When it comes to prepping for emergencies, your food resources and storage systems should be at the top of your priority list. Not only do you need to choose the right foods and supplies, but you also need to build your food systems in the right places and keep them well-organized, maintained, and protected. This includes tending to gardens, pantries, and even your refrigerator for perishable items.
Taking the right steps now to build, maintain, and protect your food resources and storage can go a long way toward keeping you and your loved ones ready for any emergency that may arise.
Taking Care of Your Prepper Pantry
The first step to taking care of food storage systems is to have the right system built in the first place. And if possible, your survival pantry should be kept separate from your everyday pantry.
Understandably, not everyone has room for a pantry, let alone two, but building your prepper pantry separate from your daily pantry can help ensure you always have enough emergency food supplies should something happen. When you combine your everyday pantry with your prepper pantry, it’s easy for emergency items to get consumed or for you to lose track of inventory.
Build in the Right Spot
The location of your pantry can play a critical role in how well your food keeps. You need to build in a place that is ideal for avoiding food spoilage, moisture, and pests. You also want to build where you have enough space to easily access your pantry, keeping it clean and organized.
The ideal place is somewhere away from the sun, dry, and with a cool temperature. High heat and moisture can lead to bacteria growth and mold, and exposure to too much light can reduce food quality by messing with vitamins and nutrients. Light and heat can also wear down packaging.
Choose the Right Foods
Taking care of your pantry also includes choosing the right foods to store. Not everything keeps well in a pantry, and you also don’t want to keep items that you aren’t likely to eat. When picking your foods, you should focus on:
- Familiar foods you enjoy;
- Foods that are shelf-stable and don’t spoil easily;
- Foods you can buy in bulk to help with cost;
- Foods high in nutritional value;
- Foods that require minimal effort to prepare.
These tips will ensure you are getting the most value out of the food items you choose to stock.
Use the Right Storage Supplies
Storage supplies are another critical factor in maintaining a good storage system for your foods. Some foods already come stored in containers that will keep them safe long-term, but others don’t. It’s a good idea to invest in certain storage supplies depending on what foods you intend to keep. This can include:
- Mylar bags: These storage bags are made from the same material as space blankets, meaning they are highly durable. Mylar bags don’t break or rip easily, and they protect food from light damage and oxidation. They also come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses to suit your specific needs.
- Food buckets: Buckets are another ideal way to store and protect food in your prepper pantry. Buckets with lids can protect your items from moisture, heat, air, and rodents.
- Oxygen absorbers: These are packets you can throw in your bags, buckets, and other storage containers to help extend the shelf life of your food. They help remove oxygen that might otherwise lead to bacteria growth.
Use an Organized System
Once you have everything you need for your prepper pantry, the best way to take care of it and keep it maintained is to have a well-organized system. Having everything neat and tidy where you can easily see and access it means you’re more likely to keep your pantry in good shape and prevent food items from going bad. When things are stacked or stored haphazardly, you can easily lose track of what you have and miss signs of spoilage or pest infestations.
Keep Up With Inventory
In addition to keeping your pantry organized and clean, you should also conduct regular inventory checks. This is especially important if your prepper pantry and daily pantry aren’t kept separate. You want to make sure you have everything you need at all times should a disaster strike.
Keeping track of inventory can also help you stay on top of general maintenance and care that your pantry might need. By checking in regularly you will ensure that any temperature, moisture, light, spoilage, or pest issues are dealt with before it’s too late. You may also keep an eye on the general structure of your pantry in case more shelves or support are needed or anything is broken and needs to be fixed.
Don’t Have Space for a Pantry? Get Creative With These Pantry Alternatives
For those who don’t necessarily have the space for a prepper pantry, there are lots of places around the home that you can use as an alternative. Just because you might not have the space to build the ideal prepper pantry doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a pantry at all. Even the smallest pantry is better than nothing.
Below are some creative ideas for alternative pantries:
- Coat closet: Just about any closet in your home can be converted into a pantry. Just clean it out and move what items are already kept there to another location. You can then build custom shelves and racks or buy some from the store that will fit.
- Bookshelf: If you have the space for a bookshelf or bookcase, then you have room for a pantry. Though a bookcase does leave food items open to the light, it is better than nothing and is an easy way to store extra food items in your home.
- Under the stairs: The area under the stairs is one of the most unutilized spaces in the home, but it is a great spot for a custom storage pantry.
- Freestanding closets: Freestanding wardrobes and closet systems are creative alternatives for a pantry, and because they have doors, they can help you keep out light, moisture, and pests.
- Kitchen cabinets: Of course, you can also convert a portion of your kitchen cabinets into pantry storage. It’s usually best to use ones that are less accessed and out of the way to prevent mixing up your daily food use with your emergency food items.
- Corridor pantry: Long corridors and hallways in your home can easily be converted into pantry space. If the hallway is wide enough, simply build shelves and racks, or buy shelving units from the store and line them up along the hall. Ideally, it would be in an area that doesn’t get direct sunlight to prevent spoilage.
Taking Proper Care of Your Survival Fridge
Having a second fridge or freezer for emergency perishable food items is quite common, but unfortunately, many people will put it somewhere like their garage or basement and then forget about it. But your prepper fridge or freezer needs to be taken care of just as much as your pantry does.
Perishable food items, of course, are more prone to spoilage if not stored properly. So it’s important to keep up with refrigerator maintenance regularly to ensure your food doesn’t go bad and your appliance lasts for as long as possible.
The ideal prepper fridge/freezer maintenance involves:
- Cleaning the condenser coils at least twice a year to make sure everything stays cold;
- Regularly lubricating the door gasket (the strip that provides insulation around the fridge and freezer door);
- Cleaning the vents regularly to maintain proper air circulation in the fridge or freezer.
You should also be mindful of how you load or store things in your fridge and freezer. Overfilling your fridge can reduce airflow and energy efficiency, and a fridge that is too empty will not stay as cool. The ideal prepper fridge or freezer is kept about three-fourths full. If something breaks, make sure you have it repaired as soon as possible.
Maintaining a Garden for Survival
Taking care of your outdoor food systems and resources is just as important as taking care of your indoor storage. A garden can be incredibly useful in times of emergency, but it, too, should be cared for — otherwise, you won’t have access to the fresh food you need to survive.
Consider Your Needs
One of the first steps to creating the ideal, accessible garden is to consider what your needs are. How much food do you need to support yourself and your family? Does anyone have specific health needs? And how easily can your garden be accessed, so everyone in your family can tend to your plants and harvest food?
If you are going to put the effort into growing a garden for survival, it might as well be big enough to actually provide you with enough food to keep you fed should something happen. You should also grow things that are beneficial to your health or that can specifically help alleviate or manage any health conditions. Access to medicine when disaster strikes might be limited.
Secure Your Garden Against Intruders
While your garden should be easily accessible to you and your family so you can take care of it, it shouldn’t be so accessible that just anyone can easily walk off the street and take from it.
Though gardens are not something people necessarily need to secure regularly, it is a good idea if you are using your garden for preparedness. While intruders might not mess with your garden now, if there is an emergency and they are desperate, they might not think twice about stealing food from your crops.
So when it comes to emergency prep, garden security is a good idea. This can include setting up boundaries or fences, using gravel for walking paths, securing garden furniture, using motion-detecting lights, and even getting a guard dog to protect your garden.
Grow the Right Crops
There is any number of crops you can grow in your prepper garden to ensure your family stays healthy and fed, but not everyone has the space or the know-how to grow tons of different plants. So if you’re going to grow anything, the top three survival crops you should have are beans, squash, and potatoes.
Use Raised Planters and Vertical Gardening
Crops that are grown directly in the ground can be more susceptible to local wildlife. While not all crops are ideal for raised beds, you should still consider using them to better protect what you can. Using raised planters can also help keep pets safe as not everything you grow in your garden is safe for your pet to consume.
Vertical gardening is another way to keep certain crops out of reach, and it can help you plant more with less space. Instead of growing crops in horizontal rows on the ground or in beds, vertical gardening uses fencing or other support systems to help trailing or spreading crops grow up.
Avoid Harsh Chemicals
Use “green” pesticides as much as possible to protect your garden crops and your own health. While harsh chemicals can protect plants from pests, if they aren’t used properly they can actually damage your crops. They also contain chemicals that are bad for you and your family’s health, especially if you have small kids or pets running around.
Build a Sustainable Water System
Water is not an unlimited resource, and many people forget about this. Just because you have such easy access to water now does not mean you will when disaster strikes. So it’s important to have a backup water system, like rainwater harvesting, that you can use to keep your garden watered if the local water supply gets shut off. Rainwater harvesting can be challenging, so make sure to do your research on how to best save water this way.
Wrapping Up
Of all the things to maintain for survival, a pantry and prepper fridge/freezer are probably the easiest to take care of and most useful. But if you can grow and maintain a quality prepper garden as well, that would be even better. The more storage and food resources you have, the more you can ensure that your family will have all the food they need if or when the time comes to hunker down and survive.
[Note: This was a guest post.]
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