Principal Categories For Planning

Over the years, we've tried a few methods to organizing our approach to Survivalism. Having lived in a rural setting for a couple decades now, the lifestyle does much to organize the effort and perspective. All comes down to the 5 Principles: Dry, Warm, Hydrated, Fed, and Self-Defense. In many ways everything ties into the first four, and your Self-Defense Preparations and Efforts result from your instincts for perseverance.

There are a couple of cautions. Food Goals must be achieved the first year or two without necessity of hunting. If your plan for meeting your food and diet needs is dependent upon a harvest you cannot assure; your plan is defective. Trapping is far more effective than hunting. The snares and traps you set "hunt" for you, and enable you to harvest much more food than you could on your own. Traps also hunt silently. Yet, takes time and covering distance to run a trapline. In the first year possibly even the second, it will be dangerous to be on the move or routinely active in the woods or wilderness. So, you have your food supply at hand to maximize your time around your homestead and also to enable defense and other projects your needs will dictate.

A secure Food Supply intact and readily available relieves much stress and anxiety. Better to have food and worry about how to stretch it and maximize it than not to have it and be consumed by the worries and hard work of acquiring it. As far as heating your home or cooking, wood heaters and cookstoves will be a great resource, but for the first year or two you'd like not to put woodsmoke up the chimney which is going to be noted by anyone in the area. Maybe wood pellets don't produce smoke or aroma? Maybe you can burn coal? Yet, if those fuels produce an aroma signature, you want to avoid that for the first year, maybe the second also. Home heating oil and kerosene are very long-storing and high BTU content fuels. Our Toyo oil miser self-contained through-wall vented heater produces no aroma from 25yds or further. Takes electricity to run, but we have run it on inverter power, so have a plan and woodstoves to use later.

Major Categories I've found useful for organizing and brainstorming are these:
-Foodstuffs, herbs, and food-prep supplies
-Cooking gear, Water Filtration, and Food-prep tools & utensils
-Personal hygiene, cleansers, clothes washing supplies and gear
-First Aid kit, supplies, reference works
-Linen and bedding
-Sewing for fabrication and repair
-Personal clothing, footwear, outergear
-Communication and computing gear
-Entertainment, books, recorded media, games, reference
-Educational Resources for homeschooling and general library
-Camping, hunting, archery and other outdoor related gear & eqpt
-Tools for Carpentry, Home & Auto repair
-Gardening Tools and Supplies
-Alternative Energy and Power generation,
-Firearms, Handloading, Gunsmithing; Tools, Parts and References
-Blacksmithing and Metalworking tools and gear, plus materials
-Fuel Storage, Restoratives, & Common Parts for motorized gear
-Reference Library


Plenty of ways to organize within the categories. Defense being one of the main Principles, a Site Map and Kit including rangecard, optics for observation, topo and road maps; plus inventory of likely avenues of approach would be a great preparation to have ready. Appraising your home or BOL for its weaknesses and evaluating how an enemy would mount an action means you can put broken glass or punji spikes in ditches, clear out underbrush and rig alarms or other preventative measures.

Probably want to keep a Vehicle Log so you're sure of when and what maintenance was done. Good idea to keep a log on other motorized equipment as well.

Couple years ago, I bought a nice Stihl chainsaw at the pawnshop. Saw needed a new chain, so I bought a replacement pulley and bar so both Stihls we own could use same chain loops and replacement bars. Nice to have commonalities for salvage if nothing else.

Homeopathy and Naturopathy/Herbalism have really worked for our family. KENT'S REPERTORY, and THE MATERIA MEDICA are the standard reference works for Homeopaths. We also recommend PRESCRIPTION FOR NUTRITIONAL HEALING by Balch & Balch as The Best Reference for non-drug herbal and other alternative medical remedies and treatments. You can buy many medicinal herbs online or at your local healthfood store and make your own herbal tinctures using 100proof Vodka or Everclear. Worth learning all you can about homeopathy and herbs...