Category Archives: Prepping

Gardening, Off Grid Living, Prepping

Using All Those Dry Beans that You Stockpiled

Tip: When building up your disaster food stockpile, think about how you will use the foods in meals. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of foods you don’t like. Or you might end up with disproportionate amounts of food, like 30lbs of pasta but not sauce to go on it.

In my book Disaster Preparedness for Women, I show exactly how to plan a food stockpile so you can make healthy, balanced meals. The book also covers all the preparedness essentials so you are ready for anything. Get the book here.

Here are 11 tasty ways to use dried beans Try these delicious dried bean recipes.

1. Red Bean Pasta Sauce

Source: 11 Delicious Ways to Use Those Dry Beans You Stockpiled

Click on the link for 10 more useful recipes. You did realize that you’d have to eat all those didn’t you?

Gardening, Off Grid Living, Prepping

Nutritious Food Plants You Can Harvest Quickly

Here’s a great list of quick vegetables that everyone should see.

We’ve grown them all!

We only need a few weeks to produce some nutritious vegetables and enjoy them for a great lunch or dinner.

Imagine having fresh spinach harvested four to six weeks after planting. Even better, a vegetable garden in your backyard will complement that verdant, green lawn and add some color and texture to your landscape.

There are many wholesome veggies you can grow, relatively quickly, a few steps away from your kitchen. Here are five vegetables to get you started.

Source: Nutritious Food Plants You Can Harvest Quickly – The Prepper Journal

Off Grid Living, Prepping

Homemade Bug Spray: Natural & Effective Repellent Recipes

Here are four all-natural homemade bug sprays that can kick those pesky insects to the curb.

If you don’t like the idea of spraying too many chemicals on yourself or your children, these recipes take seconds to mix up and really work for every day sprays.

KNOW THY ENEMY

As soon as we step outside, bugs have a way of finding us. Some use the CO2 we exhale to locate us, others go by scent, body heat, vibrations, or even the colors we wear.

For example, deerflies are attracted to CO2, warmth, motion, and dark colors. One way to make yourself less attractive to insects is to avoid using fragrant soaps, lotions, perfume, hairspray, or aftershave. Instead, use scents that block their receptors, making you harder to find.

Mosquitoes hate citronella, lemon eucalyptus, cinnamon, geranium, and catnip.

Ants and flies dislike mint, basil, and bay.

Tiny gnats (such as No-See-Ums) are repelled by citronella, lemongrass, and rose geranium.

Ticks and lice avoid lemon eucalyptus and geranium.

Source: Homemade Bug Spray: Natural & Effective Repellent Recipes | The Old Farmer’s Almanac

Off Grid Living, Prepping

Make Emergency Candles from Bacon Grease

…Nothing beats a flashlight or an emergency candle in case the power goes out, but what are you going to do when there’s no more juice in that lantern and the last piece of flick died out like the ambitions and desires of a crestfallen lover?

Make some more, of course, because that’s we preppers are good at. In today’s article, I’m going to show you a fast way to create 24-hour emergency candles by harnessing the raw power of your favorite dish – bacon.

Yup, you’ve read that right. Bacon’s not only great for breakfast, but can also be used to make portable and highly efficient light sources. So, enough chit chat! Let’s take a look at how bacon candles are made.

Source: How To Turn Bacon Grease Into Emergency Candles – Daily Prepper News

Gardening, Prepping

How to grow your own wellness garden

Besides food, one can grow many herbs that are useful medicine. Here’s a few. Be sure to click for more info.

Modern medicine owes a lot to the plant kingdom, from the treatment of heart disease to lung disorders. But plants can be useful for minor ailments and everyday self-care, too.

Growing for wellness is going mainstream. A recent survey by Wyevale Garden Centres found that more than two thirds of British gardeners consider the health and wellbeing properties of a plant before they buy it.

At Chelsea Physic Garden, a Food is Medicine Trail starts this month to highlight plants you can grow as tonics, pick-me-ups and other soothing remedies to handle the stresses of modern life.

Many are surprisingly easy to grow, even in limited city spaces. We asked Chelsea Physic Garden’s head of plant collections, Nell Jones, to share her tips for the best “wellbeing” plants to grow at home.

Source: How to grow your own wellness garden: from peppermint to turmeric easy-to-grow plants that will help with minor ailments and wellbeing | Homes and Property

Off Grid Living, Prepping

Best Long Term Storage Foods

When you live out in a very rural area, you quickly learn to have supplies on hand in case you can’t or don’t want to go into town. (Fifty miles away.)

Beyond that, one knows that if things got dicey in the cities, we would be on our own here for a while for sure.

It’s always good to have food on hand. Here’s a great article on things that can just last and last. Be sure to click the link, it’s a good one.

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Best Survival Foods: Non-Perishables That Can Outlive You

Whether you’re sick of throwing out food that’s long past its expiry date, or are working on preparing a food stockpile in case of an emergency, consumables that practically never spoil can be a huge asset to your household.

This article lists non-perishable food items that not only have long shelf lives, but if taken care of properly, these foods stand a chance of never going bad within your lifetime.These ideal survival foods will of course need to be stored the right way in order to retain their practically never-ending shelf life.

The absolute best place to keep a food stockpile is in a dark, cool, and dry spot, free of humidity, moisture, direct sunlight, and extreme temperatures.

Keeping consumables in an air-tight container, or better yet, vacuum packed, is also very important to increasing shelf life.

Although many non-perishable survival foods may change flavor and/or texture over the years, they remain edible and perfectly safe for consumption over indefinite periods of time. Use your senses to judge whether or not food with long shelf life has expired. If it smells off, has become too soft, or has developed mold, it’s better not to eat the item.

Source: Best Survival Foods: Non-Perishables That Can Outlive You

Off Grid Living, Prepping

25 Most Popular Survival Books: Survivalist & Prepper Best Sellers

Knowledge is the most powerful survival tool you could ever possibly possess. A knife and a fire steel will do wonders in the wilderness, and a hefty stockpile will be a huge asset in case of an emergency situation, but nothing will ever come close to helping you survive like the knowledge and skills you possess.While we all already know this, we also simultaneously realize how difficult attaining knowledge can be. The learning curve can be steep, mastering skills often happens slowly, and the material we need to learn can feel broad and overwhelming. Sometimes, too, it can be hard to determine whether a source of information is even reliable enough to help us on our quest for valuable knowledge.That’s where this list comes in handy. The survival books below are some of the most read, rated, and reviewed on the web. These books are written by some of the most well respected and knowledgeable industry leaders. It’s vitally important to get your information from trustworthy sources – after all, you never want your facts wrong when your life is on the line.

Source: 25 Most Popular Survival Books: Survivalist & Prepper Best Sellers

Off Grid Living, Prepping

Tips for Keeping Backyard Chickens – For Beginners

Having a new flock of chickens can be a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, especially for beginners. It takes years to learn the ins and outs of good chicken keeping. If I could go back and start over, there would be a handful of things I wish I would have known as a beginner. These ten tips will help prevent confusion and heartache for the new chicken owner.

Source: 10 Tips for Keeping Backyard Chickens for Beginners

(Thanks to Wirecutter for sharing this one.)

Gardening, Prepping

Survival Medicine: Cayenne Pepper

Prescription meds and over-the-counter medications may or may not be available in a given economic collapse, but you can always grow your own medicinal herbs or even source them in the wild. If you could only have one medicinal herb in your survival bag it should be cayenne pepper. It’s an anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and a sterilizer. It’ll warm you up, boost your metabolism, and energize you all at once. Cayenne pepper adds spicy heat to improve the flavor of all foods. It’s even beneficial, not harmful, for your digestive tract. The active ingredient, capsaicin, is what’s responsible for all the benefits. Lately, even the medical world is giving credit to capsaicin. A product called “Sinus Buster” is a popular over-the-counter sinus medication that is capsaicin based. As an aside, Sinus Buster even claims to chase away headaches. But you don’t need to buy Sinus Buster to chase away headaches or clear your sinuses. Grow your own cayenne peppers and make your own medicine!

Source: Grow You Survival Medicine: Cayenne Pepper – The Organic Prepper

Prepping

25 Prepping Excuses that a SHTF Event Won’t Care About

If disaster was a human named SHTF, it would be that person who takes delight in dropping by unannounced and seeing you at your worst: still in your PJs, out of coffee, and taken utterly by surprise.The kind of person who takes advantage of your unpreparedness to ask to borrow the keys to your new car while you’re still in shock at his arrival. The kind of person who acts surprised that you’re surprised and makes you feel like 12 kinds of an idiot for being surprised. The kind of person you must always plan for like an unpleasant in-law, whether you want them to come by or not.SHTF doesn’t generally drop by at the most convenient of times, nor does SHTF care about your prepping excuses.  In fact, SHTF thrives and grows exponentially under more adverse circumstances.25 Excuses That Won’t Matter When the SHTFSo, suck it up, put on your boots, and power through it – SHTF doesn’t care about your prepping excuses.SHTF doesn’t care about inclement weather – snow, hail, tornadoes, pouring rain, and hurricanes all just add to the party atmosphere for SHTF.

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Source: 25 Prepping Excuses That Won’t Matter – The Organic Prepper