I'm looking for ways to store and find salt. I live about 300 miles from the Gulf. Does anyone know of maps showing salt deposits or salt mines. Can you get salt from freshwater through evaporation?
I'd recommend a feed mill for 100lbs. bags of bulk salt. It will store in plastic pails indefinitely. Salt is too cheap to bother to acquire other ways. Rock salt will store better than ground and can be crushed or ground as needed.
Been there. To me, life without salt was stopping the bike I was barely still riding, putting my foot down, and falling flat on my face. While I still had the strength to push the pedals, slowly, I couldn't support my weight. Oddly, the dehydration was probably HELPING the situation. The weakness didn't really hit until after I'd found water. With all the doctors telling us that salt will kill us, many of us forget that a lack of salt will kill us much faster.
Bear in mind that "salt" is a shorthand for sodium chloride. NaCl is necessary, but it is not the only mineral that goes out in sweat. Potassium is also required for health as well as other minerals. While NaCl is a good (very) short term additive (increases thirst) in heavy sweating weather, you also need to look to other mineral inputs.
NaCl though is the hardest to come by in NATURAL foods, processed or prepaired foods that we eat have tons of it in them but not meats and fresh fruits and veggies. Other than finding salt mines in a post TEOTWAWKI situation you could find the road treatment barns and I know at least up here and anyplace that has snow thy have mountains of rock salt. You could also try the run to the coast. You cant get salt from fresh water as thats what makes saltwater saltwater BUT if you get to where the salt water is (even if its the inland places like at Salt lake city and others less known) then you can extract te salt from salt water fairly easy in any of several ways. You can distill it out by puting the water in a still and have fresh water come out and the stuff that was in the water (mostly salt but also anything else thats there same as most any meathod) will be left in the still. You could also boil it down some in an open container to increase the consentrations of salt (or not this would just make it go a bit quicker to get larger amounts) then soak the water up in bed sheets or other material and hang it to dry, the water will evaporate leaving a crystaline layer of salt (and the rest) on the material that can then be shaken and/or scraped off to be stored and/or used. All you really have to do to store slat indefinately is keep it dry and keep critters out of it (both just for keeping it in its prefered condition for food use) and it will keep for centuries.
Real salt, (Not processed chemically) will actually lower blood pressure, and a whole lot of other things. The stuff I buy and use daily looks dirty. Lots of flecks of other minerals in there. I look for deep cored salt from ancient seabeds. Redmons Realsalt is one I use. Tastes almost sweet in comparison to the table salt we used to use. Take a look at the FAQ and other articles: http://www.realsalt.com
Thanks guys, Since we are trying at homesteading I would like a supply of salt for when our sotres run out and we are just living on the produce from the farm (still about 7 years).
Isn't that the main source of our table salt ? I belive the morton's souce mine is in illinois and is quite deep underground. I'm pretty sure it is an ancient seabed salt deposit.
That's where they get it, but it's heavily processed. What comes to us in those cardboard tubes has been distilled down to pure NaCl. To that, they add Calcium Silicate to prevent caking, and dextrose to stabilize the Potassium Iodide, which they also add. The stuff Melbo mentioned is chemically the same as what they dig up. It's just crushed, and packaged. Just a random thought. Am I the only one who thinks it's odd that we MINE for food? "Where are you going, honey?" "Oh, I'm hungry. I think I'll go dig for a while. Maybe I'll strike a Lasagna vein."
If I am thinking this through properly the stuff that you dig up contains exactly what flows down streams into the lake/seabed. This of course includes animal droppings, carcass juice and whatever other nasties that you would otherwise find in streams. I wonder how long it takes for the nasty organics (poop and such) to break down in the salt so much that it is effectively biologicaly inert ? I don't mind eating the components in poop (same as components in meat) just not the live biologics in it. I understand some microorganisms form spores that are extremely tough and can survive in adverse conditions for an extremely long time. What are the chances of harmfull spores surviving in the raw salt crystals and become viable once hydrated ?
You can, you just put some grain in the pan then shake it around at the hog lot. lol Of coarse it then has to be 'smelted' into its useable form by cutting it up and adding the salt and whatever other seasonings you want then applying heat.
This would simply be an added health benifit (if it isnt cleaned) in that any such stuff would be in VERY low concentrations AND in a weakened or dead state, the exact principal used in vacines. A good example of this principal is the difference between an average urbanite exposed to a lot of this stuff is likely to come down sick because they have built no immunity to it while a person living on a working far is going to be exposed to this stuff daily (often up to the knees or past) and is uneffected. Beyond that theres the fact that most all of these things would die off pretty quick and easy especialy if its in a dry bed for long periods or if it is distilled from a salt water source in which case it is steralized by the boiling process.
I notice that Sam's club has 25 lb bags for a reasonable price. If you have to buy in smaller amounts, that may be the ticket. jim
I don't know about the whole urbanite vs used to it thing. When I was out on the ranch for 2 weeks I was the only one that did not come down with a bad case of the runs. Everybody else even long time residents there did. All the utensils were washed in the same water (unfilterd stream water coming from faucet). I however drank only the filterd tap (stream water after going through RO) while everybody else drank from the filtered and unfiltered tap. We found out why everybody but me came down with bad runs. We found bear poop about 1 foot upstream from the small stream intake. Everybody was drinking bits of bear poop. Even if you get used to the local mild regular bugs getting an unusually high dose or an unusualy virulent strain will still put you down for days. Hopefully the salt thing is far different. Any bad stomach bugs that you've noticed when you first started using the raw salt ?
