Tornado

We have been watching the news coverage of the Oklahoma tornado.  What a devastating event. Our hearts go out to those who are victims of this storm. 

We have experienced tornadoes. We have heard them.  They really do sound like a freight train.  The sky really does turn a greenish color.  We have seen the destroyed homes and property.  We have helped people clean up and rebuild after they hit. We have also seen people rise above the occasion and come through the ordeal in better than they were before.  The human spirit is something to behold!  We are grateful for all the good people who are helping after this disaster.  Such events do tend to bring out the best of most people.

We talk a lot about being prepared.  Every family should have some food and basic emergency supplies stored away in case of an emergency.  However, looking at the aftermath of a tornado you will realize it doesn't really matter if you had food stored, or a water supply, or even a first aid kit.  Anything stored in a home destroyed so completely will most likely be destroyed or lost.
A 72 hour kit or bug out bag may be useful if you had sufficient warning but that is highly unlikely in the case of tornadoes.

If you look closely at some of the wide shots of the devastation pictures, you will see that homes just outside of the tornado's path are practically untouched.  Our thoughts have turned to those homes that were not destroyed.  We hope that those people are in a situation to take care of their own needs so other efforts and assets can be used to assist their their neighbors who lost everything. 

We live on a street with our home and eight others.  We have often talked about our food storage and our neighbors.  If some event happened here, there is no way we would turn away our neighbors in a time of need.  We hope that many of the families that live near the tornado's path have some basic supplies to assist their neighbors.  Isn't being in a situation that we can help others what we should all want to do?

Carrots in the Spring

Last year we grew some carrots in our garden.  We enjoyed them in the late summer and fall.  We didn't grow many so we didn't preserve any but enjoyed sweet and fresh carrots from the garden. 

A couple of weeks ago when we were perparing the garden for the planting we found some carrots we didn't harvest last fall.  It is somewhat amazing but they were still good.  We enjoyed a mild winter so the ground never froze hard enough to damage the carrots yet the cool ground kept them fresh all winter long.

We had to cull some of them out.  A few were a bit woody and some were quite gnarly.  They were not quite as sweet as young carrots but they were surprisingly tasty.  We enjoyed a couple of good meals with our carrots.  One was simply cooked carrots.  The other meal they added flavor and great color to a pot of soup.

We typically use Thrive Carrots for recipes that call for chopped carrots.  They are easy.  No chopping, no mess, no carrots going bad in the fridge.  Simply use what we need and put the can back in the cupboard.   However, it was a treat to have fresh carrots from the garden in the spring.

It is now time to plant some more!