Preparedness for when

vanoonoo

Caterina wrote: »

Oh well maybe the Southern Preppers should think of a meet in the Croydon Ikea then! I have been meaning to go, now that it is so easy to reach by tram (I love that tram journey, I feel like a little kid!).

oh Caterina you are making me home sick I used to live in Croydon and remember the ikea being built and tram being installed heehee

there is also an ikea in Notts if anyone fancies meeting up there I would be up for that

valk_scot

Fruball wrote: »

FOR ANYONE OVERWHELMED.... (as I once was, and still am when I read about others' preps!)

Prepping can be as big or as small as you feel comfortable with - I know when I started prepping it was small - ie I lived out in the sticks and felt that a few cereal bars, some water, spare hat, gloves, scarves and wellies for us all stashed in the boot would make a difficult situation easier so I put them in the car..... It has escalated but that is where I started...

So for anyone reading this who thinks OMG I AM SO UNPREPARED... Don't worry - a trip to your local supermarket with £10 and a clever list will make you more prepared than you were yesterday... It takes time to prep - and to get your head around it.

Think about the basics and build from there. Water #1, food #2, and whatever thereafter.

Never panic - whatever small preps you have will be more than someone unprepared

Hope that has been useful to someone xxx

I do think prepping is as much about mindset tbh, as in folk who have actually admitted to themselves that emergencies do happen and have made a few low cost/low effort preparations for these will do best in the actual emergency. I know folk who don't keep even a basic first aid kit in their house, who would run out of food in three days and who don't own a single pair of sturdy shoes, warm jacket or more than minimal bedding because they go everywhere by car and have the CH on 24/7.

Just having enough food (however boring), to last a week, some charity shop outdoor clothes tucked away in a cupboard and a couple of spare duvets would go a long way towards being ready for the most likely sorts of problems, as would a £10 camping stove and gas, some candles, matches and a few bottles of Value water. And even the most dedicated car user..in fact especially the dedicated car user!...should carry basic emergency kit in the car.

As to the rest, well I've read the more extreme prepping sites, by which I mean the US ones mostly. I'm just not going there, not with guns and bunkers and two years of food and petrol stored away. I don't actually belive in the Zombie Apocalypse tbh and if a major global disaster struck the statistical chances of me and the family being wiped out by the nuclear/biological/chemical/environmental first strike are pretty high anyway. The most extreme forms of prepping are based on the premise that you'll be one of the lucky survivors of the first strike while in fact it's just as likely to be your neighbour standing there in her high heels wondering why her car doesn't start because she needs to go shoping for that night's tea.

So I'm mostly prepping for a one month time span and the far more likely sort of emergency, like very bad weather, distribution strikes, short term utility failures due to environmental impacts etc. Things that would get sorted out in due course by the council or goverment but in the intervening time I want to be able to just pull up the drawbridge and not have to worry about where my next meal was coming from, or keeping warm. Like during the last bad winter in fact, we just stayed in for a couple of weeks and didn't have to join in the mayhem down in town with everyone frantically grabbing dozens of loaves of bread off the shelves and sitting in two hour queues for petrol. It's foolish to leave yourself as vunerable to supply chain breakdown as that tbh.

But even a month's worth of supplies will probably never get used tbh, unless you live beyond the snow plough level. A week's worth would cover most of the likely scenarios for town folk and would be long enough to give you a breathing space to plan, if you needed more.

GreyQueen

frugalgal wrote: »

Thanks Fruball, I have been a bit overwhelmed with it all. I have decided that I will begin by just getting a few extras so that I have at least a week's worth of food/toiletries, etc in the cupboards at all times. I can then start building from that. I am then going to have boxes that I can store one week's worth of food at a time, that way I can easily rotate food and in an emergency situation I can give someone else a box if needed. In the box I will include tea, coffee, sugar, dried milk and food stuffs (may also include some water purification tabs in the box).

Would other people recommend storing water in jerry cans (I read that they can be stored in a dark, cool place for 6 months)???

You can store water very efficiently in repurposed fizzy pop bottles or start with the cheapest bottled water at 17p for 2 litres, use it by the expiry date and then refill from the tap and so on, rotating every six months.

This is what I'm doing. Keeping it in the dark is to prevent algaal growth which could in theory happen if you had it in full sun. I keep mine in a corner of dead space in the kitchen where it's nice and dim (you need a light in my kitch at all times).

Of course, if your household uses pop anyway, or you know someone who does, you'll just repurpose them. Milk bottles aren't to be recommended (I'm thinking of those plastic ones) as they taint the water no matter how carefully you wash them up.

Lots of people have spoken about running the bath full of water as a storage cistern in event of an emergency. Please be aware that it is a rare bath plug which won't allow water to seep out slowly and you could lose the lot, and also you won't really be able to drink this water as the wide surface will cause all sorts to fall in it. It's better to fill water carriers and stand them in the tub in case of spillage.


It can be overwhelming to think of at first (I find it so, sometimes) but it helps to break it down into areas and to work thru them as resources allow. I don't mean complete one area before starting another as this could leave your sorted for some stuff and totally unprepared for others.

My areas are;

Prescription medications. I'm on a lifesaving med. I don't take it and I die. That's my reality. For me, the meds are more of a critical resource than water or food.

Food and water. I enjoy both.

Alternative methods of cooking/ heating and lighting.

Transport; My feet, my pushbike, public transport. Can I carry my kit?

Emergency evac; I live in a tower block in a city centre. Residents have had to emergency evac before in the middle of the night (gas explosion). Can I get out with one bag in seconds if necessary?

Longer term situations; do I have skills? Yes and working on it?

Reference and resources; do I know how to do stuff and/or I have I got reference books, preferably sturdy hardcovers, not necessarily new ones?

I like the idea of your weekly box and think this will go well for you. Best of luck!

valk_scot

prepareathome wrote: »

Am trying to decide I can ( I hope) buy either a storm kettle, the cooking kit and a dutch oven or buy a cobb......works out similar price but not sure which to go for......anyone any feedback on these?

The storm kettle mention suddenly reminded me of what they teach at Scouts, how to make a storm kettle/emergency cooker out of two tin cans. We tried it one year on a particularly wet camping trip and it worked very well. They learn all sorts of useful things in Scouts, like how to build bivvies and essential camp furniture using only a knife and piece of string, campfire cooking, first aid etc etc. My OH was an Adventure scout back in the dark ages and both DS and DD are Scouts atm. It's amazing the things they know when taken out into the woods or a field! (I wish I'd been a Scout...)

Anyway, it's something to think about if you're into serious prepping and you've got suitably aged kids. Send them to Scouts or Guides and get them trained in bushcradt skills, no?

frugalgal

Thanks for all the helpful advice GreyQueen. It has given me a good starting point for my prep stores. TBH I normally have enough food in the house for a week or two but only enough for me and my son. If the SHTF and my neighbours did not have any food it will be nice to know that I have a couple of my 'weekly' boxes stashed to help them out.

I am definitely beginning to become addicted to prepping, more for peace of mind than anything else.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread x

D&DD

Just a quickie as watching Bakeoff with DS3 before we do some bread !
PAH I have a Cobb and love it..I've baked scones in it,bread,made pizza,cooked a whole chicken,lamb joint,scrambled eggs etc

I saw it first on the gadget show there is still a video online with Jason using it to cook a full meal and many youtube videos..

It is a bit pricey but I had some vouchers and cash for my birthday and finally treated myself this year

jamanda

vanoonoo wrote: »

oh Caterina you are making me home sick I used to live in Croydon and remember the ikea being built and tram being installed heehee

there is also an ikea in Notts if anyone fancies meeting up there I would be up for that

I can find that one if you mean the one at Kimberley.

(For a reasonably intelligent person my geography and sense of direction is shocking)

mardatha

I prep because I live in a high village on moors and we get snow every winter, it can lie for weeks and reach four and a half feet. I also think its just commonsense to have stuff in - like ValkScot says, if anything's going on then I want to be in here with the door shut and the fire on, not in a supermarket in a crowd of panicking people. I don't worry about the more OTT things but I do like to prep for epidemics, banks failing, price hikes, and strikes causing disruption to food and elect supplies.
EDITED - changed my avatar to a pic of the back road near my house

[Deleted User]

Morning all, interesting read this morning on here, I too have a fairly extensive collection of books that are relevant to prepping all collected over the years because I have always felt it was important to keep old skills living. I have MILs spinning wheel and carding set in the loft, and a drop spindle I'm not very good at yet, but practise would probably crack that one. We have aquired lots of periphery skills and most of the courses we have done have been at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Singleton in West Sussex. Even my highly doubting scientist husband has learned netting and now makes all our bean nets, and sometimes hay nets for horsey friends. DD1 has also done some interesting ones at the City Farm in Bristol. We are also lucky enough to live within reach of The Sustainability Centre in the Meon Valley here in Hampshire, they too do very useful courses including the Cobb building mentioned earlier. I think that is where you become a true prepper when it goes beyond preparing for a disruption of the day to day for a while and you start to deliberately aquire skills that will give you a better quality of life should the world go pear shaped in a big way. I personally don't find it quite such a terrifying prospect now mainly because of all of you on this thread, I felt very isolated and just a bit batty before finding others who sing the same hymn. I think we (the collective) will be very useful commodities to our respective communities in the event of something really big happening and keeping the old skills going will enable others to learn and make the community stronger. Sorry if that's a bit deep for this time of day but, it's just dawned on me how lucky we are to have the support of all on this thread.

Have a good day, Cheers Lyn x.

mardatha

I do love history with a passion Mrs L and I think it only sensible to prepare for the future by looking at past - the days when they had to do everything by hand and managed perfectly well. One day we might need to go back to that.
And yes, you are batty. But we luv yoo