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  • How to Make Homemade Dandelion Wine

    How to Make Homemade Dandelion Wine

    52 Unique Techniques for Stocking Food for Prepper
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    At the best of times, survival situations are highly daunting and require a level of mental and physical alertness that is destroyed by alcohol. But what if your situation is not so dire? Your supplies are well stocked for months and you are not going to be in any danger for the foreseeable future, then it might be time for a bit of a drink.

    If the local stores have ran out of stock, you are just going to have to rely on yourself to make your own alcoholic beverages. A good supply of alcohol is not just good for personal consumption.  You could also be used to barter for items that you don’t have.

    Did you know that you can make wine out of almost any plant? It requires no special ingredients and the only thing that you might need is some sugar, yeast, acid and whatever you are going to make your wine out of.

    The most common garden item that most wine makers choose to use, is the humble dandelion. You could make your brew out of any thing else that you have lying around like tomatoes or other vegetables.  However, dandelions are abundant and don’t really have any other great uses. Except for the leaves which are edible.

    All the equipment that you need, is a sealed container to ferment your wine , an airlock to let air out of the sealed container but not let air in, and some bottles or jars to store and age the finished product in.

    Making wine is an easy process and anyone can do it if they have the slightest bit of knowledge on the subject.

    How to make dandelion wine

    Ingredients:

    • Quart of yellow dandelion flowers.  Rinse them thoroughly
    • 8 cups of sugar
    • Gallon of boiling water
    • Lemon slice
    • Orange, sliced
    • Packet of yeast. If you do not have yeast, then you are not going to want to completely seal the container that the wine is fermenting in so airborne yeast can get in.

    Procedure:

    1. You are going to want to place your well rinsed dandelion flowers into boiling water and boil them for 5 minutes. Then remove the blossoms, discard them and let the water cool to about 90 degrees F.
    2. Make sure that your sealed container is sterile before you add any thing to it. You can easily sterilize your fermenting container with boiling water but make sure that you are thorough about it because any bacteria left in there is going to destroy your wine.
    3. Put the dandelion juice that you have created into your seal-able fermenting container. Then add the rest of the ingredients and stir them in thoroughly.
    4. Attach the air lock, which can be made out of tubes and pill cases, similar to a water bong. Then let your wine ferment for about 13 days. The best way to tell when fermentation has stopped is when bubbles stop forming inside the airlock.
    5. Siphon your dandelion wine off of the sediment in the fermentation container and seal it in preserving jars and let it age for about a week.
    6. Wait a week and enjoy your dandelion survival wine.

    That is how easy it is to make your own wine out of whatever you can find lying about. If your wine does not taste right or tastes like vinegar it is probably because there was too much bacteria in the wine which killed the yeast, ate the sugars and excreted acetic acid. This is easily solved but not everyone has packets of yeast in their bug out bag.

  • First Aid at the End of the World: Should You Trust Colloidal Silver?

    First Aid at the End of the World: Should You Trust Colloidal Silver?

    First Aid at the End of the World: Should You Trust Colloidal Silver?
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    This following is a guest post from Nadia Jones about colloidal silver.  As with all medical posts, please use your own judgement and consult a doctor.  I have no firsthand experience with colloidal silver taken internally myself, so I have no opinion on either side of the debate.

    One of the most important aspects of being prepared is addressing medical concerns — having a first aid response kit and solutions to medical problems of any sort as they arise. If our society were to collapse, we would no longer be able to rely on hospitals and doctors, so we would have to cure our ailments ourselves.

    This post deals with the question: Should You Trust Colloidal Silver?

    Over the years, various propponents of preparedness have offered solutions to medicine after a collapse of society, but the one that stands out as probably the most controversial is a literal solution. It’s called colloidal silver.

    Colloidal silver is a suspension of silver particles in water that purportedly has a kind of miraculous healing power. Given that silver ions are bioactive, can kill bacteria in vitro as well as in external living tissue wounds, are disinfectants, antiseptics, and are regularly found woven into wound dressings, the hypothesis that silver can act as a universal antibiotic isn’t all that surprising.

    And if you had to fend for yourself medically, the wide availability of silver and the relative ease of making a colloidal silver suspense would make it an excellent and obvious candidate for medical treatment.

    In fact, before antibiotics were introduced into the medical system in the 1940’s, silver was widely used in the medical field, treating everything from infections to epilepsy and gonorrhea.

    With all these reported usages and alleged benefits of colloidal silver, you may begin to wonder why silver isn’t used more extensively in the medical field now, especially since silver is so abundant, and relatively inexpensive.

    There is no shortage of theories explaining this phenomenon, most of them conspiratorial. (Doctors, hospitals, and governments wouldn’t make any money if they used silver.) The theory that shouldn’t be ignored, however, is the one that is based on scientific tests and trials.

    While colloidal silver hasn’t been proven to have any adverse health risks — except for argyria, which is a silver coloration of the skin due to high silver levels in the body, which is only cosmetic, as it were — doctors and scientists have yet to find definitive and consistent evidence that colloidal silver has any curative properties whatsoever.

    Silver by itself is not ionized, and it is only ionized silver that has been proven to cure and treat ailments. The silver delivered to the body by colloidal silver suspensions is inactive, and therefore should not have the same properties as silver ions.

    The FDA has prohibited manufacturers of colloidal silver to market it based on any medical claims — in fact, it is illegal to do so — and practicing doctors will never prescribe or even recommend colloidal silver to patients. Claims made about the effectiveness of colloidal silver are largely unsupported, and where they are supported, the evidence is spurious.

    It is possible that colloidal silver is a kind of placebo, in that if someone who truly believes that colloidal silver will cure their ailments administers a dose to herself, it might actually work. But whether you want to base the success or failure of your post-collapse society on colloidal silver is, in the end, up to you.

    Author Bio:

    This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.