How to Cultivate an Indoor Garden During the Winter
“For everything, there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” – Ecclesiastes 3:1-2.
For everything, there is a season, but your growing and harvesting can and should be year-round. Many gardens will be ending soon, hunting season is rolling in, and it’s time to winterize and plan for Spring. If you haven’t brought nature indoors yet, now is the time to start doing so. You could probably get one more late harvest of garlic, turnips, kale, mustard, and some squash before the cold weather sets in, but what then? Have you considered bringing your growing indoors or learning techniques to grow indoors?
Seed saving what you will need for next year’s garden, micro-gardens, micro green sprouting, mushroom starter kits, even grow tents are great ways to keep the freshly grown food flowing through winter. Supplementing your nutrition and stretching your winter supplies are valuable skills to have. Here, I’ll explore just a few winter options that may seem small now but could have a dramatic impact on your life when future disasters strike. These probably won’t sustain you if it was your only means of sustenance and nutrition, but it would definitely increase your odds of survival and add critical minerals to your food inventory. Most importantly, this can be a great opportunity to develop a skill that you can cultivate over time. A few of the approaches we’ll cover I, admittedly, haven’t even learned yet myself, but have them on my to-do list this fall and winter and I plan to share them with the community as I go. I’ll bring them up here if you want to get started on them as well. Think of it as a book club where we all read the same book and share our experiences. I will put links to some of these products at the end, but you may have most of what you need for some of them on hand already. So let’s jump in…
SEED-SAVING
If you haven’t ever seed saved and you always relied upon picking up your seeds at the local grocery or hardware store, you are going to be in
trouble the year after disaster strikes. You can purchase seeds specifically packed or vaulted for surviving an extended period, but any seed will degrade in viability after time. Your germination rate decreases each month, even with the best of stored seeds. To ensure your growth and capitalize upon your best harvests, you need to know how to seed save.
If you have one plant in particular that produced the best fruits or vegetables, you want to capture those seeds for next year’s planting. You can even start growing the seeds indoors when the outside temperatures are still too cold, harden them off in the sun when it is warmer, and get them in the ground for an early spring harvest.
Each fruit or vegetable is going to have a different way of harvesting and saving the seeds. Most seeds you can just cut out and dry on a paper towel for a few days before storing them away in a ziplock baggy. A tomato is a little different though, so I will demonstrate how to save the seeds for next year. First, you want to make sure your tomato is open-pollinated. All heirloom tomatoes are, but modern hybrids are not. Seed companies create hybrids that may be useful the year you plant them, but the second generation of seeds might not even bear fruit. Heirlooms are based upon hundreds of years of careful seed saving by generations before you or thousands of years of natural selection in nature or both, so they’re going to be more reliable for seed saving.
Choose a tomato from your healthiest plant. If you could win a prize at a state fair with that heirloom tomato, then it’s the right one to seed save from. These are some late harvest heirlooms, so they’re not State Fair impressive, but they will do for demonstration purposes. To maintain good genetic diversity, it is best to save seeds from multiple tomatoes and preferably from more than one plant of the same variety. With most vegetables, like peppers, you can just cut the seeds out and place them on a paper towel to dry. Tomato seeds have a gelatinous outer cover, so you should soak them in water for 1 to 2 days. You may see a little mold on the top of the water. Skim this off and spread your seeds on a paper towel to dry. I have also been successful season to season by just spreading the seeds out, gelatinous coating, and all on a paper towel and letting them dry out for a few days on the kitchen counter.
When your seeds are dry, you can peel them off the paper towel or store the whole paper towel in a zip lock baggy or small Mylar bag. If you are keeping them for more than a year, use an oxygen absorber and small Mylar bag, and store them in a root cellar, back in your pantry, your refrigerator, or in the freezer. The rate at which your seeds germinate will drop slightly with each month and year. Still, to plant, you can just put the seeds in a starter or bury off pieces of the paper towel your seeds dried on. I have had successful germination of plants from seeds I saved five or more years before. If you pack them for longevity, some say you can germinate them 20 years from when you pack them.
Seed saving is a skill to have, and it will ensure that you have the option of growing food after any disaster.
HOME MICRO-GARDENS
While a home micro-garden won’t ever produce enough for you to thrive on after a disaster, they will provide you with the essential nutrients
you need to survive after a disaster and long into the aftermath of a disaster. Specifically, simply sprouting Alfalfa sprouts will provide you with plenty of nutrients. One cup of Alfalfa sprouts will provide you Vitamin K, C, Copper, Manganese, Folate, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Magnesium, Iron, 1 gram of protein, and 1 gram of carbs. One cup of Mung bean sprouts will give you 3 grams of protein, 6 grams carbs, and 4 grams sugar, so slightly more than alfalfa sprout. Common sprouts are alfalfa, bean sprouts, broccoli, radish, Adzuki, Arugula, Barley, Lentils, Fenugreek, Garbanzo, and many more. If your food reserves were running low, you could deploy enough sprouts in sprouters to supply your basic survival needs.
Beyond just the nutrition, sprouts are a prepper’s secret weapon stash. They are super easy and reliable, but they also take up very little space and can remain viably active for years. One pound of mung bean sprout seeds, for instance, will yield 10 pounds of mung beans sprouts. That’s 130 grams of protein, 261 grams of carbs, and almost 1,400 calories. It’s a survival superfood.
And, sprouting is easy. I use a simple sprouting lid for a jar. I also use a larger screen container. You could simply use a mason jar with a paper towel rubber-banded to the top. It is so easy. Just soak a teaspoon or two of the seeds overnight. Drain and leave upside down for a few minutes to ensure no standing water in your seeds. Rinse your seeds and drain like this once or twice daily. In a few days, you will have more sprouts than you ever imagined. Some nutritionists and preppers swear by sprouts.
Another home micro-garden option is mushroom grow kits you may have seen lately. They will store away until you are ready to use them, or you could get familiar with them right now. Mushrooms dehydrate and rehydrate pretty easily. They can be dried and ground to powder, and added to any savory food dishes. One cup, 96 grams, will have a healthy 3 grams of protein. After you cut them to harvest, set them in the sunlight for 10 minutes to boost the vitamin D content in them. You couldn’t survive on a diet of only mushrooms, but once you find the right conditions in your house and grow them successfully, you will have successive harvests. They’ll keep coming. If you grow them outside your home on a starter log, you can keep foraging from them again and again.
A windowsill garden is another possibility through winter. With enough light and warmth, you can manage several small plants. Lettuce, Fino Verde Basil, small pepper plants, container tomatoes, onions, garlic, even carrots can be grown by a window with enough warmth and light. LED grow lights can supplement the light needs of your plants during winter’s shorter days. You can continually sprout your carrots by removing the greens, cutting off the top 1 inch, and soaking that in water until roots form in the
water, and new shoots of green appear on the top. Once you have roots formed and green shoots of leaves on top, you can transplant to a deep and narrow pot for a continual harvest and place it on a windowsill. The carrot greens are very nutritious and good for you. Don’t throw them out. You can harvest small amounts of them even while your carrot is growing. Blend them with a bit of garlic, olive oil, and parmesan for an easy pesto. You can also store them in a ziplock baggy until ready to use. These will get chopped and tossed with mustard greens and black eye peas.
Could you survive on just your home micro-garden endeavors? Maybe, if you had them all going at the same time and in full force, but it would be hard. The U.N. Food and Agricultural 
Organization shows that a well-tended 11-square foot micro garden can produce as much as 200 tomatoes a year, 36 heads of lettuce every 60 days, ten cabbages every 90 days, and 100 onions every 120 days. The real benefits of these micro-garden endeavors are the skills you learn, supplementation of your existing food storage, which makes your reserves last longer, and the added nutrient benefits that would typically suffer through a disaster.
GROW TENTS & HYDROPONIC SETS
Every year that passes, the cost of a small grow tent setup with fans and lights drops in price a little bit. What was once just mainly for growing secret, illegal plants has become more mainstream for gardening enthusiasts. The problem for both grow tents and small hydroponic setups are, of course, electricity. You need
light, warmth, and the circulation of air and water, which all require electricity. The other problem is space versus yield. The footprint of a system can be significant compared to the harvested crop.
Both grow tents and hydroponic setups are great for plants that provide vital nutrition. Still, you can also convert a room or a garage space after a prolonged disaster or grid-down situation if you have the water, electricity for lights, special grow lights, a fan, and can maintain growing temperatures. Converting an entire room or garage could provide you with enough to survive on when you consider the yield of an 11-foot square micro garden, as mentioned earlier.
If you have the land for it, there’s lots of information on fish farming, and you can raise plants in the same aquaponic system. You would need something like a greenhouse over it all to keep it from freezing during the winter, but it is being done. If you have a large aquarium in your home, you could be harvesting plants and Tilapia out of it all through winter. Tilapia fingerlings, the baby fish, can be purchased live for a few dollars, often at fish stores. As Fingerlings, they are from 1/2 to 1″ long. Within about eight months, with proper feeding proportions, they are edible at about 1 to 2 lbs. Leave a few in the tank, and they will multiply and give you a steady, reliable protein source.
Fish require minimal effort, and even a 55-gallon drum is sufficient to raise fish and grow plants. Hydroponics is just growing plants in water with no soil. Aquaponics grow plants and fish together in the same environment. However, the time to learn these skills is before a disaster strikes, so take the time to explore a solution that’s right for you now. Whatever you choose to do, a small hydroponic or aquaponic setup or grow tent now allows you to learn the essential skills you may need later.
Just because winter comes, it doesn’t mean you have to stop growing your own food. If the supply chain crashes with snow on the ground, you could still supplement your food stores with freshly harvested food with some of the approaches I just outlined. Nothing short of dedicating a garage or whole room will provide you with enough to survive entirely, but you can supplement your food supply in many of these ways. 
You’ll have a healthier and fuller life right now if you do. The time to learn these skills and the time to supplement your everyday diet is right now. It’s not after a disaster has struck. Pick something from what was covered in this video and bring it indoors this winter. Invite mother nature indoors with the rest of your preps as winter freezes the world outside.
What do you think? What’s your winter harvest plan? Are you doing something to extend your growing season indoors this winter that you could tell us in the comments? We would love to know. I read many of the comments and respond to many of them when I can.
As always, please stay safe out there.
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Hi Everyone,
* Announcing a free Ham radio in-person, all-day, 
So far this month, we’ve talked about juice, cocoa, lemonade, and drink mix to add variety to the water. You also can get packs of kool-aid. You’ll need to add sugar to mix, but you don’t have to add nearly as much as called for. You have another chance this week to pick something up and store it away.
The first key to survival is to radiate warmth. When the power goes out and the temperature drops, you need to maximize radiant heat sources. Something as simple as a hot water bottle in your sleeping bag can increase your core temperature considerably. On that note, the second the power goes out, fill every available thermos and pot with hot water from your water heater. Not only will this provide you with some radiant heat, but you will also have water should pipes freeze, or the flow of water to your house stops. 
The second key is to keep your heat in and the cold out. Immediately after the power goes out, seal off windows and doors with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Place a rolled towel at the crack below each door. Isolate yourself to one room, preferably a smaller room, that you will seal up. Remember, a smaller space will be much easier to warm up and keep warm. You also want to create a smaller space within that small space. That may mean pitching a tent or building a makeshift fort out of blankets, tarps, and a table and chairs. A tent will help maintain a climate within the room’s climate and double insulates you from the outside cold temperatures. Adding a small radiant heat source into your tent or fort will keep the temperature up even more.
The third key to surviving the temperature dropping is to dress appropriately for the extreme conditions you face. Anyone who lives in a cold climate will tell you the same thing– layer up. You want water-wicking top and bottom base layers in lightweight and mid weight fabrics. You will want a midweight fleece jacket, wind or rain jacket, pants, glove liners, mitts or gloves, a scarf, sock liners, skullcap or another cold-weather hat, thick socks, insulated boots, and maybe even insulated coveralls. You will have to experiment and plan, so you have a range of mobility and a balanced temperature. You want to be comfortably warm without sweating. Moisture is your enemy when it’s cold, so be careful not to allow sweat to build under the layers as you’ll create a new problem. You can remove layers to get your personal temperature dialed into the correct comfort zone.
Many municipal water systems are gravity and pump-fed. While the water still flows after a disaster because of the gravity, it may cease because the pumps will not be replenishing levels. When you add freezing temperatures on top of this system, lines can break far away from your home because of expanding ice, effectively leaving you without any water. 
The fifth key to surviving a freeze-out is to engage in light exercise within the first hour of waking up and again in the early afternoon. Just simply squatting, a few jumping jacks, even marching in place will get your heart rate elevated and your blood circulating. This will raise your core temperature and keep you warmer for several hours. 
It may seem odd for some that I’m doing a video about surviving a winter disaster when many are still experiencing record high temperatures. Still, it is at this time, long before the threat of a freeze-out, that you should be preparing. You should make sure that you have enough non-perishable food on hand to last you a minimum of three weeks. 
The supply chain is already in shambles at several points along the way. Most retail establishments and manufacturers rely on delicately fine-tuned just-in-time delivery systems to keep inventory as thin as possible and profits as high as possible. Storage and warehousing of extensive inventories require costly real estate and utilities. In the just-in-time system, any interruption in truck deliveries due to natural disasters making roads impassable, economic factors, lack of adequately trained truckers, rapid fluctuations in consumer demands, or lack of parts and maintenance for the active truck fleet results in shortages of thousands of products. This is true even when manufacturers or growers are producing an abundance.
There is still a shortage of microchips for several reasons, and you are probably finding out how many things you use every day rely upon them. First, as the world shuts down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many factories closed as well. This made the supplies needed for chip manufacturing unavailable for months. More people during lockdowns worked from home, and consumers and employers created a rising demand for home office equipment. At the same time, consumers massively shifted their spending habits from recreation, dining out, and entertainment to home improvement, kitchen remodels, and appliance upgrades. All of this created massive consumer demand for chips at the same time production was at a trickle.
According to the US Census, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S., making driving one of the most popular occupations in the United States. The American Trucking Association (ATA) has reported the trucking industry will need to hire roughly 1.1 million new drivers in the next decade (or about 110,000 drivers per year) to keep up with the current industry demand.
One possible solution to the driver shortage could be allowing the military and Guard to climb into the driver’s seat. There are currently 18.2 million military veterans in the United States and 1 in 10 of them are truck drivers. Turning to the military and particularly to those qualified military drivers returning from the two-decade war in Afghanistan may be one possible solution to the driver-side of the equation. If you were an 88M – Motor Transport Operator (Enlisted) in the Army, you can’t simply walk out of your military job and start as a truck driver. A Commercial Driver’s License comes in three varieties– A, B, and C. A are those tractor-trailers, semis, and big rigs you see on the road. This includes livestock carriers, tankers carrying non-hazardous chemicals, and flatbeds. Class B are those straight trucks, buses, segmented buses, dump trucks, delivery trucks, and box trucks. Class C are the double and triple trailers, tank trucks, and HazMat vehicles. As a veteran, even though your daily job may have been driving and maintaining one of these vehicles, you can’t once you are a civilian. There is a skills test waiver allowing a military driver with two years’ experience safely operating heavy military vehicles to obtain a commercial driver’s license without taking the driving skills test. This program is available in every state.
Focus on your needs over your wants. As a prepper, you do need to get the materials you need to survive a prolonged system failure. That being said, you need to focus on the essentials and pass on the luxuries or wants. According to a recent poll on our site, only about 30% of you are new preppers with less than a year and engaged in catching up. Buying a vehicle, TV, major appliance, or any durable goods of that nature in the past would have bolstered the economy’s future. Now, it just puts further strain on the fracturing supply lines. It won’t help the economy. By focusing on the basics of food, water, and power, you position yourself stronger and put less strain on the economy. When the economy collapses or natural disaster strikes, millions are left without power, food, or clean drinking water. You don’t have to be one of those millions at the mercy of the elements, your equally distressed neighbors, or the government.
The first piece of this colder than average weather prediction is the polar vortex. A polar vortex is a low-pressure, vast expanse of swirling cold air that is parked in the polar region. During winter, the polar vortex at the North Pole expands, sending cold air southward. This happens pretty regularly, but not all cold weather that comes your way is caused by a polar vortex per se. When a powerful polar vortex forms like the one we are seeing beginning to form even now, it spins in a counterclockwise direction and is typically held at bay because of the jet stream moving east to west.
The Quasi-Biennial Oscillation or QBO, also known as the “Heartbeat of the Atmosphere,” is a strong wind anomaly over the tropics. Essentially, strong winds in the stratosphere travel in a belt around the planet’s equatorial zone. Around every 14 months, the winds completely change direction. Right now, the QBO is in its east mode. The QBO is often called the Heartbeat of the Atmosphere precisely because this wind shift is so regular. This year, the shift is slower than average, and an easterly QBO will be dominant this winter. This continued easterly direction will result in a colder than typical winter. If you thought last winter was particularly cold, know that it was when the winds were going west, not east, so this winter, so far, will be worse.
So, an early forming large polar vortex, an easterly QBO changing slowly, a weakened jet stream, and a forecasted La Nina season is the perfect storm of events that can result in exceedingly cold temperatures swooping down from the north pole and just sitting over large swaths of regions for an extended period of time. We saw that in Texas in February, and we could see it with even more intensity and for a longer duration this year. All taken together in the United States, you can expect wetter than average winters in the pacific northwest, great lakes, and northeast. You can also expect a drier than usual winter for the rest of the country and frigid polar air plunging deep in the US through the central plains. From Montana to Texas over to Florida and up to Ohio, it’s looking to be cold, cold, cold. January and February of 2022 could see a repeat or even worse of the cold snap that took down the Texas power grid. 
If you think the power companies in Texas and throughout the midwest have invested heavily in correcting the cold weather’s problems in February, you would be wrong. The same thing can happen again in Texas or other regions throughout the central plains.
Remember this year that though you are taking steps to be prepared, your neighbor will not. When the temperatures drop and the power goes out, the most important thing to remember is that your neighbors are assets and liabilities. Banding together makes it easier for everyone involved. Countless stories were coming out from the Texas Snowpocalypse of neighbors pooling resources, lending extras, and coming together to stay warm and find a solution. That’s great. A warm house starts with a warm heart. But, your neighbors are also your most significant liability. If you have a stack of wood or a spare propane tank on the side of your house and your neighbors have none, how long do you think it will last? Desperation allows many to justify taking from anyone they feel has plenty.
Hi Everyone,
I’m not sure I’ll get any tomatoes from these starts, but we’ll see. Meanwhile, I’m hoping for some zucchini for sure!
Do these keep you warm? Does anyone know? 
adding some instant milk to your mug for a richer taste. If you want to experiment a little with the milk, you can get it in the bulk section at Winco (or at least you COULD). 
In addition to Johnny’s seeds, I also order from
I think WaterBricks are a game-changer for many, especially for people prepping in urban areas. The great things about WaterBricks are some of their other uses beyond compact and mobile water storage and transport. They are incredibly designed and provide the prepper with a tremendous utility that you can’t get from other water, food, or ammo storage methods. Some of their different uses are why so many governments and NGO’s turn to them for solutions ranging from instant bunkers to something they can drop from a plane into remote areas. From war zones to the harshest of environments, WaterBricks are a quick solution to many problems. WaterBricks are, of course, an ideal solution for those who need to store water, and you absolutely should be doing that as a prepper. They provide a stackable, portable, safe alternative to 55-gallon drums that would easily weigh 450lbs when full. If you’d like to check these out, you can see them on the site here: 
Center. It took a 500-pound bear working on one of these WaterBricks for a half-hour before he could get to the food inside. That’s very solid, and I am confident these can weather the most extreme conditions and hold up well when buried for an extended period.
water, air, and water vapor inside the WaterBrick will warm during the day and continue to release that warmth through the night. A thermal wall on even one side of your structure, the side that receives the most direct sunlight, will create a steady heat source through the cold night and easily keep the interior of your structure a few degrees warmer than the outside. When building your survival structure, stack the bricks so your WaterBrick wall has maximum daytime exposure to the sun. 
Keeping your food and medicine cold after a prolonged power outage is essential. The solid block of ice contained neatly in a WaterBrick can do just that. When it melts, you also have a freshwater source. With the wide opening at the top, if you freeze in a two-step process, you can also store essential survival items within the block of ice, so long as those items are stored in double-layered ziplock bags and can withstand the freezing temperatures and pressure. For this purpose, don’t think of anything larger than a mini-survival kit, but it provides you an extra means to distribute and preserve your survival supplies where most would not think of looking.
people with an in-water weight above one hundred pounds. 
If it was a single cause, we could reasonably fix the problem, but we are at a point now where fixing it isn’t a simple matter. Panic buying of some items has depleted already thin just-in-time inventories. Manufacturers have for many years embraced lean production practices to cut costs and boost profits, but lean production cannot keep pace with the current tumultuous inventory and raw material fluctuations.
A relatively new phenomenon of the recent disruptions is shortages of abundance. That is to say that the item may be plentiful globally, but your area isn’t receiving it, and it may feel added pressure on supply because of panic buying and hoarding activities. We saw this with the toilet paper panic of 2020. Retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and wood pulp makers had all finely tuned their production and sales to the precise needs of a population. When thousands of people bought up a year or more supply of toilet paper in the same week, shortages became a reality. The deficit then gave fuel to more panic buying, and it took several weeks for supply levels to restore themselves.
If you haven’t been prepping for a while; if you are just now realizing that the government might not actually come in and rescue you; if you are just now realizing that you have to start doing for yourself; if you are just now buying what you think you need to have to sustain yourself, first of all, welcome, and second you’re not alone. Thousands and thousands of people are waking up to these sad realities and buying up supplies of grains and water. That’s the reason for the limit on water bottles. This frenzy of buying activity coupled with the rising production and distribution costs causes both shrinkflation and inflation. That results in more panic buying, and the cycle continues.
Retailers and manufacturers are warning that the supply chain is in horrible shape right now and that retailers and consumers should expect further shortages throughout the next year and possibly longer. This will not only translate to low inventory but will result in increased demand. Low inventory and high demand mean only one thing– exponential price increases.
I stress some of the same core things on this channel because they work. Reducing your dependence on the lean production supply chain will benefit you now, in the immediate future, and definitely after any disaster. Getting your personal water storage up is of critical importance. Water is a commodity and an essential resource necessary for life. Ensure you have enough stored for you and your family to last over 2 weeks if it stops flowing altogether. Make sure you have the means to treat and process water to make it safe for drinking. Implement precipitation collection systems to channel natural water to your reserves.
Here’s what you will need, a pot sufficient to boil at least one gallon of water or several gallons of water, up to 5 gallons. The size of the pot will depend on the size of the batch and the size of the vessel you will ferment your batch. I will be referencing both a five-gallon batch I made and a one-gallon batch to explain the process through this video. You can scale up or down based on your capabilities and once you understand the fundamental quantities and ratios. You will also need up to a 1-quart jar of honey per gallon of water. The best ratio is 2-3 pounds of honey per gallon of water. I will explain this in the next section. You will also need at least one gallon of water, preferably Springwater, as this isn’t chlorinated and has a higher mineral content that your yeast will love. You will also need a large one-gallon jug and maybe even an airlock and stopper. I will link to a really inexpensive package in the comments below, but you can use a 1-gallon jug of your own like they often sale cider in, so long as you clean it well with hot water. I will also show you how not to use an airlock if you don’t have access to one or don’t want to purchase one. You will also need a stirrer and a funnel for returning the mixture to the jug after it has cooled.
Do you buy your honey in jars? A quart canning jar is calibrated in “fluid” ounces using the unit weight of water which is 8.33 lbs per gallon. One pound of water will fill the jar to 16 ounces. A whole quart jar of water, 32 ounces, weighs about 2 pounds. Honey is much heavier than water and has a different unit weight. Since it is heavier, one “pound” of honey will fill your quart jar only to 10.67 ounces. Filling it fully will give you 32 fluid ounces, or 3 pounds. Is that too confusing? Let me make this as simple as possible. Honey tends to be sold in bulk as pounds. You want a minimum of 2 to 3 pounds of honey per 1 gallon of water. That’s going to be roughly 30 to 32 fluid ounces of honey per gallon of water. It’s going to be 10-12 pounds of honey for a 5-gallon batch. For my 5 gallon batch, I used 2 5 -pound containers of honey and a ¾ quart jar of honey I had leftover from my fermented garlic honey recipe. So, I used about 12 pounds of honey -4 quarts- for my 5-gallon batch. Your ratios don’t have to be exact. Just remember that your mead will be 2 to 3 pounds of honey per gallon of water. The best ratio is a 1-quart jar of honey per gallon of water, which I will use here. If you exceed that your yeast may not be able to move as freely or may stall out and not convert the sugars to alcohol.
It does not matter if your honey is filtered or unfiltered, though I think unfiltered honey imparts more flavor in the finished product. If you use light honey, most of the honey flavor will ferment out. Even the faint orange blossom or clover honey taste will ferment out almost completely. If you use dense, dark unfiltered honey like an avocado or buckwheat honey, it may have just a slight honey flavor in the final product. The higher the alcohol content, the drier the final product, so it is a standard practice to back sweeten the mead when drinking it by adding a little honey into the drinking glass. 
licorice root, cloves, mulling spices, or any tea of your liking. Always use natural ingredients, and remember that a little will go a very long way in your finished product. You want the tea to be strong in character but light in nature in the finished product.
The first mead was entirely created by accident. At some point, water was mixed with honey in a container. Since honey is hygroscopic, meaning it pulls moisture from the air, and yeast and bacteria are trapped in honey and can’t grow until they have enough water in the mix to move around, this accident may have occurred quite easily. When honey is mixed with water and left out, exposed to air, fermentation will start within a few hours. When the people of that time, probably cavemen or earlier, drank the fermented beverage, they likely felt the effects. Brewing is still done in the same way and sometimes in open pots still today. So how old is mead? Nobody knows. The first batch was made by the first people to collect and store honey. It was probably around 6% alcohol, but in some instance may have been higher.
The natural yeast should have come out to about 5% from what I had read, so I was pleasantly surprised when it achieved 6.5% alcohol after about two weeks. The Sweet Mead yeast came out to about 9.9% alcohol. The Champagne yeast came out to a whopping 10.5% after about two weeks. When I swirled the champagne yeast mead, the alcohol content I whiffed off practically burned my nose. I later combined all three bathes together and after two months I had an Alcohol By Volume of around 16%. The depth of flavor from the three different yeasts gave it more character in my opinion.
This is where the hydrometer is handy. This is also where the bubbler comes in handy. With a bubbler, you can count the bubbles per minute. A slow bubble rate of 1 per minute or so means the yeast is tiring out. When the bubbles are too rapid to count, the yeast is doing its thing and still working away at the sugars. If your bubble rate is too slow to measure, give the container a gentle swirl, and you should see a vigorous head of bubbles that dissipates rapidly.
There is so much more to this several thousand-year-old recipe, but I wanted to provide you just enough to get a batch started without overwhelming you. So, there you have it. Give it a shot, and let me know in the comments below how you did. Learning the basics of fermentation will be a Godsend after a disaster. Whether that’s beer or mead, alcohol has a host of purposes in a post-disaster environment, from further distillation to sterilization to rendering a drinkable substance that isn’t susceptible to wild pathogens to just a good stiff drink to a tradeable commodity. I guarantee you the person who knows how to ferment beverages will have a place in most impromptu prepping groups. Make a batch of mead to understand the basics and raise a glass with me and enjoy. Keep building your skills…