Prepping: Present participle of prep (verb)
Verb:
1: Prepare (something); make ready
2: Prepare oneself for an event
When we bought our farm, our goal was, and still is, to become more and more self sufficient and create a place to retire to. Along the way in this process, we've come to realize that in our own way, we are also creating, hopefully anyway, a safe retreat to go to in the event there is some crisis that forces us to leave our house in the city.
When we searched for a property, we wanted something out in the country, away from the city, along the back roads, and out of the general public. When "Ma" decided to sell, of course we wanted to buy. Our initial plans went into motion and we started the long process of transforming it into what we have always dreamed of. We are doing it because we want to, and we enjoy it and we called it becoming more self sufficient, but we are discovering that we are doing is actually a form of prepping.
Words like "preppers" and "prepping" and "bug out location" are popular today. There are many, many websites on prepping. There are TV shows and books and radio shows and Internet videos devoted to it. It's become mainstream now and it's in the general consciousness There is some great info out there. Sadly though, because of some of the extreme people they show on TV, it's also become something that many people don't want to mention that they do.
Funny thing though, our Grandparents and Great Grandparents WERE preppers. They grew their own food. They did their own stockpiling for Winter or droughts or other weather events. They prepared for a time when they might have to do without. During the Great Depression, many of them did. They recycled, they reused, they learned to live on less. But to them, less was more. They didn't do it 'just in case', they did it 'just because'; that was the way they lived and the way they had always lived. They weren't doing it to be trendy or fashionable or politically correct, they didn't have a special word for it, they just did it because it meant the difference between living and perhaps something worse. It was what they knew and it was how their parents had lived, and their parents before them.
Somewhere over the years, that's gotten lost in our processed, prepackaged, disposable, instant gratification society.
So as we build our self sufficiency at the farm, we are also thinking of what would happen if something big went down and what we'd need to be to be OK. For example, we live in a hurricane threat area and we've been through several over the years. The last one, IKE, left us without power in town for over 2 weeks. No air conditioning, no refrigerator, no freezer, no fans, no TV, no way to charge phones. We lost all the food in our fridge and freezers, most stores were closed, we got low on gas, and it was well into the 100's with not even a fan. It was what might be called the perfect 'bug out' scenario.
Alas, we had no place to bug out too.
But now we do have a place. So I've been reading up on it and the more I read about stocking a home for the unexpected, the more I want to make sure that we are doing it properly. It's only in the natural course of developing the farm that we realized that we have the rare opportunity to create a safe place to relocate to (if the need arises) from scratch. We have a water well, so we're good if there is no water. We have septic tank sewage so we're good there too (toilets will still flush!). We're building a garden area. We've planted fruit trees. We have some backup water in the form of several 5 gallon bottles.
We're stocking the mudroom with canned goods. Cleaning supplies.
I'm collecting a supply of heirloom seeds of all types and storing them properly.
We've got a couple of grills and plenty of firewood. We're just storing things so we don't have to go shopping as often, but in the process, we're also creating a backup plan. And yet there is so much more to do.
If a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane hit, we now have a place of safety to go to that's far enough away from the Gulf that we'd be safer at than we would be in Houston. If there was no power in town, we'd have a place with power. Food? Shelter? Water? Check, check, check. But what else? What if something else happened that forced us there for an even more extended period of time? Another two weeks without power in town and we're good. But what about terror attack? Man made disaster? Some sort of outbreak or illness? We live in the shadow of a major metropolitan city with millions of people. It might not take much to make people crazy and make us want to leave to the sanity of the country.
We're not worrying about aliens or asteroids or Mayan prophecies, and we certainly don't think about it 24/7, that's just not who we are, but why not be prepared for the unexpected?
Here in the US, the CDC has a funny approach to the serious subject of being prepared. They are advertising it from the point of view that "if you are prepared for a zombie apocalypse", you are prepared for any emergency.
Of course it's silly, but it gets the point across.
So now we think of other things we don't have at the farm yet that will help us be more prepared for our future. We need more alternative lighting, oil lamps for example, flashlights, extra clothing, batteries, radios, more first aid products, solar powered devices and chargers, etc. In a way, anyone visiting the house would just assume it's a farmhouse in the country. And it is. But we are actually preparing it for self reliance and I guess if you want to call it prepping, then yes, we are prepping in plain sight.
Update: Such a great response to this post, I'm going to start sharing things we've done and how we've done it, ideas I've read elsewhere, and hopefully learning from you all as well. I've also added a new 'category/label' below, PREPPING so that I can organize the posts and make them easily searchable.
Will also reply to all of your comments, just ran out of time now.
