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Originally Posted by atom
Alright, I will chime in on this thread since most of the haters left.
I was raised hunting and fishing. My parents always had a huge garden and mid summer to fall meant canning season in our house. My parents still live like this and If I were to walk into their "root cellar" I would see 400+ quarts of canned tomatoes and other various veggies. These are not old, these are done every year and my parents live off their garden throughout the year. In fact, I was over there the other day and they still had onions in there from last fall that were hanging from mesh bags
Because of being raised this way, I have always felt the need to try and be self sufficient. I also like knowing how my veggies were grown. The only additives in my soil is cow or turkey shit. I also smoke meats, fish, hunt etc and try and keep my chest freezer full with meat, whether it something I shot or something I bought a lot of because it was on sale at the grocery store.
In today's world they call this prepping, 20-30 years ago this was a normal way of life.
In addition to having a full freezer, I also have 6 buckets with sealed mylar bags. 200lbs of rice, 100lb of granola and 50lbs of wheat. I also dehydrate raspberries and strawberries that I can not make into jam because there are just too damn many here. Overall I would say I have 5-6 months of food here for me, my wife and son.
I bought everything to make a wind turbine this last fall but just never got around to building it. I also was going to order solar panels and build a solar array but again, ran out of time. The funny thing is, i bought the turbine for my ice house I keep on the lake in the winter so I didn't have to haul 4 deep cells back and forth every 4-6 weeks. I am positive these deep cells could run my freezer for at least 10-15 days if I piggybacked them. If I really needed more power I have a 3800 watt generator but to me, if a disaster situation ever did arise, this would be like yelling - Come take my shit.
My wife and I are looking to move further out into the country. Ideally I would like to have 50-60 acres with water running through my land (easy here in the land of 10,000 lakes) Hopefully the real estate market remains weak for the next 2-3 years so we have time to find the perfect setup.
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Your gardening and canning experience and setup already in place as a normal way of life would score you huge pionts with the experts Adam. That plus your hunting skills, which in turn indicates some expertise with firearms and cover tactics and the like, all would serve to get you a lot further than 99% of the masses, even further than a lot of self-proclaimed preppers.
As for the water and power comments you mentioned, in the last episode of the series Doomsday Preppers they happened to show a guy who had welded and weaseled together somehow the chain axels and pedals of two bicycles to what looked like a small wind turbine. His plan was to actually dip the turbine into a nearby small running creek, and hook it up to generate enough electicity to charge batters and supplement the running of his lights, fridge, freezer, and a few small appliances as needed. He fired it up and the damn thing worked.
You should catch that episode, I think it's titled "Let her rip".
Quote:
Originally Posted by atom
Do I really think anything bad is going to happen? Nope.
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The mantra my fellow hospital staffers, nurses, doctors etc used to always tell patients was "Hope for the best, plan for the worst" when giving the families of seriously ill patients some modicum of comfort. That same line seems to also be the one that today's preppers all use.
It's about as true a saying as I've ever heard, for both purposes.