The Survival Weekly Dispatch - Volume 10, Issue 38

Happy October!

Oct 04, 2023

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out the newsletter. Tell you what, I’m pretty damn sore. As I mentioned last week, we’re working on renovating our detached garage. We started in on it last week Thursday and have been at it almost every day since. Thus far, this project has involved:

Tearing down all of the old siding
Replacing some sill plate and wall sheathing
Repairing a door jamb
Replacing a window
Wrapping the building with vapor barrier

We have rain coming in, so installing the new siding will have to wait a day. While I wish we’d have gotten the siding up by now, we can only move so fast. That said, I’m not too upset about taking a day off from the project. Like I said, I’m pretty damn sore at this point.

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Something people don’t mention when they talk about renovation projects is the fact that life goes on while you’re working on them. Meaning, we’d work on the garage every day until it got dark, then I’d shower, grab something to eat, and dive into the work that keeps the lights on.

This past week, that work has included finalizing the articles for Backwoods Survival Guide 26, approving the final layouts for Backwoods Survival Guide 25, finish an article for Field & Stream. Yet to be completed this week will be editing the layouts for Prepper Survival Guide 21 and going through the submissions for Backwoods Survival Guide 27.

By the end of October, I’ll have the 2024 Real World Prepping wall calendar ready to go, too.

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Prepper Tip -- If you carry a defense weapon, practice with it regularly. Keeping it with you is the easy part. Skills are perishable, so keep up with them as often as needed.

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I've been really disappointed in the performance of THE URBAN PREPPER'S GUIDE. Not going to sugarcoat anything, sales have been abysmal. I know the Kindle edition's formatting was awful, which might have been part of it. But, man, I really liked how the book came out and it just died on the vine.

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Prepper Tip -- The best door and window locks in the world won’t do any good if you don’t use them.

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Regarding building a survival library at home -- while I’m all for investing in a knowledge stockpile, I feel it is even more important to actually read the books and other materials you acquire. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just having them on a shelf is enough. When a crisis happens, you might not have the luxury of time to sift through your various books and such.

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Prepper Tip -- Try to do just one thing every single day to advance your journey to being better prepared for life’s little, and not so little, curve balls. Work on learning a new skill, read an informative article, watch an instructional video, buy a couple of cans of chili, trade a friend for some heirloom seeds, the list goes on and on. Remember, survival is rarely about heroic efforts, it’s about the little things.

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[Note -- this is an excerpt from the Mindset chapter of THE URBAN PREPPER'S GUIDE.]

What seems like a couple of lifetimes ago, I spent a few years working for a big box retailer. My job was primarily building bicycles and furniture displays, though I helped out in other areas from time to time. There were a few employees who spent an incredible amount of time every day complaining about just about everything. Corporate either sent too much product or not enough. There were either too many customers to get work done or not enough customers spending money. The list went on and on.

All of this complaining accomplished exactly nothing, of course, other than taking time away from getting things done. A better plan is to take a more pragmatic approach and work the problem. Don’t spend so much time trying to figure out the why or why not of the situation. Worry about that later. When a crisis occurs, deal with what needs to be handled in order to keep you and your family alive.

Think about it like this. If you don’t get the work done, the reasons for the emergency won’t matter in the slightest anyway.

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I’m sure you’ve seen these before, and maybe even assembled one or two. The basic concept is to take an Altoids tin or similar sized container and pack it with survival gear, with the idea being it is small enough for you to carry just about anywhere, so you’ll always have some essentials with you.

[Photo courtesy of OFFGRID Magazine, though I’m the one who took the photo as it accompanied my article for them on the many uses of Altoids tins.]

Despite having built countless versions of these kits over the years, I’ve grown less and less enamored with them as time has gone on. I feel that for a lot of people, these mini kits lend a false sense of security. There’s a tendency to feel that you’re ready for whatever happens because you have your trust little Altoids tin in your back pocket.

Here’s the thing, though. Just like any other piece of gear, large or small, if you don’t know how to use it properly, it won’t have much value to you in an emergency. I feel that this is especially true when we’re talking about a kit with so many limitations like these have. There’s very little margin for error. All too often, these kits are just glorified arts and crafts projects, rather than something that would be truly useful when the chips are down.

I won’t say that they are absolutely useless, as something is usually better than nothing. But, look at these mini and micro kits as like 3rd or 4th in the line of backups.

If you want to explore survival kit building further, I highly recommend John McCann’s book BUILD THE PERFECT SURVIVAL KIT. He knows his stuff and the book is very well done. Yes, he covers these tiny kits, too. You can find the book on Amazon as well as his online store.

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Despite all of the garage work, we did manage to get in a very short hike at a local park. Once life gets back to whatever passes for normal these days, we have a couple of lengthy jaunts planned.

Survival Tip – Gleaning

Pete is a good friend of mine who lives in Minnesota. We’ve never actually met in person, though we’ve had a couple of close calls that unfortunately didn’t pan out. He mentioned recently that there is a farmer in his immediate area who opens part of his field up to the public each year and people are welcome to swing in and pick as much produce as they’d like in that area. This year the crop is potatoes.

For far longer than you might guess, I seriously contemplated hopping in my car and making the 15 hour round trip, as potatoes are one of my favorite foods. But, logic finally got the better of me, as even with today’s grocery prices, I come out ahead just buying them at the store versus the cost of fuel to get there and back.

Gleaning is the term for collecting food leftover in farm fields, as well as from other sources like farmers markets, grocery stores, and even restaurants. Some companies have an advertised policy on the subject. Panera Bread, for example, teams up with nonprofits and donates to them excess bread and other baked goods left at the end of each day.

To be clear, we’re not talking about going through the garbage out behind the building. While dumpster diving could be considered a form of gleaning, at least in a technical sense, not all gleaning involves trash cans.

It might be worth your while to talk to your local grocery stores about what they do with produce, as well as baked goods and similar foods, that they’ve determined need to be pulled from the sales floor. I know a woman who used to get all sorts of free produce from her local grocery store on a regular basis. She’d can or dehydrate some of it and feed the rest to her various critters.

While you’re at it, if you’re active on Facebook see if there is a FB group focused on your county or town. You could post there to see if any local farmers allow for gleaning in their fields. It can’t hurt to ask, though because it is social media, expect some commentary from trolls.

Gleaning can be a great way to augment your grocery budget and it is definitely worth look into locally.

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.