Prep of The Day Thread

Anybody else a "light" prepper?

I have shelves in the basement full of food and a second fridge/freezer. I keep enough to always make it through a bad storm, I still remember 05 even though I was just a yute, but I'm not preparing for months on end. Mostly just fewer grocery store trips.

Anyway, I set up another shelf today and filled it up. I also filled the back seat of my truck with drinks but that's just because they had a sale. I drink a lot of fluids, more of it should be water out of a nalgene, but that's a problem for different thread. I'll run through it in a couple weeks.

The only difference between you and me is I appear to be older so I've added more shelves than you.

All prepping starts as light prepping. I started stocking buckets after our 3rd child. We both work but are cognizant lost jobs, injuries, sickness and changes beyond our control can happen. Storing more food was a way to try and ensure our children would never know what it was like to be hungry regardless of any difficulties my wife and I might encounter.

Having food is little different than having money in the bank or in the safe as a rainy day fund. The more you have, the less stressful daily life becomes and more options open up for your long term success.

If you don’t have food and live paycheck to paycheck, that is a lot of constant stress to keep your head down and grind life out. I don’t want to grind until I die.
 
The only difference between you and me is I appear to be older so I've added more shelves than you.

All prepping starts as light prepping. I started stocking buckets after our 3rd child. We both work but are cognizant lost jobs, injuries, sickness and changes beyond our control can happen. Storing more food was a way to try and ensure our children would never know what it was like to be hungry regardless of any difficulties my wife and I might encounter.

Having food is little different than having money in the bank or in the safe as a rainy day fund. The more you have, the less stressful daily life becomes and more options open up for your long term success.

If you don’t have food and live paycheck to paycheck, that is a lot of constant stress to keep your head down and grind life out. I don’t want to grind until I die.
I believe I'm definitely on the younger side of members here. I like the idea of long term storage buckets, even if that means I eat a lot of mres in 20 years. Easy to get into with some extra cash. I like having security, and self sufficiency.

I grew up with a little more prepper than most, just because of the nature of the family business. When the rains came, and the snow fell, we still had to be able to get out and stay productive.

I like to think we've gotten even better as of late. This years driven certain points home to everyone.
 
Anybody else a "light" prepper?

I have shelves in the basement full of food and a second fridge/freezer. I keep enough to always make it through a bad storm, I still remember 05 even though I was just a yute, but I'm not preparing for months on end. Mostly just fewer grocery store trips.

Anyway, I set up another shelf today and filled it up. I also filled the back seat of my truck with drinks but that's just because they had a sale. I drink a lot of fluids, more of it should be water out of a nalgene, but that's a problem for different thread. I'll run through it in a couple weeks.

actually you are doing it right. The idea is you buy when things are on sale even if you don’t “need it” and rotate appropriately. Give it time the extra shelves, water filters, fruit trees, antibiotics and pleasant insanity will come.
 
Got a sweet deal on a quad this weekend, now I can move my pig pen down further back on the property which will let me go from 2 to as many pigs as I want in the spring.

Operator identity redacted for opsec.

View attachment 409482

I'm disappointed, I would have expected you would have put a set of Pano NVG on his head. :)
 
Restacked the buckets we did a few weeks ago after double checking the O2s did their thing and the bags remained partial vacuum. Also created a cheat sheet of calories per pound of items. Here it is below for reference.

As a data point a single person at 2,000 cal per day is 730,000 per year. So a family of 4 requires 2,920,000 calories per year. Rice, flour and pasta are by far the most cost effective and dense ways to store food.

First numbers are calories per pound and second number is how many pounds fit comfortably in a 5gal food pail with a mylar bag per my personal experience.

Flour (all purpose) - 1651 @ 30
Rice - 1655 @ 33
Pasta - 1687 @ 30
Mashed potatoes (flake) - 400 @ 9
Oats - 1765 @ 15
Grits - 268 @ 30
Milk (powder) - 2250 @ 15
Honey - 1382 @ 60
Sugar - 1775 @ 35
Whey Protein - 1816 @ 20
Mac & Cheese - 1500 @ 20 (42 boxes per bucket)

Salt obviously has no calories but you can store 50lbs per bucket.

All calories listed above are uncooked as is.

It takes 450lbs of Rice to meet the 1 year per person calorie total if that's all you ate. At current BJs pricing you can get 450lbs of rice for $288 (18 25lb bags at $16 each). 20 pack of buckets at Home Depot are $65. 20 lids are $28. On Amazon (25) 5gal mylar bags are $60. (25) 500cc 02 absorbers are $11.

That means for $452 you can store a years worth of calories for 1 person or 3 months of food for a family of 4. Here are the links for the above.




Amazon product ASIN B08HQQFGM3View: https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Gallon-Sealing-Storage-Grains/dp/B08HQQFGM3/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=mylar+5+gallon+bags+for+food+storage&qid=1604259350&sprefix=mylar+5+gallon+bags&sr=8-6


Amazon product ASIN B010T4JCZAView: https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Absorbers-Dehydrated-Emergency-Storage/dp/B010T4JCZA/ref=mp_s_a_1_16?dchild=1&keywords=02%2Babsorbers%2Bfor%2Bfood&qid=1604259432&sprefix=02%2Babs&sr=8-16&th=1&psc=1
Great post!
I didn't realize instant potatoes were so low on calories.
 
Just ordered a 100 rnd can of linked 4:1 ball/tracer 50bmg ammo. At $299.99 with free shipping for new contract over run Lake City that's hard to beat.image.jpg

Might cash in an ounce of gold and pick up a few more cans if it remains on sale this week.
 
If anyone wants the name of the farm I'm buying from PM me. They are in Richmond, NH. He does pigs onsite himself and works with another local farm to get the cow shares. I think he's doing at least one more cow this month.
You should find out who the cow farmer is. We get a 1/2 cow every year. End up with ~300 lbs of beef at ~$4/lb, cut and packaged how we want by the butcher. Blows supermarket beef out of the water.
You do need to dedicate a whole chest freezer to this if you do it.
 
You should find out who the cow farmer is. We get a 1/2 cow every year. End up with ~300 lbs of beef at ~$4/lb, cut and packaged how we want by the butcher. Blows supermarket beef out of the water.
You do need to dedicate a whole chest freezer to this if you do it.

Grass fed?

We usually do 2-3 half cows a year. This was a small one.
 
We used to split a cow with our neighbors who raised a couple each year. One year the whole cow tasted like ass, our half and theirs. Only explanation was how it was butchered/killed maybe. Ended up with a freezer full of beef we wouldn't eat, even th dog didn't like it. End of that idea.
 
Starting to long term store eggs in pickling lime (Calcium Hydroxide). Can be stored even in non-climate controlled conditions for over a year. Super simple. You just mix 1oz of the lime into each quart of water used. Pour on top of eggs. That's it.

Eggs must be farm fresh. NOT washed or rinsed. They must still have the bloom.

As long as jar doesn't freeze you are good to go. Can sit in 90+deg temps with no ill effects.

20201113_200212.jpg

This is how they used to store eggs before refrigeration.

There is a second method called "water glassing" which uses sodium silicate, but the max duration is typically shorter at 6 months.

Plenty of vids on YouTube of people pulling them out 6-18mo later.
 
I haven't shot any of it yet, I will this weekend and report back. I am not expecting to comparable to OO buck as I have plenty of that on hand.
But what is on the shelves right now is not buck of any kind but bird shot or skeet loads, and yes we all know that bird shot is very deadly in short range self defense situation.
So if they 70 or so pellets of #8 coming out of the gun at 1145FPS ( whats stated on the box ) can kill, I can only guess what 15 1/4" ( .250 ) pellets traveling at the same basic speeds will do.

This is why i posted this in the survival forum and not the reloading part of this site. This is more of a "grid down"/"only have on hand"/cant find a single shell of OO/OOO buck shot and "#8 doesn't work well on Zombies" type thing, lol.
You need to get the basic casting tools. Ladle. Pot. Couple Moulds. I’ve seen guys on YouTube use a hole drilled in wood or even a 12 point socket to pour a “slug” for use in a shotgun
00 buck moulds are cheap and readily available too.
 
Anybody else a "light" prepper?

I have shelves in the basement full of food and a second fridge/freezer. I keep enough to always make it through a bad storm, I still remember 05 even though I was just a yute, but I'm not preparing for months on end. Mostly just fewer grocery store trips.

Anyway, I set up another shelf today and filled it up. I also filled the back seat of my truck with drinks but that's just because they had a sale. I drink a lot of fluids, more of it should be water out of a nalgene, but that's a problem for different thread. I'll run through it in a couple weeks.
I stocked up enough mountain house and 5 gallon buckets to last close to a year for my family. I have ammo and other assorted preps, but never went too crazy. I’m (soon to be) divorced and in an apartment now, but she has all the preps at the old house a half mile down the road. No room at the new pad for anything significant.
 
Just a short story relating to the shared cow.

I have an uncle that lives way out in the country and one that lives in the city. Country uncle tells city uncle that he is going to buy a couple of pigs to raise for meat and asks city uncle if he wants to invest in this venture in exchange for half of the meat.

So city uncle sends him the money to buy the pigs. Country uncle has a small farm and they grow their own feed corn. The pigs thrived and were getting close to the time to harvest them. City uncle gets a phone call from country uncle saying "There was a break in the fence and your pig got out. He's gone."

City uncle felt like they should have shared the meat regardless. Country uncle was adamant "Nope. One was mine and one was yours and yours is gone."

Needless to say that was the last deal between them. City uncle loves to tell that story at family gatherings.
 
You need to get the basic casting tools. Ladle. Pot. Couple Moulds. I’ve seen guys on YouTube use a hole drilled in wood or even a 12 point socket to pour a “slug” for use in a shotgun
00 buck moulds are cheap and readily available too.

I agree, this was more of a last ditch thing, something you could make in a very short budget and time frame.

I never posted, but they shot fine. I only had time to put a few down range and didn't pattern them to 000 normal buck but seemed to have a decent coverage on a target full of other holes, of course lol.

In a grid down, SHTF situation I would not even think twice about loading up more and using them. I am going to order another 5K maybe even 10K more and just have them on hand. They could even work as "grape shot" in a cannon, or for my wrist rocket sling shot, might even get some 3/8" ones for that.

I will look into a mold, thanks for the tip.
 
Starting to long term store eggs in pickling lime (Calcium Hydroxide). Can be stored even in non-climate controlled conditions for over a year. Super simple. You just mix 1oz of the lime into each quart of water used. Pour on top of eggs. That's it.

Eggs must be farm fresh. NOT washed or rinsed. They must still have the bloom.

As long as jar doesn't freeze you are good to go. Can sit in 90+deg temps with no ill effects.

View attachment 411064

This is how they used to store eggs before refrigeration.

There is a second method called "water glassing" which uses sodium silicate, but the max duration is typically shorter at 6 months.

Plenty of vids on YouTube of people pulling them out 6-18mo later.

I was just reading about this the other day. Does make them taste funky?
 
I agree, this was more of a last ditch thing, something you could make in a very short budget and time frame.

I never posted, but they shot fine. I only had time to put a few down range and didn't pattern them to 000 normal buck but seemed to have a decent coverage on a target full of other holes, of course lol.

In a grid down, SHTF situation I would not even think twice about loading up more and using them. I am going to order another 5K maybe even 10K more and just have them on hand. They could even work as "grape shot" in a cannon, or for my wrist rocket sling shot, might even get some 3/8" ones for that.

I will look into a mold, thanks for the tip.
Sweet. Good to know.
 
Ordered online some Pri-G and Pri-D fuel stabilizers ( great stuff ) and somehow this crazy thing found its way into my cart. No idea how it got there :rolleyes: but ehhh, why not.

376B0279-E54F-4E74-8D78-EAC9B2E4A0A0.jpeg
 
Made some beef tallow. My first go at it. Pretty idiot proof. Put fat in fridge. Once firm, chop/dice into smallish pieces (I did about 1/2") place in crock pot on low for about 12hrs. Stir occasionally. Strain onto wax paper in a baking dish when the remnants turn brown, but not burnt.

20201116_110945.jpg
 
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