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Granny, Fred, Silvertip... It is apparent your hearts are in this for a purpose.
Not me. lol
My grandma barely remembered the Great Depression for the simple fact that nothing really changed. She said they ALWAYS lived like that...
So that's my prepping. Having a stocked pantry, useful skills, know-how and ingenuity.
I think the zombie apocalypse has odds somewhere between slim and none, leaning heavily toward "none."
I live out here because my husband and I've always lived on the Plains. I hang out with people who can, quilt, garden, grow livestock, work on their own vehicles, etc, etc, etc. for the simple fact that that's what folks have ALWAYS done out here. When you're fairly poor and a bit of a distance from services, you just get used to taking care of things yourself.
But I've always loved apocalypse fiction.
On the Beach, Alas Babylon, Earth Abides, One Second After... They all make me think "What if..." and most of the time my internal reply is, "I think we'd probably be okay." Frankly, I think fortification would be far less important than having strong connections with your neighbors.
Last edited by itsMeFred; 04-18-2012 at 12:54 PM..
My situation is pretty much the same as ItsmeFred's, my familiy have always been homesteaders and not a lot of money so we had to provide for ourselves.
One guy joked that if you wanted to find any of my family, just go to the head of a creek high in the mountains, and hike 5 miles back in and there we were
I have always been taught and used what are now called "prepper" skills, but I think are far more accurately called Self Sufficent.
We still do a lot of this stuff, and it is still because there isn't a lot of extra money, but it can be enjoyable, hard physical work never hurt anybody, and eating meals you have completely taken from crops/animals you have raised and knowing the root cellar is full for the winter, well that is a great feeling.
Be glad to help answer your questions Countryswan. Don't get discouraged because there is a lot of stuff out there to read or hear. Best advice is use your common sense and look at what you can realistically do. Don't let all the hyperbole confuse the issue.
CountrySwan -- Welcome to the forum! The western side of VA is lovely, and it is one of the common "go to" areas for strategic relocation. If you're happy there and don't feel like there is a significant risk to staying then I'd plan to bug-in rather than relocate. Your house and land sounds very workable for everyday self-sufficiency as well as long-term SHTF with a few repairs and modifications. No one can tell you exactly what to do because everyone's goals and resources are different and different locations require different solutions, but the A-B-C-1-2-3 of SS&P is securing food (storage, growing, raising, hunting, foraging), water (access, treatment & storage), shelter (domicile, heating/cooling, defense); maintaining sanitation & hygiene (waste treatment, cleanliness & healthcare/medical), and obtaining the necessary skills and tools.
Since your basement is leaking, I'm assuming that you must have a pretty high water table where you're at? Firstly, get the foundation walls fixed to stop the leak so you don't undermine the structural integrity of the basement and house. Secondly, you might consider putting up extensive gutters and installing a rainwater catchment system and holding tanks which will 1) get a lot of the rainfall away from the house, 2) provide additional water for irrigation and/or livestock without pumping your well, and 3) be an emergency source of drinking water should you need it. And Thirdly, you want to make sure that your water and sanitation systems are installed and working properly to avoid contaminating your water supply.
You mentioned that you have a well already, do you know how old it is and how deep it is? Is it properly cased and capped to avoid surface water infiltration and contamination? Do you get it tested regularly and know the common things that the water should be treated for in your area? Do have a stock of the necessary treatment materials (filters, etc)? What kind and size pump to do you have? Do you have a manual backup pump? Do you have a holding tank/cistern or do you pump straight from the well every time you turn on a tap? Are you currently on sewer or septic? How old is your system? Are pit latrines ("outhouses"), mouldering toilets and/or composting toilets legal in your area? Once you know these things you can work on maintaining an adequate clean water supply and appropriate sanitation. I recommend the following books to get you started: The Home Water Supply, Water Storage, Wells & Septic Systems, and The Humanure Handbook.
Given your location and the average climate, it would be relatively easy to have a large 3 season garden (perhaps even 4 season with greenhouse or high tunnels), some small livestock, and firewood from your greenbelt area to meet most of your needs. Nearly every garden and orchard crop can (or could) grow there, and you should be able to establish decent pasture/hay fields for small livestock as well. You just have to determine what you want to do, and whether you think you could manage it (it is work, but not EXTREMELY hard work ). It is entirely possible for 4 acres to provide you with nearly everything you'd need as long as you use sustainable methods and don't have a very large family. I suggest you read Five Acres and Independence to give you some ideas; the book and some of the info is outdated, but it will get you started planning a small self-sufficient homestead. There are many books on small-scale farming and self-sufficient living focusing on individual aspects as well as holistic overviews, but Five Acres illustrates what can reasonably done on a homestead your size and what to expect, and then you can go from there.
If you have good southern exposure most of the day and year, both solar thermal and solar PV may work great for you. Since your garage already gets very warm and brick makes an excellent thermal collector, you may want to research solar hot water and/or solar collectors to heat the space. Both would significantly reduce the amount of electricity/fuel/wood necessary to heat your home and domestic water. A small wood-burning stove would also be beneficial and would give you the extra boost in winter. Since you have relatively mild winters, you should be able to collect most of the wood you'd need from your lot through coppicing branches or harvesting smaller saplings... big trees mean big logs which burn longer and hotter and may be more than you need to heat your home. Check a local woodstove/heating specialist in your area and they will normally be able to tell you how many BTUs and heating days you'd need for the size home you have and the wood species you use (FYI - when I lived in Front Royal, I only needed 4 cords of mixed hard & softwood to heat an 80yo 1800 sq ft farmhouse/cabin). Natural Home Heating and Solar Water Heating are good books to get you started if you're interested.
If you have an unobstructed southern plane on your roof, roof-mounted PV panels may be a great option for you to provide at least minimum survival power... but even pole or rack mounted panels in the yard would work (just takes up more space). If you have good wind in your area, then a wind turbine for backup/supplementary power may also work. You can hook your well pump up either to PV or turbine (electrical) or simply to a windmill (mechanical)... just depends on your particular location and needs. Knowing how much electricity you NEED vs how much electricity you WANT is critical... it is entirely possible to live quite well on an affordable 3kw system if you use power wisely. A backup combustion generator is always a good thing, and there are several multi-fuel options available that would allow you to use propane, natural gas, bio-gas, diesel, bio-diesel, gasoline or ethanol. A small (2-3kw) gas or diesel generator, battery bank, and inverter is a very workable and affordable "starter kit" for self-generated power that can utilize your existing AC household wiring and appliances.
Either The Homeowners Guide to Renewable Energy or The Renewable Energy Handbook would be good books to get you started.
y'all are so helpful and I am finding a strong lean into this.
I showed my husband and you could see the oil can getting his brain to churn.
"hmm, since we have a high water table we wouldn't need to dig very deep for water, for a small pond"..
That's it.. get fired up. Yes people, this is going to be the start of something quite nice.
I cannot tell about the wind.. sometimes its windy, but I have no idea if there is enough for a turbine. A statistic to look up. There is a lot to learn, but I have the tenacity and the motivation.
All those years in the Girl Scouts has returned for more badges... "Badges... BADGES..We don't need no stinking badges!!
I will start with small step and begin to prepare for an imaginary 2 week power outage. Even that alone is huge. Put one foot in front of the other CS..
I will learn a lot and be better for it! Whoo woo No information you share will go unread or ignored. If oyu have the thought to write it.. I'll read it
and take heed. Immeasurable thanks.
welcome to a fine adventure. even if nothing happens in your lifetime you are still going to discover a great lifestyle and some great people as you can already see. i would recomend not moving or buying anything just yet.
saw lots of good stuff on starting small and getting a plan. if you have a plan you have something you can change.
here in my neck of montana i've helped 2 famalies goe from not knowing if chickens nurse to being full blown cow milking hog loving hillbillies but you don't have to go that far. just try to enjoy the ride. look for fancy poultry club and other groups like that to find local friends who can help you start.
my late wife and i had 10 acres in sonoran desert mountains with goats and chickens and nothing but a honda 200 generator that ran air conditioning and t.v. and carted water in pickup. she was cityslicker from buffalo and had a ball for our few years together.
countryswan, I am glad you started this thread. You are getting some great responses! I tend to get caught up in looking at one aspect of getting started, and get side tracked from the big picture, lol
My grandma barely remembered the Great Depression for the simple fact that nothing really changed. She said they ALWAYS lived like that...
So that's my prepping. Having a stocked pantry, useful skills, know-how and ingenuity.
I think the zombie apocalypse has odds somewhere between slim and none, leaning heavily toward "none."
I live out here because my husband and I've always lived on the Plains. I hang out with people who can, quilt, garden, grow livestock, work on their own vehicles, etc, etc, etc. for the simple fact that that's what folks have ALWAYS done out here. When you're fairly poor and a bit of a distance from services, you just get used to taking care of things yourself.
But I've always loved apocalypse fiction.
On the Beach, Alas Babylon, Earth Abides, One Second After... They all make me think "What if..." and most of the time my internal reply is, "I think we'd probably be okay." Frankly, I think fortification would be far less important than having strong connections with your neighbors.
Strong community has, throughout human history, proven to be its own form of fortification. It is unrealistic for most to think they can make it entirely on his/her own. There will always be some predators in urban environments bent to do harm. I look back to the R.K. riots and think how that small community of Korean business owners (also armed) protected their businesses from looting.
Out in rural areas where law enforcement and EMS services are less dense I think knowing one's neighbors and having a relationship will be very important. Farmers and ranchers have been willing to lend each other a hand
throught the history of our country because they know at some point they may be in need of assistance themselves.
Some excellent points have been raised here, but the most prevelent or germain point I see, is that everybodies situation and requirements are different, so you have to work with what you have for what you want.
Where I am, Solar is not a good alternative energy. We have a lot of grey snowy days when we need energy the most, and have the least sun. Plus, during the winter our sun doesn't come up until after 8:00 AM and it is getting dark again by 3:00 PM.
Wind isn't a great option either because even though we have a lot of it, we have too much and it tends to burn out bearings and armitures quickly.
Both are pretty expensive for what you get as well, so I use a hybrid system incorporating several different means to my ends.
With heavy stone, concrete and brick construction you have a lot of mass. This resists changes in tempuratures so once you have your home warm, it tends to stay warm.
To keep cool, you open all the windows at night and cool the interior of the house, then close everything tight during the day and it will remain much cooler inside than out.
The current home I am building has a greenhouse incorporated as the top story, and with thermal mass up there and a small fan, I should be able to move warm air from the greenhouse into the living quarters to help heat during the winter.
We get a lot of very cold below zero tempuratures here in the winter, so every little bit helps.
The primary heat source is wood, with a natural gas, (methane) backup.
Water is a great source of power, and you don't need a dam, just a water wheel. Good cheap clean power. Doesn't work in the winter though after the water freezes. Spring run off can be a problem, but if you have a diversion channel to limit the amount of water hitting your wheel, you are fine.
I can make all the bio diesel I want, so having a generator with a battery pack works well so I can run my generator once every 3 days or so to charge the batteries, and have all the power I want very cheaply. I don't have to worry about paying for expensive solar cells, and I don't have to go pick my wind turbine up from the neighbors field after one of our little breezes pass through either. Plus, It works all year around, and I have power on demand, all I want, when I want.
My situation is very different from what you find in the Midwest or Atlantic States or even the West Coast, so what works for me might not work for someone else.
The ideas and solutions for self sufficent living are endless, that is one of the things I really enjoy about it
So true Silvertip -- usually the most appropriate solutions are hybrids, and are completely unique to each person. The best we can do is share ideas, experiences, and potential pros & cons
In our situation, like yours, we don't get enough sun in winter when it need it most because we need to have lights on all the time and are stuck inside to avoid becoming popsicles. But we have massive amounts of sun nearly 24hrs a day in the summer, when we aren't stuck inside by anything other than mosquitoes So we schedule all our really heavy energy needs, usually power tools and equipment, during the summer months when we actually MUST suck down lots of power or risk overcharging our battery bank with our solar PV array. Oilseeds are not really a crop option here so no bio-diesel, and it's too cold for an anaerobic digester year-round so no bio-gas either, but we can grow potatoes like nobodies business and can use a gasoline generator converted to ethanol for our winter power needs. Solar thermal is plenty for hot water and warming up the house in the mornings during the summer when the wood stove would bake us out of the house; but in winter we're running the woodstove all the time for heat, so it's nothing to keep the hot water going that way when we have to drain the (now useless) solar collector during the dark winter so it doesn't freeze during the 3-4 months of sub-zero temps. Keeping cool is pretty easy, since even during the summer heat our nighttime temps are rare above 60 and we have low humidity and light breezes that cool the house down fast with properly aligned windows (but we do need to cover them to avoid baking during the day in summer!) Wind turbines are a half-way decent supplement in winter when we get chinooks, but it's not continuous or high-speed... but we are looking at a steam turbine off the woodstove/DHW system for winter, too.
So that just shows how different solutions can be for just a couple aspects of self-sufficient living between two folks with somewhat similar (but not identical!!) conditions. And goes to show that a single solution often doesn't work 24/7/365 so you might need to consider hybrids and hybrid backups.
I find it's usually better to tell people what you've done, what you were trying to achieve, and why you chose to do it that way, rather than insist that your way is the ONLY way Figuring out what you need to get and do in order to get and do what you want with what you have to work with from all the information and other resources available is what SS&P is all about
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When you're fairly poor and a bit of a distance from services, you just get used to taking care of things yourself.
i like it
). It is entirely possible for 4 acres to provide you with nearly everything you'd need as long as you use sustainable methods and don't have a very large family. I suggest you read 
