“Tom Brown’s Guide to City and Suburban Survival” is packed with the wisdom it takes to be a confident urban survivor. Brown’s vast background filled with experience in outdoor survival and tracking makes him the perfect author to broach the subject of city and suburban survival. Famed for his ability to track down not only missing people but also fugitives, he knows the importance of having an intimate knowledge of infrastructure, resources, and natural events. Brown is the author of 16 books dealing with nature, awareness and survival, tracking, and a series of field guides. He runs the Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School where people from a wide variety of backgrounds learn the special skills of trackers. Brown has taken his years of experience and brought them to the city dweller in this succinct yet powerful guide to preparedness and survival in the city.
Bug Out Vehicle – An Urban Survival Secret For Natural Disasters Or Other Situations
Since the tragedies of September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina, many more Americans have been rethinking just how well they are prepared to face an interruption in civil services and the supply line known as “the grid.” When the grid goes down, it is never at an opportune moment. The gas goes off, the electricity goes off, the grocery store shelves have been stripped bare, and the gas stations are out of gas or cannot sell because there is no electricity to run the pumps.
Are Your Survival Preparedness and Survival Skills Up to Par? Do You Have an Emergency Kit?
There is much to consider when preparing for survival in the event of a national, natural or man-made disaster.
Garden Seeds For Survival
Planting a garden is a good way to protect your family from both major and minor disasters. Being able to access your own produce without having to depend on a network of industrial farms, shipping contractors, and supermarkets can mean the difference between having food or starving if any part of that network falls apart. Even without a major disaster, being able to grow your own food has been a time-honored way for families to protect themselves against personal disasters such as a loss of income. In fact, many families have joined a trend of growing their own backyard produce as a result of a job loss or illness that has forced them look for ways to save money and/or produce additional income.
A survival garden will differ somewhat from your typical suburban backyard produce patch. Since this will become your primary means of feeding yourself and your family, you will want to chose fruits, vegetables, and herbs that are high in nutrients and calories, can be stored without too much extra equipment, and that take up relatively little space to grow.
Start by identifying fruits and vegetables that grow well in your climate and soil conditions and that provide a lot of nutrients and calories. Foods such as lettuce, for example, typically have very short growing seasons, provide virtually no calories, and require a great deal of water in order to grow. While many people love to grow their own lettuce, it simply is not very practical for a survival garden. Once picked, it lasts for only a week without refrigeration. If you insist on having it, limit it to only a few heads, and plant a dark green variety such as romaine which provides a good amount of folic acid and iron versus iceburg, which is practically devoid of any real nutrients.
Potatoes, on the other hand, are one of the most nutrient and calorie dense vegetables available, are very easy to grow (albeit not from seeds), and have very long growing seasons. Potatoes adapt to a large variety of soil conditions, and can easily become a staple of a survival diet. This food has been used by people for centuries to fend off starvation, and there are a wide variety of ways to cook and use this starch. Potatoes can stay in the ground for up to several weeks after they mature, and once harvested they can last for several months in a cool, dark area. Plan to devote several rows to this crop.
Onions are typically only thought of as a complement to other vegetable or meat dishes in our society today, but for centuries they were a staple of many diets all over the world. Onions are easy to grow and are full of nutrients such as Vitamins A and C. When buying seeds, look for heirloom varieties, as many modern onions are less nutritious (but look better on supermarket shelves) than more traditional varieties. Try out several different types of onions; purple onions and yellow onions provide different nutrients and have very distinct tastes, but are very similar to grow and store.
Fruits are full of nutrients and typically tend to be much more calorie dense than vegetables, but finding the right varieties for your region can be difficult. In general, unless you have a lot of gardening experience and/or a greenhouse, avoid tropical and exotic fruits. Bananas and kiwi are very difficult to grow outside of their home regions and take up a lot of space. Fruit trees such as pears, lemons, and limes can be a good investment, however. Since many varieties of fruit take several years to grow from a seed into a ready-to-harvest tree, keeping several small fruit trees in your backyard or on a porch is a good idea. Gain some gardening experience before trying apples; while these are great fruits for a survival garden due to their nutrient and calorie density, many modern apples are actually hybrids and caring for the trees will require some knowledge of branch graphing.
Finally, consider dedicating a small section of your garden to herbs. Herbs are usually fairly easy to grow and can be used for a variety of purposes. Even people living in apartments can devote a small space to an indoor herb garden. Herbs such as garlic, ginger, rosemary, parsley, sage, and mint are great choices for beginners. Plant garlic among your other vegetables; the plant is a great natural pesticide and has a variety of medicinal uses, as well as culinary ones. Rosemary is a very hardy plant and can be used to ease sore throats if brewed into a tea.
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