Recently we looked at the home as a working system. Food, water, first aid, light, tools, and family need all work better when the family as a whole understands how the household actually runs. The next step is to practice with the pantry. A pantry is not just extra food on a shelf. A useful pantry is food the family typically eats and knows how to cook. One simple way to learn your pantry is to make preparing meals from the pantry a game. Look through the cabinets, refrigerator, freezer, and garden if you have one. Then ask, “How many meals could we make before we had to go to the store?” Not fancy meals, but life-giving, wholesome meals. Beans and rice, soup and bread, pasta and sauce, oats, tacos, eggs, tuna salad, fried potatoes, pancakes, or whatever your family already eats. As you do this, observe the shelf life and whether something could be bought in a larger quantity at a better price. For example, I like Ro-Tel. I found that the large can is considerably cheaper, although I used to buy the smaller cans because I did not want waste. Now I buy the large can, use what I need, and put the rest in a clean quart jar in the refrigerator to use in the next week or so. This is a simple example although the goal is not to make this complicated. The goal is to save food cost and set the household up to eat for a period without constantly running to the grocery store. These observations will show what foods you really use and what comes up missing frequently. Do we have enough salt, oil, seasoning, stock, sauce, flour, eggs, or other common items that turn stored food into normal meals? Then start noticing the small grocery runs. Did we go for milk, bread, eggs, coffee, butter, pet food, toilet paper, dish soap, onions, snacks, or something for lunches? Repeated runs are clues. Preparedness does not need to begin with special emergency food supplies. Sometimes it begins by keeping more of the normal things the household reaches for every week. If we use pasta sauce every week, one jar is fragile. Four or six jars give the home more breathing room. If we use rice, oats, coffee, peanut butter, canned tomatoes, beans, broth, or animal feed all the time, those are not random storage items. They are part of the household rhythm.

I built my poly tunnel from cattle panels, and it has been one of the more useful experiments on the homestead. I used 16-foot cattle panels and arched them across a 12-foot span because that is what my space allowed. If I had more room, I may have gone closer to a 14-foot span because it would give a little more growing width while still leaving plenty of headroom. The tradeoff is that a wider span lowers the center height. The 12-foot span worked well for my bed layout. A person can usually reach comfortably into a 32-inch bed when there is access from both sides. With 24-inch walkways, the layout works out like this: 32-inch bed, 24-inch walkway, 32-inch bed, 24-inch walkway, 32-inch bed. That equals 144 inches, or 12 feet. In real life, I would still leave a little room for posts, side rails, plant growth, straw bale insulation and general working space. This simple layout worked out well. With the 12-foot span and roughly 5-foot side walls, the center height is close to 9.5 to 10 feet, depending on how the panel bends and where it is fastened. With the same side wall height, a 14-foot span would be closer to an 8-foot center height. That would still be enough headroom and would give a little more floor or straw bale space. There are several ways to build a cattle panel poly tunnel, and some are much more permanent than others. Mine was built as a one-man, lower-cost experiment, not as a finished commercial greenhouse where I arched the panels from one side to the other. Another way would be to run the panels lengthwise with a pitched roof. In the design, the north wall can be more solid, act as an insulator and a wind break. I have seen people use straw bales along the north wall for insulation, water barrels with aquarium heaters or solid construction with insulation. For my first build, I used 7-foot T-posts so I could get about 5 feet of side wall height. I placed 1 1/4-inch PVC tees on top of the posts, then ran 3/4-inch EMT conduit through those tees as the side rail. The ends of the cattle panels were then wired to the EMT with wire bag ties.

Do you water your garden where the foliage and soil get wet? Please add clarification in the chat... Thank you

Got my seed potatoes, peas, and beans planted. Still a little harsh out for above ground plants here. Though some have already started planting transplants too. I'm just not willing to kill mine. I'll wait another week for temps at night to get a bit higher. Just so excited. Happy gardening!

Over the next week or so I will be posting snipetts on how select an herb in relation to body type. What I use current is body system you want to affect, primary action you would like to solve, the energetic quality of the herb, the dosha fit and the cautions for preexisting conditions or allergies. These seem straight forward although there are a lot of moving peices. Attached is a start. What is your Dosha?