Author: R. Ann Parris

Three Sisters, Elders, or Iroquois mounds are one of the most common and oldest examples of companion planting to be found. Corn, beans and squash are grown in close association, with each plant filling another’s needs. It’s a proven winner large or small, throughout history, including modern university studies on yields and post-harvest soil. Succotash gardens are also billed as a survival and a storage all-in-one gardens – pretty fair assessments. The first in is corn. Pole beans are planted after a delay, and use the corn as a trellis. They also stabilize the corn, removing the need to hill…

Editors Note: Another article from R Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! Weather proofing applies to a lot of our lives, from backpacking to maintaining our homes for increasing efficiency. Our gardens are no different. Weather-proofing our gardens is getting harder and harder these days, though. There are cycles we can (and should) track. Location…

 Editors Note: Another article from R Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal, a supplement for her last post on the subject. with new information and a guide on how much and seed would be the minimum someone needs. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! “How much seed do I need?” It’s a simple question. And a common one, in the self-sufficiency…

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from Rebecca to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! With a compact size, particularly in ratio to annual yield per plant, strawberries fit into all lifestyles, from an apartment rail or window, to sprawling acreage. They’re relatively inexpensive as potted starts, they’re even more affordable as bare-root bundles or seeds, and there’s a…

There are probably 1,001 uses for wooden shipping pallets besides sticking them in a burn barrel. We can regularly source them for free or for very low cost by talking to distribution centers and contractor supply stores about their breakage piles, eyeballing the dumpster areas of shopping centers and warehouses, or checking sites like Craigslist and Freecycle. Spin around online and you can find all sorts of projects and builds for people of all skill levels. They can make our lives easier and seriously cut our costs in many cases. A free item with that much potential makes them an…

Loved ones go missing every day, all over the modern world. They always have. Disasters – especially fast-moving disasters – have more than their share. In a major crisis, we can expect to continue to have lost souls we want to find. As always, a little prep work will greatly improve our odds of success. A while ago I wrote an article about missing persons that focuses on steps to take now that applies to both continuing “normal” or near-normal life and temporary disasters. Many can assist with various limited-comms, bug-out-route and grid-down missing person searches as well. “Psh, Only…

Periodically preppers and prepper fiction bring up hoof stock as options for A Bad Thing that removes electric and combustion engines. It’s really only been 100-150 years since equines and bovines were the go-to, and in some less-developed nations, they still are. There are also still plenty of areas worldwide where we can find bovines and equines laboring alongside tractors and transport vehicles. Even here in the U.S., we use livestock to access remote areas, help us haul big game out of back country, and periodically tow somebody’s 4×4 out of mud or off a frozen rut. So it’s not…

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal.  As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! I’ll leave the scavenging-vs-looting debate to others, and propose a situation where big chunks of humanity have died off, where fires and flooding rivers and sewage systems change where humanity is located and what legal services are in play, that we’re resupplying…

Emergency food bars are commonly talked about in the prepper and survivalist world as an alternative to meals and a bug-out bag item, but they also have a lot of value in boosting calories, which can be low on a beans-and-rice diet and in a lot of the food packages available for long-term storage. There are already endless reviews on individual five-year ration bars. Here I want to do a side-by-side comparison between the most common to help narrow down choices, and weigh them against a handful of supermarket alternatives. Planks of Blocks & Packs of Shingles Most ration bars…

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from R.Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! One of the challenges when we get into preparing for disaster is keeping everything neat and organized. In some cases, we’re trying to maintain our own or a spouse’s sanity and keep some of our preparations neat, tidy and organized without being in…

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from R.Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! Information is hugely important to success in any endeavor. We have to know what’s going on to best respond. There are all kinds of clues we can take from our surroundings and the skies to fill in some of the gaps the loss…

Come spring and summer, a lot of us would be delighted to have a few more hours in the day. Gardening and producing crops is one of the many reasons. Sometimes we just don’t have the time or money to get started or to expand as fast or as much as we’d like. Here are a few hacks we can use on that front, whether we’re beginners, or in a hurry for some expansions. Most are totally appropriate for anyone with a patio, balcony, or prime prepper property with acreage. They’re about saving time so we can start learning our…

Editors Note: The second of a two-article submission from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share as well as being entered into the Prepper Writing Contest and have a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! So, we’re ready to dig up our yards and grow food. Having figured out how and where we want our future plants to pop up, it’s time to deal with what’s already there. But, man,…

Editors Note: The first of a two-article submission from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share as well as being entered into the Prepper Writing Contest and have a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! So, we have looked over our yard or pasture and decided it’s time. Maybe we’re just ready to learn. Maybe we want to avoid contamination recalls or boycott Big Ag. Or maybe A Bad Thing…

Editors Note: Don’t forget to vote in our current Prepper Journal Writing Contest! Getting Gear I will stand by physical fitness and know-how as two of the seriously overlooked areas in disaster preparation. They apply to all disasters; car accidents, annual storms, all the way up to whatever apocalypse you like. Even so, there are facets of preparedness that do require “stuff”. “Stuff” usually means spending. That can be a problem for beginners, for people trying to budget, and for preppers traveling when disaster strikes. One way we can lower the burden on what must be bought is by taking…

There are all kinds of potentials that lead to various mini or full-fledged ice ages … nuclear and volcanic winters, solar grand minimum, Agenda 21, polar shifts, breakdown of the oceanic conveyor, asteroids, or a perfect storm of incidents. Some of them have happened, some not all that long ago, really. Some of them will undoubtedly happen again; it’s just a question of this lifetime, this millennium, or some further distant date. There’s ebb and flow in just how big, widespread, and bad results could be, and whether “It” results in airborne particles in the atmosphere. There are also shared…

One of the things that has made us a successful species is our ability to wield fire. Getting a fire started and variations to make them efficiently and specific to purpose have huge benefits in survival settings and off-grid, no- or low-power scenarios. Some of the information out there gets used and passed along without a lot of consideration to the conditions, though. I think sometimes we’re just looking for a DIY or a “craft”, especially if we’re on a tight budget, and don’t really test or think it through before we go whole hog. Sometimes we’re overlooking something even…

Preppers sometimes get the impression that spring answers the winter prayers of the hungry. Not always. One of the worst times of year for pre-supermarket temperate-zone humanity wasn’t winter at all. It was spring, all the way into early summer in some cases. If our worlds fail and we return to the agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our past, we’re going to find ourselves with the same “Hungry Gap”. However, with some planning and understanding, we can mitigate the effects. Not all arid and incredibly hot climates are immune, either. Many have similar issues; they just cycle around the too-hot-to-grow…

Sanity is important. Really. It’s easy to think that in a disaster we’ll just make do because we won’t have any choice. That’s adding a lot of stress to our bodies and minds in an already stressful situation. People die and are brutalized as a result of today’s stresses, and various reactions to them. We are not all going to be immune should something occur – income loss, natural disaster, or nation-altering event. However, we can make some sanity-saving preparations to ease those stresses rather than increase them. Curtains We’re used to a great deal of privacy in most Western…

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly receive a $25 cash award as well as be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today. Get In Shape No, really. With absolutely nothing to your name, you can be better off than a quarter if not half the preppers with gear, land, and partners. Want a little…

There’s no shortage of people who are delighted to put 2017 in the rear-view. I’m one of them. Mine doesn’t even revolve around politics or the major disasters that struck over the course of the year – and they were legion. I was lucky enough to weep only for strangers. Mine comes from the repeated “small” one-two punches from nature. It was a tough year here, but it was only tough. We didn’t make national news (thank heavens). I am also lucky enough that, right now, I don’t need the things that were impacted. However, 2017’s local effects will resonate…

Editors Note: Another guest post from R.Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. Whether this is you, a parent or grandparent, it is all something we should prepare for as either helpers, or eventually having to accept help. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly receive a $25 cash award as well as be entered into the next Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today! I had an odd epiphany while I tried to…

When we turn to sustainability, a lot of preppers consider tree fruits for part of our long-term food supply. They can be expensive to buy, so it’s tempting to just plant a seed from the tasty apple we ate for lunch or the fruits of a nearby tree that’s thriving. Johnny Appleseed did it after all. It’s not quite that easy these days, though. Our most common tree fruits need a little help in the seed-to-plant stage. Then what we get from our 5-20 year investment may be … pretty disappointing. Rampant Hybrids The modern era has changed our fruit…

Our world has changed enormously in ten, twenty and fifty years. It’s night and day from a hundred years ago. How we reach each other and share information is mind blowing. We now know things about illness, waste, and chemicals that make us shudder a little at the past. We’ve seen fisheries and industries rise and collapse.    However, some things have stagnated. In many ways, mainstream food production is one of those areas. We may use GPS and computers to help us source, plan and site things, but largely we’re doing it the same way we were at the…

Editors Note: Another contribution from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly receive a $25 cash award, as well as being entered into the Prepper Writing Contest AND have a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! Caches periodically come up in preparedness. When they do, there’s routinely talk of burying them. Buried caches can work, but there are some considerations. One of the things warned about…

An overabundance of eggs or milk is a good problem to have. It’s one some families will never experience, but it’s a common enough problem that it pops up annually on Facebook groups, homesteading and preparedness forums, and family gatherings. I’m a huge proponent of various preservation methods, from freezing and oiling eggs to churning and pressing home-raised milk into salted butters and hard cheeses for later use. I’m especially a fan of the pre-modern storage methods. Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough time or space to develop skills or store it all. If we have livestock and pets, they’re…

Boy oh boy, to have come back for more … you have earned your biscuits and I wish you productive hens and no little red eggs or white butterflies in your gardens. So, last time we created a pretty big “short” list of factors that combine to determine not only how much seed we need, but also how much land space. You got an example of how something like sustainability goals, or lack thereof, can affect how many seeds you’d want to stock because it changes what you’re planting. We also mentioned developing baselines, to see how things perform in…

It’s a mystery in many houses – where in tarnation do the odd socks go? In others, there’s people like me who have a special ability to wear and snag holes … in just one sock … at a ridiculous rate. This leaves many sad, lonely “survivor” socks waiting for their mate to appear, or hoping the next ripped sock matches it.  Then, commonly, after ages spent waiting with other sad, lonely survivors accumulating beside them, they’re sent to the landfill. Happily, it doesn’t have to be so. Those socks have massive potential for increasing our preparedness. They can save…

Editors Note: Another contribution from R. Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly receive a $25 cash award, as well as being entered into the Prepper Writing Contest AND have a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today! Something that can be of value to any prepper at any stage of development, even urban preppers in tight dwellings, is planning. Permaculture’s sectors and zone maps are two of…

Editors Note: A contribution from R. Ann Parris. The Prepper Journal hopes the content of the summit recommended here lives up to her expectations, as does she! Also note this starts in just five (5) days. Free Online Summit & Email Protections Every year we see more and more free online summits come out. Some are excellent. Some are … not. Most have good nuggets in there somewhere. This time around, it’s the Self Reliant School hosting one. (I am not affiliated with SRS, nor to my knowledge, with any of its staff or scheduled speakers.) They have 28 speakers…