Food & Water For Home & Bugging Out.

[Keith]

There are many important items that you need for home & for going abroad, but food & water must be considered a priority. If you can forage, or you grow your own food, good, but you must back this up with a good supply of dried foods. You do not need to spend money on freeze dried foods or RAT packs. Just stock up on dried foods. They are light in comparison to other food sources & they store well long term. Even so it is better to use your stored foods & rotate. Canned foods are also a good choice for the homestead, but too heavy to carry on the trail.
Dried peas,beans,lentils,rice,barley,oats, corn & sultanas are all good foods for storing & for use as trail foods. You can also dry your own foods for the trail & for storage; meat, brasicas, potatoes, tomatoes, fruit, squash (pumpkins & marrows), also you can roast pumpkin seeds. We dry our corn on the cob by hanging, other foods are dried in the open oven of our wood fired stove, or on top in racks & on racks on the top of our wood heater.
It is said that if you grow Jerusalem Artichokes you will never go hungry. This vegetable will keep producing year after year & it is available all year round.
If you are in town or city then you need water containers for all the family. These can be water canteens, or you can simply use soft drink bottles & or wine cask bladders. Out of town you need water tanks if you don't have them already. We are totally off grid so we store our own water supply in tanks. In a shtf situation there will be no mains water supply, so you need tanks.

Dried Pumpkin.

Drying corn on the cob.

Bottled preserves.

Jerusalem Artichokes. Related to sunflowers. Corn & sunflowers are good crops to grow for your chooks.

Two of our 5000 gallon water tanks. We have 5 tanks all together, these two at the main house, two 1000 gallon tanks up at the cottage, & a 1000 gallon tank for the main house gardens.

Cattail Pond can deliver water to the main house & to the cottage. It is also a source of food with fish & cattails & attracts a lot of wildfowl & game animals.
Keith.

 

[lonewolf]

it has to be said that all canned(tinned) food is processed and most commercial dried food may be, and processed food is not good for us, a diet heavy in processed foods has been linked to bowel and other cancers, apparently due to the "emulsifiers" used to promote shelf life.
in a SHTF event we may have no option but to eat these foods, but if possible we should try to obtain fresh food, either by hunting/trapping, growing our own food or rearing meat animals, in the longer term these processed foods should be used sparingly and as a last option to supplement fresh foods (not replace them) due to time of year, scarcity of game or plants or because its just not safe to go outside, in any case these stocks of processed foods will not last forever and will at some point run out just like stocks of other consumables will.