Did you know that there are many different times of pantries? Butler’s pantry, kitchen pantry, slide out pantry, built-in pantry, free-standing pantry, and of course the most important one – the Prepper Pantry!
The question isn’t do you have a pantry – but do you have a dedicated space for your Prepper Pantry? If you do, you’re lucky. If you don’t, you’re not alone, and you’re not up the creek without a paddle. There are plenty of things that you can do to make up for that lack. Let’s talk about some of your options.
Start Where You Are – With What You Have
Start with the most obvious place and grow from there. We started in one cabinet in our garage and put canned goods in there. We grew from there to a single shelf in the garage. From there, we expanded to the masterbedroom closet. And by that time, we decided to move kids into one room so that we had an entire room for our Food storage.
Places to Store Your Stash
But there are plenty of other places that you can stash your short-term food storage – aka Prepper Pantry. Do you have a linen closet? Instead of keeping towels, washcloths and sheets there, put a towel rack on the back of your bathroom door. Everyone’s towel and washcloth go there. Sheets go in the room for the bed that they will go on. This frees up your linen closet for your pantry.
Another option that you have is to put your bed on risers. Amazon has FIFO’s (First-In, First-Out). These are rolling can racks. You put a store-bought can in the top and it rolls down. This way you always use the oldest one first. If you put your bed on risers, you will likely be able to fit these under your bed. If you have a queen-sized bed, you can fit 10 of these FIFOs allowing you to store 540 cans under them. You can also store 432 cans under a twin bed. This is a great place to keep your short-term storage.
Another option is to put a short bookcase in a closet. This allows you to hang clothes above it, but to store foods on those bookcases. I also have six baskets that fit under my coffee table. Each would hold 36 cans of food allowing me to fit 216 cans under my coffee table. You can place a short bookcase between a couch and the wall. Use this ‘couch table,’ but store canned goods on the shelves.
Organizing Your ‘Non-Pantry’ for Short-Term Food Storage
When you are working without a dedicated room for a short-term food storage pantry, you’ll need to be able to find the foods that you need when you need them. That can be more difficult than it sounds, so here are some tips. Make sure that you’re storing like items together: vegetables (beans), vegetables, fruit, meat, soups, sauces, etc.
Once you’ve organized your short-term food storage by type and location, you need to know where you’ve put everything. I use a list app on my phone called Cozi. This app allows me to create headings and to categorize items under each heading. This way, I always know what’s in each location.
Rotating Your Short-Term Prepper Pantry
But moving onto short-term food storage, we have four types of foods that most people will have in their short-term food of your Prepper Pantry. These four include home canned items, store-bought canned items, boxed items, and bagged items.
The first question you need to ask yourself is: are you going to use some type of FIFO (First-In, First-Out) unit or will you store your canned goods on shelving units? If you’re using FIFO units, then it’s easy to make sure that you’re using the oldest item first. If, however, you are using regular shelving units, and you purchase canned goods by the flat, put the month and the date on the top of each can. Put the newest case on the bottom of the pile of flats and the oldest should be on the top. As you finish out a flat, you replace it with a new one on the bottom of the stack of flats.
What about boxed items? I also like to purchase boxed items in flats. These are taller, so you can’t stack them, but once again, when they are purchased, I like to label the top of them each with the month and day. I use the items in front, move everything forward, and replace the free spots with the next newest items.
When I work with bagged items like pasta or chocolate chips, there’s one thing that I do differently. Sharpies don’t write well on these types of items. I like to use circle stickers. I still prefer to purchase these by the case. When I bring them home, I mark them with circle stickers. Then one of the circle stickers goes on the front of the case with the month and year.
Now what about home canned items? There are several ways to store these. You can use the flat that they came in to store them. I highly recommend removing the ring and labeling the top with the month and year. These usually to from top to bottom, front to back on a self.
Another way to store your home-canned jars is a product called a cannning jar safecrates. These are sold by LemProducts. Each of these safecrates holds a dozen pint or quart canning jars. It keeps the jars together, and they are stackable as well.
Finding Places for Your Long-Term Storage Items for your Prepper Pantry
Let’s start with places that you should NOT store your long-term food storage items. Please don’t store your long-term food storage in your attic. Even food properly packaged in buckets in Mylar with oxygen absorbers, may only stay useable in your attic for 6 months when it would normally last thirty years! Don’t stash long-term food storage in your garage. Do not store your long-term food storage in an outdoor non-climate-controlled location. And do not put your long-term food storage in an area inside a home that experiences temperature swings.
But where can you store your food then if you don’t have a dedicated food storage room? You may have options that you haven’t considered. Do you have a root cellar? You can store your buckets there. You can store food buckets in the bottom of a clothes closet or in the bottom of a linen closet. If you have people with whom you are very close, you could discuss the possibility of storing your long-term food storage in their basement. Terms would have to be discussed. Buckets would have to be labelled. Access would have to be granted, but this may be a possibility for your family. Another potential option would be storing your long-term food storage in a climate controlled storage facility. The downside to that is that you’ll have to pay monthly, but it may be at least a short-term solution to your problem until you can get your situation ironed out.
Visually Organizing Your Long-Term Food Storage for you Prepper Pantry
Organizing your bulk items can be fairly simple. If you’ve chosen to store your foods in sealed Mylar bags with an oxygen absorber in a 5 gallon bucket (which is my recommendation) the easiest way to know, at a glance, what is in the bucket is to use color coded Gamma Seal lids. I’ve found gamma seal lids in the following colors: blue, white, orange, green, black, red, and yellow. So your food storage organization may look like this –
- White gamma seal lid – wheat berries
- Black gamma seal lid – oats
- Orange gamma seal lid – dried navy beans
- Red gamma seal lid – dried black beans
- Green gamma seal lid – sugar
- Blue gamma seal lid – salt
- Yellow gamma seal lid – corn
Black and white are the most prevalent colors which can be purchased in only that color. Once the contents are organized at a glance by color, you only need to worry about the dates of each item. I would highly recommend you use label stickers or name stickers (Hello, my name is…) and mark the top, front and back of each bucket with the date.
When you stack the buckets, you want the newest items to be in the back on the bottom and you want to work your way up and forward as you move to newer buckets.
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