While the 50+ peach babies have been moved up into their gallon pots and and even more lines of grow lights have been hung and fan is set up and ready for extra air movement, along with winter sowed seeds, we are still off by a solid four to six weeks before we want to start more for the garden.

Which means that i am in late winter cleaning, sorting mode. The big storage closet and the secondary dry storage Pantry on the main floor of the house needed a full deep clean, sort, check on levels of supplies, lists for re-stocking made.

As folks know i have been struggling with some health issues and while i am working hard to gain back strength, i had started having issues lifting some of the stacked heavier items on the top shelfs so we shift a number of them into the closet shelfs for better height pull out and carry, and put the big light weight Tupperware tubs filled with dried herbs an more up top till they are needed again in the big push in gardening season.

While i knew that with me making meals out of the pantry, canning cellar and freezers for the past five months without proper restocking happening as i have been dealing with illness, keeping the fresh food to standard fresh fruits we keep in the house, the salad and salad fixings and soup veggies, meant that we were using up layer after layer of the storage goods.

Still color me surprised that after this weekends sort and clean, all those tubs on the third shelf were empty, all have been washed, dried and placed waiting to be refilled and put back into the use. Each shelf is always two layers deep, that is a lot of empty tubs that are normally filled!

While the working pantry in the kitchen still has some of the items that are normally in the tubs on the third shelf it means there is no fill up back up in stock..

On one hand this is a total win! The whole point of a deep pantry is that you can go not just days or weeks but MONTHS making meals and there are in fact still many months of meals to be made from the staples in the house.

On the other hand, i need to do some stocking up, i will be feeling the price increases, a lot of these items gotten when they cost a lot less and came in bigger amounts. I will be feeling the inflations that is for sure!

Other things will have to wait till the gardens in full swing for me to prepare and dry the food or blends for future meals in 2026 and beyond.

Onward this week, i will tackle the front working pantry in the kitchen itself, at which point i will have a full handle on the shopping list for re-stocking for the dry goods. Then onward to the freezers (for a fast recap as i know what is in all of them but one) and then we need to do a final count of the canning pantry which will be a good thing for the rest of the garden planning!

How are you doing coming into the depth of winter? How is your deep pantry holding up? Having you ever needed to eat out of your pantry for weeks to months due to anything really, job loss, new baby, health related issues?

How did your pantry hold up? what was something you ran out of faster then you were expecting? Its been hard to find bulk 2 pound bags of my favorite dried soup blend of rice/peas/beans/barley in the store for the past while so i am fully out.

I am giving though to making my own blend of it, as it a favorite for sure.