52 Weeks of Food Storage

**These transcriptions are auto-generated, so heads up: there will surely be some mistakes!

Oh my gosh. We’re doing this. Welcome to 52 Weeks of Growing Your Food Storage. I’m so glad that you’re here. This is gonna be an awesomely productive year for your food storage. So we do have a few housekeeping items. I’m going to try to keep this short.

#1
You should have received a welcome email from me that has instructions on how to ensure that you continue to receive my emails.
These videos are not going to be anywhere available on my website or anything like that. I’m making this super easy. I didn’t want you to have to log in somewhere to access them. So you do need to be getting my emails every week. If Sunday evening comes and you haven’t gotten it yet, you’ll wanna check your junk mail. But hopefully if you follow the instructions in that welcome email, you will be getting my email every week and it shouldn’t be an issue.

#2
The second thing in that email is a list of blog posts that I have on food storage in general.
There are three blog posts on short-term storage and three on long-term food storage. I would recommend that you go through them if you have the time, you don’t have to do ’em now. You don’t have to read ’em today, and if that totally stresses you out, don’t worry about it. I just think that it’s really important to know kind of where we’re going and what all this means and why and all of that, so they’re very comprehensive. Let me know if you have any questions, but I wanted to remind you that those are available as just resources that you can read and refer back to.

#3
The third thing in that email was the link to this printable. This is a super simple printable that I created just for you. It’s really just an easy way to keep track of things that you buy this year.
So this little box here is meant for you to put the quantity of the item that you purchased. This line is for you to put the description of it. So bags of rice. You can get more descriptive there if you want to. You can put how many ounces are in each bag. You can put how many cups. I personally would go with what’s usable. I would rather know how many cups of rice because when I’m making rice for my family, I know how many cups we use every time I make rice. And so if I were gonna go to the trouble of labeling, I would put how many cups are in the bag, but that’s just me. I just wanted to throw that out there as something for you to think about.
And then this second line, the shorter line, is for you to put an expiration date. As you are unloading your groceries, you might as well jot down the expiration date of the items that you have purchased in this program this year so that you have a quick reference for it. If you don’t wanna do this, if this isn’t your style, if this seems overwhelming, don’t do it. This is not required.
You’re still gonna be buying the food. You’re still gonna have food in your pantry to cook with. This is just for those of you who want to kind of be able to get a snapshot by looking at one piece of paper, who wanna be able to kind of see their progress and who want a way to track it really, really simply.
So use this if you want to, don’t if you don’t want to. Totally up to you.

#4
The next thought that I have for you is just as we get started, if you want to create a folder in your email that’s called “52 Weeks of Growing Your Food Storage” or “Plan for Awesome” or something like that, it would be a real easy way to keep these emails organized.
These videos are not going to be available anywhere else, so when you get the email, if you delete that email, you’re not gonna have access to that video anymore. So if you think you’re gonna wanna go back and watch any of the videos, just throw ’em in a folder, and that way you know that you always have them.
Having said that, I don’t think that you’re gonna need to save these videos. They’re gonna be real quick. They’re just gonna tell you what to buy that week and maybe some reasoning behind it or things to think about, but they’re gonna be quick. And once you’ve purchased those items, you don’t need to worry about ’em the rest of the year.
So it’s up to you if you wanna save those videos or not. But I just wanna give you a heads up. There is not going to be some master list available anywhere for you. I just wanted to give you the idea to have a running folder that you can keep these emails in if you prefer.

#5
And then this last thing is the most important. So thank you for sticking with me to the end.
To make this program effective, you must be replenishing this food as you use it. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is we are not buying a year’s worth of food storage this year. We’re just getting you some inventory.
We’re getting a variety of items that you will have in your pantry, fridge, and freezer that you hopefully would be able to create some meals out of if there were shortages or if you weren’t able to get to a grocery store or whatever it might be, right? Let’s say you buy a couple things of peanut butter in January. Let’s say that’s next week. It’s not, but let’s say it is. If you’re like my family, those two jars of peanut butter will be gone by summer. You’re not gonna have anything to show for that in December of this year, right? Unless you are replenishing those peanut butters. And I’m not going to give you reminders because I don’t know how quickly your family is gonna go through peanut butter, so it will become your job starting now to be really vigilant. And maybe have a little mini family meeting and let people know if you finish a jar of anything, if you use a packet or a bag or a box of anything, if you are the last person to use it before you throw it in the trash, you need to write it on my grocery list so that I remember to replenish that.
Because if I’m buying two jars of peanut butter this month for my food storage, I don’t wanna use that by summer and have nothing. I want to always have at least two extra jars of peanut butter. If you use peanut butter, you probably already have at least one that’s maybe half used right now in your pantry. What this program is doing is giving you two extras to put behind that. Well, if you don’t replenish those, they’re gonna be gone by December and this won’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything.
The point of short-term food storage is that you are constantly using it and rotating it, so I wanted to make you aware of that. Don’t let that intimidate you. All you’ve gotta do is replace stuff as you use it. It’s really not that big of a deal, but this may be a new concept, not only for you, but for the other members in your household.
And of course, nobody’s gonna be perfect. I’ve been into the food storage game for my whole existence as a mother, and my kids still don’t write stuff on the grocery list. It’s fine. They do an okay job at it, but they’re not perfect. And neither am I. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a recipe and I forget, and then I realize, oh man, we’re running really low on this and it’s because I haven’t replenished the last couple that I’ve used or whatever.
So you’re not gonna be perfect. But I do wanna make it clear. If you want to feel accomplished and if you want to have food storage to show at the end of this year, that will need to be happening on a regular basis. The point is, we’re gonna be buying things that you are using on a regular basis, so you’ve gotta be on top of that and replenishing them.