With the cloudy overcast weather all day yesterday and the falling temps, and the fact that I am starting to pick the green tomatoes in the garden has me thinking about winter.

Maybe I'm the only one that gets in this frame of mind but when winter is coming I feel like I need to be ready. What if we get stuck in the house for a couple weeks? What then? It's happened before, the first winter in our house we were snowed in for days but luckily we had power. Well, you already know that I keep up a pretty big stockpile all year long. But I do a few things differently when I'm getting ready for winter.

I start thinking about things that we can eat that don't need to be cooked. I like to stock up on granola bars, crackers, that kind of thing. Also I keep several gallons of purified drinking water in the pantry. We also have sterno cans in the pantry to cook with heat if we need it.

We've also decided that we are going to invest in a wood stove. Before we bought the house it had a wood stove in it that we had to take out to pass inspection since it was ancient. So everything is already set up for a stove, we just need to purchase one. Our house is all electric so a woodstove would be our security that we will be warm this winter no matter what. So we will be stockpiling wood to be ready to have heat.

I also stockpile different meds like Tums and Tylenol and also first aid stuffs. We have a large stockpile of shampoo, deodorant, ect year around so I don't have to worry about gathering those things.

Dog food and cat food is another thing we will be stockpiling. I already have a large stockpile of dog food from a recent surplus store sale so we need to work on getting cat food. We also need to start watching for a sale on chicken feed so they can be stocked up as well.

I also like to keep a big stockpile of batteries on hand. We have a bunch of flashlights around that house(the freebies from Menards!) and I also stockpile candles and lighters and matches.

So anyways, that's what's on my mind for now. I'm also in that scary fall cleaning mode where I want to clean out and clean up. I'll post another article in the upcoming weeks on getting ready for winter. For now it's a start to be getting your "winter stockpile" ready:)