Five leaves, four timescales
On this page11
Emergency water, measured in days
Stored tap water for an outage or a disruption, rotated. The container matters for a short window and the real variables are volume and whether you can lift it.
Emergency food, measured in years
Dry staples packed to exclude oxygen, opened once. This is the bucket and mylar craft and it is the one this shelf cannot serve.
Oxygen absorber use, which is a technique rather than a thing
An iron-based sachet that consumes the oxygen in a sealed package. It is the method that makes the years possible, and it imposes its own requirement on the container.
Salt storage, measured in decades
Salt does not spoil. What it does is take up water from the air and cake into a solid, so the whole problem is moisture and the whole answer is a seal.
Seed vault, measured in generations and alive
The only leaf whose contents are respiring. Cool, dry and dark, and unlike everything else here it can be killed by being too well sealed if it was stored damp.
Which is why one container does not serve all five
A jar that is right for salt is wrong for a year of rice and wrong again for seed, and the differences are about barrier and volume rather than about quality.
Three of the five are jar crafts
Salt, seed and the working end of the pantry. 210 jars here, led by 123 PET single wall jars and 18 glass straight sided jars.
One is a bucket craft
Emergency food, which we have already said we cannot serve, and saying it once clearly is better than hedging on every page.
And one is a volume problem
Water, where the question is how many litres you can store and carry. 21 containers over a gallon, which is a thin answer for a household supply.
Read the barrier section for what actually degrades things
Oxygen, light, moisture and temperature, in that order of consequence for most of what is stored here.