The Practical Prepper

Recent changes in my day job have unfortunately required me to schedule a hiatus from my regularly scheduled writing here on The Practical Prepper. I've enjoyed my time with this blog and greatly appreciate the hundreds (maybe thousands) of readers who visited and read my posts — thank you all very much!

At this juncture, it seems appropriate to provide a look back at all of the blog's posts. As the newest post of the bunch, this post is naturally positioned to provide newer readers with a sense of the organization and content available. Regular readers may find this post helpful as a "table of contents," of sorts.

Preparedness Planning & Philosophy: These posts are written to essentially walk beginning preppers through the fundamentals of prepping, and were intended to be read in a more or less sequential order:

1. Becoming a Practical Prepper
2. What are you preparing for?
3. In a disaster, could you and your family survive for at least 72 ho...
4. Catastrophe! Do you stay or go?
5. Figuring out your prepping priorities
6. Getting your preparedness up to PAR
7. How to avoid a line at your door in a disaster
8. 6 areas for declaring your personal independence

Food and Water Storage: The articles collected here provide useful tips on how to go about storing food and water, as well as addressing some topics regarding food storage:

1. Some basics about water storage
2. Collecting and purifying water from natural sources
3. Food storage is the first step in food preparedness
4. The non-farmers guide to whole grain storage
5. Managing your food supplies in an emergency
6. What kind of food should you store? Here are 6 ideas
7. Have food allergies? You need to be a prepper

Tools for Bugging In or Bugging Out: The first three posts below relate to ideas that are useful within your home, especially if you have to shelter in place ("bugging in"). The other two are more geared toward evacuating ("bugging out"):

1. Heating your home in a power outage
2. How's your first aid preparedness?
3. Is home safety a part of your preparedness?
4. Do you have a pet bug-out bag?
5. 16 basics for your car's emergency kit

Financial Preparedness: Preparedness is not just about being ready for natural disasters. It's important to be able to weather financial storms in your life too. These posts will help you toward that goal:

1. Financial preparedness: six tips on reducing debt
2. Can you get prepared while reducing debt?

Preparedness against Specific Threats: These posts discuss specific natural disasters and how you can prepare for them:

1. It's almost spring—how's your tornado preparedness?
2. What is a CME, and why should you care about it?
3. Summertime: Are You Ready for a Heat Wave?
4. Avoiding a "bolt from the blue" (and other lightning strikes)

Gardening Topics: Part of being self-reliant, and thus being prepared, is to produce some of your own food. These articles help non-Farmers get started with their gardening:

1. Have you considered container gardening?
2. New to gardening? Try these five easy-to-grow plants
3. Five more easy-to-grow plants for newer gardeners

Miscellaneous Preparedness Topics: The first three of these articles are a grab-bag of topics that were written to highlight some skill that augments a self-reliant/prepared lifestyle. The last one is an earlier retrospective that discussed the most popular posts on this blog (at the time of that writing):

1. Using mobile technology to enhance your preparedness
2. Cast iron cookware—an excellent choice for practical preppers
3. Back to basics skills: How to properly hold and use a hand saw
4. Spring Break: A recap of our Top 5 posts on The Practical Prepper

I hope that you find (or have found) the material posted on The Practical Prepper. Once again, thanks for reading… and stay prepared!

Believing that preparedness and self-reliance are key to individual freedom, Atticus Freeman is the founder of the Self-Reliant Info blog, in addition to authoring The Practical Prepper weekly blog here on Farm Dreams. Thanks for reading!