Prepping At My First House, by M.J.

I just bought my new house in one of New Mexico’s larger cities. It’s not a rural homestead. But it is a nice neighborhood and I’ve spoken with my neighbors a few times. So far so good. And I certainly couldn’t have afforded this home in my old stomping grounds in Southern California. I financed this house in part by liquidating some investments and in part by getting a loan from my parents, which I am paying back at a regularly monthly rate (including interest) that’s lower than the rent I was paying at the apartment that I stayed in …


Some Basic Preparedness Information – Part 4, by C.I.

(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.) Protection If you can’t legally stand in front of your property, with a means of self-protection for your life and your family, then you will lose it to those with evil in their hearts. Desperate men and women will do desperate things to feed themselves and their children. About 2-3% of the population are sociopaths and are quite dangerous. Along with refugees, these individuals will migrate out of the large cities as supplies run out there. Your Dog: Usually the first casualty in an armed invasion. However he or she will give …


Some Basic Preparedness Information – Part 3, by C.I.

(Continued from Part 2.) Cooking Use a stove as long as you have electric power, natural gas, or propane. If you can find an old fashion wood-burning cookstove, great. This allows you to be able to cook when fuel or grid electrical power is gone. With a lot of gas stoves, the surface burners will work without electric power, but you will need to light them with a match or some other spark source. The oven will not work in modern models without electric power. A camping stove, gas, propane, or charcoal grill can be used. However, you will need …


Some Basic Preparedness Information – Part 2, by C.I.

(Continued from Part 1.) Other foods Baking powder (how to make) once mixed, it has a shelf life. However, each ingredient separately will last for years: 2 tsp of cream of tartar, source Bulkfoods.com 1 tsp of baking soda, 1 tsp of corn starch Gravy (canned or dry) for food fatigue prevention. Bouillon cubes mixed with flour and water will give you a gravy, which will make bland foods more pleasant to eat. Flour (white) will keep for 8-10 years. Pasta, 1,600 cal per pound, great shelf life Dried potatoes 1,700 cal/pound, good shelf life Oil/fats olive oil keeps for …


Some Basic Preparedness Information – Part 1, by C.I.

Editor’s Introductory Note: Reader C.I. has compiled some solid preparedness information for SurvivalBlog readers, partly from tried and true and widely published recommendations that date back to the 1940s, and partly from her own experience and observations. A lot of the following will already be familiar to long-time SurvivalBlog readers, but it provides a concise review that is useful for consideration for “filling in gaps” in your preps. And it is quite important reading for anyone who is new to family preparedness. This lengthy article will be serialized into four installments. – JWR — It is hard to be a …


Jerusalem Artichokes for TEOTWAWKI Gardening – Part 2, by Soli Deo Gloria

Consideration # 4: Pests & Diseases Pests and diseases are a concern for any crop. They can drastically reduce your yield or even destroy your plants completely. Most people who grow corn plant special hybrid varieties that are resistant to many diseases and then they also spray their fields with various treatments throughout the season. This is because crop diseases are a huge problem when it comes to corn. The huge fields of it that are grown across much of the country every year mean that diseases can rapidly spread across vast swaths of land. Of course, the hybrid varieties …


Jerusalem Artichokes for TEOTWAWKI Gardening – Part 1, by Soli Deo Gloria

A lot has been written on this blog and elsewhere about the importance of gardening in order to grow your own food in a post-TEOTWAWKI world. When you think about a survival garden, the first question you need to ask is “What should I grow?” I’d like to suggest that most people are missing some important factors when they try to answer that question. I’m going to walk you through some serious ideas to consider when it comes to survival gardening. If you are new to the whole idea, I hope this will get you started in the right direction. …


Sanitation for Survivalists, by Tunnel Rabbit

This article is an introduction to hygiene and sanitation for families, small groups, and communities. During early wars, dysentery was by far the cause of most of the combat ineffectiveness in the field. It can debilitate armies. Second to dysentery, were trench foot and frostbite. Sanitation begins with personal hygiene, and is important regardless of group size. Individual habits contribute to the health of others. We do not need to be spreading disease among ourselves and becoming sick and inffective. The broader issue of sanitation must be addressed and practiced at the group level. Having lived in austere conditions for …


An Ultralight Get Home Bag – Part 5, by J.M.

(Continued from Part 4. This concludes the article.) Seasonal Considerations One of the problems with planning any kind of self-contained outdoor survival kit for New England is that you have to be able to handle a wide range of weather conditions, including really cold and wet winters. Things like thunder snowstorms, freezing rain, blizzards and sub-zero temperatures aren’t uncommon, and if you’re not prepared for the worse than you’ll probably fail (translation: die). I don’t want to get into too much detail on the background for my decisions, but if you’d like to read more I had another article published …


An Ultralight Get Home Bag – Part 4, by J.M.

(Continued From Part 3.) Information/References I firmly believe that one of the keys to surviving almost any situation is having the right information, so I tried to include enough of the right information sources to get her through her journey. Fortunately, she has a decent cell phone in a rugged case, so she can use that in most scenarios. Here’s what I recommended: Rand McNally maps (2.5 oz./ea., 5.0 oz. per trip) – These are hardcopy state-level plastic coated maps. They’re not as detailed as topo or Delorme Atlas and Gazetter maps, but they’re a lot lighter and more compact …


An Ultralight Get Home Bag – Part 3, by J.M.

(Continued From Part 2.) Food This was one of the toughest areas to address – I didn’t want her to have to do things like hunt, fish, trap, or forage on the way, since those take a lot of time and can be very dependent upon the season, but 7 days’ worth of food is heavy and bulky so I proposed an alternate approach for her. Since she takes a suitcase and stays overnight for any trip that’s not immediately local, I recommended that she only keep 3 days’ worth of food in the backpack and bring another 4 days’ …


An Ultralight Get Home Bag – Part 2, by J.M.

(Continued From Part 1.) Shelter/Warmth The next area involves protecting her core body temperature, especially while sleeping at night. One important thing to keep in mind is that in New England it gets down into the lower 60s or upper 50s at night, even in the summertime, and since you can get hypothermia at temperatures as high as 60 degrees you need to make sure you can stay warm and dry year-round. While there are various commercial and public buildings along most of her get-home routes that she could seek shelter in, I didn’t want to assume that would I’ll …


An Ultralight Get Home Bag – Part 1, by J.M.

A few months ago I was approached by a friend of a friend who asked me for some help. She’s a medical device service technician and her job takes her around most of New England visiting hospitals and other healthcare facilities to do service work on medical equipment. She lives in New Hampshire, and she and her husband have a nice spread with chickens, goats and a large vegetable garden and greenhouse. We’ve had talked several times about preparedness in general and how she would home after a disaster if she were on the road, and she finally decided it …


Surviving Virginia’s New Year’s Snowstorm, by K.A.A.

Unlike many of you, I am an average suburbanite, not a hardcore prepper living on a homestead in the country. My family needs to stay where we are because of my husband’s work. So we are making the best of living a short distance from Washington, DC. We are generally well-prepared for the typical emergencies experienced in northern Virginia, such as severe thunderstorms and hurricanes. But we were caught mostly unprepared for the unusually severe snowstorm that we had in early January, 2022. This storm delivered 14-inches of snow where I live and stranded hundreds of drivers, including one of …


Using a Dankoff Solar Powered Water Pump – Part 5, by Tunnel Rabbit

(Continued from Part 4. This concludes the article.) Spare Electric Motor The motors used in the Dankoff slow pumps are of the highest quality and would not need service except for brushes. However, it would be nice to have a spare motor just in case an armature fails, or a bearing fails, or if the original motor is lost to theft. If the spare pump motor was stored in an alternate location with a spare pump head and coupler, then we could eventually fabricate the missing parts.  A recent quote from the owner, Kenny at Dankoff Solar Pumps: $539 for …