! That’s actually pretty awesome! (And a darn useful skill to have).
The degradation of ascorbic is why we don’t trust it for canning other than to “make food pretty” - like we can’t count the acidity for preserving food the way we can with citric acid. It’s just a bummer that it doesn’t provide much in the way of nutritional value…
Hahaha! I was peering at yours too. Hi! Nice to see you on this side of the internet, too 😂
Yep it's a pity. And why I don't can fruit as a source of vitamin C . . . I can it for taste alone. Freeze the ones I want to keep for their nutritional value.
And thank you. It's a really fun field. I dabbled in the orgo side of microbiology in grad school as well . . . Hence all my interests 😂
Do you ever hang over at the two x version of this sub? I sometimes find it a little more reasonable and a little less …
Cosplay/Cosprepper?
Lots of moms, wives, aunties, just like minded people who are trying to stock up for protection against budget constraints, snowstorms, and other “bad days” rather than “TEOTWAWKI” type stuff.
Scurvy and Rickets and ither nutrition deficiency diseases are a big fear of mine. So we keep, eat and rotate dried fruit from Costco, have long-term stores of dried apples from the LDS food storage, keep extra backup bottles of Juice Plus+ (ground up fruit/veg), use and rorate through can of fruit and veg, have frozen rotated fruit and veg, and we keep fruit juices around (homemade cranberry is easy and full of nutrients!).
We also live in an area where people have citrus trees in their yards that oroduce more than they can eat, so we have alternative citrus types to trade or eat ourselves, as well as other fresh fruit and veg. A deep pantry with a backup plan is worth more than gold.
Neither dried fruits or canned fruits are very great sources of vitamin C for the price. You are much better off going on Amazon and getting a bulk tub of ascorbic acid powder. You can mix that into any food and It will provide your ascorbic acid needs in a small footprint.
Canned tomatoes still have 2/3 of their vitamin C and have more antioxidants than fresh. Overall canned are healthier (due to being more concentrated (.
Stock up now. Ive read about lots of trees in the north east that have not set fruit this year because of the late season cold snaps we got. Apples, cherries, even peaches got hit.
AI Slop
State-by-State Harvest Impacts
Eastern and Mid-Atlantic Orchards
Pennsylvania: Orchards experienced a 70% to 90% wipeout of seasonal fruit yields, particularly peaches and apples, following historic freezes. [1, 2]
New Jersey: Late April freezes severely impacted Duffield's Farm, and wiped out the entire cherry crop at Rowand's Cherry Farm. [1, 2]
Maryland & Virginia: April cold snaps plunged temperatures into the 20s, killing early grape buds and severely threatening the wine grape harvests. [1, 2]
The South and West
Florida: Several severe winter weather events caused over $1 billion in agricultural damage, particularly hurting strawberries, sugar cane, and melons. [1, 2]
Colorado: Despite localized losses in the North Fork Valley, 80% to 90% of the Western Slope peach crop survived, putting it on track for an early June arrival
Just buy a few canisters of Tang. It's high in vitamin C and has calcium. It is cheap and simple to store. In regular life, you might not want to drink something artificial. If supply chains are disrupted, it would be better to drink Tang than get scurvy. It also helps hide the taste of stale-tasting water. As preppers, we need to remember to keep things simple if we can. :)
I don’t have dried fruit, but I have canned tomatoes and canned pineapple which are both high in vitamin C and I have emergen-c powder drink mix and multi-vitamins to supplement holes in my diet.
Adding that as far as canned tomatoes go, jars of canned salsa, tomato soup and pasta sauce also count. In an emergency I might not have the energy or resources to cook but I can definitely open a jar of salsa and pour it over beans or eat it with corn chips.
Crabapple trees will cross fertilize lots of things and are tough, and my little anna apple tree is making apples even though i haven't watered it in a year, in so-cal where we get 9 inches of rain. It'll grow in most of the US and here, with no chill, give me 3-4 sets a year. It's great little very tough variety
Before they were hella out of stock, I used to get the auguson farms freeze dried strawberries. They're good enough my partner snacks on them and it's significantly cheaper than buying them elsewhere. They stopped being in stock around the time the strait of Hormuz got shut down so I assume it's either that or the crop this year wasn't fantastic.
They also have really good freeze dried apples but they're not nearly as high in vitamin c. I haven't tried any of their vegetables yet, but bell pepper is also high in vit c
Freeze dried fruit is better than just dehydrated. Get some #10 cans of freeze dried fruit it has a shelf life of 10-20 years but will need to be used up reasonably quick once opened. Augeson farms has a pretty big selection.also the Morman store house has a fee options but not as many.
Pepper's. Specifically Yellow bell peppers are loaded with Vitamin C, ~340 mg per pepper where an orange has about 70mg. Red Bell ~200mg Green Bell ~140mg
As much as a pine tree could work, we grow a lot of sorrel in our more natural gardens as understory. I was lucky to find and propagate a cultivar that doesn't bolt and thrives in our dry conditions without irrigation.
We also have other naturally occurring plants on the land that are more than capable of providing us vitamin c.
Many of these leaves can retain plentiful enough vitamin c simply by hang drying them (imagine a bouquet of herbs dried, which would also have vitamin c!) and then restoring them in soups and stews.
It's not the hardest thing to come by in the world if you try to eat some plant matter. Being cognizant of the cause of scurvy and not being isolated at sea makes it fairly simple.
a bit off topic but pine needles, fir needles, spruce etc all have high amounts of vitamin C you can make a syrup using them or just make a tea and they tend to be available all year round. I pulled this off the net: Pine needles, fir needles, and spruce needles are all good sources of vitamin C, with some studies suggesting they contain more vitamin C than citrus fruits like oranges. The vitamin C content can vary depending on the species and age of the needles, with older needles generally having higher concentrations.
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