This Prepared Life
Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. Hosted by Allison Michael, this show is about creating a calmer, more resilient life through everyday preparedness and intentional living. Inside the episodes, you’ll find realistic food storage tips, Allison’s Three Layer Food Storage system, preparedness skills, homemaking rhythms, and encouragement to help you care for yourself and your family with more confidence and less overwhelm. From emergency preparedness and food preservation to homemaking and building a well-stocked pantry, this podcast offers practical guidance to help preparedness feel more natural in your everyday life. Whether you’re filling your first pantry shelf or have been preparing for years, you can expect simple action steps, honest conversations, and a reminder that preparedness does not have to come from fear. Here, we believe in being prepared, not scared — one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time.
This Prepared Life
What to Buy for Your Pantry This Month: August Stock-Up Guide
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What should you stock up on in August?
One of my favorite ways to build a home food supply is by paying attention to grocery store sales cycles. Every month, different foods and household items go on sale, making it the perfect time to stock your pantry while saving money.
In this episode, we're talking about what to watch for during the month of August, including food, household items, and seasonal produce that's perfect for preserving.
In this episode we discuss:
• Why grocery store sales cycles matter
• School lunch foods and pantry staples to watch for
• August produce that's great for canning, freezing, and freeze drying
• Household items that often go on sale this month
• The three items I'm personally stocking up on this August
• One simple preparedness challenge to complete this month
Building a home food supply doesn't happen overnight. Small, intentional purchases throughout the year can make a huge difference over time.
Resources:
Order My New Book Home Food Storage: A Preparedness Plan for Creating and Using an Emergency Food Supply
https://amzn.to/4hM7NQv
Join the TPL Membership Community:
https://www.thispreparedlife.com/community
Website:
https://www.thispreparedlife.com/
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Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. I'm Allison, and together we're building a calmer, more resilient life, one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional stuff at a time. Today we are gonna go through an August stock-up guide and talk about things that are gonna be on sale, store sales cycles, and food and non-food items for you to consider in your preparedness and food storage journey. If you have been around here for any length of time, you have probably heard me talk about store sales cycles and what is a store sales cycle. A store sales cycle is the length of time between when an item goes on sale and when it goes on sale again. Stores all rotate on a different cycle, and how long or short that cycle is depends on the size of the grocery store and its buying power. So a large big box grocery store is going to be able to have a much shorter sales cycle than the little mom and pop grocery store on the corner in your neighborhood. They're gonna have a longer time in between sales, if at all. Different things impact what is going on sale in any given time, national days will impact sales cycles. What is going on in society will impact sales cycles, what is happening specific times of year, whether it's holidays or back to school time, end of summer, those all impact store sales cycles. Harvest seasons impact sales cycles. For the month of August, we are gonna talk about some food items for you to watch out for, some non-food and household items. And then I'm gonna share three of the things I'm watching out for this month. One of the groups of foods that always goes on sale in the month of August is easy convenience foods and foods for school lunches. During the month of August, kids and parents are getting ready to send their kids back to public school, to private school, wherever you choose to send your kids to school if you don't homeschool. And oftentimes that means cereal, granola bars, juice boxes, pudding cups, fruit cups, peanut butter, jelly, lunch meat. Those are all things to look out for in the month of August. Peanut butter and jelly is a great thing to watch for and then stock up because those will last for a considerable amount of time on your pantry shelves. The convenience food, not so much. You're gonna want to rotate those by expiration date, first in, first out, though the expiration dates are usually rather long. So buy the items, look for the expiration date, write it on the box or the package in a permanent marker and rotate first in, first out, and you're gonna be good to go. That's how I rotate cereal. We do have a couple kinds of cereal that I keep a couple boxes in stock on my shelves for, and I just write the dates on them and rotate those. Produce that you can usually find on sale or really good deals on this month are bell peppers, blueberries, melons, corn, summer squash, and tomatoes. If you preserve food, you can buy those by the case oftentimes at your grocery store. Just ask your produce guy: do you sell this by the case? When there's a sale, you'll get that sale price on that case of food. Or look for local farmers that might be selling case produce. There's absolutely zero shame in canning and preserving food you have purchased from the grocery store. If you have been hesitating to learn how to can and preserve because you don't garden, you don't have to. You can buy a case of apples at the grocery store, and that applesauce is going to be just as delicious and made with just as much love as apples that were harvested at a local farm or grown by someone. So don't let not gardening, not growing your own food prevent you from canning and preserving food for your family. There are a lot of things outside of food that also go on sale this month: gardening supplies, gardening accessories, grilling accessories, ziploc bags, Kleenex, school supplies, and seasonal clearance. This time of year, when my kids were little, I was always looking for next year's summer clothes and spring clothes. It can be a little hard sometimes to know how fast they're gonna grow, but you do the best you can. And buying on clearance and putting those into a box for that future child is a prep. Hand-me-down boxes are a prep. So check those non-food household items out and see what kind of good deals you can find. Three things that I am going to be looking for and doing something with in my preparedness and my food storage this month are bell peppers. I love the flavor of peppers. I always try and store a bunch. I will freeze them and freeze dry peppers for my long-term storage. You can freeze peppers diced, you can freeze them sliced, and you can even freeze them in cups for making stuffed peppers. Frozen peppers will last roughly for 12 months if you have stored them in an airtight container. They are gonna lose that crispness that a fresh pepper would have, but tossing some pre-sliced frozen peppers into a chili or a fajita is gonna taste amazing in December when they're not on sale in the grocery store. The shelf life of peppers, like I said, frozen, you're gonna get up to 12 months. Dehydrated peppers, you're gonna get one to two years. And then freeze-dried peppers, you're gonna get up to 25 years storage on those. Cereal, granola bars, and convenience foods are things that I will often keep in my layer two pantries. So I'm gonna look for those for my food storage for any of the ones that my family does eat. Now, mind you, we are in a new season of life now, and my family is just the two of us. All of our kids have grown and gone. We're not gonna be eating as much of that stuff as the kids probably would have. And the third item that I am gonna look out for this month and purchase our school supplies, I know I don't have any kids in school, but that doesn't mean that we don't use paper, we don't use pens, we don't use pencils. I'm gonna look for notebooks, I'm gonna look for folders, I'm gonna look for sharpies, pens, pencils, paper, that kind of thing. I keep a bin in one of the rooms on a shelf. It's just a small bin, and what we use for the year is in there. And so I'm buying them when they're considerably cheaper than the rest of the year. And if you are a homeschool mom or even a public school mom, get what you need for the entire year now. Those items are not gonna expire or go bad, they're just gonna sit there. And what you don't use this year, you can save for the next year. Um, that's a great way to save money. I know when my kids were a little and we were homeschooling, they would go through crayons and colored pencils and scissors and glue like crazy. So I always liked to keep a large bin of those things. And anytime we were running out, I could just pull them out and they had more without me having to go pay full price at the store for them. Here is your simple challenge for this month. I want you to buy one extra pantry item for your layer two pantry or preserve something for your layer two pantry. If you do that, shoot me a message on social media, comment on this if you're on YouTube. I'd love to hear what you put on your shelves this month. And if you would like a deeper dive into this information, my book is currently available for order, and I will link that in the description. You can also get complete printables of what to stock and how to preserve it inside my membership, and I will link those below as well. Thank you so much for being here today. Please leave a comment, leave a review, it helps more than you know.