Prepping 101

No matter how much food you store, it will never be enough. At some point you will have to either grow your own food, or provide a valuable product or service that you can swap for food, or for the “coin of the realm” (whatever money turns out to still work after the collapse), that you can swap for food. But in most parts of the world, food doesn’t grow year round regardless. Grains will store with little outside intervention. Beans will certainly store in most environments, and potatoes, winter squashes, and some fruits will last the winter if you provide for them a root cellar of some sort that will keep them fresh. Other than that, if you want to eat vegetables and fruits year round, you will have to learn how to can your food. It isn’t hard, but you have to do it now, because as you’ll see, canning is fraught with pitfalls if you don’t do it right.

This is one of the few articles in this series where I haven’t yet reviewed the product, but I plan to follow it up with a review in the future because I bought one. My intention in posting this today is to give the regular readers of this column a official heads up on a heavily discounted and apparently high quality product that may be a priority for you in your prepping supplies. For many years I have been looking at wood cook stoves. If you have never seen one (and I actually haven’t in person), these are not regular woodstoves. Wood cookstoves were popular in the US between the 1880s and 1930s. They look like a regular stove, with an oven and burners, but they run on wood and have no electric or gas components.

I find it shocking that the least popular articles in this series are always about the threat of nuclear war. Because from a purely survival standpoint, nuclear war is the only scenario that will most likely result in the actual post apocalyptic society for which we are all preparing, a society in which survival will truly be of the fittest, and of the most prepared. Nuclear war is also the most likely scenario of where our current international disaster is headed, and I’m not saying this to be alarmist. If you look around the world right now, clashes are ramping out of control in nearly ever corner of the globe. World currencies are competing for who can devalue themselves the quickest, because of un-repayable debt, and America is being shut out of world trade deals, because everyone but Americans now understand that our reign is over. If you were an American power broker, wouldn’t you say it’s about time to pop a nuke or two and get the world back in line with American values?

The title of this week’s column was named intentionally to mean more than just specifically what we will be talking about. Nowhere in this series will you find, “go do this and you will survive!” There is no such thing. But building skills that you don’t currently have, and backing up those skills with some usable resources, is at this point prudent. All I can do is sow some seeds of knowledge and hope that in your own best interest, you will follow up and build a library of survival knowledge, and a pile of survival assets. If you have followed us from the start, you will remember a year ago when I wrote the first article on seeds, and my focus then was “don’t screw it up” (because you will, and it is better to get the screws ups under your belt). Here we are now a year later, and for most of the country, this is a great time to start some seeds. Danger of a last freeze is quickly passing, and it is time for new things to grow.

A friend the other day asked me if I knew anything about setting up a charitable trust to purchase a silencer. He specifically asked because he’d like one for survival, to be able to get in and get out quietly hunting game on public and private land. My answer is what the heck do you want one of those for when you can get a killer crossbow for about the same price?

Can you believe it has been over a year since I started this column? If you are a new subscriber, you may have missed some of the seminal early stuff, so I would go into the archives and read some if you have the time. There is more information here than you’d find in years of subscriptions to print mags, and hundreds of hours of surfing survival blogs, which are both mostly full of fluff geared towards advertisers. From the start this column has taken a hard look at actual survival without the benefit of modern society, but we began with the question, why should we do this?

Yet another brutal winter has a lot of people thinking about heating their homes when the power goes out. Even a few days without heat can be deadly, let alone the potential damages to your home from frozen water pipes and expanding ice. Imagine a whole winter without heat! Could you survive it? How would you survive it is the better question. Because if you live in the country, it is easy to just own an emergency wood stove, and keep a cord of wood covered in the back yard. That will keep you warm enough, and keep your pipes from freezing. But what if you live in an urban setting, or even a suburban area where you don’t have a lot of land to store wood?

This 33 second video from Febuary 8th never made the national news, not even Drudge, despite that fact that it has over 3,000,000 plays on Youtube. Alex Jones (aka Bill Hicks) even played information gatekeeper on it by changing the story from the original “breaking” story of a nuke, to later explaining that it was a chemical plant. What do you think it was? But the bigger question is, why wasn’t it injected into the 24 hour news cycle for the talking heads to speculate on for at least a day? Could it be that the powers that be decided it wasn’t the time for the next nuclear fear porn? Why would they do that? Is it because that the real “black swan” event scheduled to trigger WWIII is set to be nukes?

I don’t care how prepared you are. Whether you own a fully stocked bunker 500 feet below the surface that used to be a missile silo, or if you consider prepping to be a generator, 5 gallons of gas and some canned vegetables, there is always a chance that you will have to light out on foot with nothing but the clothes on your back. What then? You aren’t a cow and you can’t eat grass, but there are a lot of things in the woods and in the fields that you can eat for survival. The trick is knowing what is good and what is bad, and don’t that in advance.