Here’s Why“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation” – Gordon B. HinckleyIn the preparedness community, the gold standard, the benchmark, the milestone that is often cited when being prepared is 1 year. While we acknowledge that this is the aim that we as preppers should shoot for, for those starting out on their preparedness journey or even those that have been developing their supplies for a period of time, 1 year is quite an intimidating goal. We would argue that 3 months should be the gold standard for those starting out on their preparedness journey. There are several reasons why we came to this conclusion that we’ll discuss in this blog. To start, picture this. Two men separately are lost in the wilderness after losing the trail on their hiking expedition. Both have food and water to get them through the day. The first is a casual hiker. He manages to get out on a hiking trip once a month and camps once a year. The second gets out into the wild almost weekly. He has hunted for deer and turkey every season and grew up on a farm. Both will have to survive for a week in the wilderness before they find their way to a road or are rescued. Who will survive? The answer might surprise you. If you were a betting person, you would probably stake your bet on the person with more experience, but what if we told you the casual hiker has just as much of a chance of surviving the week? We see it all the time, where one person should have the skills and equipment they need but fail to apply them. Let’s say the casual hiker has in his pack a personal filtration straw, for instance. Of course, he didn’t expect to use it, but just one piece of prepping equipment changes the whole dynamic. He probably thought the liter of water he was packing would be enough for the hike. The regular outdoorsman, packing the same amount of water, doesn’t have a filter straw and decides to drink from the running water of a clear stream. Who has the best odds of survival now?Honestly, both individuals, so equipped, may be able to make it the week they would need. Both have some basic foundation in hiking and being outdoors. The dynamic constantly changes at two weeks, three weeks, a month, or more. The assessment of their survivability rating changes every morning they wake and every night that they sleep. So what is it that determines their chances of survival? It’s the time needed to get through their present ordeal, their knowledge, and preparation. Whichever of these two men you identify with, you can increase your odds of survival by understanding the time you need, increasing your knowledge and skills, and getting your preps in order.Let us put this another way. If you live along the eastern seaboard of the United States, you know hurricanes are a thing to be expected. It happens every year and has happened every year for as long as people have lived on the eastern seaboard and longer than even our documented history of hurricanes. Knowing this, why is the news filled with people making mad rushes on stores, buying up food and supplies, generators and batteries, plywood and 2X4s to cover their windows, even toilet paper? The first reason is that no matter what you do, most people will not take the steps they need to take to prepare for even the most obvious and imminent disasters. The second reason is that when people prep, they typically only prep for a few days of sheltering in place. Because of this, they find themselves lacking by the fourth day and desperate after the first week of enduring the aftermath of a disaster.IT’S TIME THAT YOU NEEDWhen you begin to prep, you will hear much talk about the timeframe you need to prep to endure whatever disaster you face. How long should you expect to have to make it on your own? The range is astounding– from 3-days to a Mad Max post-apocalyptic, Walking Dead as long as you can survive. It’s somewhat overwhelming for new preppers, and many don’t take that first step because they are unwilling to commit to a post-apocalyptic level of preps. The simple fact is you are buying time. You are prepping for your longevity. So how long should that be?3-DAYSGovernment agencies set the bar the lowest by suggesting you have 3-days of food and water on hand for each person and pet in your household at all times. They will further advise you to have a few other items like a flashlight and a radio. Governments are concerned about getting most people through the initial phases of a disaster to a point in time where they believe that they will be able to step in and establish relief camps, evacuation centers, or open supply lines for relief food, water, and medical care. They are looking to count and clear the bodies and move the rest of the people to safety or rebuild and clear the wreckage. This minimalist approach to preparedness would be great if everyone did this. If everyone had 3-days of emergency supplies all the time, you wouldn’t see the runs on stores before a disaster like a hurricane strikes. You wouldn’t see as many desperate people in the aftermath. 3-days is the low-hanging fruit, as they say. It’s easily plucked from the tree by anyone, and it is quick to be depleted.3-WEEKSFar better would be to have the correct gear, food, and water to last you and every member of your family three weeks. That will get you through predictable disasters like the hurricane and unpredictable disasters like civil unrest. Of course, there are no guarantees, but it’s sufficient enough to hunker down and lockdown and be independent, cloistered away from the wildly swirling chaos outside. It may also be enough to make it through a brutal aftermath until order and relief efforts are restored. Still, it’s small enough for you to take a good deal of it with you if you need to bug out to a geographically safer area. We tell beginning preppers first to get that low-hanging fruit of 3-days. Then set your goal to reach higher to that 3-week mark. At that point, you would need at least 20-30 gallons of water per person, at a bare minimum. You would need food and nutrition enough to provide you with at least 40,000 to 50,000 calories or so and a means to prepare it. That may sound like a lot of calories to avoid running a calorie deficit for 21 days, but it is doable. 3-MONTHS: The Solid FoundationAfter 3-days and 3-weeks, the next logical goal or benchmark is 3-months. This should be everyone’s goal when getting serious about preparedness. 3-months is where you want to be. When you are confidently prepped to 3-months you can also scale up as needed. Once you hit the 3-month mark, you should definitely strive to push your preps further, but when you have a solid 3-months, you know that the foundations of your preps are solid. If you have a full year as your target, you might get your food there, but might still be lacking in water or fuel sources. If a disaster strikes before you can get to that one-year goal, you will have gaps in your preps. When you’re talking 3-months of stored water, you are talking about having 90-gallons of water per person stored up, which is an absolute bare minimum for each person. That’s nearly two 55-gallon barrels of water per person. It’s not impossible, but it’s a space issue for sure. Food is a little easier because a sack of beans and a sack of rice would give you the calories to survive, even though you would be far from thriving and nutritionally sound if that’s all you had to eat (and I hope you have a food plan for far more options). Sticking with the water analogy, though, a year’s worth of water would be almost 7, 55-gallon barrels for one person. For some, that would be very difficult depending on your living environment, but water is one of those essential items you absolutely have to have to survive.Your long-term survival is going to depend more upon your knowledge, resourcefulness, and skills. You may have 3-months or a year of water stored up, but if you don’t know how to harvest water from the wild, can’t treat or filter it, don’t know how to build a rain harvesting system, or don’t know how to ration and keep track of your supply, when it’s gone, it is gone. If you have these skills, though, your water supply goes from a fixed time period to an ongoing collection and treatment process that will last you as long as you need. You can replenish it, find resources to top it off, and reduce waste and overconsumption. The time you need has to be sufficient for the challenge of the disaster. 3-days will get you to the relief phase of most natural disasters. 3-weeks will get you through the more extreme natural disasters and several unknown disasters that could befall you. 3-months is that sweet spot that allows you to thrive through most disasters, known and unknown, and adapt to any new way of life growing out of the aftermath. After 3-months, you will know if help is coming or if you are genuinely on your own. And if help is not coming in 3 months, we are in a new world.If you are properly prepping, you are also prepping for the very real possibility that recovery from the disaster won’t be possible. You are preparing your skills and knowledge. You’re setting aside seeds and other long-term vision solutions to re-establish a livable environment for yourself. In that sense, even the person prepped for 3-months is really prepping for many years into the future.SO, 3-MONTHS IT IS. NOW WHAT?If 3-months is the sweet spot you should set your goals to attain, what’s next? How do you do it? First, you need a workable plan. You won’t be successful in planning for disasters you won’t likely face. You won’t be successful with a bunch of gear you have no experience using. You won’t even be successful if all you have is food and water stored up since you may not have the proper nutrients, means to cook it, the capability to safely dispose of the waste, the proper awareness of operational security, rationing principles, and so forth. You have to have the resources, the tools to accomplish the job, and the knowledge of how to use those tools and maximize your resources. So, your preparedness begins with your supplies, tools, and understanding of how to deploy those assets best.Focus on a foundation of food, water, and fuel or energy. Make sure you have a solid store of all three to get you through a 3-month period. Once you have mastered all aspects of a 3-month self-sufficient prepping, you can begin to scale up these resources without gaps. You can stretch your food stores in different ways to get to a year or more’s worth. You can also learn to forage and hunt. You can stretch your physical water supply, but you can also supplement your supplies through filtration and collection devices. You can invest in a solar battery system and electric cookware that runs off it sufficient enough to boil water and cook food. All the while you are expanding your preps and knowledge, your core 3-months is solid. We will say that after a disaster, water and fuel will be easier to obtain than food for most in a suburban or urban environment. Ask yourself if you could close your front door for 3-months and survive, what would it take? If you have laid the foundations of inventory and rotation, built skills, and implemented a plan to prepare, you only need to apply these principles and practices over the next 3-month period. When you know you need more water, food, fuel, or other resources, you will have the skills to get those things, decrease your consumption if possible, or work around the problem. Once you have your core 3-months established you can focus on the equipment you need to increase your survival after a disaster. Having the right tool is 80% of the job. With the right equipment, you will add time to your survival.In my course I’ll be releasing on the 14th of February of 2022, the Prepper’s Roadmap, I go through all of these issues with meticulous and purposeful considerations. I lay out a plan that you can build at your own pace, providing guidance to consistently build your preps to 3-months of self-sufficiency. I don’t tell people, out the gate, to prep for a year or more because prepping for a year as your target stretches your foundational preps too thin in the short term plus it’s just overwhelming to hear this when starting out. You are far better off building a stronger foundation by mastering the 3-months of preps. Get that before you look to stretch beyond that. Scaling up is much easier once you have this solid foundation built. If you have your core 3-months of preps and equipment, you will be able to stretch that and supplement that as the circumstances force you to do if you have also taken time to build your prepping skills. If you’re stretching your food by foraging or scavenging, or you are stretching your water by harvesting rainwater or alternate wild water sources in your area, your 3-months of calculated preps will last you much longer. If you were also rationing and topped off as we teach right before the disaster strikes, your 3-months of supplies might actually be worth more.CONCLUSIONPrepping isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. You have to set your goals realistically and move towards them step-by-step. If you place your target for 3-months and master that, you will be able to scale up to extend that time to a year or more. On a long enough timeline, everyone’s chances of survival drop to zero. We would guess that the person who methodically built that 3-month prep plan has a surer foundation in prepping than the person who set a year goal and scrambled to piece it together as best they could.If you are just starting out, set your goal for 3-days–that lowest hanging fruit. Once you accomplish that, reach higher. Stretch it to 3-weeks or follow a clear plan like we’ll lay out in the Prepper’s Roadmap for 3-months. Once you have 3-months in order, you can aim higher, but you do so with the assurance that you haven’t left any glaring gaps in your preparedness. Not food, water, or equipment.If you had to realistically guess at how long your current preps would last you through any major disaster, how long would that be? A day? A week? A month or more? Let us know your assessment of your own preps in the comments below. Could you make it to 3 months? As always, stay safe out there.
Steps to Take Now“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – Leon TrotskyThere’s a looming threat of a global war brewing around Ukraine and in the South China Sea. At the same time, we have a never-before-seen level of divisiveness in democratic countries worldwide. Old alliances are fractured, and new partnerships have been formed behind closed doors. Ransomware cyberattacks have created shortages and outages. State-sponsored troll farms, right now, are ginning up conflicts, and deepening divisions are driving people further apart. When we look at the big picture, it doesn’t add up neatly. The war of today is vastly different than the wars of the past. The battlefield stretches around the world and will leave no person unaffected. Is World War III around the corner, and are we being played right into it as the world’s nations get divvied up and redistributed among the superpowers? Here we will examine that possibility and what you should be doing now if war is on the horizon, even if you are thousands of miles from the conflict zone. Let’s find out…Download the Start Preparing Survival Guide To Help You Prepare For Any Disaster. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/getstarted for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. THEN VS. NOW: THE NEW LOOK OF WARThere was a peacetime draft in the United States starting in September of 1940. The ranks of fighting men swelled to 1.8 million. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, by December of the following year, that number had doubled to almost 4 million soldiers, sailors, Marines, and even Coast Guardsmen. There was a clear build-up following a clear attack. World War, even then, had a predictable build-up.You also had a role if you were at home, far from the frontlines. You planted a victory garden, worked in factories, became part of the civil defense, raised bond money to support the war effort, and endured shortages of rubber, metal, and other resources, so the soldiers had what they needed. Nations mobilized and united to fight a common enemy whole-heartedly. Alliances were formed. Allies were made that still hold some value even today.The United States fought in faraway lands during the Vietnam war, while those at home were assured that those foreign adversaries wouldn’t storm U.S. soil. The two conflicts were different. War was different, but there were clear enemies in all previous wars. There was a clear period of buildup to the major conflicts. After previous wars ended, whether it was the GI Bill or VA loans, America experienced an economic boom. Wars today do not take these more conventional forms. Clearly, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq looked traditional, and there will still be a buildup of troops and armaments overseas, but the war on terrorism wasn’t against nation-states, though the terrorists were covertly funded and supported by our nation’s adversaries.When a clear nation is to blame, there can still be ground conflicts, even in a nuclear age and an age of hypersonic weapons; but ever since Krushev said in 1956, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within,” a conflict of a different sort became more dominant than ground conflicts with neatly defined enemies. The enemies have become less clearly defined but have been increasingly more active in the shadows.THE COLD WAR IS FREEZINGThere’s been a Cold War that has been fought for years. Many who don’t follow as closely Russian and U.S. relations would claim that the U.S. won when the U.S.S.R. collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell, but that was just the conclusion of years of covert battles. The war raged on, and the struggle for global control, the distrust, the covert actions seeking to destabilize the other–those conflicts continued. The merging of food production and supply chain systems increased our vulnerability by making us dependent upon singular systems for our food, water, and energy. It made us more efficient and made us have to work less, but it also turned multiple options into a singular target.MISINFORMATION: TROLL FARMSAt the same time, technology and the information age brought misinformation and made us vulnerable to attack. Over the last decade, we have seen the rise of troll and misinformation farms, state-sponsored, out of Albania, Brazil, India, China, Finland, North Macedonia, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and even within the United States. It’s not likely the government of North Macedonia or Bulgaria is that interested in an election or a mask or vaccine mandate in Canberra, Ottawa, Wellington, Paris, or Brussels. Yet, for some reason, thousands of individual social media posts per day are coming from those locations daily by people with profiles alleging that they’re your fellow citizens. These propaganda campaigns are highly focused on democratic nations. Acting as an individual, maybe even in your city or town, the sole purpose is to fuel misinformation, spread propaganda, attack critics, and interfere in political opinions and decision-making. These often escalate to involve real people who believe in the cause, have absorbed the online fervor, and are legitimately making their voices heard. We are not saying by any stretch that the truck blockades and protests aren’t legitimate or that the causes aren’t worthy. However, it is interesting to note that the Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed striking labor unions and trade groups, specifically truckers, in Chile for more than 18 months from 1972 through 1974 before then socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown. Is what we are seeing a page from the same playbook but a different clandestine agency coaching the play? The similarity of the actions and causes though the countries and people are so ideologically different, speaks to a singular playbook being used rather than a world coming together all at the same time about a particular cause.According to one study by the British daily broadsheet, the Telegraph, 30 governments out of the 65 studied paid keyboard armies to spread misinformation, destabilize political adversaries, and foster distrust in the media. There are forces at work, right now, in every comments section of every political or socially debatable opinion piece on the internet, and this has only served to widen divisions and turn neighbor upon neighbor. The ultimate feather in the cap of these misinformation campaigns is when the movement develops its own leaders and activities of good-hearted people suddenly swept up in a cause. Then, the true puppetmasters can sit back and watch the destabilization and protests they were able to create. People encouraged by these stoked and sometimes made-up causes act out in very public ways that further amplify divisions. Make no mistake about it, the war for your attention is raging on, is being orchestrated often thousands of miles from you, and is being delivered to a screen on your wall or in your hand. RANSOMWAREThe ransomware weapon deployed in this escalated cold war is more noticeable and more likely to impact you directly. Some of the same state-sponsored groups, but this time organized hackers, have seized control of and shut down various critical systems. Like a covert Operation Paperclip, successful hackers are either sent to jail or rewarded with jobs in the clandestine services of nations worldwide. They are matched up with groups, supplied with the latest equipment and intelligence, and set loose on enemy nations. The JBS meat processing plants and the Colonial Pipeline are two such attacks you have probably heard of, but there have been hundreds more. JBS paid $11 million to these foreign hackers. The owners of the Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million to these state-sponsored hackers. Meanwhile, the links to governments are often unprovable. Though the shots, the orders to attack another nation’s vulnerable systems, might be directly called from the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, or the White House, they are mainly unprovable. These ransomware attackers are working with state-sponsored immunity, often receive millions of dollars in ransom, and become even more sophisticated after each attack. While seemingly opportunistic in nature, these attacks are the first shots in a much greater conflict. They are more proof of concept and tests, even though they have off and on crippled certain parts of our supply chain. When we witness clusters of these attacks, a precise orchestration of them, you will know that the proof of concept is being applied as an all-out weapon.The next war we face will be overt land grabs by Russia and possibly China, accompanied by orchestrated ransomware attacks and an escalation of troll farm activities to make us appear even more divided every day. After all, the U.S. government will have a hard time convincing the American people that we need to keep Russian troops out of Ukraine, when hackers attack the supply chain and the people are starving. When the American people, divided even further by the fires stoked by foreign troll farms, can’t agree on the simplest of things, they will be sufficiently distracted to allow Russia to grab back each of its former soviet-bloc countries. Add to that a significant grid-down situation, and it isn’t likely Americans will have the will to fight anything in the South China Sea or Ukraine. When the world’s nations are reeling with their domestic conflicts aggravated by ransomware attacks starving their populations, they will hardly come together to stop Xi Jinping from sending forces in to seize control of Taiwan. Beyond Russia and Ukraine and China and Taiwan, there remains a constant threat of a nuclear Iran or an EMP from North Korea. There remains the continual threat of either Russia or China creating a disaster to look like it originated from North Korea or Iran. There’s even an ongoing possibility that the troll farms will stoke the fires of civil war and sow the seeds of division so profoundly that the only harvest is chaos and neighbor turning on neighbor. The instability out there will impact you in your hometown, despite being thousands of miles from any direct conflict zone. The face of war is different. The fog of war is more significant. The famous Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, “three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” This is still true today. The only difference is the fog of uncertainty has gotten much thicker. The visibility to see clear enemies who are clearly responsible has become more difficult. The likelihood of entering a war without a clear enemy is very likely.This is a new type of war, with unclear enemies, but raging in your own community and delivered to you daily in the media, over the internet, in higher prices for everything that becomes in short or threatened supply, and in the form of protests and conflicts in your city streets encouraged by foreign adversaries. As this escalates, some governments will change. Well-intended leaders will be demonized and defeated. We have seen it happen in several former soviet-bloc countries, but it can just as easily occur through the same tactics in your country. Make no mistake about it, Krushev’s prophetic statement in 1956 has become a full-blown war strategy and is being implemented around you every day.HOW CAN YOU PREPARE? STEPS TO TAKE NOWThere isn’t anything you can do to divert the course of geopolitical conflict when secret hackers and troll farms are fighting those conflicts. There is little that even your government can overtly do to countries they know and have evidence of being directly involved in cyberattacks or instigating disputes and protests in free nations. Whether you voted red, blue, orange, green, or purple won’t matter when the power goes out. None of that will matter when Russia rolls troops into Ukraine or China lands troops on the beaches of Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, or Malaysia. What cause or protest you join won’t matter when the flow of natural gas through pipelines is halted, the byproduct of fertilizer is depleted, agricultural yields plummet, and the world is starving. Most of the world’s grain reserves are held or controlled by just three nations. One of those is China. Another is Russia. What happens when one of those countries doesn’t get its way? Still, with all of these potential problems, some of the same ways we have mobilized for previous world wars apply to our situation now.From a prepper’s standpoint, you need to prepare as if the war is already happening because, as we have pointed out, it already is, and it is intensifying. Focus on the eight pillars of prepping: shelter, food, water, energy, medical needs, security, communication, and community. Examine each as if we are engaged in another world war. Do you have enough stored food and locally produced food supply chains to keep you in food when the global supply chains fail and international food inventories plummet? Should this be the year you learn to sprout greens, plant your Victory garden, start a community garden, or focus on making local connections for grown food? You can probably compensate for not getting grapes from Mexico or Asparagus from Peru, but what will you do when you can’t get corn, wheat, oats, or rice? What will you do when there is a shortage of raw ingredients in all your processed and manufactured foods? What will you do when there isn’t enough grain to feed the ranching and meat industries, herds are purposefully thinned, supplies plummet, and the price of everything you want to eat skyrockets? If you think your grocery bill is high now, it will seem like an easy street compared to when production stops or is knocked off-kilter worse than it was at the height of the pandemic and amidst ransomware attacks. Your solution is to get local, grow your own foods to substitute for reduced supply, and store enough food for 3-months or more. Learning to forage, cook, hunt, and fish will also help. If your space permits, perhaps this is the year you establish your small chicken coop.When the power goes out because the power provider’s systems are seized up, sabotaged by a foreign adversary, or pipelines are shut down over geopolitical conflicts, you will have to function with no energy or reduced capacity of only what you can generate. If you need to heat your home in the winter or cool it in the summer, you might have an actual health and safety issue. Most modern home construction is decently insulated but lacks a fireplace or anywhere to burn biomass. You have to have even a minimal capability for grid independence. If you were on minimal power, could you get by for an indeterminate amount of time with renewable power such as a solar panel array and a battery system?If the municipal water source is tainted, back flowed with sewage, or stops altogether, you will need your own supply of water. You will need the means to boil your water with the power out. You will need the means to harvest, filter, and treat water from wild sources. You will need medicines and medical knowledge for yourself or your community, and you will need some community. If the propaganda and misinformation troll farms are successful, neighbors will turn against neighbors. We already see that, so maybe they are already successful. It’s the community and the strong network you build now, regardless of other people’s beliefs or politics, that will get you through when the chips are all down.Finally, whatever happens, and no matter how bad it gets, you need to keep safe and be able to communicate through the fog of this new war. If the conflict is at your doorstep, you need to make sure you are in communication with others in your network and others in your group. Maintaining contact allows you to cut through the fog of war. Your security takes you from being a soft target to a hard target, and it is always the soft target that will be targeted first.Take these practical steps. As a prepper, focus on the eight pillars and approach them with these three things in mind. Stay calm, build or work from an actionable plan, and implement your plan daily. A little time, energy, and resources applied each day will get you to your goal. Prepping isn’t a race; it’s a marathon. You have to build slowly over time and make where you are when disaster strikes what you have to work with to get you through to a better day. The best time to prep was a year or more ago. The next best time is right now– today. Be pragmatic. Remain level-headed, and focus intently on what you need to do today. Get a plan now and act on it now. If you wait for longer, you may find that getting the things you need will be harder and at a greater cost.ConclusionIn a time of globally dispersed armaments, high-altitude nuclear blast potential, and hypersonic missiles, any massive nuclear threat carries with it the prospect of mutual destruction and a poisoned planet. Though not impossible, the probability of these conventional forms of war is, in my opinion, lower. The world has seen world wars before. They happened when our resources weren’t streamlined into a single supply chain. They happened when we weren’t as deeply divided and so vehemently in opposition to each other. They happened when the enemy was more precise and the causes more certain. Perhaps nothing will happen. Possibly diplomacy and saber-rattling will keep the peace. Maybe the threat of overt and covert retaliation will carry too many perceived consequences and keep a steady calm. We can hope, but we can also prep like that won’t be the case, and we would be prudent to do so.At the very least, you need to prep as if war is coming to your doorstep. We can still learn from the lessons of how our ancestors dealt with war to light our own path of preparedness. What do you think? Are we already engaged in a battle that we just haven’t seen play out in conventional forms? Do you have family members who survived through a war? What was their most significant asset? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can, typically within the first hour of releasing a video. Please consider subscribing to the channel if you’d like to be notified when we release a video and give this blog a thumb-up to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.
Surviving the Aftermath“There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, and the search for quantifying such a safe level is in vain” – Rosalie Bertell.The threat of nuclear explosions has changed over the years. The concept of mutually assured destruction between two superpowers has given way to several more nuclear-capable countries, tactical bombs, air bursts, surface bursts, hypersonic missiles, high-altitude detonations, improvised nuclear devices, and dirty bombs. The exact origin of a dirty bomb might not be known, so retaliatory strikes might not be possible. Nevertheless, the radiological threat could kill you in the days, weeks, and months after detonation. Even a small nuclear fission bomb can instantly vaporize anything at its center, have a blast radius that collapses most buildings within a 20-mile radius, and a thermal radiation radius of 48 miles even without wind. After that, prevailing winds can carry radioactive ash hundreds of miles. Just one crude 150 kiloton bomb, like one the North Koreans tested in 2017, detonated on a ship in the Long Beach harbor, would spread enough deadly radioactive ash over a 1,800-mile area to give everyone in the affected area ARS – acute radiation syndrome. Everyone in a 450-mile radius would have serious radiation exposure complications that will likely lead to death within a few hours or days. If the bomb were equivalent to the largest ever detonated, the deadly ash would spread from Los Angeles, California, to Billings, Montana. If the blast doesn’t kill you, the resulting fallout could. You don’t want to survive the initial blast only to die a horrible death from radiation poisoning. This blog will discuss steps you may take after a nuclear event to increase your odds of survival by reducing your radiation exposure.Download the Start Preparing Survival Guide To Help You Prepare For Any Disaster. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/getstarted for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. GET INSIDE. STAY INSIDE. TUNE IN.If you have some warning of the blast, you will want to immediately get inside the nearest building and stay away from any windows. The deeper and lower you can get in a building, like an underground parking structure, the more likely you will be to survive. If you are outdoors when the detonation occurs, lie face down at the lowest point you can find. If you are in your vehicle, get to the floorboard. After the shock wave passes, get inside the nearest shelter location. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, or mouth. If you have a mask, wear it. If you can cover your mouth with a cloth or a towel when you are outside, do so. Understand that your clothes are likely contaminated and will need to be disposed of as soon as possible. You will also need to wash down as quickly as possible to remove any radiation from the skin. If you have pets that come in after the blast, they will need to be wiped down then washed as soon as possible.The fallout will be lessened if the detonation is in the air or at a high altitude. If it is a surface blast, thousands of tons of dirt and debris can be thrown several miles into the atmosphere, substantially increasing the amount of fallout. As the heat of the blast cools, unstable atoms from nuclear fission will mix with the debris particles from the blast. These radioactive particles are the fallout that creates the dangerous long-term effect of the blast. Think of these particles like campfire smoke. They may be odorless, but have you ever been in the proximity of a campfire and walked away from it without smelling like smoke? It only takes a few particles to create cell damage. The harmful ionizing radiation of inhaled particles can result in cell damage and eventually cancer. Lesions and radiation burns may erupt on the skin in areas where fallout particles have settled.After the shock wave passes, your goal is to be inside before the fallout reaches you. The highest radiation levels will come with the fallout. Once the shockwave passes, you have between ten and fifteen minutes to find shelter or protect yourself from the fallout. If you plan to move to a safer location after the blast, you must do so within these ten to fifteen minutes. Assuming you are at home, immediately close and lock all windows. Turn off all fans and HVAC systems. Close any fireplace dampers. You can use plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal off windows and doors and all airway entry points into your building, especially facing the direction of the blast zone. After a nuclear blast, windows can shatter. Seal them off, and continue to seal rooms to the middle of your structure, where you will need to hunker down. If you expect people to come home, seal off an entry room where you can have them strip down and begin the decontamination process by wiping down and light washing before moving to a more thorough shower. You need to shower off anyone who was outside immediately. Use soap, but do not use conditioning products as these can bind the radioactive particles to your hair and skin.Move to the center of the building. Radiation will settle on the outside of the building, especially on the side facing the known blast area. If you have a basement, that is the safest place for you to be. If your structure is damaged or someone’s need for medical attention is great, you ideally want to still stay inside for the first hour. The more layers of dirt, steel, and concrete between you and the outside world, the less radiation can reach you. Radiation levels will be at their highest during the first hour. Listen to the emergency radio for more information. The likelihood of cell phones, cell towers, and small electronic devices being fried out is very high, but a typical transistor-type radio may still be operational.Anyone, including you, who enters your home after the blast has occurred should strip off their outer layer of clothing and shoes outside and immediately shower with a thorough cleansing. Avoid over-scrubbing, which could lead to scratching yourself and introducing radioactive material directly into your system. The clothes should be placed in a plastic bag and put far away from your structure. Do not bring it indoors with you. If no shower is available, careful use of wet wipes and copious amounts of water can wash all skin surfaces exposed to fallout. Blow your nose and wipe your eyelids, eyelashes, and ears with a moist wipe, clean wet cloth, or damp paper towel. When helping others, wear waterproof gloves, eye protection, and a dust mask. You are dealing with dust-like particles.Simply removing your clothes outside can reduce almost 90% of radioactive materials from you. The human gut is sensitive to radiation. If a person has been exposed and they are already vomiting, the probability of them having acute radiation poisoning is exceptionally high. The likelihood of their death within the next few hours is also very high. You will want to bring any preps with you to the middle area of your home or basement. Any food outside, like fruit trees or a garden, will no longer be safe to consume. You should stop using municipal water sources as soon as possible. Even though the pipes may be underground and the water safe for this reason for a little while, radioactive fallout will make it into the system. Being inside is your best protection from fallout. The more concrete, steel, and packed dirt between you and the outside world, the lower your exposure to radiation will be.STAY OR GO?The radiation can have a half-life of several thousand years, but the fallout gamma radiation levels are highest the first 24-hours after the initial blast. Gamma radiation decays very rapidly. Fallout will give off half its energy in the first hour and 80% of its energy in the first day. After this, further dispersing of the ash will further reduce levels. After 2-weeks, 99% of the fallout radiation has dispersed. That remaining 1%, however, can still be dangerous. Like snowdrifts, accumulation points can stay fatally high in radiation. Precipitation and wind can reduce levels even further. You must begin to estimate and track wind direction and speed from the moment of the initial blast. Based upon the estimated bomb yield, which will eventually be announced on the news or can be generally surmised by the area of the blast zone, and the wind speed and direction, you can use a Nuke Map calculator like the one I will link to in the comments below to determine if leaving the area is essential and can be safely done. Staying inside for at least 24-hours after the initial blast can protect you from the most harmful exposure levels. Staying locked down for several days or weeks, after rain has come and gone, and wind has blown and shifted directions for several days can reduce the levels to dangerous but not fatal levels. If you are anywhere near the estimated fallout zone, your best option is to hunker down indoors for as long as you possibly can. If you can visibly see the ash on the ground or raining down from the sky, you absolutely cannot be outside and move through the ash safely without a radiation suit and an NBC or CBRN gas mask.The most hazardous fallout particles are also the heaviest. They will fall to Earth the fastest and coat rooftops and other flat surfaces. If you see this occurring, your safest bet is to stay inside until those heavy particles have been blown or washed away. If you estimate that you are within the fallout zone or see smoke or ash in the air or falling from the sky, you must stay inside. The radioactive levels will be too high to leave the zone. If you see the smoke and ash in the distance, and it isn’t coming directly towards you, evaluate wind speed and direction from the estimated detonation point. If the winds can shift to blow the fallout field in your direction and the possibility of additional detonations is low, you need to determine if leaving the area is your best long-term survival option. If you are relatively safe from the fallout area but live within the region of the blast, at some point, radiation will spread to your location. Whether that is from shifting winds or precipitation runoff, the radioactive particles are small and will eventually spread to all areas in the radius of the blast.Know your typical weather patterns. If storms usually blow in from the west and the nuclear event is anywhere to the west of you, radiation will eventually reach your area. If you are west of the blast and weather typically blows in from the west, meaning the blast was east of you and the fallout is blowing further east and away from your position, shifting winds and precipitation runoff may eventually bring radioactive fallout to your area. Still, most of it will be moving further west and away from you. Your goal is to stay inside and as far from outside air sources as possible. You should assess if the attack is over or if a second strike is possible. Monitor all news channels if you still have electronic monitoring capabilities, as EMPs are part of the initial nuclear fission blast.Eventually, you will need to leave your structure if you are near the blast zone. When that time is will depend upon the size, the number of blasts, and weather patterns. Ideally, you want to wait for at least 3-days. At that point, the outside fallout radiation will have lessened to a degree where you can flee the area without too much risk. This is another reason to monitor the outside world, weather, and emergency broadcasts. You don’t want to leave one nuclear zone only to head into another. The longer you can remain indoors, the safer it will be. If you can stay in your basement for 3-weeks, the levels of radiation from fallout outside will drop from fatal levels to survivable levels with limited exposure.DEALING WITH FALLOUTAnything planted in the ground in a fallout zone will be inedible, as it can absorb nuclear radiation. Even burning firewood can release radiation that was absorbed into it after the fallout event. You should treat the whole area as poisoned and seek a safe place from both the initial blast and the significant fallout. If that isn’t an option, rebuilding and creating a safe zone with reduced radiation levels will be difficult but not impossible. Removing the top layer of dirt can provide you with a reduced radiological area for growing. Planting sunflowers and then pulling the mature plants up by the root and disposing them away from your site will remove radiation from the water, earth, and air and sequester it in the plant biomass. That’s also why you don’t want to eat the seeds or burn the stalks.Food in your home that is sealed and away from visible fallout will be safe to consume, so long as it was not also part of the first radiological shockwaves. You should wipe off all containers with a clean and damp cloth before opening them. Put the used cloth in a plastic bag and dispose of it away from your structure. Scientists and government officials will test municipal drinking water to determine when it is safe for consumption. Until then, only your stored water is safe to drink. Any water harvested from rain and stored outside your structure will not be safe to consume or even use on your lawn. It should be dumped directly into the sewer system. Though the tap water may be too contaminated to drink, the government indicates that it can be used to wash and decontaminate surfaces. We would avoid using it in this manner unless a true emergency exists, as radiation levels in the water supply will continue to decrease over time.The blast zone may remain unlivable for many lifetimes. In some cases, cleanup can reduce the amount of radiation over time. Over time, radiation particles will be washed away and dispersed. This can be encouraged by washing down buildings and removing top layers of soil. Some exposure to heightened radiation is still possible. Over time, increased exposure to radiation can result in sickness or even death. If the entire area is a radioactive zone and minimal clean-up efforts can be implemented, you should avoid exposure to the outside world unless you are directly moving to a known safe location. Radiation poisoning is one of the worst ways to die. Potassium Iodide tablets at a dosage specific for radiation emergencies can block the Thyroid’s absorption of radiation. The pills can be crushed and mixed with liquids. The iodine in salt or foods rich in iodine may help a little but typically do not contain enough iodine to block radioactive iodine from getting into your thyroid. It works because taking the potassium iodide fills up the thyroid with stable iodine. This then stops the absorption of radioactive iodine. Wearing a protective suit and an NBC or CBRN gas mask outdoors can also reduce exposure to harmful radiation. In general, alpha, beta, gamma, and x-ray radiation can be reduced by minimizing exposure, maintaining distance from known areas of high concentration, remaining indoors, and wearing protective clothing. Think of that radiation out there like that campfire smoke. If it permeates your clothes and hair, you are too exposed to the source. The more distance between you and the campfire, the less likely you will be exposed to the smoke. Still, if you can smell the campfire, you are taking the particles of its smoke into your body. We use this comparison fully aware that radiation doesn’t have a signature smell. You can be exposed to lethally high doses of radiation and be completely unaware of it until it is too late. When dealing with the fallout, your best option is to shelter away from it and then wait for as long as you can before venturing out into the world. Even then, get to somewhere safer if your area is significantly tainted.CONCLUSIONIf you are fortunate to survive the blast zone of a nuclear fission bomb or an improvised nuclear device, the fallout and radiation can still be enough to kill you. If you can make it indoors and seal yourself in with your preps within the first quarter-hour, your odds of surviving and not receiving a lethal dose of radiation go way up, as does your survivability. Over time, radiation levels will drop significantly. Eventually, the fallout zone will even become re-inhabitable. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima demonstrate that the fall-out zone can become inhabitable again. You can survive nuclear fallout if you take the safety measures outlined here. If you found this blog helpful, please give it a thumbs-up. Consider subscribing to the channel if you’d like to be notified when we release a video.As always, stay safe out there.NOTES FOR COMMENTS SECTION:Calculate a hypothetical nuclear blast in your area with this calculator to understand how the fallout might impact you: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/Potassium Iodide Tablets for Radiation Emergencies only: https://amzn.to/3heIVRb
DIY Laundry Detergent“Don’t you just love those 12 seconds when the laundry is done?” – Everyone, Everywhere.In our blog on doing laundry after a grid-down situation which we will link to here, we mentioned that we make my own laundry detergent for around $20 for a year’s worth. Commentor’s on that video were unanimously asking in the comments section for that recipe, so here it is. Before we divulge the recipe though, washing machines aren’t what they used to be, and using any detergent other than commercial specifically formulated chemical mixes might actually void your warranty. While we did a lot of research before coming up with this mixture and it works for me, you might not have the same results. If you don’t or anything happens to your machine, you promise to hold us blameless. We don’t know what type of water you use, what type of machine you have, or what you might be doing with your laundry. That said, this is the formulation that works for me and probably thousands of other people, and we’ll tell you why you have to use certain ingredients and what they are doing where we can throughout this blog. The total plus for this is you end up with enough detergent that we think works better than all the synthetic commercial formulations for around $20. It will allow you to do hundreds and hundreds of loads. The other big reason to switch to a recipe formulation you know is safe is because many of these modern, synthetic concoctions may have carcinogenic or allergenic properties, immunotoxicity, or reproductive toxicity. Clothes are in contact with your skin, and many want a more natural solution rather than unknown chemicals leeching into your skin or gassing off into your environment. Let’s do some laundry.Download the Start Preparing Survival Guide To Help You Prepare For Any Disaster. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/getstarted for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. THE DEBATE & INGREDIENTSThere’s a debate and controversy on the internet about how effective DIY laundry detergent actually is at getting clothes clean. People are passionate about their laundry detergents. Research any one ingredient of any laundry detergent and you will find its great use and its harmful effect. When we set out to make my recipe we favored natural ingredients that could do the job well with minimal impact on the environment. As with any highly concentrated substance, it’s toxic for human consumption, just like all laundry detergent, so keep it away from kids and pets.Detergent residue, fabric softeners, minerals from hard water, and body oils can all build up in textiles over time. This has led to a recent craze called laundry stripping where clothing is soaked in a mix of Borax and water. Clean laundry leaves behind brown murky water, which is the accumulation of all those nasties we mentioned a moment ago. To try this you just need to put some towels you swear are clean in a hot tub of water with a 1/4 cup of borax, a 1/4 cup of washing soda, and a 1/4 cup of laundry detergent. While it is “stripping” your laundry and giving it a deep cleanse of any accumulated detergents, dirt, fabric softeners, hard minerals, and oils, it is also acting on the dyes at that harsh ratio and strength. That’s what is really causing the dirty-looking water. So, yes it’s working, but no it isn’t working to the extent that it might visually appear to be working. We like to think of laundry stripping as turning to the old ways to strip away the accumulations left by the new ways because we think some detergents actually stick to the fabrics of your clothes and attract dirt. You can use 1/4 cup of this detergent recipe in a bath of hot water to perform laundry stripping. Then put those stripped textiles in a rinse-only cycle in your washing machine along with 1/4 cup white distilled vinegar. Your laundry will be amazingly clean.Fortunately for us, this recipe uses borax, baking soda, washing soda, and detergent bars, so it is already acting at much smaller doses to soften the water, strip away dirt and grime, but not at a level that’s harsh on your clothes. When using soaps of any kind, you will have build-ups, and this is where a lot of cautions come in, especially with high-efficiency washers. Any soap buildup in a high-efficiency washer can cause a host of problems. Even with HE-specific commercial detergents, though, you will still see soap and detergent buildup. This is why our formulation has Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) in it, and also why you should always use 1/4 cup white distilled vinegar as a fabric softener. This will clean your clothes further and soften them in a way far superior to commercial fabric softeners and with none of the chemicals that do who knows what to our bodies.For this recipe, you will need 3 lbs. Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda, 4 lbs. Borax, 4 lbs. Baking Soda, 2lbs. Epsom salt, and 3-4 bars of Zote or Fels-Naptha laundry soap. Here we are using 2 bars of Zote, a leftover Fels-Naptha bar from my earlier video on doing laundry after a grid-down situation, and a 2-ounce bar of my homemade soap also from an earlier blog. You can skip the homemade addition if you didn’t make a batch of your own soap. The Zote has a laundry detergent scent whereas the Fels-Naptha has much less of a scent. The Zote has citronella in it, which is why it has that smell. If you are sensitive to scents or you want to use essential oils for your scent, use Fels-Naptha instead of Zote and use the oils in with your vinegar fabric softener so they retain their scent. We got most of these ingredients at the dollar store or my local savings market, and all of them for less than a total of twenty dollars. Laundry detergent and laundry soap are too harsh for regular skin. It’s the saponification of the soap that has rendered it perfectly harsh enough to clean clothes but too harsh for direct skin washing. The super washing soda and baking soda act as boosters and fresheners. They also help to eliminate odors. Washing soda is sodium carbonate. It has a high pH of 11 which makes it pretty alkaline. If you can’t find it in the stores you can make it out of baking soda by heating the baking soda on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees for a half-hour. This will liberate from the baking soda the hydrogen atom. You basically convert NaHCO3 to Na2C03. Our recipe uses both Super Washing Soda and Baking Soda. Epsom salts typically come scented and unscented. You can always use about 15 drops of essential oil in this recipe to add scent. For my purposes, we will use 2 pounds of lavender-scented Epsom salts. That will probably all get washed out in the main wash. The Epsom salts are magnesium sulfate. They will also boost your laundry and act as a fabric softener.MAKING THE DETERGENTThe first thing you must do is grind or grate the soap bars down. You can use a cheese grater for this. We don’t want to spend that kind of time on it, though, so we will cut the bars and add them into a blender or food processor along with some of the Epsom salts and baking soda to keep it dry and keep it from clumping. We will be honest, the way we learned to do this and did it in the past was by grating the bars with a semi-fine cheese grater. We think that method is still the best. Even with the additional baking soda and Epsom salt, these laundry bars contain moisture to keep them playable and soft. That puts a real strain on a blender. A food processor may be better, but moving forward we will go back to the cheese grater method. We pulsed and blended this to a pretty fine powder. We put these ingredients into a 5-gallon bucket. We continue to pulse the Epsom salts into fine dust. The smaller the particles the easier they will break down and dissolve in my laundry water.Once all the Epsom salts and bars are ground down and placed in the bucket, 3 pounds of Super Washing Soda, and any of the remaining baking soda. You can mix and break up large particles by hand with these ingredients. When we add the 4 pounds of Borax, however, we switch to a utensil as the caustic nature of the detergent is higher. Mix these ingredients but be aware that they are slightly caustic. You may want to wear eye protection and one of those masks you have in abundance after the pandemic. It’s not really gassing off, but the fine powder isn’t good for you to inhale. Once it is mixed, you can transfer it to a nicer container, and you are good to go.USING THE DETERGENTFor a typical load, you use two tablespoons of detergent in your washing machine’s detergent receptacle. That’s going to be approximately 1 ounce, or a shot glass full. For a heavily soiled load of laundry, you can increase this to two 3 tablespoons. In your fabric softener receptacle, you want to use 1/4 cup vinegar. Be careful when you pour your ingredients into their respective slots, as baking soda and vinegar cause a reaction. You should always use vinegar, however, with this detergent. When combined as we prescribe here, you prevent any buildup and maximize the cleaning factor of your detergent and softeners. You can add essential oils into the vinegar to impart a little scent to your laundry, but you don’t have to worry about your clothes coming out smelling of vinegar or you smelling like a pickle. The distilled white vinegar will not impart any vinegar smell to your clothes whatsoever. It will make them super-soft and allegedly will result in less static cling. It’s an amazing addition. Distilled vinegar will also keep your machine performing optimally and super clean. Do not skip the vinegar step. One of the whole arguments about using commercial versus homemade detergents centers around the use of soap versus surfactants. Laundry bars are soap that has gone through the saponification process. Surfactants are typically artificial and are made to decrease water tension. For our purposes, the addition of the magnesium sulfate, the soda compounds, and the borax are all softening the water and enhancing the effect of the saponified laundry bars. Vinegar is the final step for maximizing your results. We have seen where people make a vinegar and hair conditioner combo and call it fabric softener. We do not suggest doing this. The addition of hair conditioners introduces oils that can bond to dirt, bacteria, and minerals and will result in less clean and coated clothes with long-term use. Trust me, just use the straight vinegar with maybe a few drops of essential oil in it.You can use the same amount, 2 to 3 tablespoons, for hand washing your laundry, and your detergent used in this concentration is gentler on the environment than almost anything you can buy at the store. There are many plant additions you could put in a detergent formulation that contains either surfactants or saponins. These act on dirt and oils differently. For our purposes, we left them out, as not everyone has soap nuts, soapwort, or other plants containing saponins available to them. This basic formula should get you through just fine, and we think you will be pleased with the results, especially if you haven’t before been putting much thought into your laundry detergent. After a few weeks, you will notice cleaner clothes and possibly even feel a bit healthier when you free your environment just slightly more of potentially harmful synthetic chemicals.HOW MANY LOADS?So, we don’t know how much laundry you do in a year. We just know it seems like we do a ton or more laundry every year. At the one tablespoon or half-ounce rate of usage, you will be able to do approximately 334 loads of laundry for an investment of under twenty dollars. That’s about 6 cents per load and nearly a load every single day of the year. According to one statistic, we came across the average American family washes 300 loads of laundry each year. Personally, we think that’s a pretty low number. In comparison to our batch and a box or bottle of detergent at the store, you will get between 20 and 100 loads of laundry from a typically sized box or bottle of commercial laundry soap. Ours is a savings of at least half to two-thirds of the money or more. The real benefit, though, in my opinion, is that this formula uses mostly all-natural ingredients and not a bunch of questionable chemicals that could be causing us harm by seeping into our skin or gassing off into our environment. You can make a double or triple batch and seal it in a 5-gallon pale to keep you in laundry detergent long after the manufacturers experience any shortages or deliveries to your store stop.Give it a try and tell me what you think of our mix in the comments below. Is there anything you would add or take out? Have you used a similar mix or vinegar in the fabric softening phase of your wash cycle? Let us know in the comments below. We try to read many of the comments and respond to them when we can, and that’s typically within the first hour of releasing a video. Please consider subscribing to the channel if you’d like to be notified when we release a video and give this blog a thumb-up to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.
It’s About to Get Much Worse“Don’t depend on the enemy not coming; depend rather on being ready for him” — Sun Tzu.Just as it appears we are closing the chapter of our history entitled “COVID,” we seem to be opening the next chapter entitled “World War III.” It’s easy to be complacent and dismissive of our uncertain future by thinking that the conflict is over there, far from our borders. Still, war has changed as we have become far more globalized and far more dependent on a global economy and supply chain.In this blog, we’ll explore some of the main things to watch for in the coming weeks as the Russo-Ukrainian conflict continues. This new war will impact you directly from the more extreme possibility of radioactive fallout to the almost certainty of markets and economies collapsing. Here is what you can expect next…Download the How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks guide today. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/cybersafe for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. RADIOACTIVE FALLOUTSince this Russo-Ukrainian conflict began, we have seen Russia shell two nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined they would do something so incredibly dangerous and reckless. It seriously could have ended in catastrophe. They’ve already taken Chernobyl, which introduces uncertainty. If Putin is forced to withdraw, he may adopt a scorched Earth policy, rendering parts of Ukraine uninhabitable for years to come and an ecological disaster of a never before seen scope. Chernobyl is under Russian control at the moment. That incident in 1986 led to over 100,000 people needing to be evacuated, 40,000 people hospitalized, and 1.8 million people given the status of victims of the disaster. The fallout zone after that single disaster had a fallout zone that covered almost 60,000 square miles (150,000 kilometers) and left an uninhabitable area twice the size of the city of London. Even on the borders of this uninhabitable zone, people still suffer the long-term effects of excessive radiation level exposure. That was just one nuclear power plant. Ukraine has four nuclear power plants with 15 active reactors between them. The Russian army has been firing on all sides of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. If it the containment walls are breached and the cores melt down, it will be ten times larger than Chernobyl was. From the physiological effects to the poisoning of everything from food to wool to livestock and water, the threat posed by this conflict around these nuclear power plants could have a global impact far beyond the official fallout zone. After the Chernobyl disaster, which could seem small in comparison, traces of radioactive deposits were found in most of the countries in the Northern Hemisphere. With this kind of potential threat, the world has two things it must do: prepare for potential radioactive fallout, and enter the conflict to secure the nuclear power plants and prevent them from being damaged by either side. Even if radioactive fallout from one of these plants doesn’t occur, the direct deployment of U.S. or NATO forces escalates the conflict and could result in tactical nuclear usage. Having Potassium Iodide tablets in your inventory and depending on whether you are anywhere around 1,000 miles of Ukraine, you may want to consider a CBRN mask and filter for each of your family members and some type of protective suit.WWIIIBefore this all started, I wouldn’t have given it serious consideration, but much is happening in real-time today, and it’s not off the table. With Nato approving the sending of jet fighters into Ukraine, we’re ratcheting up the pressure on Russian soldiers. How Putin reacts is to be seen. As one subscriber aptly put it, “Putin is homicidal, not suicidal,” so the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange is elevated but still unlikely. That being said, Putin has put the world on alert with his very high-stakes nuclear posturing by putting his nuclear forces on “high alert.” Putin thrives off ambiguity– will he or won’t he? Assuming his mental faculties are still intact and there is a way for him to possess and balkanize the areas of Ukraine his army has seized to come back later after crippling sanctions have been lifted, the threat of even limited tactical nukes is low but probably as high as it was during the Cuban missile crisis.We’re clearly in unchartered water with Vladamir Putin at the moment. The moment NATO or U.S. forces, anti-missile batteries, or air defense systems are overtly deployed in the Ukraine conflict is also the moment an all-out World War becomes possible. The frontlines of the conflict jump everywhere worldwide. From Finland to Alaska, Taiwan to Venezuela, Iran to Myanmar, the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, fronts and skirmishes could open anywhere. Some leaders will seek to capitalize on the chaos for their own gains, which will create sub-conflicts in a world already ablaze. Individual incidents that can occur as dramatically as a radioactive dirty bomb in a major city could be ordered and directed from the Kremlin but made to appear as though it originated from North Korea or a terrorist organization. The direct line of attack, the sequence of orders, may be obfuscated to such a degree as the true origin with Putin may be unclear. This is how the war could come directly to your city or town.Incidences of sabotage in allied countries could occur as part of this WWIII where, again, the clear path to the original orders and culprits may be vague and unprovable to the rest of the world. Russian citizens worldwide and people of Russian descent should be aware that increased scrutiny and hostilities directed towards them may occur. North American and European citizens should remain hyper-vigilant that they may be directly targeted worldwide.Today’s war may look very different from the World Wars of the past. A world war will not have clear militarized zones but will span the globe. Don’t expect ships full of GI’s storming beaches, but do expect possible acts of sabotage and possibly explosions in a city near you. The US and European allies are already bolstering a line of defense that stretches through every country along or near the Russian border. The potential for any mile of that five-thousand-plus mile western border with the rest of the world is a potential conflict zone. One jet that flies too close to contested air space, one ship in the wrong waters, one border incursion could have a domino effect that could set the entire world on fire.Currently, only two things are certain. First, Putin likely never expected either the level of resistance the Ukrainians would present or the extent and magnitude of the sanctions that would be put on his country and his ruling oligarchy. Second, nobody can say with certainty when and if this conflict will end nor the extent of the humanitarian crisis it creates. Ukraine had a population of 44 million before the war, up to 5 million exiles from Ukraine, as is estimated right now, could impact European nations for years to come. So far, this is on a path to get worse and worse by the day.HIGHER PRICESIn just the last week, the futures for Crude Oil are up 31%, Brent Crude is up 18%, natural gas increased by 12%, and wheat increased an additional 22% over its 31% increase in February. Retail fertilizer has gone up over 163% over the last year, shattering all previous records, and gasoline prices are heading to a never-before-seen all-time high. You have probably noticed that. Likely, by the time you view this video, prices will be far beyond what we have cited here. We think we will quickly see a national average price of $7.00 before this year is out if the conflict continues. We will also see a lifting of the restrictions on drilling and fracking and more of a wartime emergency effort to drill to keep prices down. Even with ramped-up production and tapping into reserves, oil prices will continue their ascent, as they tend to take giant leaps on mere rumors of scarcity.Expect that there will be a more comprehensive embargo of Russian oil and gas. The U.S. is announcing its ban even as we write this. Expect that the U.S. and other partners will ramp up production and remove some of the restrictions recently implemented. Expect some countries, like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran, to not be very helpful in either increasing output or seeking to contain prices. These countries have warmed to Russia over the years and will profit mightily from an ongoing conflict. China, which is feared to be aligning more and more with Russia, does not appear to be interested in doing anything other than remaining neutral in the conflict. Even their condemnations have been lackluster. China will instead seek to profit from this conflict by inking new trade agreements and contracts with both sides. As the price of oil goes up and up, so does the cost of manufacturing, shipping, and all other facets of production across every industry.Beyond fuel, expect food prices to go up, possibly even doubling. Part of that increase is related to the fuel prices, as the cost of transporting, processing, manufacturing, and shipping all go up. However, the significant part of that is that one of the major byproducts of fuel production is fertilizer. Fertilizer prices are at record highs right now, and Russia stopped exporting any fertilizer months ago. China has been hoarding fertilizer for several months. The fact is that without fertilizer, farmers of every ilk will see higher costs and lower harvest yields. You will see this most dramatically in wheat production because Russia and Ukraine combine for so much of the world’s wheat production; however, you can expect the rising costs to crossover into every grain, including livestock feed. Ukraine and Russia account for 80% of the world’s supply of Sunflower oil. Belarus accounts for 15% of the world’s supply of fertilizer. So, every crop and every livestock product will go up in price the longer this conflict continues.The price increases you will see are not the result of any national policy, federal bank, or political party. If there is a single person to blame for the high rising prices worldwide, it has to be Vladamir Putin at this point.CYBERATTACKSUkraine anticipated Russia’s cyberattacks and had been hardening systems against them for several months leading up to the Russian Federation’s invasion. As a result, they were able to minimize the impact. Some power was knocked out here and there. A system or two was brought down and later restored. If the Russian cyberattacks aimed at Ukraine were any indicator of Putin’s first blitzkrieg-style attack, the Ukrainians did a great job defending themselves. The Russian hacking, cyber attacking, and ransomware groups are still in full effect. The real question is how much the Kremlin has weaponized these groups. They aren’t fully weaponized if they were merely funded and allowed to do their previous hacks and ransomware attacks with maybe only a kickback to some Russian oligarchs. It would be akin to throwing a spear sideways or a blunt object at a target. However, if they are not only supported but also directed, trained, and aimed, it is akin to focusing the sharp end of a spear at any target they want. Based on the minimal results seen in Ukraine, we are leaning towards a less organized and less weaponized group.So far, only the state-sponsored Russian ransomware group CONTI has come forth with their full-throated endorsement of Putin’s criminal invasion. While this group is fully capable of exploiting systems and bringing down infrastructure, most of the hacking community seems to be coming out on the side of Ukraine and freedom. Russia may have difficulty mobilizing the cyber attacking wing of its war machine. That’s not to say that systems will not go down. Expect to see a dramatic increase in cyberattacks and misinformation through deep fakes. Already some of the footage released on social media channels has been debunked. It’s these seeds of doubt which can sprout and blossom into confusion, delusion, and inaction in the minds of many.Even one successful ransomware or cyberattack can send prices skyrocketing, as we saw with the Colonial Pipeline attack and the JBS ransomware attack. JBS paid 11 million dollars to get its systems back. The Colonial Pipeline paid nearly 5 million dollars to get its systems back. However, a fully weaponized attack may not result in the systems being freed even after a hefty ransom has been made through the dark web. Cyberwarfare can result in the wanton destruction of systems rendering them incapable of coming back online in their previous form. Prepare as if a cyberattack could bring down the systems you rely upon, especially with so many companies coming forward and refusing to do business with Russia. IF Visa or Mastercard or some other fiscal system should go down, will you be able to spend money to get the things you need, or are you one who swipes your card for everything? Be vigilant against cyberattacks, both big and small. You might want to view our recent video on protecting against cyber attacks which we’ll post a link to in the cards above, so you can make sure you are prepped.MARKET FAILURESThey say war is good for business, so a global war has to be like Black Friday for businesses, right? Wrong. We have already witnessed massive upheaval and uncertainty in the futures markets, which will trickle down into all stock and index markets. This will affect pensions and retirement accounts, large and small businesses, and push prices upwards. As embargoes are enacted, and new trade deals have to be struck, there will be a significant lag in the global economy. That will be a boon for some countries, and it could lead to an economic collapse for others.With all of the sanctions being put on it, the Russian economy could collapse in on itself. The Russian people could suffer tremendously, and there isn’t much they can do about it. Protesting Putin’s war could find them facing a prison sentence of 15 years or more. Putin’s generals and oligarchs aren’t likely to implement a coup, either. Vladamir Putin is well known for his fear of assassination and other paranoid ideas. As for the European Union, expect the countries to adopt a wartime stance and form new partnerships; but this will take time. Expect the U.S. and Canada to do the same and step up production to fill the void left by Russian products and exports. All of this will take time, however, and we can expect to see markets falter and fail, and perhaps even some economies collapse altogether. The world is already reeling from the effects of COVID, and a global war will only compound those problems and continue to complicate international commerce.WHAT CAN YOU DO?You need to prep as if the war will disrupt your easy life because it will. If you can safely store gasoline, like in a Wurx fuel storage container, you should get that filled up. It won’t be enough to keep your car running for days and days, but it will be enough to keep your generator going. Realize that when the price of gas goes that high, low-wage workers are more apt to call in sick even when they are not. Sometimes a sick day will result in wages, whereas commuting to work would result in a loss. While this might not affect you, it will impact the economy further and the services you receive. Don’t be surprised when you see many businesses understaffed. You can also prep by growing something– anything to supplement your food supply and force you to cook and preserve your own food. If you have contemplated a spring garden or you have been dreaming about it all winter, get your seeds now, and learn to save seeds from your harvest this year. If things continue along their current trajectory, we will see a seed shortage in retail establishments, just like was witnessed at the start of lockdowns, which coincided with the planting season. If you have never grown anything or have only contemplated it before, now is the time to do that. If you have a balcony that gets sunlight, make this the year you grow cherry tomatoes or Amaranth. Consult the City Prepping channel videos about growing food in your apartment, sprouting, and the 16 pounds of food to get you through the longest. While these growing activities cannot solely sustain you with such a limited space, they will stretch your existing food supplies, provide vital nutrients, and save you hundreds and hundreds of dollars in food costs by not eating out. Now would also be the time to spring for that 25-pound sack of flour or wheat berries and learn to process them into flour. The prices will only go up from here on these staple products, and the cost of a loaf of bread will rise to never-before-seen levels.Get any essential medicines on hand for several months out. Push your doctor for a larger prescription. As this situation continues to spiral out of control, the supply lines of medicines from APIs, Advanced Pharmaceutical Ingredients, to manufacturers to shippers and dispensers will become more complicated. You may have already noticed this due to some of the other problems in the supply chain. If you have experienced complications recently getting your prescriptions filled, imagine multiplying that in the future. While on the subject of health, if you have put off any minor surgeries that may require more extensive surgeries later, get them taken care of as soon as possible. If you have taken a little break from your New Year’s resolution to get physically fit, now is the time to remotivate yourself. This situation could get even uglier very quickly.ConclusionThe world faces a complicated future, and comparisons to previous global conflicts shed some light on what that future may look like. It may be time for you to start that Victory Garden, learn to conserve and maximize your resources, and do more with less. Realize, too, that the panic caused by market failures, cyberattacks, higher prices, and an escalating war will move many to panic and hoarding activities. There is a difference between hoarding and prepping. Prepping involves a whole strategy working towards greater self-sufficiency. Hoarding is having 3,000 rolls of toilet paper in your garage but no food or water. It’s never too late to start prepping. If you have been following this channel for a while and are already prepping, now would be the time to download the guide or take a look at the Prepper’s Roadmap course when it opens again to make sure all your boxes are checked. At the very least, don’t forget why you came here. As these global events spin out and escalate beyond our control, don’t forget to prepare for the immediate threats you still might face, like natural disasters– hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and similar events.What do you think? What will be the most impactful thing on you stemming from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, and how are you prepping for it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can.As always, stay safe out there.Videos:Sprouts: https://youtu.be/fy8HMojIT08
Microgreen Seeds: https://bit.ly/41fDm9W16 Pound of Food to Keep You Alive: https://youtu.be/TbUDuU0mmGAItems Discussed:Potassium Iodide tablets: https://amzn.to/3CnxWhJProtective Jumpsuit: https://amzn.to/3Mpd6DkCBRN Masks: SOF-77 (NBC/CBRN): https://bit.ly/3d5CoX4 , VK-450 (NBC/CBRN + Carbon Monoxide protection): https://bit.ly/3xJKQmM
The New Face of War“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” — Albert Einstein.We know that the new wars being waged are far from battle zones. Cyberattacks on financial institutions, municipal utility services, ransomware, and just hacks meant to disrupt scheduled processes can plunge you into darkness, shutdown services you rely upon, or bring the supply chain to a grinding halt. As much as technology makes so many facets of our lives so much easier, it also makes us vulnerable to suffering from the damaging effects of cyberattacks. This blog will examine a few of the glaring vulnerabilities and how those could escalate into a major crisis very rapidly. Still, we received several emails recently asking how folks could protect themselves from the cyberattacks that are clearly going to come out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In this blog, we’ll go into detail discussing 5 things you can do now to prepare for what will very likely come next.Download the How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks guide today. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/cybersafe for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. UNDERSTAND THE REAL THREATIf you only ever have a few dollars in your checking account, it’s not likely anyone will specifically target you. Your account may be swept up en masse with other accounts like a school of fish trapped in the cyberattacker’s net. Your ability to access your account pages on the internet or conduct any transactions on the internet may be halted. You cannot just dismiss this with a “Well, I don’t interact on the internet, so no big deal.” It is a big deal. You might not access your accounts online, but your banks and stores often access the same systems over the same networks. Have you ever been in a store and had to wait on your transaction because systems were down? It’s like that. Even if you are only paying in cash, that point of sale is tied to a more extensive network. We don’t live in a time where things can just be written down in a ledger and transacted in cash. When was the last time you had a clerk who could count back change appropriately without seeing the calculated total of your change on their computer terminal?The real threat to you is the larger targets that impact your life directly and indirectly. We have seen in recent years water treatment plants knocked offline because the computer systems they were operating were programmed in the late 80s. That’s over 40 years of missed updates and OS releases meant to harden systems against attack. Trains, planes, automobiles, traffic systems, tracking systems, transaction systems, logistics and shipping systems, utilities, medical records, and databases at major corporations that provide you anything and everything from physical products to services are all vulnerable. We would be mistaken to think that they have invested heavily in securing their systems against outside attacks. In reality, recent hacks and ransomware attacks have soberly proven otherwise. Anyone system can stop a multitude of other systems, and the house of cards could quickly come crashing down around you, bring down your grid, your networks you rely upon, or plunge the world into chaos and dark ages. It’s not a pretty picture when you spell it all out, but there are still things you can do.#1 – HACKING STARTS WITH YOUWhile you cannot get your region’s electrical provider to upgrade their systems, you can still do your part to protect yourself from those that would exploit you and to recover your assets after systems are restored. You have to start by securing your corner of the system, and here is a quick list of four ways you can do that. Again, consider downloading the FREE How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks document, as we will put an additional six ways in there. Let me start by explaining that we have worked in the IT industry for years, even as the owner of our own digital development company. Some of the people who have worked for us started programming, web design, and web security back when building webpages could only be done in Microsoft notepad. If you don’t know what we mean by that, just know that there’s a long history and understanding of network security and the internet here. These more prominent hacks you hear about on the news, the millions of other breaches you don’t hear about, and the hacks already made, laying dormant and ready to be initiated, all started with a single user or a single port accessed. The CIA’s exploit of the Iranian nuclear processing system resulted from one user plugging his infected thumbdrive into one of the centrifuges networked computers. Often the larger financial institution exploits come from one user on a secure system clicking a link they weren’t supposed to or unknowingly providing access to their username and password. Malicious actors gain higher-level permissions on a system or network by piggybacking off that one unknowing user. From emails allegedly sent from your company’s CEO with exploitive links and files to stolen federal laptops that lack good user security to disgruntled employees selling information and databases, larger exploits come from individual users. Don’t be that guy, and also harden yourself off from being exploited with these basic steps:UPDATE YOUR SYSTEMS AND APPSIf you are like me, you hate updating your systems. It’s a big time suck, and it can sometimes change the way you navigate or the look and feel of your operating system. Every time I update my system or an application, it’s always with a deep breath and with my fingers crossed. Still, updates often result from the providing company realizing an actual or potential vulnerability. They are trying to get ahead of it with the fix. That being said, one of the largest hacks in recent history, the SolarWinds hack, was through an update on systems. That hack impacted numerous companies, even the Departmental Offices division of Treasury, home to the department’s highest-ranking officials. If your update notification comes through your computer or on your phone, wait a few days before allowing the installation and switch off automatic updates on your systems until the threat of cyberattacks lessens a bit. That pop-up on your computer warning you about the critical updates you need to make may be bogus. Most software companies don’t communicate like that with their consumers, and most provide you the option not to update. If it’s an exploitive update, you will probably hear about it on the news within a few days. The best way to update your systems is to go to the sites that provide you the software and actively seek out their “Check for Updates” pages. Do update your systems in this way if you are running old operating systems or frequently use the same Apps. One recent study found that the latest version of Microsoft Windows had a total of 907 vulnerabilities. One hundred thirty-two of those vulnerabilities were classified as critical. You can bet that the company is shutting down vulnerabilities as they find them, but you leave your door unlocked if you don’t update your system regularly. PASSWORD1234Update every one of your passwords right now, especially if you use the same password wherever you can. If your password is already compromised from a previous hack, it won’t be usable anymore in that earlier version of stolen data when the hackers flip the switches on their exploit. Second, stop using the same passwords. Many critical systems have two-layer authentication, PINs, biometric, password vaults, or authenticator Apps like Google Authenticator. It’s a hassle, for sure, but you need to take advantage of these protections. Not using them is like buying locks for your house but never installing them. When you make a password, take advantage of all the numbers and special characters available to you. Make it complex and avoid any familiarities. Many years ago, we had a simple simple passwordthat used my pet’s name and some other memorable numbers and words. We mainly used it for simple apps for health and diet, but sometimes for other sites too. These simple apps often lack security and protection and get hacked. That password that was associated with various online accounts which had anyone of them been hacked, could have been used to hack my other accounts. Don’t reuse passwords. If you have to write it down, write it down in two places, one secure at home and one for your wallet if it’s something you need to access when away from home. For very important accounts, we put the password on paper and store these in my vault. If you have it in an electronic file on your computer or a thumbdrive, make that file password protected too. Run something like Google Account Password Checkup. This will inform you as to which passwords may have been compromised. A password checker will also tell you where you are re-using passwords and where your passwords are weak. You may find some old accounts that you don’t use anymore. Shut them down and delete your profile. At the very least, make sure they don’t share email addresses and passwords with your critical accounts. Finally, get in the habit of changing your way-too-complex-too remember password on a regular schedule, like every 3 to 6 months. We recommend a paid tool like lastpass.com or 1password.com. We have used these services over the years to secure passwords and they have tools to alert you if there’s been a compromise.UPDATE ACCOUNT PROFILESHave you moved or changed cellphone numbers or email accounts? If you have, you want to update all your account profiles online. Even if you haven’t, you will still want to do this. About two years ago, we were doing this at our primary banking site, and we noticed the email address they had was some weird address we had never heard of or used. We thought, “That’s weird.” So, we changed it to what it should be and made a mental note to circle back and recheck it in a few days. A few days later, we went back into the account, to my profile page, and it was changed back to that weird address. We called the bank, and we discussed it. We told them we didn’t know that address, and we had corrected it and changed it back to what it should have been. Long story short, after a lengthy call with my bank and them reaching out to their IT folks, they had to shut my account down entirely and open a new account for me. That was likely an exploit in their system, unmonitored but awaiting activation. It was changing my email to that other email, even overwriting my corrections, so when their system implemented a password update, the email would go to that weird address, and voila–they were in my account. We hope my bank was able to audit their systems for other customers that may have been affected, but the whole event underscores the need for you to conduct your own audit of all of your profile pages and settings at every major site that you use. This keeps you one step ahead of any hackers who may have already acquired your information but don’t know how to use it or any who are lying in wait for official orders like a sleeper cell.SWITCH TO ONLINE BANKING AND CASHIt may seem counterintuitive to protect yourself from cyberattacks by switching to online banking for some of your transactions, but you protect yourself a bit from fraud when you do. This is a 360-degree approach to your fiscal survival that also means you should have your assets spread out to survive significant calamities and minor infractions. We‘ll give you an example here. We were working late one night when my wife was out of town, and we got an alert on my cellphone asking if we had just made a transaction at the Microsoft Store. Well, my son does play games online, but he shouldn’t have access to the ability to pay for anything, and he better be asleep at 11:39 PM. My wife was out of town and sometimes expenses pop-up in weird places, but we just texted her to confirm it wasn’t her. What we think happened since we watch my card so closely, again watch every transaction, is that when we were coming back from his practice, we stopped at a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through. We were talking, so it barely registered when the worker took my card and set it on the counter next to the register. We figured he would run it in a minute, and we were talking to my son. We think, though, maybe he had his phone propped up and filmed the front and the CVV number on the back. That’s all he would have needed. We guess it could have happened anywhere, and it does millions of times per day. We can’t prove anything, but the first thing we did was not reply to the alert we got on my phone. That’s a known phishing hack too. We logged into my bank from my computer and saw almost 700 dollars of transactions in the last two hours. The bad guys were on a spending spree from the Apple store to Tacos in Las Vegas to groceries in West Covina and a few places we couldn’t discern. Though we could easily eat $56 of tacos in Vegas, we were at home. Within minutes of calling the bank, though, the card was knocked out of service, a new card was on its way to me in the mail, and once the transactions cleared or failed, we could file online the fraud claim and was reimbursed 100% of all the lost money.So, within 2 hours, my account was drained $700, and it took a week to get it back, but there are two takeaways here. First, we were protected because so many of my transactions are electronic, and we bank online with my electronic devices and safeguards in place. If they could take $700 in under two hours, they could have drained my entire account by morning. If we didn’t bank online, we might not have known until my balance hit zero or my own transactions failed. Second, the bank reimbursed our losses within a week. They see it all the time. They know the score, so they act fast and hope to minimize their losses while retaining me as a customer. If you still send paper checks, realize you are sending account details, addresses, names, and routing numbers through the mail, handled by many hands and potentially stolen right out of your or someone else’s mailbox. At the same time, most banks offer online bill pay that connects right up to the provider’s account. Companies that don’t have an account can often be issued and mailed a check right from your bank. Shift the liability over to the institution in charge of keeping your money safe. Limit the exposure of your information in the world by focusing it in with your online banking. Let them handle the security. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have cash on hand. When it all goes down, and systems fail, you will be glad to have $300-$600 in low denomination bills. When your check or credit isn’t accepted, your greenbacks may still hold perceived value.#2 – FINANCESLet’s assume for a moment that a more extensive cyberattack has occurred against the financial institutions or the Treasury, or the banking systems as a whole. When it comes to getting your money back, at what point in the line are you compared to the millionaire across town? The bank is probably still going to want whatever payment you owe them monthly, but they aren’t exactly going to prioritize your savings account. In a more significant economic collapse, your currency could become worthless. However, I think debt collectors would still call you even knowing that the currency and economy have tanked.Even after a significant cyberattack that brings a partial grid-down, finances are still critical. Assuming systems will eventually be restored, you will need records of what you had where. From bank accounts to credit card statements to loan papers, you will need to prove what was yours and what was owed and what was owned. My Survival Binder that comes with my Prepper’s Roadmap course has some of this information in it, but for the specific instance of making it through and restoring your life after a significant cyberattack on fiscal systems, have these things in place. First, have recent pay stubs and banking statements to show the regular patterns of your income and expenses, and balances. Also, have printouts of the first page and balance statements of major accounts updated with some regularity. It will be nice to prove you lost everything in your IRA or 401k if you ever have to do that. If the attack leads to a grid-down, partial grid-down situation, or even just significant supply chain disruptions, you will want to have between $300 and $600 or more in denominations of $20 and under. Even if the dollar is worthless tomorrow, it will retain some value for those who hold on to the hope of a recovery. Even if it doesn’t get that bad, cash is still king, as they say. That store is likely to do that small transaction for you in cash even if the point-of-sale system isn’t working. You are instantly trustable to them with $40 in hand, whereas that piece of plastic that doesn’t work doesn’t lend you any credibility in their eyes.Build your bartering skills and network. Sure, now you can buy a dozen eggs at the grocery store for a few dollars, but what will you do when the egg ranches go offline? Do you think those farmers who are barely making a living wage from their corporate bosses are going to jump through extra hoops to get eggs they don’t actually own to you? You would be much better off if you knew someone with a few chickens and you made something, hunted and processed game, or had some skill or knowledge you could trade for a dozen or more eggs. You would be even better off if you had chickens of your own and thereby had a commodity to barter with in fresh eggs. Understand the value of things and skills when the ordinary means of measuring value, your currency, is worthless.We are not a financial consultant, and we don’t give financial advice, but we will tell you this final point on your finances, and that’s to lock up any abundance. If you have thousands in savings, it is losing money for you every day, whatever the paltry interest rate you are getting on it. Inflation and deflation will make it worth less in the future than it is right now. Far better would you be to have it tucked away in a retirement account, savings bonds, or use it to pay down your mortgage, debt, or your car. This converts your money now into future money, provides you resources now and in the future, and takes it off the table when cyber hackers rob your institution where you keep it. You could keep it under your mattress or in a wall or buried in a mason jar on your property as your great grandparents did. Heck, the ancient Romans used to bury it outside the castle, city, or estate walls just because invaders and robbers would look within the walls. The problem with this strategy, though, is it’s just sitting there losing value until some successive generation stumbles upon it.That’s everything we will say about your online presence and your finances here. We will leave the rest for the FREE download. Here we have to discuss something more germane to your survival. No talk of protecting yourself from cyberattacks would be complete without addressing what you need to truly survive these events: water, food, and energy.#3 – WATEROn a planet that’s blue from space because of the amount of water, it’s important to realize that only .3 percent of it is drinkable. Of that amount, much of that will still make you sick from viral, toxic, or bacterial contaminants. Humans do a great job all on their own polluting that small amount. So there’s more than 97.7 percent of the water that won’t do you a bit of good when you are thirsty. We cannot stress the need for water more, especially with the type of disaster that comes with cyberattacks. These large-scale operations are on infrastructure targets because they cause the populous the most chaos, pain, immediacy, and anxiety. Still, most people are entirely reliant upon their municipal water sources. When it rains, that rain is swept away from their property, and not a drop is retained.These big companies that control the flow of water to your tap have made it illegal in some states even to put a rain barrel under your gutter to collect water for your lawn or garden. These are also the same companies that have spent so little on hardening off their systems that they are running Windows 98 to mix the proper chemicals to treat your drinking water. These are the same big companies that don’t upgrade their systems, and we hear about their huge profits and high levels of lead or other toxins in the drinking water. The water system is incredibly vulnerable as it is and more so because so many are utterly reliant upon it.At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, take steps now to store 3-months of drinking water for each person and pet in your home. Beyond that, have the means to filter and treat the water you collect from the wild. Many will die of dysentery in their very private lakeside communities in a grid-down situation. Others will be so desperate for a drink of water that they will steal it from anywhere they can get it. Don’t depend on getting the water you need to survive from the government relief truck that may or may not come into your neighborhood with drinkable water for the masses. It might not come. It might not have enough for you after the thousands of desperate people clamor to get theirs. Survive a largescale cyberattack by having the water you need to survive stored in your home. Cans and bottles of water from the store to replace your flowing tap will be the first thing depleted and looted from those stores.This is a small thing. When we look at it now, it’s a small task, but it will rise to a matter of life and death the moment the grid goes down in even a partial way.#4 – FOODJust like water, you need food to survive a large-scale cyberattack that could render the supply chain from farm to table useless. Corporate farmers might have bigger hearts than the corporations they answer to, but they don’t own that grain or that harvest. Here is another example of what we mean. In the recent shutdowns from the pandemic, millions of people were no longer eating out. The demand for potatoes for everything from fries to chips plummeted. Did those farmers process those potatoes into dehydrated mash potatoes? They didn’t have the means to do so. Even the companies that do that didn’t have the means to process that overabundance. Did they give the potatoes away? In some cases, they gave tons of them away to local residents. We don’t live near a potato farm, and you probably don’t either, so I didn’t get any of those free potatoes. You probably didn’t either. In many cases, the farmers dug giant pits with costly backhoes and simply buried all those potatoes and wrote off the loss.Your food supply chain is vulnerable. From production to logistics, there are many exploitable points along the way. So, what can you do? First, start storing enough food to get you by for an incredibly long period, and know how to cook it when the power goes out. Canned goods are great and not as susceptible to inflationary forces in the short term, but they come with an expiration date. Dehydrating food will give you up to a year on that expiration date– sometimes longer and sometimes shorter. Knowing how to can or pickle food can not only extend shelf life but provide you with a useful skill when your refrigeration no longer works, or you are collecting your own food. Freeze-drying your own food or buying freeze-dried foods comes with a heftier price tag upfront but can give you meals that will taste fresh and last for 25-years or more. We cannot imagine what 20 pounds of beef will cost in the year 2047. It might cost the same as a freeze-dryer purchased today.It may seem odd to fight a cyberwar by growing your own food, but you need to start a victory garden of your own, either on your land or someone else’s. You need to know the edible plants in your area, and you need to know how to preserve, freeze-dry, dehydrate, and pickle every scrap of food you acquire. Get to the point of zero waste. If you only grow patio plants, it’s something. It may not sustain you entirely on its own, but it will stretch and supplement your foods. It will give you something to trade and barter with. Build a supply of shelf-stable foods. It may not end up being enough to keep you for months or years after a significant breakdown of systems, but it may be enough to help you survive through to a better day. The ultimate goal is always self-sufficiency, of course, but that isn’t always a possibility for most on limited land and with limited resources. Focus on your 3-week, 3-month, then a year or more supply like I outline in my Prepper’s Roadmap course and work from there.#5 – ENERGYThere are other pillars of survival that we could cover, but water, food, and energy are the three biggies when it comes to insulating yourself from cyberattacks. That is because these three pillars of survival are also the most vulnerable systems that we have exposed to cyberattackers. When it comes to energy, we mean all forms of personal energy that you use. If the grid goes down tomorrow and remains ransomed for weeks or systems are simply destroyed by hackers, your problems become much bigger than flipping a switch and realizing the lights are out. Your phones will be down. Security systems will be down. Medical, EMS, fire, and police services will be down. All forms of utilities beyond electricity will eventually be down. Even natural gas isn’t a magical delivery system of flowing air. It relies on pumping stations and monitoring equipment. Some of those run generators on the natural gas they produce, but the same isn’t necessarily true at the furthest points on the capillaries from the pumping stations. Water is often fed to communities through gravity from those massive hillside water towers. Still, those are replenished and continually filled by electric pumps that push the water up to them.When the energy stops flowing, just consider that all systems as you currently know them will eventually fail. We don’t have a well or a natural gas main. We don’t even have a forest nearby to provide me and everyone else with burnable wood. You need energy from refrigeration to charging radios, flashlights, walkie-talkies, or reusable batteries. At the very least, you may need biomass energy to boil water you obtained in the wild. You may not be in a position to install a home power solar system and battery like we just showed in a recent blog. Still, Jackery solar-charged battery systems like we reviewed a few months ago are on sale at Costco right now, according to their most recent circular. You can also get one from the link provided below. Maybe that system or an even smaller system with a few other products could keep you cooking, boiling water, charging phones, and whatever else you absolutely need to survive. We’ll post links below to some solar generators we would recommend that we’ve recently reviewed.We would recommend you watch the video we created a few months ago to help you determine your power needs. If you haven’t watched it yet, we’ll post a link below. Definitely start there. Approach your energy needs first by assessing what you absolutely need. Understand the vulnerability of the current system.Fill out the energy assessment we made available through City Prepping (LINK), and understand what you will need to get by on your own. Then, start building the same way you approach the other preps. Get your self-sufficiency to 3-weeks at the bare minimum. Maybe rechargeable battery systems will handle the basics. Then get to 3-months or more. Perhaps a solar battery or other renewable system is what you need. Simply having a gas generator as backup won’t be enough after 3-months when gasoline is scarce. You may be surprised with how little you need to get by, but energy provides us light and heat when properly harnessed. Do you have hurricane candles, a means to heat or cool your living space? Do you have the means to cook and purify water for three or more months? Don’t overlook your energy needs. Look at it from all angles and make yourself as infrastructure independent as you can be for the longest amount of time.ConclusionYou will find more information on what you should be preparing in the FREE downloadable How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks PDF, which you can download via the link in the description and comment section below. We want you to have a solid printable version of it all in hand. Feel free to forward it share the link with other family members, co-workers, or friends to help spread the word about prepping for cyber attacks.There are casual preppers and hardcore preppers. There are people who craft or can or cook for their enjoyment and people who do it as a business. There are people you know who prep, and there are a thousand for every one of them prepping that you don’t know about. There are rich people looking to escape into space or in their triple insulated bomb shelters far underground, and there are those who, on meager funds, are learning to do for themselves and how to survive, even thrive after life throws the worst at them. We don’t know where you are on any of those scales, but we know it doesn’t matter. If you look at the long arc of history and you look at how recent global upheaval has predictably panned out, you would be foolish not to brace for even more tribulation and chaos.We are engaged in what can only be characterized as World War III. We can’t imagine that when Albert Einstein said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” that he ever thought one of the weapons of World War III would be cyberwarfare; yet, here we are. We have already seen the weapon wielded in many ways over the years. From individuals to state-sponsored operations, many cyber groups openly threaten to attack for one side or another. This isn’t a question of if. It is a question of when. We would like to say that things will get better tomorrow. We would also like to say that the price of gasoline will one day go back under two dollars. Both statements would probably be lies or, at least, gross understatements of the realities we are facing. Many cyberattacks have already been launched since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and many more are to be expected. Most people will be blindsided when one of these attacks impacts them directly. Some people will even criticize the advice and explanations I am giving here as fear mongering. That’s okay. There’s lots of opinions and information on all sorts of matters, but that doesn’t change the fact that some, as again my great grandfather used to say, would “Miss the forest for the trees.” You don’t have to be most people if you start diligently and methodically prepping today. We tell you this because, if it all goes, as my great grandfather also used to say (he was full of aphorisms), to “Hell in a handbasket,” we would like to think that we helped a few people make it through to better days. We would like to believe that others will be standing with me on brighter days when we rebuild a better future together.What do you think? What’s the most vulnerable system you see and how are you addressing that? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can, typically within the first hour of releasing a blog. Please consider subscribing to the channel if you’d like to be notified when we release a video and give this video a thumb-up to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.
The Failure of Everything“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.”John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.We recently conducted a survey on the Community Tab on our channel and asked what your primary concerns were given the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Cyberwarfare taking down infrastructure was #1 which we addressed in a recent video along with a free download guide. The second most significant concern was “How to prepare for an economic collapse in your nation.” Believe it or not, when you prepare for an economic collapse in your country, you should also expect the infrastructure to collapse around you. You prepare in similar ways. In this blog, we will look at a few things you can do now to get on better footing should a more significant collapse occur, ways you can endure through the collapse, and where you should be focusing on your preps. Some of the ideas we will express may seem simple, but they give you a powerful defense when compounded into a plan. Let’s take a look…Download the How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks guide today. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/cybersafe for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. IS ECONOMIC COLLAPSE POSSIBLE?Some would say we are already on the cusp of a collapse. Others will tell you that we are riding a bubble. Others will say to you we have been on a long and slow decline for years that will be punctuated abruptly soon enough. Still, others will point to the events around the world and domestically as evidence that an economic collapse is possible in the future. Maybe our collective hubris or our sense of exceptionalism convinces us to ignore the facts, history, and the real world. We don’t know. We know that economic collapses have happened in the past in economies around the world. We know that no economy is immune to that possibility, whether it is riding high or plummeting low.From the Weimar Republic to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, history is riddled with examples of extreme famine and hardship brought on by economic collapses. The difference between then and now is that we are today dependent upon a global supply chain that will cease to function if our economy or other economies fail. We are no longer obtaining our sustenance from the farm just outside of town. Take a trip to your big box store and look at the labels of where your food came from or originated. If you want to eat grapes, they probably come from Chile. If you want Asparagus, it may have come from Peru or Mexico. That ground beef may have come from Canada, the United States, or Mexico. We guess they’re not really sure when they put that label on it. It’s not likely that the palm oil in your favorite cracker was grown and processed in the next state over from you. Just the journey from your state’s farms to your table is a journey of many miles and many hands. How will that food get packaged and delivered to you when that cardboard manufacturer closes operations? When the price of fuel and electricity goes way up even as the currency becomes worthless, how many orders for food from other countries will go unfulfilled? How many crops on large corporate farms will be left to rot in the field?The question is less whether an economic collapse is possible and more to what extent the failure will be when it occurs today. If it’s just your economy, you could grab up all your gold and all the goodies you can carry and flee across the border. If the collapse involves several countries, it could stretch worldwide and leave you no safe haven at all. Besides, if gas were in short supply, not making it from refineries to station, or at an astronomical price because the currency was so worthless, could you really make it the hundreds or thousands of miles to neighboring and more stable countries. The reality is that you will probably be stuck where you are if your economy collapses. Accepting that fact, you have to know what that will look like, what things will no longer work, and what you can do to leverage your position. If you look at the long arc of history, you will see that if you can put any nationalistic ego and exceptionalism aside, economic collapse isn’t just possible; at some point, maybe in your lifetime, it’s highly probable. You may have endured a recession, a mere loss of some value, and the inflation of goods, but an actual economic collapse means everything stops, and you are totally on your own.INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSEIf an infrastructure collapse– a collapse of essential services– doesn’t precipitate and exacerbate an economic collapse, it certainly follows one. Police, fire, teachers, social service workers, the folks who mix the chemicals at the water treatment plant, the folks who fix the lines and pipes, flip the switches, turn the dials, pick up the trash, and keep the world moving behind the scenes that you never see, might work for a little while out of goodwill and habit; however, they will eventually have to tend to their own families and will be hard-pressed to justify working without pay. The definition of infrastructure varies by source or which politician you listen to on the television. In a nutshell, “Infrastructure is the set of fundamental facilities and systems that support the sustainable functionality of households and firms. Serving a country, city, or other area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function.” It’s your most fundamental arteries like roads, tap water, electricity, other utilities, education, healthcare, railways, ports, and airports. It’s also those teachers, city workers, trash collectors, street sweepers, and people engaged in community-assisting activities. These workers are all around you. You may be one of them, and you know that what makes it all go around is money. If the currency bottomed out and did not look likely to recover, how long would you report for duty over taking charge of your home and getting your garden producing like never before? If looters are in the streets near your house looking for resources, will you be hanging out at the office or driving a truck for the city? Well, neither will the other millions of your fellow co-workers.A collapse of infrastructure preceding or resultant from an economic collapse means you have to be completely self-reliant. You won’t be able to go to the store to pick up a few items you need. You won’t be able to go through a drive-through because you didn’t feel like cooking. It seems obvious to say this, but most people don’t consider the implications until they face them. Even then, there’s an inclination to blame others over admitting your need and finding a personal solution. We witnessed quite a few people new to prepping due to the civil unrest years before, even more after the power outages of the big Texas freeze, still more after every flood, fire, hurricane, or tornado. More and more people realize that government, FEMA, neighbors, or insurance companies won’t always rescue them. Even passing emergency relief funds through congress has become a partisan struggle that can take days or weeks. At the same time, infrastructure equals government and big business. Big businesses supply the services that the local or federal government doesn’t provide. When the profit disappears because the currency collapses, it isn’t likely companies will be prioritizing you, the consumer who can no longer pay.When you contemplate this infrastructure collapse, which you absolutely should, imagine how the pioneers lived. They had no running water or electricity. They had no natural gas or gasoline power. They had no store bigger than a general store, maybe a day’s or more journey away. How did they survive? They set aside what they needed to survive the winter. They wasted nothing of what they grew or processed. They supplemented with what they foraged and hunted. They learned to make candles from beeswax, rushes, or tallow to provide them light. They adopted methods from their ancestors to fit their modern times. You have to do the same, and prepping involves doing that ahead of time.WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?When the economy collapses, you and every single person around you will suddenly need to do everything for yourselves. From gathering and cooking the food you need without electricity or natural gas or stores or farmers to collecting water and removing waste from your premises, you need to plan on doing all of these things for yourself. When the economy collapses, gas will become too expensive to make food deliveries from farm to table possible. Pumping stations will cease to operate when the grid goes down. If you live in one of the many areas of the country that is only inhabitable because of the water pumped in or only cooled or heated because of the flow of natural gas or electricity, your area instantly becomes inhospitable at best and uninhabitable at worst.You can compensate for the sudden loss of resources and services by prepping what you need to get by with a more spartan lifestyle today. Focus on a prepping plan like the Prepper’s Roadmap or some other guide, and start working at all angles of that plan, from food to water, medicine, energy and fuel, and security. You need to prep from a 360-degree approach. Most will not. Most will be unprepared. Even some who do prep will find massive gaps in their preps because they failed to take a 360-degree approach. Essentially, if you need to do everything for yourself and survive on only what you have, what do you need to do to make that happen? From the food you need for sustenance to cooking it, to getting rid of the waste, you need to plan each phase meticulously.An actual economic collapse isn’t merely a market correction where many heavy investors lose their shirts, and you lose value in your retirement account. An actual economic collapse will result in a catastrophic failure of everything you currently value. If you don’t know how to do it for yourself, it isn’t going to get done. Realize, too, that most everyone around you has failed to prep at all. That’s hundreds, thousands, or millions of desperate people now being forced to take things into their own hands. They will be ignoring established social order and taking what they need to survive, banding together to be more powerful and secure, and expecting you to give over what you have prepped for your own survival. Awareness of this basic fact is why many don’t disclose their prepping, and you should never reveal the full extent of your preps. At the same time, you do need to get the conversation going and build a network of friends, family, and acquaintances you can rely upon.COMMUNITY & LOCATIONWhere you are when the bottom falls out and who you know will probably be some of the most significant determinants of your ultimate survival. If you commute miles to your job, leave early, come home late, and barely know your neighbors, you are probably going to be alone when the economy collapses. If you have built up a few neighborhood relations, cultivated a few like-minded friends through church or groups or classes, you are likely going to fare far better. We will give you an example. Just as I was writing this, a good friend and neighbor of ours we met years ago when our kids were in the same Cub Scout pack texted me to ask about solar cookers and water purifiers. He recently got a 55-gallon barrel of water set up in his garage, “just in case.” We have a mini-network where we can help each other out, look out for each other, and maybe trade or exchange resources if we need to. That’s just one person. Imagine if your neighborhood or church had classes on preparing a 72-hour disaster kit for surviving after a natural disaster. How many contacts and resources could you cultivate from that? Have you ever taken a class in woodworking or soap making, or canning? How many of those people do you think are more prepared than the average person? Do you have “a guy” from the farmer’s market who supplies you with fresh eggs, produce or meat? How well do you know this resource because it could be critical to you when the economy collapses? Take steps now to cultivate a community and a network. You make your community stronger right now when you do.The other aspect that can’t be overlooked here is location. We have lived in apartments in sketchy parts of town, the country, small towns, big cities, and the suburbs. We have seen all walks of life and all levels of self-sufficiency from all over the world. Let’s admit it if you live in a rural setting, your chances of survival are much greater. When you have four neighbors separated with a bit of acreage, likely, you will all be looking out for each other even a little bit when the economy collapses. If you have a hundred neighbors, most of whom you don’t know, will that neighbor have your back or put a knife in it to get your resources? Both situations have the element of isolation as the key. The rural person is isolated from competitors for resources. Urban people need to look out for their resources by maintaining a low profile and containing their resources within their walls. If the power is out, you don’t want to be running your lights and radio off your solar battery at night with the windows wide open. When there is widespread food insecurity, that’s not the time to be cooking up that apple pie or frozen turkey or searing your steaks. You don’t want to advertise your food and energy stability. There are three levels to this: having more than you need, having what you need, and not having what you need. Most will not have what they need when the standard systems of their economy collapse. You want to have what you need to get by. If you signal that you have what you need or more than you need, others will eventually come and deplete you of your resources to bring you to their level, which is not having what you need.Build a network and understand the landscape of where you are at. You can survive an economic collapse no matter where you are geographically located. It will be harder for urban dwellers, easier for those in neighborhoods in the suburbs, and far easier still for those in small towns or rural settings. As much as things fall apart, people are also remarkable at coming together through a shared tragedy. When we are all suffering from the same disaster, we no longer have the luxury of divisiveness. There’s a collective understanding that we need to put differences aside and come together as a community. There’s an instinctual understanding that surviving as a group is far easier than surviving entirely on your own. Start waving hello to that neighbor. Start asking questions about what your friend will do if the big one hits. Start the conversations and cultivate the relationships in your community and the human resources of your location. WHAT CAN YOU BUY FOR A DOLLAR?Assume you can’t get anything with your paper currency. Most coinage these days isn’t worth as much as the metal it is minted with. Many turn to precious metals as a solution, but this assumes a recovery. We think the person who knows how to bake a few loaves of bread with squash flour will have an easier tradeable commodity than a person with an ounce of pure silver or gold. Gold is great, and all, but people have to eat first. After an economic collapse, you could offer someone an ounce of gold or a loaf of bread and a pound of beans, and they may be more likely to take the food. How much would a lighter, flashlight, knife, or gun get you in trade versus an ounce of metal? That’s not to say that precious metals don’t have their place. If you needed to buy a piece of rural land from someone not as desperate because they produce much of what they need, those silver and gold bars might have the right exchange value.Looking through history, you will see instances where people had wheelbarrows heaping with their worthless paper currency, still barely enough to buy a quart of milk or a loaf of bread. Precious metals and gems were only beneficial to them by providing them a means to carry value from their country to another. In a global economic collapse, even precious metals and gems won’t be as valuable as food, water, and other essentials, and how do you break a bar of gold or a diamond or emerald into the correct exchange amount for an everyday purchase? The people with tradeable goods or services faired much better through regional and national economic hardships. The person who raised rabbits or farmed eggs would fare far better than the banker or real estate investor. The local doctor could no longer get paid in cash, but people still paid for his services by giving him commodities like fish or grown food or some other item that retained perceived value even as the currency was worthless.The fact is that the currency buys less and less every year, but this has been a slow and consistent decline through countless administrations ever since we abandoned the gold standard. In an economic collapse, this decline is like the bottom falling out from underneath you. Suddenly price tags are meaningless because prices can no longer be met equally with the appropriate amount of currency. Far more valuable are usable things, tradeable resources, and useful skills. If you know how to fix the only power generator I have, that’s priceless. If you know how to fix my shoes, that’s worth a lot to me. If you know how to hunt, fish, forage, sew, brew, caseiculture, garden, make soap from fats, weave, process water to make it drinkable, or even render plastics into biodiesel, you are worth more to people than a wheelbarrow full of worthless bills.CAN YOU GROW YOUR OWN?We are a mobile society that seeks luxury and the easiest path. So, there isn’t always a way for us to learn these things. As much as my grandfather taught me how to grow the best and sweetest tomatoes or catch a 4-foot blue catfish, much of his knowledge didn’t get passed on to us. We learn something new every year about my tomato plants, and we struggle to catch fish, and that is with the luxury of having a great teacher where many don’t even have that. Another problem is that we are far removed from the nature that provides us with the sustenance we need to survive. If you live in an apartment or condo, it may be challenging, to say the least, to grow any of your food or get water from the wild. Even if you have some yard space that isn’t otherwise occupied by a pool, driveway, or non-edible landscaping, it’s hard to press it into service to feed one person, let alone a family. Twenty-one states have an average lot size for a house of under 11,000 square feet. As a general rule of thumb, you need anywhere from 100-200 square feet of growing space per person you intend on feeding. That’s just the space. You need the knowledge, skills, tools, and seeds to cultivate and maintain that space. There are only a few plants that you can set and forget. Growing everything you need simply isn’t an option for everyone. Still, you should be growing something, whether that’s sprouts, mushrooms, microgreens, patio tomatoes or peppers, or a window garden, grow something. A mushroom spore print can last up to 18 years. Beans, peas, and lentils will sprout for you even when they are 5-years old. There are creative ways to produce your own food for years into any disaster.Knowing you can’t grow it all unless you plan on abandoning your area for an area of land you own in the country, you need to focus on building that pioneer level of 1 year or more food storage. Unlike your pioneer ancestors, you have the technology of freeze-drying and moisture meters, electric dehydrators, and fancy pressure canners. You have hundreds of years of big and small companies striving to extend the shelf life of their products. Most of the meat sold in cities in the 1800s was rancid by the time it got to the consumer’s kitchen. That’s why we have steak sauce and ketchup today. That’s why we have jerky and smoked meats still today. We also can leverage technology to maximize shelf-life. A low-acid food like a canned vegetable can have 2-5 years of shelf-life. It’s pretty easy with some meal planning and know-how to build a reserve slowly, just one can at a time, of food sufficient to feed every person and pet in your home for 3-weeks, then 3-months, then well over a year. Above all else, don’t believe that you can simply make it through a prolonged collapse on beans, rice, and Ramen. Will you survive? Yes. But if you think you can get by just on these, put them to the test and eat nothing but these three for 3-days straight. After 3-days, your gut will be a mess, and you will be horribly dehydrated and bloated from the high sodium. Have your food storage contain a full spectrum of foods from salts to proteins, sugars, and greens. Then cook from this pantry, so you aren’t trying to figure it out after the infrastructure collapses.Finally, know how to use everything. Stop throwing food out and wasting food. If you are regularly cleaning out your refrigerator of leftovers or moldy food, you need to learn to use your resources more wisely. If you are going to the farmer’s market and trimming and throwing away the carrot tops when you process your carrots, you need to learn how to use these things. Make this year the year you make your own dill pickles or sauerkraut. There are videos for doing this on this channel. You will pick up a valuable skill that will enrich your life now and equip you with some basics of surviving when the infrastructure collapses and refrigeration is a memory of a former time.CONCLUSIONWe witnessed how fragile and interwoven our economies and dependencies have become from lockdowns around the world. Even as we try to make corrections from the damage caused by those months, we face the threat of a global war, decreased production, sanctions, embargoes, and still numerous and increasingly inflamed political divisions and civil unrest. Any one of these things could be the lit fuse of a broader economic collapse involving your country, countries bordering yours, or the entire global economy. Understanding the total loss of resources and services is the first step in surviving that. Prepping for the possibility of such a collapse now will increase your personal odds of survival. Economies often stutter step into recession, but we rarely see them collapse entirely. That should not make us bury our heads in the sand and ignore the realities, nor should it make us simply wring our hands and shrug our shoulders at an unalterable fate. Prepping now for an economic collapse in your country can put the odds of surviving in your favor and decrease the desperation that those around you will undoubtedly face almost from the first day.What do you think? What are some of the things you are doing to protect yourself from the possibility of an economic failure? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can, typically within the first hour of releasing a blog. Please consider subscribing to the channel and click that bell icon that will appear next to the subscribe button if you’d like to be notified when I release a video. Give this video a thumbs-up or leave a comment to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.
Scavenged Resources Less Than $7!“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle” – Saint Francis Of Assisi.There are many long-life candles on the market ranging from affordable to more expensive types. It’s essential to know how to make your own if you are ever in an emergency or grid-down situation, and we’ll discuss a couple of them here. First, we will walk you through the process of building an incredible 300-hour candle out of materials you probably already have on hand. Then, we will put it to the test and calculate our burn time to make sure the candle we are building will burn an incredible 300 hours. Let’s get started…Download the Start Preparing Survival Guide To Help You Prepare For Any Disaster. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/getstarted for a free guide to help you get started on your journey of preparedness. WHAT YOU NEEDFor this candle, you will need a jar. You can use a mason jar that will be less prone to cracking from the heat, but we will use an old pickle jar. That will be closer to what you might have on hand after a disaster. When selecting a jar, you want to make sure the glass has no air bubbles in it. When heat is applied to a jar with air bubbles, it causes the air in the bubble to expand and the glass to crack. We will also heat this glass before adding hot oil to it as a precaution against cracking.For the oil, we are using off-the-shelf Crisco. Modern formulations of this product have Hydrogenated Palm Oil and Soybean Oil. Both of these will burn slower. They will also stay relatively solid at room temperature. Finally, we need a candle. we could go with a small long burning candle or Beeswax candle, but we want to emulate your post-disaster situation, so we are going to use a tapered Christmas candle.MAKING THE CANDLEStart by gently melting the Crisco in a saucepan. Our jar is about 48 ounces, and my can of Crisco is the same, so we will liquefy the entire amount. You don’t want to use the Crisco can itself because it is cardboard. You could in an emergency because the heat generated by your single flame isn’t that great, but glass will be a safer option for your candle. As the Crisco is liquifying, you will want to size your candle to be an inch to one-half inch below the top of your jar. This can be done pretty easily by measuring and then just rolling your knife on it on a cutting board. We want to use the thicker part to give it more wax, so we taper the end of the candle then set it aside.When the oil is liquified, turn off the heat and remove it from the burner. It will stay liquid even as it approaches room temperature, so let it cool down to below 120 degrees or so before pouring. We heat the jar with hot tap water to around 120 degrees. If you are doing this in a mason jar, you could heat the jar in a hot water bath or even the oven. The idea is to avoid putting hot oil on cold glass. We just added the shavings in here because waste not want not. You can add essential oils like citronella, geranium, lavender, or eucalyptus to make your candle also act as a kind of insect repellant; but if you leave it just pure oil and wax, you will be able to use the Crisco for cooking or one of its many other post-disaster uses if you need to. You could still cook over the flame in a container, even with scented oils, but you can’t use the oil in your cooking without also making everything you cook taste like an essential oil.When the temperatures are close, and your oil has cooled sufficiently, ladle it into your jar. When the glass is heated enough, and the threat of cracking has subsided, you can pour the oil into about 2 inches from the rim of the jar. Put the lid on and place it in the refrigerator to solidify again. After about 2 hours, the oils will have hardened enough to be soft but firm enough to insert the candle. Insert the candle, so only the top half-inch to an inch is out of the solidified oil. Return it to the refrigerator to harden even more.After about another hour, use the end of a spoon to make a small trough around the candle. This will create a pool of wax that will form and slowly uptake the oil to keep your fire burning. You can use your finger for this too. We also take about two pinches of salt and sprinkle them around the flame area. The sodium will help extend the candle’s life just ever so slightly by regulating temperature by just a few degrees. That may be a myth, but it’s something we learned a long time ago, and we have no reason to doubt that it’s true.That’s it. You just made an emergency candle. It’s terribly simple, and even if you don’t have refrigeration, your Crisco will solidify enough to prevent your candle from moving. Let me explain all of the reasons why this works as we light it and put it to the test.WHY THIS WORKS AND EVERY OTHER QUESTIONThis works for several reasons. First, it’s not solely a wax candle. Beeswax, Soy Bean Oil, and Parafin candles will give you the greatest burn time when it comes to waxes. Here, the candle is more of a catalyst and a wick. The oil part is similar to an oil candle, but oil candles alone are difficult to keep lit without a decent wick. So, this candle marries the best of the wax candle with the best of an oil candle.Hydrogenated Palm Oil and Soybean Oil will give you the longest burn times for the oils. You could use any vegetable or even animal fats, but the vegetable oil will provide you with the cleanest and longest burn. You could use rendered lard, but the flashpoint is lower (370 degrees versus 470 degrees), and your area may be smokier and smell like cooking meat. This candle will work best in colder climates and on colder days. If the ambient temperature is too hot, your vegetable shortening can liquify again, and your candle will not stand straight. That’s not a problem once your oils harden off again.Our go-to candle in an emergency is these storm candles, jar candles, or prayer candles. The slim cylindrical glass holder also protects the flame during high winds. I always make sure to have a half-dozen in my inventory in case the lights go out. They say these will burn for about 90 hours, so this will still be my go-to candle. Other models like this one can burn for 36-hours. It uses the longer burning Soy and Palm oils like we do here. It has a 3-wick system and advertises 12-hours per wick. Evenly burning may be a problem with this type of candle, though it claims to have a dam board system separating the wax areas. We think you would still get a solid 36-hours out of the candle. It has fantastic portability for a camping pack or bug-out bag, and the 3 flames make it easier to cook over.Finally, there’s this 100-hour candle powder wax setup. This candle kit includes 21 ounces of unscented palm wax powder and 20 wicks that last for 8 hours each. This lets you make an impromptu candle out of just about any container, as the wax powder beads will melt around the wick. We think this one is great for versatility, and it still retains a lightweight and portable profile.So, there are options available for emergency candles. This wax and oil version we are fashioning out of vegetable shortening is genuinely meant for emergencies, focusing on extending the resources you have or making use of resources you might scavenge for after a disaster.TESTING IT OUTWe determined the entire weight of oil and candle used by subtracting the jar’s weight. To calculate total burn time, you can either let the candle burn out completely or determine the rate at which the flame consumes the candle, so we lit the candle and recorded the time. After four hours, we took another weight measurement to note the difference, and it was a half-ounce lighter. After another four hours, we again measured to determine the weight difference, and it was another half ounce lighter. We let it burn through the night and measured every four hours, and it was always precisely a half-ounce. It stayed that consistent through an entire 24-hour cycle. You could keep time by it. That is actually another use for a candle, by the way, as a measure of time. Imagine if you needed to know how long you or someone else was gone. Simply light a candle and calculate the weight difference between when they left and when they got back. Every half-ounce here equals four hours.Doing the math, though, we had set out to make a 100-hour candle, but we blew that up considerably. At the rate of 1 ounce per eight hours and a starting weight less the jar weight of 37.9 ounces, we can multiply by 8 for the hours. We have created a candle that will burn for an incredible 303.2 hours. That’s just a little over 12-and-a-half days of straight burn time. That far exceeds my expectations. If you were only burning this candle about 6-hours a night, it would last you 50 days. The final aspect of an emergency candle is how well it stays lit and how worry-free the flame is. We had minimal air circulation and only turned on our house fan for a while during this test, but the flame was steady and not as low as we would have thought. The high walls of the pickle jar protected it from breezes and therefore flickering. The jar’s wide mouth allowed enough oxygen in for the center flame to burn steadily. It was never wildly out of control, as we feared might be a possibility with the oil. It was pretty consistent and steady. It didn’t flicker as much as we expected.CONCLUSIONSo, there you have it. It’s part a wax candle and part an oil candle, and it will stay lit for an incredible 303 hours. 50-days of light, heat, and fire is almost a luxury through a disaster. The flame may be small, but that’s a tremendous amount of light and heat that you can throw together for a few dollars or with pieces you scavenge. Next time you have one candle that, at best, will burn for 3-hours, turn it into a mega-candle with this simple method. Pack all the parts in your emergency storage and consider including essential oil drops if you also plan on using your candle as an insect repellant.What do you think? Have you made one of these? Any tips, things to try, or definite do not do suggestions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can, typically within the first hour of releasing a video. Please consider subscribing to the channel and click that bell icon that will appear next to the subscribe button if you’d like to be notified when we release a video. Give this blog a thumbs-up or leave a comment to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.100 hour candle – https://amzn.to/3ImoigWPrayer Candles – https://amzn.to/3IiJVyD36 hour candle – survival type – https://amzn.to/3I9kUWzOil Candle – https://amzn.to/3KElXiQ
3 Factors to Ensure Survival“All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere” — Martin Scorsese.As an apartment dweller, believe it or not, you have some advantages over your country and suburban kin. Sure, they may have acreage and look at your small space as a liability, but we want to let you know you have the possibility of an extended survival timeline by being in your apartment and being prepped. Living in an apartment doesn’t necessarily reduce your odds of survival, though some would have you believe so. This blog will examine the advantages and liabilities of living in an apartment after a disaster or grid-down situation. Some of the disadvantages you can prep for, some you can’t. Let’s take a look…Download the How to Protect Yourself from Cyberattacks guide today. We’ll post a link below or visit cityprepping.com/cybersafe for a free guide to help you get started on your preparedness journey. WINDOWS, DOORS, & WALLSMost apartments are built with just one or two sides with windows, one entry door, one or more shared walls, a shared floor, and a ceiling that is someone else’s floor. If you are on the ground floor, these are more difficult to secure and defend, but you have an instant defense against any conflict in the streets if you are even one floor up. Your height advantage is easier to defend by firing down or throwing things at people. You are hidden and out of reach for most looters or robbers even without these more extreme measures. Your concealment is a great advantage, as any adversary doesn’t know how many people may be in the apartment or what they may be armed with. You can increase your security by duct taping Xs on windows to prevent their shattering, barricading the door, and covering the peephole. Keep curtains or shades drawn. In the immediate moments after a disaster strikes, secure all windows and doors. If you do live on the ground floor, make sure you have installed extra door and window locks.Barricade your door. You might feel that it is safe, but when you are in an apartment, someone has a master key to your door. If that manager gets robbed, a criminal could literally go door-to-door throughout your building. You want to make sure you have more than just a flimsy chain lock on your door. Place a doorstop under your door, prop a chair under the handle, or do both. Make sure that your door only opens when you want it to.Set up your operations toward the center of your apartment or as far from windows, doors, shared and exterior walls as possible. The exterior wall and some of the interior walls will be load-bearing, so they will be thicker. Depending on where you live, you will at least have 2X4s, insulation, maybe fire-resistant layers, brick, or cinder blocks. While these are not impenetrable, it requires someone’s commitment to hammering away at it to get through. Since it is an apartment building, there is a higher concentration of people who may not sit idly by while someone hammers away at a wall, but there are undoubtedly easier targets that don’t require much labor. It is not likely someone will waste ammo firing blindly into your walls, as you might see in an action movie, but the walls are susceptible to being penetrated by stray bullets.If you have a patio, you have an advantage in growing some of your food to supplement your supplies. You also have a huge disadvantage in that eight-foot piece of glass as the only barrier between you and the chaos outside. A sliding patio door is part door and part window. You should keep it as secure as possible by placing a cut dowel in the runner tracks, making crisscross Xs that interconnect across the entire glass and to the frame, and keeping curtains or blinds drawn. If you have enough duct tape in your prepping supplies, you can completely cover the window and overlap onto the frame in a weave pattern of alternating horizontal and vertical tape. You can leave a few spaces to look through still. If the possibility of it breaking is high, consider moving your mattress from your bed to cover the window. You can also easily store in your prepping supplies plastic sheets and tarps. These can be affixed to the interior wall to cover windows. They can be cut to seal off vents and other airways if you are bugging in because of biochemical or radiological threats outside.When you tape up your windows, realize that you are also signaling your presence in the apartment. Depending on the calamity you are in, that can be fine or a problem. You still hold somewhat of an advantage over other neighbors in that you are signaling you are better prepared than your neighbors and, therefore, more likely to be able to defend yourself. The element of concealment and the limited access points provide you with a more easily defensible and secure position than a house. Finally, your floor that may be someone else’s ceiling and your ceiling that may be someone else’s floor are much thicker barriers than your walls. They are not impenetrable, especially by stray bullets, but they aren’t likely to be access points into your apartment. You can often hear neighbors through walls or walking on their floor, which is your ceiling. They can hear you too. Be mindful of this and keep the volume of electrical devices whisper quiet to not advertise your energy resources. Also, speak in soft, even whisper tones. You want to hear your neighbors, but you do not want to be heard.FOCUSING ON PREPSYou benefit from the isolation in an apartment, but you are also wholly dependent upon municipal water, utilities, and services. You also have more limited space. You need the absolute minimum of one-gallon water per person, per day, for at least 3-weeks. That’s 21 gallons per person at the absolute minimum. Preferably, you far exceed this and have a 3-months supply on hand per person. That’s going to be about 90 gallons, and that’s a serious challenge given the space constraints. To meet this minimum, consider emergency bathtub liners and collapsable water bags that can be filled in the immediate moments after a disaster. WaterBricks can be stored under beds, and Wurx containers can be stacked in closets. You have to assume that the water will stop flowing to your apartment and that the water that makes it to your apartment may be tainted after a disaster, so you also need to make sure you have the means to filter, treat, or boil water. You can’t have a campfire in your apartment, so a small alcohol stove or can of Sterno allows you to pasteurize or even boil water. Don’t forget small propane or butane camping stoves and extra small tanks. These can generate a tremendous amount of clean-burning heat when it is cold. They are also very efficient. Some apartments may have a gas-only fireplace. This can work for heating water, but you can’t rely on the gas continuing to flow indefinitely after a disaster. First, get your storage levels as high as your space will allow. Then get your fillable and collapsible containers in your supplies and ready to deploy. Then get your means to filter, treat, and boil water.When it comes to food, you still have the space challenge. We recommend dedicating one cabinet in your kitchen solely to shelf-stable foods. Freeze-dried foods, MREs, cans of food, dehydrated food, rice, beans, amaranth, and sprouting seeds will supply you with the essential calories for survival. We go into this in greater detail in my Prepper’s Roadmap course but understand that 1 pound of Alfalfa seeds will yield almost 14 cups of sprouts. While that alone won’t provide you nearly enough nutrients to survive on, it will boost your nutrients and supplement your other food stores. We mention sprouting seeds here because a pound of seeds takes up very little space. Ten pounds of lentils will take up an area about as big as a boot box. They’ll also provide you with 70 cups of cooked food which is slightly over 16,000 calories. You have to be more creative with your stored food but dedicate a space to your shelf-stable foods. Use a section of your closet like the shelf that often is at the top and the area under your bed to store additional cans of food. Canned goods will last for years so long as the can remains in good condition. Favor foods that require minimal cooking. A simple set of camping mess kit and cookware will allow you to heat small meals over a candle’s flame. Even something as simple as a thermal cooker will allow you to continue to cook your food after turning off the heating source used to warm up your food. Avoid cooking any overly fragrant foods to avoid arousing your neighbor’s attention.Food and water are the absolute basics you have to have in place, but living in an apartment requires some other notable preps. You need a crank flashlight that can charge small devices; since the power may be out, your solar options may not be possible, and batteries will not last forever. A small solar power bank that can be charged on a window sill can be an option. Make sure that you have an emergency radio to monitor the outside world. Your goal is to lock down and stay put for as long as possible, but there will come a time when you will need to leave your apartment. When you run out of food or water or your apartment building is on fire, you will have no other option but to leave. Fire is probably your biggest threat. When the power goes out, it is very likely that several of your neighbors may be using a candle or cooking with an open flame. That’s a lot of inexperienced people playing with fire. The possibility of one of those unattended candles or fires creating a much larger fire is incredibly high. Make sure you have a fire blanket and fire extinguisher if you have a small fire or you need to evacuate through one. Make sure you know your evacuation and escape routes. Calling the fire department after a disaster isn’t likely to be of any use. Also, make sure you have your bugout bag packed and ready to go. That being said, have an emergency candle or two in your supplies. Consider having what you need to make a 100 or 300-hour candle, as we show you how to do in another blog. Also, make sure you have a lighter or matches in storage.Make sure you have two 5-gallon buckets with lids. Store in them toilet paper, wipes, and trash bags. You may need to purpose one of the buckets into a bathroom for solid waste and the other for liquid waste. Lining it with a trash bag will allow you a means to dispose of the waste. Wipes will be more efficient and take up less space than toilet paper, but ensure you have both stored. Toilets can still be used for liquid waste, as this will spill over into the sewer lines rather than over the top of your bowl. You may not be able to flush your toilet, and you should never use vital drinking water to force flush them. Have puppy pads in your supplies or extra kitty litter if you have pets. Taking your pet outdoors might no longer be a safe option. Also, plan food supplies for all your critters. You should have an extra bag of food for when disaster strikes. In addition to your hygiene, you need to ensure your medical needs can be met. Have a well-stocked first-aid kit and an ample emergency supply of any medicines you need to take frequently. Be able to treat any post-disaster wounds, cuts you may suffer in your quarantine, and other people you might take into your apartment. Also, be able to treat with over-the-counter medicines digestion, sinus, inflammation, and cold and fever conditions.Have a basic tool kit that includes pliers, a hammer, nails, and heavy-duty scissors. You will find these items helpful in repurposing household items after a disaster, repairing damages to your apartment, or for self-defense. Have a fixed blade knife for these purposes as well. Pull out your camping gear, pitch a tent in your living room, and sleep in your sleeping bag with a sleeping pad underneath. If cold is an issue with no power, you will be creating your warm microclimate. Your mattress and box spring can be repurposed to barricade doors and windows. This will protect you and add a layer of insulation between you and the outdoors.COMMUNITYLiving in close proximity to people can be both a positive and a negative. We have lived in apartments where we never saw my neighbors and in apartments where we saw too much of or knew too much about my neighbors. People were living next to, near me, or across the hall that we could trust, and many people were big question marks, or we knew that we couldn’t trust at all, let alone after a disaster. Though you will be going it alone, keeping as low of a profile as possible, and answering your door for no one, making a few connections, at least knowing some of your neighbor’s names will provide you with a watchful set of eyes and ears on the community around you. If you can find some like-minded people, you will benefit from your mini-network. Your community might come together to post guards in the main lobby and by entryways. Your community might pool some resources after a disaster. If you live in a house, you could be overrun and wouldn’t have any community support. When you live in an apartment, you have many people who have a vested interest in your security. If your neighbor is involved in a violent altercation next door, it is in your best interest to know about that. If a gang of marauders is roaming your halls, that impacts everyone. In looking out for their own individual interests, your community is also looking out for you. Don’t misunderstand the extent that your neighbor has you covered. You can’t expect anyone to come to your rescue. It’s just that when they look out for their self-interests, they are also kind of looking out for yours.If you have at least one person in your building or complex you trust, would it be advantageous for you to give them a walkie-talkie? Communicating after a disaster is still essential, even if your ultimate goal is to be as low-profile and hidden as possible. If you can provide a free WiFi network after a disaster, your neighbors won’t even have to know it is you, but they will have information and news available to them. The internet was designed to survive a disaster, but your typical internet service providers may not be operational. Providing a set time of accessible internet via a satellite connection, mobile connection, or a 5G router might keep you with a connection. If you are up for one set hour per day, people will find the connection even without you advertising it. Community social media groups may prove valuable for organizing and staying informed. My neighborhood has at least two Facebook pages. People often post about porch pirates or people caught on their doorbell cameras. Any mischief in the community is well known. Consider a peephole security camera for yourself, as this is always safer than pressing your eye and face against the door. It also doesn’t signal that you are home. Some Bluetooth messaging like Bridgefy will allow you to send offline text messages when you don’t have access to the Internet.Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about your preps. Desperate people easily rationalize that they have a right to your abundance or excess. Maintain your operational security or OPSEC by keeping your preps a secret and out of sight. If anyone enters your apartment, make sure your preps aren’t visible. Make sure that everyone thinks you are either just as desperate as the rest or barely getting by and surviving. If you feel compelled to share any of your resources, do it secretly or make sure the other person will keep your gift a secret. Otherwise, you may find a line outside your door of people looking for a handout.Your community is an asset and a liability. Approach the assets like you approach your preps. Build them up before any disaster strikes. Know who you can trust. Have a casual conversation or two long before any disaster strikes. Give the friendly wave, nod, or smile to begin to build a shared sense of community.CONCLUSIONBugging-in when living in an apartment isn’t without its challenges. In some ways, it is easier than a home. It’s challenging, though. Think creatively about your preps. Dedicate space to them. Make sure that at least one cabinet, some closet space, and the under the bed space are dedicated to your preps. Know who you might be able to trust in your highly populated environment. Keep your preps a secret, and set up a base of operations for yourself after a disaster away from exterior windows and doors. You have to be more aware that you may be driven out of your area, so make sure you have multiple escape routes and a bug-out-bag ready to go. Just because you are in an apartment doesn’t mean your odds of survival are lower than someone in a house. You just have to be able to do more with less space.What do you think? Have you made one of these? Any tips, things to try, or definite do not do suggestions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We try to read the comments and respond to them when we can, typically within the first hour of releasing a blog. Please consider subscribing to the channel and click that bell icon that will appear next to the subscribe button if you’d like to be notified when we release a video. Give this video a thumbs-up or leave a comment to help the channel grow.As always, stay safe out there.LINKSBathtub Liners and Collapsible Water Containers – https://amzn.to/3JkmOVACamping Mess Kit – https://amzn.to/3JkuYNI
In this blog, we will identify over two dozen plants you need to get in the ground this month to grow some of what you eat and start your survival garden. With each plant, we will identify why it’s essential to get in the ground now and why we selected that plant over the thousands of others you could be growing. Let’s see, and then let’s get to planting.PotatoesMany cultures have survived on little else but potatoes as a diet staple. The great thing about potatoes is that they have a long growing season, and if you can’t get around to harvesting them, you will simply be creating a perennial potato patch. Depending upon your climate, potatoes left in the ground will either sprout and grow new plants in the spring or overwinter, endure the frost safely underground, and sprout new plants next spring. If you use our above-ground container technique, you may have to insulate the container or move it into your garage if your climate gets bitterly cold, as the container will not insulate from frost and freezing as well as the Earth. Once your soil has dried out a little and is an average temperature of 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, you should plant your seed potatoes in moist, heavily composted soil. Potatoes don’t like floods but do like a steady moisture level.The typical white potato has all the essential amino acids a body requires to build proteins and repair and maintain cells. If you solely ate potatoes, you would develop vitamin and mineral deficiencies. It won’t sustain you forever; however, leaving it in the ground or storing it in a dark, cool, dry place for months makes this a great survival food. Seed potatoes planted on April 1st will take at least 20 weeks to mature, putting your earliest harvest opportunity around August 5th. If you leave them in the ground even longer, you will get bigger potatoes. We recommend you plant your seedlings now in compost-rich soil and nurture the plant for as long as possible, with a harvest date no earlier than September or October. When you harvest, leave some behind in your potato patch for next year’s crop.Sweet PotatoesWe give these a category of their own first because they are not actually potatoes. Second, our bodies process the starches at different rates so we don’t get insulin or sugar spikes. Nutritionally, they are very similar, but 100 grams of sweet potato will give you 107% of your daily value of Vitamin A. In contrast, the equivalent grams of potato will give you a tenth of 1%. The plants are more finicky than potato plants, favoring warmer climates and longer growing seasons. The plus, though, is once you have your patch established, you can simply bury the vines after harvest, and you’ll have another set of sweet potatoes next year. Leave these in the ground and harvest as you need them, assuming there’s no heavy snow on the ground which would deny you access to them. They’ll get larger and larger with time. The minimum time required to harvest would be 90 days if conditions are perfect, but we use the same 20-week timeframe as potatoes before we even consider taking a look. You can harvest when the plant dies back, and they have a shorter shelf life than their cousins, but they will still last a long time and can be dehydrated or freeze-dried easily.Garlic, Onions, AlliumGarlic takes a long eight months to mature, bulb onions a minimum of 100 days, and scallions a little over two months. Even before you harvest the bulb, you can harvest a few leaves, the flower, or the scape to supplement your diet and flavor your cooking. These plants don’t contribute much to your nutritional intake, but they have copious amounts of several vitamins and minerals. The allium family has interesting health benefits, like reducing inflammation, lowering cholesterol, and possibly protecting against oxidative stress.The other reason to plant Allium is the number of plants to choose from. There are around 700 species of garlic and 1,000 different types of onions. There’s probably a variety indigenous to your area, so you have almost assured a harvest. They can also grow relatively close together, with garlic with just 4 inches between plants and some onion varieties right on top of each other. We start planting after the frost and plant every week for three months to guarantee a long harvest window stretching well into fall. Garlic is ready for harvesting when the foliage begins to yellow and fall over. Some varieties mature faster than others. However, if this yellow occurs before mid-June to August, that is probably an indication of pest damage or nutrient deficiency. We grow around five dozen garlic plants, elephant garlic, potato onions, Egyptian walking onions, bunching onions, and a giant onion variety. Some varieties, like the Egyptian walking onion, will grow as a perennial, so we can plant it once and enjoy it for a lifetime. Onions will prefer moist soil but do pretty well after flooding. In drier climates and with inconsistent watering, they will develop poorly. These are also excellent indoor windowsill plants.Root VegetablesGinger, turmeric, Sunchokes, beets, turnips, carrots, and other root vegetables all benefit from a long growing season. We featured Sunchokes in an earlier video. And we have encouraged you to eat your carrot tops in other videos. The longer these plants are in the ground, the larger and, in some cases, the more prolific they become in later seasons. Leaving them in the ground and harvesting them as needed until the very last day gives you a natural means to store them. Carrots and other root-type vegetables will get woody if they get too large, but they can still be cooked down and softened. Carrots and beets will need at least 50 days. We plant carrots not in a row but throughout my garden. We have also had decent results growing them in a 5-gallon bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. Sunchokes, ginger, and turmeric are slow growers and will take a long time. Wait to harvest these until the plant starts to die back.All these root vegetables will last a long time in a cool, damp climate like a root cellar. Our ancestors grew them, harvested them, then ate them all winter until they were gone.LettucesLettuces make the list of April plantings because they take such little time to harvest and benefit from the moist conditions of April showers. You can enjoy fresh salads in just a month or two from the time you sow seeds. This plant grows well in containers on window sills or stackable containers in the garden. It’s excellent for hydroponic setups. We have learned over years of planting to plant a little each week, so I am constantly harvesting and not just harvesting everything all at once. You will get little nutrition from lettuce, though it has a decent amount of vitamins. You will get 1 gram of fiber per cup of shredded lettuce, and lettuce is 95% water. It can temporarily give you a feeling of fullness while contributing to your hydration and vitamins. Most importantly, lettuces are easy to grow and quick to large harvests. Plant some in April, but also be prepared to plant some right after any disaster where the supply chain may break down.PeppersMost peppers require soil temperatures between 75 to 85 degrees for germination and well over 100 days to harvest from planting seeds. Unless you start them indoors at a germination station, as we showed you in our recent video, you may want to buy seedlings if your growing season is short. Fortunately, there’s been a recent popularity explosion in gardening and pepper varieties. You can find everything from long sweet peppers to scorching hot peppers. There are over 50,000 different types of peppers that we know about. One word of caution, though, we never buy a small pepper plant from the nursery already showing fruit. You want it to start fruiting in your soil under your conditions. Not only can you shock the plant and stunt or kill whatever peppers or flowers are on it by transplanting, but it may not yield a large harvest because the plant has already entered its fruiting phase.Peppers like warm soil and moist conditions. They prefer to be watered sparingly. They will let you know they need water by drooping their leaves. Peppers are grown as annuals but are, in fact, perennial plants, so you could technically bring a pepper plant indoors during the winter months. We often get a couple of years out of my pepper plants because there aren’t any extended periods of frost where we are. If frost and freezing temperatures concern you, consider bringing good pepper plants indoors over winter. Peppers are excellent and prolific producers in containers and pots, perfect for balcony or windowsill gardens.Amaranth, Sorghum, SunflowersConsider Amaranth, Sorghum, and Sunflowers if you want a garden that doesn’t look like your typical garden but has excellent nutrition. Except for the shorter time to harvest sorghum, the other two will take over 100 days to harvest. The birds will let you know when these are ready to harvest. Before that, the plant will die back a bit and dry out. When that happens, clip the heads and dry them out by hanging them upside down. Just 4 Amaranth stalks will provide you with more than 1000 calories of a complete protein source, containing all nine essential amino acids. These gluten-free seeds and pseudo-grains don’t look like your typical garden plants, and they are nutritional powerhouses. Plant them in April and enjoy them year after year softened in broth, mixed into salads, or dried and powdered into flour. These are some of the ultimate survivor foods which belong in any survival garden.Legumes: Lentils & BeansWe wrestle with whether to use our precious garden space growing beans every year. We usually do it as a companion plant to fix nitrogen in the soil. In this way, they share space with other plants. The main reason we have this dilemma of whether or not to plant is that these are all cheap to purchase dried in bulk at the grocery store. The problem with that is the lack of variety. You can only get under 50 types of the 16,000 legume species. From peanuts to black beans to red lentils to pinto beans to soybeans to peas and red lentils, there’s a seemingly limitless range of plants to choose from. Another consideration is that commercially grown legumes often have lots of pesticides and herbicides used on them. If you share any of those concerns, consider planting legumes with other plants throughout your garden or dedicating a patch to them. These are staple plant-based food sources that keep millions of people around the world alive. It will take at least 50 days until harvest, so put them in the ground now. When you harvest, you can dry them easily and store them for a year or longer in some cases. They’re a great source of nutrition, fiber, and protein.SquashSquash requires space and time, but April is a good time to plant it. Over 100 types of squash are categorized into both summer and winter varieties. You can plant either category in April. If space is a concern, consider a bush variety like Zucchini. If you can keep bugs away, you can grow massive two-foot-long zucchini, but it will start to get woody at that size. Still, it can be easily cooked, grilled, or blended into soups. Squash with a harder outer skin will keep longer than your root vegetables, which is why squash is considered a survival food. One 2-pound squash can be easily stored, transported, cooked in various ways and is loaded with carbs and protein. It can also feed a small family. If pests are a problem, consider hard-skinned varieties and put straw or grass clipping under the fruit as it matures. Consider trellising vinier varieties. Finally, if you want juicy watermelon this summer that is free of pesticides and homegrown, get your plants in the ground now, as they will take about 100 days to give you fruit. That will get you to a target date right around the 4th of July.TomatoesIf you like tomatoes, April is a great time to get them in the ground. Like peppers, many 4-inch or larger plants in wide varieties are available at many nurseries if you don’t want to start them from seed. When you plant them in good, compost-rich soil, plant them deep and bury all but the top two sets of leaves. If you have ever examined a tomato leaf, some are fuzzy. Those tiny hairs, when covered in moist dirt, change into roots. This method is a quick means to develop a more extensive root system. The better your roots in the early days of the plant, the better the fruit when it is time to pick it.Never get the leaves wet when watering, and always water at the base. Tomatoes will only need about an inch to an inch and a half of water per week, so never soak them. I include tomatoes here because there are sprawling indeterminate and short compacted bush varieties. With 10,000 known types, one suits you and your space and time constraints. These are also excellent sources of potassium, vitamin C, and folate. Tomatoes can be temperamental and frustrating at times to grow. Watch for caterpillar or tomato worm infestations and treat at the first signs of infestation. There are other plants you could be planting right now, and we encourage you to download our growing guide and review our gardening playlist to get a full range of your options. These are the ones we recommend you get in the ground this month as soon as your last frost day of winter. Use good, rich, well-composted, and amended soil from the start, and your plants will establish good roots first, then leaves, then fruit. With careful and consistent attention and watering, you will have a massive harvest spanning 30 days to 9 months. A garden is the best way to supplement your food sources, insulate yourself from rising costs like we will see with lettuce in the next few months, and begin to understand what you are consuming and how it was grown.Pick all or a few of these plants detailed in this video, and start your journey to self-sufficiency today.As always, stay safe out there. LINKS:
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When you begin to prep, you will hear much talk about the timeframe you need to prep to endure whatever disaster you face. How long should you expect to have to make it on your own? The range is astounding– from 3-days to a Mad Max post-apocalyptic, Walking Dead as long as you can survive. It’s somewhat overwhelming for new preppers, and many don’t take that first step because they are unwilling to commit to a post-apocalyptic level of preps. The simple fact is you are buying time. You are prepping for your longevity. So how long should that be?
3-DAYS
Government agencies set the bar the lowest by suggesting you have 3-days of food and water on hand for each person and pet in your household at all times. They will further advise you to have a few other items like a flashlight and a radio. Governments are concerned about getting most people through the initial phases of a disaster to a point in time where they believe that they will be able to step in and establish relief camps, evacuation centers, or open supply lines for relief food, water, and medical care. They are looking to count and clear the bodies and move the rest of the people to safety or rebuild and clear the wreckage. This minimalist approach to preparedness would be great if everyone did this. If everyone had 3-days of emergency supplies all the time, you wouldn’t see the runs on stores before a disaster like a hurricane strikes. You wouldn’t see as many desperate people in the aftermath. 3-days is the low-hanging fruit, as they say. It’s easily plucked from the tree by anyone, and it is quick to be depleted.
3-WEEKS
Far better would be to have the correct gear, food, and water to last you and every member of your family three weeks. That will get you through predictable disasters like the hurricane and unpredictable disasters like civil unrest. Of course, there are no guarantees, but it’s sufficient enough to hunker down and lockdown and be independent, cloistered away from the wildly swirling chaos outside. It may also be enough to make it through a brutal aftermath until order and relief efforts are restored. Still, it’s small enough for you to take a good deal of it with you if you need to bug out to a geographically safer area.
We tell beginning preppers first to get that low-hanging fruit of 3-days. Then set your goal to reach higher to that 3-week mark. At that point, you would need at least 20-30 gallons of water per person, at a bare minimum. You would need food and nutrition enough to provide you with at least 40,000 to 50,000 calories or so and a means to prepare it. That may sound like a lot of calories to avoid running a calorie deficit for 21 days, but it is doable.
3-MONTHS: The Solid Foundation
After 3-days and 3-weeks, the next logical goal or benchmark is 3-months. This should be everyone’s goal when getting serious about preparedness. 3-months is where you want to be. When you are confidently prepped to 3-months you can also scale up as needed. Once you hit the 3-month mark, you should definitely strive to push your preps further, but when you have a solid 3-months, you know that the foundations of your preps are solid. If you have a full year as your target, you might get your food there, but might still be lacking in water or fuel sources. If a disaster strikes before you can get to that one-year goal, you will have gaps in your preps.
When you’re talking 3-months of stored water, you are talking about having 90-gallons of water per person stored up, which is an absolute bare minimum for each person. That’s nearly two 55-gallon barrels of water per person. It’s not impossible, but it’s a space issue for sure. Food is a little easier because a sack of beans and a sack of rice would give you the calories to survive, even though you would be far from thriving and nutritionally sound if that’s all you had to eat (and I hope you have a food plan for far more options). Sticking with the water analogy, though, a year’s worth of water would be almost 7, 55-gallon barrels for one person. For some, that would be very difficult depending on your living environment, but water is one of those essential items you absolutely have to have to survive.
Your long-term survival is going to depend more upon your knowledge, resourcefulness, and skills. You may have 3-months or a year of water stored up, but if you don’t know how to harvest water from the wild, can’t treat or filter it, don’t know how to build a rain harvesting system, or don’t know how to ration and keep track of your supply, when it’s gone, it is gone. If you have these skills, though, your water supply goes from a fixed time period to an ongoing collection and treatment process that will last you as long as you need. You can replenish it, find resources to top it off, and reduce waste and overconsumption.
The time you need has to be sufficient for the challenge of the disaster. 3-days will get you to the relief phase of most natural disasters. 3-weeks will get you through the more extreme natural disasters and several unknown disasters that could befall you. 3-months is that sweet spot that allows you to thrive through most disasters, known and unknown, and adapt to any new way of life growing out of the aftermath. After 3-months, you will know if help is coming or if you are genuinely on your own. And if help is not coming in 3 months, we are in a new world.
If you are properly prepping, you are also prepping for the very real possibility that recovery from the disaster won’t be possible. You are preparing your skills and knowledge. You’re setting aside seeds and other long-term vision solutions to re-establish a livable environment for yourself. In that sense, even the person prepped for 3-months is really prepping for many years into the future.
SO, 3-MONTHS IT IS. NOW WHAT?
If 3-months is the sweet spot you should set your goals to attain, what’s next? How do you do it? First, you need a workable plan. You won’t be successful in planning for disasters you won’t likely face. You won’t be successful with a bunch of gear you have no experience using. You won’t even be successful if all you have is food and water stored up since you may not have the proper nutrients, means to cook it, the capability to safely dispose of the waste, the proper awareness of operational security, rationing principles, and so forth. You have to have the resources, the tools to accomplish the job, and the knowledge of how to use those tools and maximize your resources. So, your preparedness begins with your supplies, tools, and understanding of how to deploy those assets best.
Focus on a foundation of food, water, and fuel or energy. Make sure you have a solid store of all three to get you through a 3-month period. Once you have mastered all aspects of a 3-month self-sufficient prepping, you can begin to scale up these resources without gaps. You can stretch your food stores in different ways to get to a year or more’s worth. You can also learn to forage and hunt. You can stretch your physical water supply, but you can also supplement your supplies through filtration and collection devices. You can invest in a solar battery system and electric cookware that runs off it sufficient enough to boil water and cook food. All the while you are expanding your preps and knowledge, your core 3-months is solid. We will say that after a disaster, water and fuel will be easier to obtain than food for most in a suburban or urban environment.
Ask yourself if you could close your front door for 3-months and survive, what would it take? If you have laid the foundations of inventory and rotation, built skills, and implemented a plan to prepare, you only need to apply these principles and practices over the next 3-month period. When you know you need more water, food, fuel, or other resources, you will have the skills to get those things, decrease your consumption if possible, or work around the problem. Once you have your core 3-months established you can focus on the equipment you need to increase your survival after a disaster. Having the right tool is 80% of the job. With the right equipment, you will add time to your survival.
In my course I’ll be releasing on the 14th of February of 2022, the Prepper’s Roadmap, I go through all of these issues with meticulous and purposeful considerations. I lay out a plan that you can build at your own pace, providing guidance to consistently build your preps to 3-months of self-sufficiency. I don’t tell people, out the gate, to prep for a year or more because prepping for a year as your target stretches your foundational preps too thin in the short term plus it’s just overwhelming to hear this when starting out. You are far better off building a stronger foundation by mastering the 3-months of preps. Get that before you look to stretch beyond that. Scaling up is much easier once you have this solid foundation built.
If you have your core 3-months of preps and equipment, you will be able to stretch that and supplement that as the circumstances force you to do if you have also taken time to build your prepping skills. If you’re stretching your food by foraging or scavenging, or you are stretching your water by harvesting rainwater or alternate wild water sources in your area, your 3-months of calculated preps will last you much longer. If you were also rationing and topped off as we teach right before the disaster strikes, your 3-months of supplies might actually be worth more.
CONCLUSION
Prepping isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. You have to set your goals realistically and move towards them step-by-step. If you place your target for 3-months and master that, you will be able to scale up to extend that time to a year or more. On a long enough timeline, everyone’s chances of survival drop to zero. We would guess that the person who methodically built that 3-month prep plan has a surer foundation in prepping than the person who set a year goal and scrambled to piece it together as best they could.
If you are just starting out, set your goal for 3-days–that lowest hanging fruit. Once you accomplish that, reach higher. Stretch it to 3-weeks or follow a clear plan like we’ll lay out in the Prepper’s Roadmap for 3-months. Once you have 3-months in order, you can aim higher, but you do so with the assurance that you haven’t left any glaring gaps in your preparedness. Not food, water, or equipment.
If you had to realistically guess at how long your current preps would last you through any major disaster, how long would that be? A day? A week? A month or more? Let us know your assessment of your own preps in the comments below. Could you make it to 3 months?
As always, stay safe out there. 
There was a peacetime draft in the United States starting in September of 1940. The ranks of fighting men swelled to 1.8 million. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, by December of the following year, that number had doubled to almost 4 million soldiers, sailors, Marines, and even Coast Guardsmen. There was a clear build-up following a clear attack. World War, even then, had a predictable build-up.
There’s been a Cold War that has been fought for years. Many who don’t follow as closely Russian and U.S. relations would claim that the U.S. won when the U.S.S.R. collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell, but that was just the conclusion of years of covert battles. The war raged on, and the struggle for global control, the distrust, the covert actions seeking to destabilize the other–those conflicts continued. The merging of food production and supply chain systems increased our vulnerability by making us dependent upon singular systems for our food, water, and energy. It made us more efficient and made us have to work less, but it also turned multiple options into a singular target.
At the same time, technology and the information age brought misinformation and made us vulnerable to attack. Over the last decade, we have seen the rise of troll and misinformation farms, state-sponsored, out of Albania, Brazil, India, China, Finland, North Macedonia, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and even within the United States. It’s not likely the government of North Macedonia or Bulgaria is that interested in an election or a mask or vaccine mandate in Canberra, Ottawa, Wellington, Paris, or Brussels. Yet, for some reason, thousands of individual social media posts per day are coming from those locations daily by people with profiles alleging that they’re your fellow citizens. 
The ransomware weapon deployed in this escalated cold war is more noticeable and more likely to impact you directly. Some of the same state-sponsored groups, but this time organized hackers, have seized control of and shut down various critical systems. Like a covert Operation Paperclip, successful hackers are either sent to jail or rewarded with jobs in the clandestine services of nations worldwide. They are matched up with groups, supplied with the latest equipment and intelligence, and set loose on enemy nations. The JBS meat processing plants and the Colonial Pipeline are two such attacks you have probably heard of, but there have been hundreds more. JBS paid $11 million to these foreign hackers. The owners of the Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million to these state-sponsored hackers. 
There isn’t anything you can do to divert the course of geopolitical conflict when secret hackers and troll farms are fighting those conflicts. There is little that even your government can overtly do to countries they know and have evidence of being directly involved in cyberattacks or instigating disputes and protests in free nations. Whether you voted red, blue, orange, green, or purple won’t matter when the power goes out. None of that will matter when Russia rolls troops into Ukraine or China lands troops on the beaches of Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, or Malaysia. What cause or protest you join won’t matter when the flow of natural gas through pipelines is halted, the byproduct of fertilizer is depleted, agricultural yields plummet, and the world is starving. Most of the world’s grain reserves are held or controlled by just three nations. One of those is China. Another is Russia. What happens when one of those countries doesn’t get its way? Still, with all of these potential problems, some of the same ways we have mobilized for previous world wars apply to our situation now.
If you have some warning of the blast, you will want to immediately get inside the nearest building and stay away from any windows. The deeper and lower you can get in a building, like an underground parking structure, the more likely you will be to survive. If you are outdoors when the detonation occurs, lie face down at the lowest point you can find. If you are in your vehicle, get to the floorboard. After the shock wave passes, get inside the nearest shelter location. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, or mouth. If you have a mask, wear it. If you can cover your mouth with a cloth or a towel when you are outside, do so. Understand that your clothes are likely contaminated and will need to be disposed of as soon as possible. You will also need to wash down as quickly as possible to remove any radiation from the skin. If you have pets that come in after the blast, they will need to be wiped down then washed as soon as possible.
The radiation can have a half-life of several thousand years, but the fallout gamma radiation levels are highest the first 24-hours after the initial blast. Gamma radiation decays very rapidly. Fallout will give off half its energy in the first hour and 80% of its energy in the first day. After this, further dispersing of the ash will further reduce levels. After 2-weeks, 99% of the fallout radiation has dispersed. That remaining 1%, however, can still be dangerous. Like snowdrifts, accumulation points can stay fatally high in radiation. Precipitation and wind can reduce levels even further. You must begin to estimate and track wind direction and speed from the moment of the initial blast. Based upon the estimated bomb yield, which will eventually be announced on the news or can be generally surmised by the area of the blast zone, and the wind speed and direction, you can use a Nuke Map calculator like the one I will link to in the comments below to determine if leaving the area is essential and can be safely done. Staying inside for at least 24-hours after the initial blast can protect you from the most harmful exposure levels. Staying locked down for several days or weeks, after rain has come and gone, and wind has blown and shifted directions for several days can reduce the levels to dangerous but not fatal levels. If you are anywhere near the estimated fallout zone, your best option is to hunker down indoors for as long as you possibly can. If you can visibly see the ash on the ground or raining down from the sky, you absolutely cannot be outside and move through the ash safely without a radiation suit and an NBC or CBRN gas mask.
Anything planted in the ground in a fallout zone will be inedible, as it can absorb nuclear radiation. Even burning firewood can release radiation that was absorbed into it after the fallout event. You should treat the whole area as poisoned and seek a safe place from both the initial blast and the significant fallout. If that isn’t an option, rebuilding and creating a safe zone with reduced radiation levels will be difficult but not impossible. Removing the top layer of dirt can provide you with a reduced radiological area for growing. Planting sunflowers and then pulling the mature plants up by the root and disposing them away from your site will remove radiation from the water, earth, and air and sequester it in the plant biomass. That’s also why you don’t want to eat the seeds or burn the stalks.
There’s a debate and controversy on the internet about how effective DIY laundry detergent actually is at getting clothes clean. People are passionate about their laundry detergents. Research any one ingredient of any laundry detergent and you will find its great use and its harmful effect. When we set out to make my recipe we favored natural ingredients that could do the job well with minimal impact on the environment. As with any highly concentrated substance, it’s toxic for human consumption, just like all laundry detergent, so keep it away from kids and pets.
The first thing you must do is grind or grate the soap bars down. You can use a cheese grater for this. We don’t want to spend that kind of time on it, though, so we will cut the bars and add them into a blender or food processor along with some of the Epsom salts and baking soda to keep it dry and keep it from clumping. We will be honest, the way we learned to do this and did it in the past was by grating the bars with a semi-fine cheese grater. We think that method is still the best. Even with the additional baking soda and Epsom salt, these laundry bars contain moisture to keep them playable and soft. That puts a real strain on a blender. A food processor may be better, but moving forward we will go back to the cheese grater method. We pulsed and blended this to a pretty fine powder. We put these ingredients into a 5-gallon bucket. We continue to pulse the Epsom salts into fine dust. The smaller the particles the easier they will break down and dissolve in my laundry water.
For a typical load, you use two tablespoons of detergent in your washing machine’s detergent receptacle. That’s going to be approximately 1 ounce, or a shot glass full. For a heavily soiled load of laundry, you can increase this to two 3 tablespoons. In your fabric softener receptacle, you want to use 1/4 cup vinegar. Be careful when you pour your ingredients into their respective slots, as baking soda and vinegar cause a reaction. You should always use vinegar, however, with this detergent. When combined as we prescribe here, you prevent any buildup and maximize the cleaning factor of your detergent and softeners. You can add essential oils into the vinegar to impart a little scent to your laundry, but you don’t have to worry about your clothes coming out smelling of vinegar or you smelling like a pickle. The distilled white vinegar will not impart any vinegar smell to your clothes whatsoever. It will make them super-soft and allegedly will result in less static cling. It’s an amazing addition. 
So, we don’t know how much laundry you do in a year. We just know it seems like we do a ton or more laundry every year. At the one tablespoon or half-ounce rate of usage, you will be able to do approximately 334 loads of laundry for an investment of under twenty dollars. That’s about 6 cents per load and nearly a load every single day of the year. According to one statistic, we came across the average American family washes 300 loads of laundry each year. Personally, we think that’s a pretty low number. In comparison to our batch and a box or bottle of detergent at the store, you will get between 20 and 100 loads of laundry from a typically sized box or bottle of commercial laundry soap. Ours is a savings of at least half to two-thirds of the money or more. The real benefit, though, in my opinion, is that this formula uses mostly all-natural ingredients and not a bunch of questionable chemicals that could be causing us harm by seeping into our skin or gassing off into our environment. You can make a double or triple batch and seal it in a 5-gallon pale to keep you in laundry detergent long after the manufacturers experience any shortages or deliveries to your store stop.
Since this Russo-Ukrainian conflict began, we have seen Russia shell two nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined they would do something so incredibly dangerous and reckless. It seriously could have ended in catastrophe. They’ve already taken Chernobyl, which introduces uncertainty. If Putin is forced to withdraw, he may adopt a scorched Earth policy, rendering parts of Ukraine uninhabitable for years to come and an ecological disaster of a never before seen scope. Chernobyl is under Russian control at the moment. That incident in 1986 led to over 100,000 people needing to be evacuated, 40,000 people hospitalized, and 1.8 million people given the status of victims of the disaster. The fallout zone after that single disaster had a fallout zone that covered almost 60,000 square miles (150,000 kilometers) and left an uninhabitable area twice the size of the city of London. Even on the borders of this uninhabitable zone, people still suffer the long-term effects of excessive radiation level exposure. 
Before this all started, I wouldn’t have given it serious consideration, but much is happening in real-time today, and it’s not off the table. With Nato approving the sending of jet fighters into Ukraine, we’re ratcheting up the pressure on Russian soldiers. How Putin reacts is to be seen. As one subscriber aptly put it, “Putin is homicidal, not suicidal,” so the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange is elevated but still unlikely. That being said, Putin has put the world on alert with his very high-stakes nuclear posturing by putting his nuclear forces on “high alert.” Putin thrives off ambiguity– will he or won’t he? Assuming his mental faculties are still intact and there is a way for him to possess and balkanize the areas of Ukraine his army has seized to come back later after crippling sanctions have been lifted, the threat of even limited tactical nukes is low but probably as high as it was during the Cuban missile crisis.
In just the last week, the futures for Crude Oil are up 31%, Brent Crude is up 18%, natural gas increased by 12%, and wheat increased an additional 22% over its 31% increase in February. Retail fertilizer has gone up over 163% over the last year, shattering all previous records, and gasoline prices are heading to a never-before-seen all-time high. You have probably noticed that. Likely, by the time you view this video, prices will be far beyond what we have cited here. We think we will quickly see a national average price of $7.00 before this year is out if the conflict continues. We will also see a lifting of the restrictions on drilling and fracking and more of a wartime emergency effort to drill to keep prices down. Even with ramped-up production and tapping into reserves, oil prices will continue their ascent, as they tend to take giant leaps on mere rumors of scarcity.
Ukraine anticipated Russia’s cyberattacks and had been hardening systems against them for several months leading up to the Russian Federation’s invasion. As a result, they were able to minimize the impact. Some power was knocked out here and there. A system or two was brought down and later restored. If the Russian cyberattacks aimed at Ukraine were any indicator of Putin’s first blitzkrieg-style attack, the Ukrainians did a great job defending themselves. The Russian hacking, cyber attacking, and ransomware groups are still in full effect. The real question is how much the Kremlin has weaponized these groups. They aren’t fully weaponized if they were merely funded and allowed to do their previous hacks and ransomware attacks with maybe only a kickback to some Russian oligarchs. It would be akin to throwing a spear sideways or a blunt object at a target. However, if they are not only supported but also directed, trained, and aimed, it is akin to focusing the sharp end of a spear at any target they want. Based on the minimal results seen in Ukraine, we are leaning towards a less organized and less weaponized group.
They say war is good for business, so a global war has to be like Black Friday for businesses, right? Wrong. We have already witnessed massive upheaval and uncertainty in the futures markets, which will trickle down into all stock and index markets. This will affect pensions and retirement accounts, large and small businesses, and push prices upwards. As embargoes are enacted, and new trade deals have to be struck, there will be a significant lag in the global economy. That will be a boon for some countries, and it could lead to an economic collapse for others.
You need to prep as if the war will disrupt your easy life because it will. If you can safely store gasoline, like in a Wurx fuel storage container, you should get that filled up. It won’t be enough to keep your car running for days and days, but it will be enough to keep your generator going. Realize that when the price of gas goes that high, low-wage workers are more apt to call in sick even when they are not. Sometimes a sick day will result in wages, whereas commuting to work would result in a loss. While this might not affect you, it will impact the economy further and the services you receive. Don’t be surprised when you see many businesses understaffed. 
If you only ever have a few dollars in your checking account, it’s not likely anyone will specifically target you. Your account may be swept up en masse with other accounts like a school of fish trapped in the cyberattacker’s net. Your ability to access your account pages on the internet or conduct any transactions on the internet may be halted. You cannot just dismiss this with a “Well, I don’t interact on the internet, so no big deal.” It is a big deal. You might not access your accounts online, but your banks and stores often access the same systems over the same networks. 
While you cannot get your region’s electrical provider to upgrade their systems, you can still do your part to protect yourself from those that would exploit you and to recover your assets after systems are restored. You have to start by securing your corner of the system, and here is a quick list of four ways you can do that. 
If you are like me, you hate updating your systems. It’s a big time suck, and it can sometimes change the way you navigate or the look and feel of your operating system. Every time I update my system or an application, it’s always with a deep breath and with my fingers crossed. Still, updates often result from the providing company realizing an actual or potential vulnerability. They are trying to get ahead of it with the fix. That being said, one of the largest hacks in recent history, the SolarWinds hack, was through an update on systems. That hack impacted numerous companies, even the Departmental Offices division of Treasury, home to the department’s highest-ranking officials. 
Update every one of your passwords right now, especially if you use the same password wherever you can. 
Have you moved or changed cellphone numbers or email accounts? If you have, you want to update all your account profiles online. Even if you haven’t, you will still want to do this. 
It may seem counterintuitive to protect yourself from cyberattacks by switching to online banking for some of your transactions, but you protect yourself a bit from fraud when you do. This is a 360-degree approach to your fiscal survival that also means you should have your assets spread out to survive significant calamities and minor infractions. We
Let’s assume for a moment that a more extensive cyberattack has occurred against the financial institutions or the Treasury, or the banking systems as a whole. When it comes to getting your money back, at what point in the line are you compared to the millionaire across town? The bank is probably still going to want whatever payment you owe them monthly, but they aren’t exactly going to prioritize your savings account. In a more significant economic collapse, your currency could become worthless. However, I think debt collectors would still call you even knowing that the currency and economy have tanked.
On a planet that’s blue from space because of the amount of water, it’s important to realize that only .3 percent of it is drinkable. Of that amount, much of that will still make you sick from viral, toxic, or bacterial contaminants. 
Just like water, you need food to survive a large-scale cyberattack that could render the supply chain from farm to table useless. Corporate farmers might have bigger hearts than the corporations they answer to, but they don’t own that grain or that harvest. Here is another example of what we mean. In the recent shutdowns from the pandemic, millions of people were no longer eating out. The demand for potatoes for everything from fries to chips plummeted. Did those farmers process those potatoes into dehydrated mash potatoes? They didn’t have the means to do so. Even the companies that do that didn’t have the means to process that overabundance. Did they give the potatoes away? In some cases, they gave tons of them away to local residents. We don’t live near a potato farm, and you probably don’t either, so I didn’t get any of those free potatoes. You probably didn’t either. In many cases, the farmers dug giant pits with costly backhoes and simply buried all those potatoes and wrote off the loss.
There are other pillars of survival that we could cover, but water, food, and energy are the three biggies when it comes to insulating yourself from cyberattacks. That is because these three pillars of survival are also the most vulnerable systems that we have exposed to cyberattackers. When it comes to energy, we mean all forms of personal energy that you use. If the grid goes down tomorrow and remains ransomed for weeks or systems are simply destroyed by hackers, your problems become much bigger than flipping a switch and realizing the lights are out. Your phones will be down. Security systems will be down. Medical, EMS, fire, and police services will be down. All forms of utilities beyond electricity will eventually be down. Even natural gas isn’t a magical delivery system of flowing air. It relies on pumping stations and monitoring equipment. Some of those run generators on the natural gas they produce, but the same isn’t necessarily true at the furthest points on the capillaries from the pumping stations. Water is often fed to communities through gravity from those massive hillside water towers. Still, those are replenished and continually filled by electric pumps that push the water up to them.
Some would say we are already on the cusp of a collapse. Others will tell you that we are riding a bubble. Others will say to you we have been on a long and slow decline for years that will be punctuated abruptly soon enough. Still, others will point to the events around the world and domestically as evidence that an economic collapse is possible in the future. Maybe our collective hubris or our sense of exceptionalism convinces us to ignore the facts, history, and the real world. We don’t know. We know that economic collapses have happened in the past in economies around the world. We know that no economy is immune to that possibility, whether it is riding high or plummeting low.
If an infrastructure collapse– a collapse of essential services– doesn’t precipitate and exacerbate an economic collapse, it certainly follows one. Police, fire, teachers, social service workers, the folks who mix the chemicals at the water treatment plant, the folks who fix the lines and pipes, flip the switches, turn the dials, pick up the trash, and keep the world moving behind the scenes that you never see, might work for a little while out of goodwill and habit; however, they will eventually have to tend to their own families and will be hard-pressed to justify working without pay. The definition of infrastructure varies by source or which politician you listen to on the television. In a nutshell, “Infrastructure is the set of fundamental facilities and systems that support the sustainable functionality of households and firms. Serving a country, city, or other area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function.” It’s your most fundamental arteries like roads, tap water, electricity, other utilities, education, healthcare, railways, ports, and airports. It’s also those teachers, city workers, trash collectors, street sweepers, and people engaged in community-assisting activities. These workers are all around you. You may be one of them, and you know that what makes it all go around is money. If the currency bottomed out and did not look likely to recover, how long would you report for duty over taking charge of your home and getting your garden producing like never before? If looters are in the streets near your house looking for resources, will you be hanging out at the office or driving a truck for the city? Well, neither will the other millions of your fellow co-workers.
When the economy collapses, you and every single person around you will suddenly need to do everything for yourselves. From gathering and cooking the food you need without electricity or natural gas or stores or farmers to collecting water and removing waste from your premises, you need to plan on doing all of these things for yourself. When the economy collapses, gas will become too expensive to make food deliveries from farm to table possible. Pumping stations will cease to operate when the grid goes down. If you live in one of the many areas of the country that is only inhabitable because of the water pumped in or only cooled or heated because of the flow of natural gas or electricity, your area instantly becomes inhospitable at best and uninhabitable at worst.
Where you are when the bottom falls out and who you know will probably be some of the most significant determinants of your ultimate survival. If you commute miles to your job, leave early, come home late, and barely know your neighbors, you are probably going to be alone when the economy collapses. If you have built up a few neighborhood relations, cultivated a few like-minded friends through church or groups or classes, you are likely going to fare far better. We will give you an example. Just as I was writing this, a good friend and neighbor of ours we met years ago when our kids were in the same Cub Scout pack texted me to ask about solar cookers and water purifiers. He recently got a 55-gallon barrel of water set up in his garage, “just in case.” We have a mini-network where we can help each other out, look out for each other, and maybe trade or exchange resources if we need to. 
Assume you can’t get anything with your paper currency. Most coinage these days isn’t worth as much as the metal it is minted with. Many turn to precious metals as a solution, but this assumes a recovery. We think the person who knows how to bake a few loaves of bread with squash flour will have an easier tradeable commodity than a person with an ounce of pure silver or gold. Gold is great, and all, but people have to eat first. After an economic collapse, you could offer someone an ounce of gold or a loaf of bread and a pound of beans, and they may be more likely to take the food. How much would a lighter, flashlight, knife, or gun get you in trade versus an ounce of metal? That’s not to say that precious metals don’t have their place. If you needed to buy a piece of rural land from someone not as desperate because they produce much of what they need, those silver and gold bars might have the right exchange value.
We are a mobile society that seeks luxury and the easiest path. So, there isn’t always a way for us to learn these things. As much as my grandfather taught me how to grow the best and sweetest tomatoes or catch a 4-foot blue catfish, much of his knowledge didn’t get passed on to us. We learn something new every year about my tomato plants, and we struggle to catch fish, and that is with the luxury of having a great teacher where many don’t even have that. Another problem is that we are far removed from the nature that provides us with the sustenance we need to survive. If you live in an apartment or condo, it may be challenging, to say the least, to grow any of your food or get water from the wild. Even if you have some yard space that isn’t otherwise occupied by a pool, driveway, or non-edible landscaping, it’s hard to press it into service to feed one person, let alone a family. Twenty-one states have an average lot size for a house of under 11,000 square feet. 
For this candle, you will need a jar. You can use a mason jar that will be less prone to cracking from the heat, but we will use an old pickle jar. That will be closer to what you might have on hand after a disaster. When selecting a jar, you want to make sure the glass has no air bubbles in it. When heat is applied to a jar with air bubbles, it causes the air in the bubble to expand and the glass to crack. We will also heat this glass before adding hot oil to it as a precaution against cracking.
Start by gently melting the Crisco in a saucepan. Our jar is about 48 ounces, and my can of Crisco is the same, so we will liquefy the entire amount. You don’t want to use the Crisco can itself because it is cardboard. You could in an emergency because the heat generated by your single flame isn’t that great, but glass will be a safer option for your candle. As the Crisco is liquifying, you will want to size your candle to be an inch to one-half inch below the top of your jar. This can be done pretty easily by measuring and then just rolling your knife on it on a cutting board. We want to use the thicker part to give it more wax, so we taper the end of the candle then set it aside.
This works for several reasons. First, it’s not solely a wax candle. Beeswax, Soy Bean Oil, and Parafin candles will give you the greatest burn time when it comes to waxes. Here, the candle is more of a catalyst and a wick. The oil part is similar to an oil candle, but oil candles alone are difficult to keep lit without a decent wick. So, this candle marries the best of the wax candle with the best of an oil candle.
We determined the entire weight of oil and candle used by subtracting the jar’s weight. To calculate total burn time, you can either let the candle burn out completely or determine the rate at which the flame consumes the candle, so we lit the candle and recorded the time. After four hours, we took another weight measurement to note the difference, and it was a half-ounce lighter. After another four hours, we again measured to determine the weight difference, and it was another half ounce lighter. We let it burn through the night and measured every four hours, and it was always precisely a half-ounce. It stayed that consistent through an entire 24-hour cycle. You could keep time by it. That is actually another use for a candle, by the way, as a measure of time. Imagine if you needed to know how long you or someone else was gone. Simply light a candle and calculate the weight difference between when they left and when they got back. Every half-ounce here equals four hours.
Most apartments are built with just one or two sides with windows, one entry door, one or more shared walls, a shared floor, and a ceiling that is someone else’s floor. If you are on the ground floor, these are more difficult to secure and defend, but you have an instant defense against any conflict in the streets if you are even one floor up. Your height advantage is easier to defend by firing down or throwing things at people. You are hidden and out of reach for most looters or robbers even without these more extreme measures. Your concealment is a great advantage, as any adversary doesn’t know how many people may be in the apartment or what they may be armed with. You can increase your security by duct taping Xs on windows to prevent their shattering, barricading the door, and covering the peephole. Keep curtains or shades drawn. In the immediate moments after a disaster strikes, secure all windows and doors. If you do live on the ground floor, make sure you have installed extra door and window locks.
You benefit from the isolation in an apartment, but you are also wholly dependent upon municipal water, utilities, and services. You also have more limited space. You need the absolute minimum of one-gallon water per person, per day, for at least 3-weeks. That’s 21 gallons per person at the absolute minimum. Preferably, you far exceed this and have a 3-months supply on hand per person. That’s going to be about 90 gallons, and that’s a serious challenge given the space constraints. To meet this minimum, consider emergency bathtub liners and collapsable water bags that can be filled in the immediate moments after a disaster. WaterBricks can be stored under beds, and Wurx containers can be stacked in closets. You have to assume that the water will stop flowing to your apartment and that the water that makes it to your apartment may be tainted after a disaster, so you also need to make sure you have the means to filter, treat, or boil water. You can’t have a campfire in your apartment, so a small alcohol stove or can of Sterno allows you to pasteurize or even boil water. Don’t forget small propane or butane camping stoves and extra small tanks. These can generate a tremendous amount of clean-burning heat when it is cold. They are also very efficient. 
Living in close proximity to people can be both a positive and a negative. We have lived in apartments where we never saw my neighbors and in apartments where we saw too much of or knew too much about my neighbors. People were living next to, near me, or across the hall that we could trust, and many people were big question marks, or we knew that we couldn’t trust at all, let alone after a disaster. Though you will be going it alone, keeping as low of a profile as possible, and answering your door for no one, making a few connections, at least knowing some of your neighbor’s names will provide you with a watchful set of eyes and ears on the community around you. If you can find some like-minded people, you will benefit from your mini-network. Your community might come together to post guards in the main lobby and by entryways. Your community might pool some resources after a disaster. If you live in a house, you could be overrun and wouldn’t have any community support. 
Many cultures have survived on little else but potatoes as a diet staple. The great thing about potatoes is that they have a long growing season, and if you can’t get around to harvesting them, you will simply be creating a perennial potato patch. Depending upon your climate, potatoes left in the ground will either sprout and grow new plants in the spring or overwinter, endure the frost safely underground, and sprout new plants next spring. If you use our above-ground container technique, you may have to insulate the container or move it into your garage if your climate gets bitterly cold, as the container will not insulate from frost and freezing as well as the Earth. Once your soil has dried out a little and is an average temperature of 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, you should plant your seed potatoes in moist, heavily composted soil. Potatoes don’t like floods but do like a steady moisture level.
We give these a category of their own first because they are not actually potatoes. Second, our bodies process the starches at different rates so we don’t get insulin or sugar spikes. Nutritionally, they are very similar, but 100 grams of sweet potato will give you 107% of your daily value of Vitamin A. In contrast, the equivalent grams of potato will give you a tenth of 1%. The plants are more finicky than potato plants, favoring warmer climates and longer growing seasons. The plus, though, is once you have your patch established, you can simply bury the vines after harvest, and you’ll have another set of sweet potatoes next year. Leave these in the ground and harvest as you need them, assuming there’s no heavy snow on the ground which would deny you access to them. They’ll get larger and larger with time. The minimum time required to harvest would be 90 days if conditions are perfect, but we use the same 20-week timeframe as potatoes before we even consider taking a look. You can harvest when the plant dies back, and they have a shorter shelf life than their cousins, but they will still last a long time and can be dehydrated or freeze-dried easily.
Garlic takes a long eight months to mature, bulb onions a minimum of 100 days, and scallions a little over two months. Even before you harvest the bulb, you can harvest a few leaves, the flower, or the scape to supplement your diet and flavor your cooking. These plants don’t contribute much to your nutritional intake, but they have copious amounts of several vitamins and minerals. The allium family has interesting health benefits, like reducing inflammation, lowering cholesterol, and possibly protecting against oxidative stress.
Ginger, turmeric, Sunchokes, beets, turnips, carrots, and other root vegetables all benefit from a long growing season. We featured Sunchokes in an earlier video. And we have encouraged you to eat your carrot tops in other videos. The longer these plants are in the ground, the larger and, in some cases, the more prolific they become in later seasons. Leaving them in the ground and harvesting them as needed until the very last day gives you a natural means to store them. Carrots and other root-type vegetables will get woody if they get too large, but they can still be cooked down and softened. Carrots and beets will need at least 50 days. We plant carrots not in a row but throughout my garden. We have also had decent results growing them in a 5-gallon bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. Sunchokes, ginger, and turmeric are slow growers and will take a long time. Wait to harvest these until the plant starts to die back.
Lettuces make the list of April plantings because they take such little time to harvest and benefit from the moist conditions of April showers. You can enjoy fresh salads in just a month or two from the time you sow seeds. This plant grows well in containers on window sills or stackable containers in the garden. It’s excellent for hydroponic setups. We have learned over years of planting to plant a little each week, so I am constantly harvesting and not just harvesting everything all at once. You will get little nutrition from lettuce, though it has a decent amount of vitamins. You will get 1 gram of fiber per cup of shredded lettuce, and lettuce is 95% water. It can temporarily give you a feeling of fullness while contributing to your hydration and vitamins. Most importantly, lettuces are easy to grow and quick to large harvests. Plant some in April, but also be prepared to plant some right after any disaster where the supply chain may break down.
Most peppers require soil temperatures between 75 to 85 degrees for germination and well over 100 days to harvest from planting seeds. Unless you start them indoors at a germination station, as we showed you in our recent video, you may want to buy seedlings if your growing season is short. Fortunately, there’s been a recent popularity explosion in gardening and pepper varieties. You can find everything from long sweet peppers to scorching hot peppers. There are over 50,000 different types of peppers that we know about. One word of caution, though, we never buy a small pepper plant from the nursery already showing fruit. You want it to start fruiting in your soil under your conditions. Not only can you shock the plant and stunt or kill whatever peppers or flowers are on it by transplanting, but it may not yield a large harvest because the plant has already entered its fruiting phase.
Consider Amaranth, Sorghum, and Sunflowers if you want a garden that doesn’t look like your typical garden but has excellent nutrition. Except for the shorter time to harvest sorghum, the other two will take over 100 days to harvest. The birds will let you know when these are ready to harvest. Before that, the plant will die back a bit and dry out. When that happens, clip the heads and dry them out by hanging them upside down. Just 4 Amaranth stalks will provide you with more than 1000 calories of a complete protein source, containing all nine essential amino acids. These gluten-free seeds and pseudo-grains don’t look like your typical garden plants, and they are nutritional powerhouses. Plant them in April and enjoy them year after year softened in broth, mixed into salads, or dried and powdered into flour. These are some of the ultimate survivor foods which belong in any survival garden.
We wrestle with whether to use our precious garden space growing beans every year. We usually do it as a companion plant to fix nitrogen in the soil. In this way, they share space with other plants. The main reason we have this dilemma of whether or not to plant is that these are all cheap to purchase dried in bulk at the grocery store. The problem with that is the lack of variety. You can only get under 50 types of the 16,000 legume species. From peanuts to black beans to red lentils to pinto beans to soybeans to peas and red lentils, there’s a seemingly limitless range of plants to choose from. Another consideration is that commercially grown legumes often have lots of pesticides and herbicides used on them. If you share any of those concerns, consider planting legumes with other plants throughout your garden or dedicating a patch to them. These are staple plant-based food sources that keep millions of people around the world alive. It will take at least 50 days until harvest, so put them in the ground now. When you harvest, you can dry them easily and store them for a year or longer in some cases. They’re a great source of nutrition, fiber, and protein.
Squash requires space and time, but April is a good time to plant it. Over 100 types of squash are categorized into both summer and winter varieties. You can plant either category in April. If space is a concern, consider a bush variety like Zucchini. If you can keep bugs away, you can grow massive two-foot-long zucchini, but it will start to get woody at that size. Still, it can be easily cooked, grilled, or blended into soups. Squash with a harder outer skin will keep longer than your root vegetables, which is why squash is considered a survival food. One 2-pound squash can be easily stored, transported, cooked in various ways and is loaded with carbs and protein. It can also feed a small family. If pests are a problem, consider hard-skinned varieties and put straw or grass clipping under the fruit as it matures. Consider trellising vinier varieties. Finally, if you want juicy watermelon this summer that is free of pesticides and homegrown, get your plants in the ground now, as they will take about 100 days to give you fruit. That will get you to a target date right around the 4th of July.
If you like tomatoes, April is a great time to get them in the ground. Like peppers, many 4-inch or larger plants in wide varieties are available at many nurseries if you don’t want to start them from seed. When you plant them in good, compost-rich soil, plant them deep and bury all but the top two sets of leaves. If you have ever examined a tomato leaf, some are fuzzy. Those tiny hairs, when covered in moist dirt, change into roots. This method is a quick means to develop a more extensive root system. The better your roots in the early days of the plant, the better the fruit when it is time to pick it.