Using buckets for long term food storage

emergency flour storage bucket

Look at the supermarket today and you’ll find an abundance of fresh food to choose from. It wasn’t always like that. The Netherlands suffered a big famine in the winter of 1944/45. People had to travel by bicycle from the big cities to the countryside, in hopes of finding farmers who had some food available for sale.

The Dutch famine is a classic example of how rapidly things can go wrong in a wealthy densely populated country. Famine is not just something you hear about on TV, my grandparents lived through one, they had to eat tulip bulbs to survive. Many people suffered hunger during the Great Depression too.

In countries plagued by war today, famines are happening as we speak. Things can go wrong in a country without war too however. In Venezuela in 2016, 75% of the population lost an average of 19 pounds of weight! A big natural disaster could similarly lead to people going hungry. For this reason, we will look today at ways to store food to prepare for potentially disastrous situations.

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DIY Emergency Kit

With regular large scale disasters already common in North America, it’s a good time to talk a bit about disaster preparation and how a 5 gallon bucket can help provide some good physical insurance against a catastrophic situation.

diy bucket emergency disaster kit

Image Credit: SafetyKitStore.com

A well designed emergency kit will contain the best bits of modern technology and healthcare. IT should be designed to secure you in a variety of disaster scenarios, while remaining portable enough to take with you if you need to evacuate.

Since this is a website about buckets, we are designing a sample kit that fits neatly in a 5 gallon bucket. You could also use a backpack, but you won’t get the benefit of an airtight, waterproof seal. Continue reading

Water Boiler

Count how often in a day you use hot water out of the tap. I can think of several – washing hands, taking a shower, cleaning clothes or as a shortcut to boiling water for pasta.

hot-water-5-gallon-bucket

Hot tap water is the ultimate modern luxury, but you can’t always count on it being there. Your hot water might vanish during a water boiler breakdown, plumbing trouble, a natural disaster, or even something as mundane as going camping.

With an efficient 5 gallon hot water system in place, you’ll never have to go without. Continue reading

Grain Thresher

When wheat, barley, or other grains are harvested, the grain must be separated from the rest of the plant before it can be used to make flour. This separation is called threshing. In the agriculture of today, threshing is done with massive machines called combines.

As you probably have figured out by now, you can make your own ultra-cheap thresher with a 5 gallon bucket.

wheat-kernals-in-hand

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Pail Liner

I used to wash 15 buckets a day back when I picked up compostable food scraps in 5 gallon buckets in Victoria. The buckets had to be clean enough to sit for the next week in an office environment without stinking. It would take me 1 hour to wash those 15 buckets.

Then I started lining those pails with paper before I dropped them off for people. All of a sudden, clean-up time for those 20 buckets shrunk from a full hour to less than 15 minutes! My workload was cut by a factor of 4, just because I took 10 seconds to line my pails.

compost-pail-emptying

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