STORING GRAINS IN BUCKETS

 

Storing food items in plastic buckets is easy, cost - effective, and 
efficacious. I purchase my used food buckets from a nearby donut shop and clean 
them myself too. Plastic buckets that have held pickles or relish retain an 
odor, which can only be removed (in my experience) by storing grain in them for 
6 months or longer...then the chickens will willingly eat the wheat! But buckets 
from bakers or donut shops leave no residue or aroma.

I place a tall kitchen garbage bag inside the bucket (which provides extra 
moisture protection), fill the bucket, suck air out with a straw, seal the bag, 
then seal AND LABEL AND DATE the bucket. Then the buckets are frozen for 4 days 
at 0 F, and are ready for storage! 

A normal food bucket as described above is about 4 gallon capacity, and will 
hold 30 pounds of rice, 25 pounds of pinto beans, about 25 pounds of wheat, but 
only about 20 pounds of oats. I also store waxed tins of tuna, corned beef, 
bacon, hams, etc, in buckets, omitting the freezing process. Processed as 
mentioned above, the contents can be stored for years...for example, I recently 
opened a bucket of pinto beans dated 1993 that I grew from my own acclimated 
seed, and they were perfect. Buckets of food stuffs prepared this way may be 
stored in a crawl space, garage, or outbuilding, thus freeing up space in the 
home larder for harder to pack items.

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