What to Do Today to Become Self-Sustaining

 

So, you want to be self-sustaining?  You have dreams of turning your home and yard into a “preppers paradise?”  Or perhaps your goals include purchasing a tract of land and turning it into a homestead?  Whether you have desires to create a self-reliant farm or just want to start down the road of learning how to become more self-sustaining, I have a few tips for you here.  Maybe you were convinced by my previous article on the subject –

Why Everyone Should Learn “Prepping” Skills

Whatever the case, it’s important to realize that it takes dedication to succeed in any of these areas.  Generally speaking, there are 6 major areas to consider being self-sustaining.  Of course, this isn’t all-inclusive, there are many, many things to learn beyond this.  But these 6 are the basics of getting started.  Now I don’t want to scare anyone off.  In fact, my hope is to help everyone achieve some level of sustainability. 

So, let’s look at these 6 areas:

1.       Shelter

2.      Electricity

3.      Water

4.      Meat

5.      Fruits and Vegetables

6.      Staples

When we speak of shelter, there are going to be 2 avenues which I have already touched on.  You either already own property with some type of shelter (a house, a mobile home) on it or you plan to purchase property with either shelter already on it or you plan to place a shelter

there.  The first thing you need to do is figure out how you can live comfortably.  Not how you dream about living.  Yes, we all watch those “Alaska” shows where people thrive in -40 degree winters and 10 feet of snow.  And we all (or those like me) think, “Heck yeah, I can do that.”  Well, it takes a special kind of person to do that.  So, what environment are you capable of living in?  And what the heck does this have to do with the sudden shift away from shelters?  Well, can you live in a canvas tent, or an RV, or a cabin built from free pallets?  Or do you need to build a brick home just like any other brick home in any other subdivision?  The choice is yours.  So, decide on your land and your shelter, then you can move on from there.

Now, the two most difficult items to obtain from the list above are Water and Staples.  Yes, some may disagree, but hear me out.  Unless you have a continuously running water source on your land or you are able to build a water source (i.e., dig a well), you’re not going to have freshwater resources.  So, you need to plan that into your check-off list.  And then, there are Staples.  What do I mean by that?  These are things like Flour, Corn Meal, Sugar, Coffee, Tea, Salt, Spices.  Items we use in everyday cooking that we buy in bulk but are extremely difficult to produce on our own.  I wouldn’t be able to grow coffee on my property.  Or grow cane fields to produce sugar.  Or field of wheat to make flour.  So, we have to think about how to obtain these or substitutes.  And this leads to the next category…Fruits and Vegetables.

So, I was doing a lot of thinking the other day and remarked to my mom, that there are 3 main carbohydrates in the world.  Rice, Flour (Bread and Pasta), and Potatoes.  Wherever you go, different cultures depend largely on one of these three staples as the basis of their diet.  Now, in a situation where we had to “live off the land,” we wouldn’t be growing rice.  Like I stated earlier, I couldn’t grow enough rice or wheat (flour) to support myself.  But we can grow potatoes.  And rather easily too.  Potatoes, and to a lesser extent beans, would be the main carb we could grow to sustain our diet. 

So back to the main point of this article, what can you do today to get started in being self-sustaining?  As I have argued before, start with a small backyard garden.  First, learn what grows well in your area. 

Check out your Agricultural Zone below:

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone

Then, begin to plant fruits and vegetables that you enjoy eating.  Start with easy to care for items that are staples of dishes like tomatoes, bell peppers, and sweet peppers.  And don’t forget the potatoes!  Growing potatoes is easy and a great start to becoming self-sustaining. 

And that leaves us with the next category of Meat!

Yep, good ole’ meat.  I can go on and on about mean and sustainability, but that’s for another article.  The purpose here is to get you started.  For purposes of this article, I’m not referring to hunting or trapping to obtain mean, but becoming self-sustaining, as in a homestead.  And the easiest and most rewarding animal to raise for beginners are chickens.  They are so easy to care for and most municipalities do not have laws against raising a couple chickens in your

backyard.  A decent size coop, fresh food and water, and some hay, and you can raise 2 or 3 chickens right in your own back yard.  Some chickens lay an egg a day, some every other day.  But you are learning how to raise animals and getting the benefit of fresh eggs.  And from time to time, you could butcher one up for dinner if you like.  More on that on another day.  If you are really feeling the call of the homestead, you could also consider raising meat rabbits.  These animals breed well.  Yes, they are cute.  You have to go into it with the mindset that these are for food.

Let There Be Light!

Finally, we arrive at electricity.  You will have to decide how much or how little electricity you can live with (or without).  Just remember, if you want to truly be off-grid, or in a total SHTF situation, there may not be any external electrical resources.  We don’t realize how much we depend on it, until it’s not there.  My suggestion to you is to try and rely on as little electricity as possible from time to time to get an idea of just how much is used.  And it’s not the lights!  Lighting is one of the smaller consumption items.  Think about the things we forget about.  The refrigerator, the deep freezer, the HVAC (Air Conditioning and Heating), the washer and dryer, the TV, the Wi-Fi modem, the aquarium, the stove, the computer, shall I go on?

There are several options out there, solar, wind, water, but only solar is accessible for most people.  So, obviously, it is possible to go totally solar, many are doing it.  It is expensive though.  Do some research on the matter.  Now I said this was about what you can do today, right?  Well, dip your toes into the river of solar power.  Start with solar power packs that have small solar panels that you can use to recharge cell phones and small electrical items. 

Purchase lights like these on Amazon that are cheap, but recharge with small solar panels

and provide a lot of light for many hours:

Get inexpensive solar panels and solar batteries that can charge higher consumption items like fans and computers.  By the way, these and the solar pack and lights I mentioned are great for camping!

Start building your way up to more and more solar power and then spend time using only these items.  This will help you get used to the idea of relying on solar power. 

So, I hope this article was helpful for you.  I want to help individuals understand how to become more self-reliant and take the small steps towards that goal.  I believe that if we start small, we learn invaluable skills and knowledge to help us for when we have to make the big plunge.  That’s all for today, folks, wish you all well and Stay Safe!

#outdoorlife #selfreliance #sustainability #homestead #offgrid

Why Everyone Should Learn “Prepping” Skills

 

These days, the term “prepping” is tossed around without really an understanding behind the meaning.  I, personally, rarely use the word preferring terms like “self-reliance” or “homesteading.” Often a “prepper” conjures up images of some whacko holed up in the mountains with a cache of guns and ammo who rejects society and will kill anyone who comes within miles of his compound.  Come to think of it, maybe I am a prepper.  But really, to be a prepper means to be prepared.  “Prepared for what?” you might ask.  And the answer is anything.  It is not very farfetched that some type of incident or incidents could occur where individuals would find themselves in the position of having to be more self-reliant in some manner and to varying extremes. 

As a matter of fact!  - we’ve already experienced it this year.  Remember our initial reaction to COVID-19?  I don’t know about your neighborhood, but the grocery stores here in my town were wiped out.  Not just of toilet paper, but all paper products, canned goods, dried foods, meats, you name it.  And it lasted for weeks. 

So, it wasn’t a super extreme version of a SHTF scenario (for you non-preppers, that means a Shit-Hit-The-Fan scenario, a large incident that causes all of society to crash), but it certainly brought to the forefront how easily we could find ourselves in one.  No, my friends, it is not just for the whacko’s to contemplate what might happen in the event of a societal crash or even partial crash.

Epidemic?  War?  Alien Invasion?  Asteroid Crash?  Government Takeover?

Yeah, a lot of possibilities.  And don’t forget the very real possibility of a Zombie Apocalypse!  So, do you know some basic survival skills?  What if there were no grocery stores?  What if there was no electricity?  What if other people were trying to take what you have by force?  To understand where we need to go, we have to understand where we came from.  My personal belief is that it is a very pitiful situation that people have become so disconnected from the land and from their food.  And I don’t just mean meat, but yes that’s a big one.  Plants too.  So many people don’t have any idea how to grow a garden.  It is so important that everyone learns how to grow a small garden.  You can raise your favorite crops!  And it’s more than just popping a seed in some dirt and watering it.  Much more!  Do you know what crops grow in your location?  Do you know your agricultural zone?  Do you know what kind of dirt to use?  How to fertilize and with what type of fertilizer and when?  How much to water?  How much sun?  Every plant is different.  You can pretty much pop any seed in any dirt, add some water, and it will start to grow.  But the real test is, will grow to adulthood and flower and produce fruit?  What conditions do you need for the flower to produce fruit?  Do you need two of the same plant to cross-pollinate? 

And then there was meat!  …and don’t even get me started on meat.  Sorry, this is a pet-peeve of mine (pardon the pun).  Society has become so disconnected from where they get their meat.  We go to McDonald’s and order or a burger.  Sometimes, for those that can actually cook, they buy a piece of steak from the grocery store.  But that meat came from a living animal.  A lot of people view hunters with hatred, but that hunter loves animals just as much as anyone else.  That hunter also has the conviction to pull the trigger and kill that animal, gut it and clean it, and chop It up for his family to have food.  While you may detest hunting, it is a much more noble means of providing meat on your table.  I’d also like to add that a large percentage of funds from hunting licenses goes towards environmental stabilization. 

So, you can grow your veggies and you can kill and clean a rabbit.  Now what??  Well, you’ve eaten meat for a day, but what about the next day?  So, you kill and clean a deer.  Now what??  What do you do with the extra meat and veggies that you don’t eat today?

Canning and Preserving.

That’s right.  One of the main skills to learn in prepping is how to can and preserve food.  It’s the only way to make it through the year.  You can’t grow plants year-round, at least not most and not with a lot of fruit production.  You probably (maybe?) can’t hunt year-round.  Or at least you wouldn’t be able to kill large animals on a regular basis.  So, you have to learn how to preserve the excess food that you have.  And trust me, this is a science all to itself.  It takes a lot of knowledge and math to know how to properly do these things.  Unless you don’t care about killing yourself and your family with some bacteria. 

Then there’s all the other things:  building a fire, cooking, building shelter if you need to, living without electricity, making and repairing clothes, raising animals (chickens are the best to start with), and on an on. 

You can start now!  That’s right!  No matter where you live, you can start learning with a small backyard or patio garden and some backyard chickens.  Chickens are great because it teaches you how to raise animals (there’s a lot of science for that too) and you get the benefit of daily fresh eggs.  Just think, if you raised 2 chickens who lay one egg a day each and had a few bell pepper and tomato plants, you could, if nothing else, survive off a southwest style omelet every day.  You wouldn’t be eating a lot, but you could survive!

So, I think I’ve made my point.  These are important skills to learn.  The good news is you can learn them.  There are many resources out there to help you with gaining the knowledge you need to survive if things get bad.  Don’t think that it can’t happen.  It can and likely will.  Only you can take the steps necessary to ensure that your family will be able to face the undesirable consequences. 

The blog you are reading right now was designed to help you take those first steps:  Read More.  Click on the “Follow” button to make sure you get notified of future posts.

And this accompanying YouTube channel will provide you with videos of living outdoors:  See More.  Be sure to “Thumbs Up” the video, then click on the Subscribe button below the video and hit the notification bell so you get notified of future videos.

Thanks, and I hope this was useful information for you!

#outdoorlife #direcklyonthecoals