living fridge free

So the plan is to live in my house fridge free - facilitated by use of a cool room/cellar.


Life has progressed since i started this blog.  Currently we are sharing a house with another family who have similar living ideals to us.  They own the house a long with the 10 acres that it is on which has facilitated many more ideas.  They have lived fridge free before using their fridge (switched off) as an insulated cool room and kept it cool by using freezer blocks which they rotated twice a day to keep it cold enough to store things long term.

In thinking about how I will do it a few things have come apparent.  one is that we will most likely have a house cow very soon.  This means access to fresh, raw milk relatively easily, which in turn means that we can just go day by day - no more needing to store milk for a long time.  Butter will be fine in a cool room.  Hopefully I will be making cheese from any excess milk which will also be fine stored in the cool room.  Vegetables will hopefully mostly be coming from the garden so can be picked as needed and long term storage will be (you guessed it) the cool room.
Meat will be mostly from the freezer I think.  This will also form long term storage for things like berries picked over summer and other fruits, sauces I make in big batches that involve meat and probably some vegies as well (green ones mostly which will be blanched and then frozen).
The cool store will be designed with lots of shelves to house bottled things - fruit, tomato sauces etc - and other long term storage foods - cheeses, soaps (need cool storage), bulk lots of flour, rice etc.

In slightly unrelated news, having justified spending money of fibre and related stuff by calling it skilling up for TEOTWAWKI, i have had the inkling of a thought about starting a market built on barter.  Not sure South Lumberjackistan is ready for it, but if I'm working on the premise that the monetary system is not going to last a huge amount longer then this is the way stuff will go anyway...  hmmmm.  How to start...