William Bronson

I think a diesel heater could be a better medium term emergency heat source for you, even accounting for the cost of diesel fuel.
They are portable, cheap, and require no specialized infrastructure, unlike a wood stove.
Not very "permie" but neither is natural gas.

With that worry out of the way, you could take more time/money and build a permanent rocket stove, wood stove or pellet stove.

I have a handful of full sized bulbs in my kitchen.
I was planning on replanting them next year, to see what I get.
I am also considering cutting of the bottoms and planting those.
This works great with grocery store onions.

Sugar macerated garlic is what I immediately thought of.
Macerated fruits make amazing syrups.
Google suggests a Chinese version( Tangcu Suan) or Persian Sugar-Pickled Garlic.
Both use salt, and sugar, at least one calls for taming the heat with a salt brine that is discarded.
For my money, I would skip the brines and go for strait sugar and crushed garlic.
After it collapsed to a point I liked, I would strain it.
The liquid would get jellied, and canned, the solids cooked and used to make salt.

Since this is a readily available resource, along with the food scraps, maybe building  static aerated pile would make sense.
This could speed up and automate your process.


I bet chickens and red wigglers could give you an amazing end product with those inputs.

I often lay the prunings of nearby shrubs and trees into the paths of my garden.
They just need to lay kinda flattish, which minimizes the amount of processing needed.
Walking on them breaks them down further.
Leaves and the smallest twigs decay first, and in a year or two, I remove the remaining  sticks to a another path and harvest  the composted wood.

My ideal mulch would be thick tiles/thin pavers.
Some of them would have thick inset  windows and a pit underneath, for compost and it growing things.

Every possible prep will be easier as an organized group.
The Cincinnati Permaculture Institute just bought an old corner bar/cafe near me.
The CPI board is interested in building this property into a community resilience hub.

I was able to equip my next door neighbor with propane burners and bottles so he could start a pop up restaurant there, so the basics of an outdoor kitchen are already in place.

Back to the food.
Beans are seed, and they last a long time and seem resistant to rodents.
Wheat berries are also seed, and they last a really long time.
I'm not sure about the costs.
Whole oats, might be good as well.
I have been growing out a flour corn, trying to increase my seeds stock.
Popcorn of all things, could be a good thing to buy in bulk.
It can be ground for cornmeal, and it's available in quantity even at a Sam's or Costco.
I already prowl around the ethnic grocery stores looking for seeds, but a lot of their whole grains come from warmer dryer places.
I did just stumble across a  Uzbek food mart, but was too overwhelmed with the hot fresh take home food to explore the dry goods.


This whole subject reminds me of the little house on the praries books.
One in particular, a harsh hungry winter where Paw Engles figured out his bachelor brother neighbors had wheat seed hidden away in their tiny homestead behind a false wall.

I'm not interested in challenging my moral compass with hunger, and I would like to avoid that for everyone.

The crazy shame is the fresh food that goes to waste, everyday, but one little hiccup in this system and most people will go hungry.

I have two chicken right now.
Their coop is maybe 2 feet x 4 feet.
They sleep right on top of each other, even in the dead of summer.
They spend all day outside, in almost any weather.
I would definitely feel fine with a few more chickens in that space.

The USDA has a rule that says it should be at least 120 days between application of raw animal manure and harvest, for a plant like lettuce.
So I think you will be fine.

I am 0 percent prepper or homesteader but I am the closest to that world in my family, so they have asked me about this.
Not the 3 day thing, but about growing food when food is not available.
I steer them towards having food, over growing food.
If you have a years supply of food when shtf you can grow food during that time.
If you have an active garden but no food stored up, you are in trouble.

They all have deep pantries, so I don't address short term supplies.
We all eat beans as staples in our diets.
I encourage a large rotating stockpile of that and a large quantity of shelf stable fat, which means coconut oil for my family.
That's it, just more of one shelf stable pantry staple.


Next up, a grill, running on propane.
Propane can run out, but that is a medium to long term problem.
Using a propane grill to burn wood is pretty simple.
My mom doesn't trust propane so I have acquired a charcoal grill for her household.
A grill is hardly idea for boiling beans, but it is easy to acquire and use.
Using and maintaining a grill is associated with good times in my family, and that makes it less of a mental burden than the alternatives.
A "haybox" cooker is easy to improvise when needed.

Water is a harder nut to crack, but we all have gardens, and we live in a place with heavy annual rain fall.
55 gallons of stored rainwater isn't a lot for a garden.
But it is a lot for drinking.
Put one under every down spout and top it up from the tap if you use it to garden and they should be full when shtf.
This is another example of a prep built into a joyful activity.
It will need to be filtered for drinking and that is kind of impossible to cloak in joy.
Boiling the water then feeding it through a Berkey style filter should make it safe.


A priority in all of this is to be prepared for something that might happen without hiking up anxiety about that thing.
Anxiety haunts my family enough as it is.

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