Keeping Grains Handy

Now that I’ve lived in this house for almost two years, I wish I could take everything out and start over with where things go. Almost every day, I think about the book . . If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, and that makes me giggle. In the summer, we sleep in the basement bedroom because it stays so cool so that means the basement bathroom kinda becomes the master bath so everything I had stored in the bathroom closet, because we thought we’d rarely use that bathroom, had to find a new home because the bathroom things we use daily are now downstairs and I’m guessing we’ll just have them downstairs and have another of everything upstairs and that means we’ve lost more storage space. It’s easier staying downstairs because Rita, Boots and Oscar stay downstairs. Maybe we’ll always stay downstairs.

Also, now that we have the little outdoor sink (which by the way, they’re on sale at Walmart . . our WM anyway so if anyone wants one, this is a good time to get one – they’re really handy) set up downstairs on the patio so we’ve moved the grill and the smoker downstairs.

All my grains are stored in 5 gallon buckets. In Texas, I kept them along a wall inside the sewing room and they were stacked two high. Here, because there’s less space, I have them in the downstairs garage and they’re stacked four high. I’m not sure how it happens but every grain I need is either in the top bucket or the bottom bucket and I cannot reach the top bucket, plus I cannot grab a 40+ pound bucket from that high and safely get it to the floor. The way they’re stacked, whatever bucket I need, the buckets above it have to come down to get to it. I end up having to try to plan ahead and get Vince to get down the grains that I need. The other day I needed three different grains and they were spread out so he had to move a lot of buckets to get to it.

I keep the ones that I use almost every time I make bread (hard red, hard white, spelt) where I can reach those so I can refill the containers often. I also buy flour in either 25 or 50 pound bags so I have buckets of all purpose, bread and prairie gold flour handy. I didn’t put the flour in the smaller containers because I use so much of that and I’d be refilling them way too often.

I kept thinking there had to be a better way. While watching one of Rose Red’s videos the other day, she said she keeps all her grains in buckets in their food storage area but she uses these Rubbermaid containers to keep inside so . . I ordered the Rubbermaid containers. We had this rack that we had in the kitchen in Texas so cleaned it all off, labeled the containers and now I have most of my grains in them.

These are mostly the grains I use at least once a week. Top shelf is buckwheat, rye and spelt. Next shelf is hard red, kamut and corn, next is hard white, barley and kamut. The bottom shelf will hold einkorn, millet and soft white wheat. The einkorn is in a bucket that hasn’t been opened yet and it has one of those pry off lids so Vince has to open it, I’ll fill my little container and then we’ll pour what’s in the bucket into a larger bucket with a gamma seal lid. We could put a gamma seal lid on the bucket the einkorn is in but it’s a smaller bucket than we use and that would not fit with our other stacked buckets. The millet is still in the bag and we haven’t opened it yet so it has to be poured into a bucket (hopefully today) and the hard white just hasn’t found it’s way out of the bucket pile yet.

So far, this is working out much better than having to shuffle heavy buckets around several times a week.