The Survival Weekly Dispatch - Volume 11, Issue 9

March came in like a lion....

Mar 06, 2024

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out this week’s newsletter. Monday afternoon and evening, we had another round of bad storms come through. There were unconfirmed reports of at least one tornado, along with high winds, rain, and hail. Thankfully we were spared any damage here, just a few branches down.

Then Tuesday morning brought us the Great Meta Outage™. For those who remain blissfully unaware, Facebook and Instagram both went down for a bit. I’m told there were other apps affected as well. Regardless of the hows and whys, the outages should be a reminder to make sure you have multiple means of keeping in touch with family and friends, with at least some options not being tied to social media.

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Prepper Tip -- It’s important to have several ways to receive storm alerts and similar warnings. Case in point – my county has a siren system. Here’s what it says on the county website, “The outdoor warning sirens are activated for tornado warnings and damaging winds greater than 80 mph.” The site also makes it very clear that these sirens are intended to only be heard if you are outside. As they point out, if you’re indoors, particularly inside any reasonably energy-efficient home, you’re likely not going to hear the siren, especially if you’re running the A/C, have a TV on, or have other ambient noise in the home. It probably won’t wake you up from a sound sleep, either.

Most cell phones these days are equipped to receive Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs). These are short messages giving you a heads up about a situation and can be activated by the National Weather Service, as well as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the President of the United States. Check your phone’s settings to ensure you’re able to receive these messages.

Another option is the Public Alert Sense service. You can sign up for that here.

Having a NOAA weather radio up and running wouldn’t be a bad backup. These will alert you to severe weather as well as many non-weather-related emergencies, including public safety threats.

The FEMA app is one more option, though I’ll admit I’m not personally familiar with it.

To my way of thinking, it’s better to get two or three alerts to the same situation than miss an alert entirely and be surprised.

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My friend Wendell Adams at The Prepared Wanderer has a great review of a new Ozark Trails survival kit he found at Walmart.

His findings weren’t particularly surprising, though.

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One of my goals this year is to get more involved with my local prepper community. To that end, I decided to host a class that will cover First Aid, CPR/AED, and Stop the Bleed. I’m not the instructor for this, I’m a fellow student.

If there is training you want but you don’t see offered in your area, seek out instructors and see if you can set something up. In this particular case, I knew the instructor, so I got in touch with him to see what he charges per student, how many students he would need at a minimum, and what he required for a location. Then, I posted a request in a county-wide FB group I’m in that I was seeking a location to host a First Aid class. I received several offers from various businesses, including a few that were free. It took another day to finalize dates, then I announced the class. It was filled within 24 hours.

I’m working on doing similar things for classes on wild edible foraging, container gardening, ham radio, and more.

This sort of thing isn’t impossible to do on your own, but I’ll admit it isn’t always quite that easy. But it is definitely worth exploring if you’re looking to learn new skills and you’re willing to do a little work to make it happen.

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Every county in the US, as far as I know, has a County Extension office. This is a resource that many people aren’t aware exists. It’s staffed by university employees and volunteers. These people truly know their stuff with a wide range of topics, including:

Gardening
Local crops
Pest control
Landscaping
Personal finance
Health and wellness

These extension offices run the Master Gardener program. This is a volunteer program that provides intensive training in subjects like plant pathology, sustainable gardening, integrated pest management, and soil health. In exchange, once they’ve been certified, the Master Gardeners volunteer time to maintain community gardens, provide public education, and similar endeavors.

It might be worth your time to check out what your local county extension office has to offer.

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A couple of days ago, I got my annual reminder of the one Facebook post I made that truly went viral. I’d made it with a FB account that has since been nuked. The post generated thousands of likes and shares in short order. I always regretted not putting some sort of Amazon Affiliate link somewhere in the post.

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According to the US Forest Service, “Fens are peat-forming wetlands that rely on groundwater input and require thousands of years to develop and cannot easily be restored once destroyed.” I bring that up because I didn’t know what a fen was myself, but we hiked through one over the weekend. It was a fairly short walk, and not much to see. We plan to go back later in the spring when things are blooming.

Survival Tip – Be a Good Steward

It won’t be long before the first spring plants will be budding and people will be venturing out to forage for what they can harvest. If you’ll be among them, be a good steward.

What do I mean by that? Well, because foraging is essentially free, at least in terms of you’re not having to fork over cash for what you’ve picked, there can be a tendency to treat the outdoors like it’s your own private preserve. Whether you own the land yourself or it’s open to the public, there are a few things to remember.

Harvest only what you need. If you go too far, you run the risk of exhausting the available resources. Think about it like this – if you harvest all of the plants today, what will you do next week?

That said, if you find a crop of something that you know to be ridiculously invasive, feel free to grab all you can before it chokes out other plants around it. Garlic mustard and burdock are a couple of examples. Even wild blackberry bushes can get out of control.

As you process your harvest, do what you can to save the seeds and spread them around next time you’re out there. You could also do some research and find out some of the native species that should be in the area, but haven’t been seen lately. Contact your local county extension office and they might be able to point you to a source for seeds for those plants.

Prepper Survival Guide and Backwoods Survival Guide

For those new to my little corner of the Internet, I am the Editor in Chief for both Prepper Survival Guide and Backwoods Survival Guide magazines. Here are the covers for the current issues that are available in stores right now.