Food

So, I brought up Water as probably being the most important thing we can figure out. I made that post mostly for newcomers that may just be getting into prepping and with that in mind, I thought I'd point out some food stuff. I would love additional input.

Food I think is second to water, and there are several layers to getting food. The first layer would be to simply get storable foods, so here are a few good deals:
ShelfReliance
Grab & Go Meals
Premium 1600 Year Supply of Food
MREs
Food Insurance
Dehydrated Food for Home Storage


If you can't get these for some reason, or you don't think they fit your particular lifestyle, just buy extra dry and canned goods when you go grocery shopping and build your stocks up slowly. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing effort. Couple of things that a lot of people tend to overlook would be vegetable oil and vinegar. Vinegar is great because it can be used for multiple things, like cleaning. If you have the Apple Cider vinegar, you can put a little in a bowl, cover it with plastic wrap and punch a few holes in it and catch any fruit flies that may be annoying you.

So, those are good starts and are easy to get access to right now. But, they cost money and will eventually run out. There are a few skills it would help to start learning now. Obviously hunting & fishing & foraging are three important skills in gaining access to food. We have forums about that on siloutdoors.com that are free access, so I'm not going to spend time on them. I'll only say it's important to play to your strengths and if you are weak on any of them, that's where community comes in... which is the entire purpose of SARC. You can ask any questions you have about those in the appropriate forums.

If you are not a hunter or gatherer, but you have a savvy green thumb, then gardening/farming is also incredibly important and productive. These can be singular or communal efforts and there are a lot of different ways to approach gardening in particular. If you're in an apartment or just want to save ground space in your garden, I've used the Topsy Turvey and had great results. I've also used the Upsy Downsy and the Strawberry version... all worked well and all of which are available at Walmart I think. Here's a good blog that has some more detail on it if you're interested.

If you have a yard, but not much space, you could try a 3 Sisters Garden method that the Native Americans used. The short and skinny is that it's a symbiotic relationship gardening setup, each plant benefits the other. You can migrate this to other vegetables as well. Here's a list. There's also Tire Gardening, which I'm going to try with Potatoes this year. Although I'm planning on doing the tire stacking method.

There's also community gardening, which totally depends on your community and how much you trust the people in your community. If you think about it, we have a whole lot of public space we're paying taxes on that doesn't do anything. And then, to add insult to injury, we have to pay someone to take care of it since they changed the rules on using criminals for public work projects like that. If you live in a community that has a space that would make a good garden, you can try pitching the idea at a local townhall and see if anyone would be interested in using the space.

The idea is simple, people in the community that are interested put in time to cultivate and raise different plants and everyone who puts in the time share in the results. Now, obviously there will be those that put in more time and those that put in less and how you work out the details to make that work would be on you and those involved. A nice benefit is that it would connect you with like minded people right there near you that maybe you didn't know were there and develop good habits in case the price of food gets out of control. Not to mention, just getting kids involved so they understand where food comes from is a great learning experience.

So, ok... all of this is fine and dandy, but what about storage? If there is no electricity, how do you store all this? Here's a few methods that you may be interested in learning:
Canning
Dehydrating or Drying
Solar Powered Refrigerator

I will be honest, I'm not strong on any of these yet, but if there is someone reading that is, please add your 2 cents.

Once you get a routine down, you should check out this link. It's a list of things you probably aren't storing, but probably should be... and why. They are LDS, but not preachy, so if you're anti-LDS for some reason, maybe don't go there... but if you're interested in some excellent info, great link. Great blog really.

Also, if you aren't a meat eater, or you are unsure of your ability fish/hunt and get the protein you'll need to stay healthy, check out Quinoa as a storage items. Gluten-free source of protein.

Any other inputs or thoughts on food are appreciated.

Water

Good day party peoples of the Zulu Nation.

I've pulled this off the forum, and there are a few comments and additional info in the SARC forum at SILO, but the first thing to know about prepping is water. You can have all the bullets, food, gadgets and skills in the world, but if you don't have water, you'll be dead in a few days. Fact. So, if you're new to preparedness, water is first. Get some water now to have it, and then follow up with learning a few different ways to purify it. First and most important skill. Put it this way, if water shuts down, how do you get clean water for drinking?

Here's two cheap and reasonable ways to start. If nothing else, you can print out the directions for the slow sand filtering system so you have it if there is no more interwebs... stupid solar flares.

If you fail to get your hands on anything and find yourself facing a situation where you need to get fresh water, first and foremost: boil. Remember boil orders? Boiling water destroys most no-no's in water. If you happen to get your hands on a plastic bottle, you can use the sun to kill stuff in the water by painting half the bottle black and leaving the clear side facing the sun for several hours. However, BPH related cancer becomes an issue if you keep doing it over and over and expose yourself to it constantly. But if you find yourself in a bind... water now... possibility of cancer later... it's your call.

Berkey products are really good and are at a really good price. Zombie Squad (great forum if you've never been) used them at Zombiecon (the Berkey Light version) to clean stream/river water when I went. A little drop of bleach in the top half kills the bacteria and parasites, the filters cleans everything (including the bleach) out. Although, I'm not entirely sure the bleach was even needed, but better to be safe than peeing out of your butt hole. Water tasted good... course that could've just been the ridiculous heat too.
http://www.berkeyfilters.com/

And then there's the sports bottle version.

Understandably, you may not have access to bleach later... although it's not entirely necessary, just an extra security step... but if you're neurotic like me, then redundancy of systems is a good thing. With that in mind you could combine the Berkey with a slow sand system. You can use either by themselves, but it can't hurt to double up either. Or, if you're just into building your own. This link has a couple downloadable PDFs available.
http://surferswithoutborders.org/Slow_Sand_Filter.html

So, first things first. Get some water now and start researching water filtering systems, bottles and and other methods of getting water. We'll circle back to this topic later when we get to harvesting rainwater and such... but that's not even worth thinking about if you're just now starting out. Baby steps.

SARC

SARC (SILO Apocalyptic Resource Community) is a local group to Southern Illinois formed on the SILO (Southern Illinois Outdoors.com) forums. We are attempting to group together in a community fashion and trade information, ideas and skills that will be useful in case society stops working as we know it now. This could be the result of a Solar Flare, Crop Prices getting too high or something worse.

This blog is a way to expand the viability of this community and reach out to others around us that are interested in contributing to our attempt to build a survivalist community in our region. It's also going to act as a sort of 101 for people first getting into Preparedness. There is soooo much to think about when it comes to preparing yourself that it can be overwhelming to someone who has very little exposure, and there is so much information out there in the form of podcasts, forums, webpages, blogs, articles, online books... it's hard to find a place to start. So, I'm attempting to fill that gap. As I move this blog (and soon an accompanying podcast) forward, I will point to other places that have a lot more in depth information on the topics.

If you're local to the St. Clair County, Illinois area and you'd like to join the SARC forum, we do charge a $5 fee, but this is purely to prevent drive-by posters or people who would hassle us pointlessly as so often happens on the internet. We also have a Twitter feed that is localized to our area, but open to anyone, for weather alerts, solar alerts, amber alerts, terror alerts, etc... Please feel free to post comments here if you have input and do not wish to join the forum.