Adapt or Die

It's a rainy day here today. Turned cold yesterday and stayed cold, well cold enough. Not like freezing cold but I did fire the wood furnace back up again kinda cold.

Rain almost always dampens my spirit and motivation and keeps me inside, especially cold rain. So today I got down another jar of Small-Hold beans and started simmering me a big pot. Actually I got em down last night and soaked them over night in anticipation of today being just the way it turned out.

This is the kinda food I like. Either grown completely here or with minimum outside additions all produced locally. Thrown together in a familiar manner that requires no recipe or thought, just minimal preparation and then the smell of it cooking all day. Hmmm I wonder what lamb would be like with these beans rather than ham? I might have to try that.

Little things like the smell of my own beans simmering that I have carefully crossbred and adapted to my own soil with years of planting and saving seeds would be enough to make me a life long prepper regardless of the world around me. Not that I do a whole lot of what is termed prepping anymore honestly. As I have mentioned before I seem to have moved beyond simple prepping and into sustaining. I mean how many pails of rice, 1000's of rounds of ammo or rooms full of canned goods with a 5 or 10 year shelf life can one person really keep? Eventually it becomes it's own money pit just rotating the stuff which is why I moved to production over simple hording.

You can keep 1 year, 3 years or 5 years worth of supplies but eventually you have to ask yourself why? What happens when it's all gone? If I have enough hope to plan for a future collapse why stop there? Why spend money on 6 months worth of food in  number 10 cans when that same expenditure of resources could give you the tools to produce food for a lifetime?

The answer for me anyway is that the prepping part is just the backup not the lifestyle. It took me a while to understand that. Dreams of remote cabins with wooded hillsides that couldn't grow a tomato plant in a hanging basket but would look good trying, had to be dashed. Stored food is a must of course but stored with a plan to replace it with your own produce is the only plan that has a future. Otherwise the clock is ticking on one disaster for you the very second the one your prepping against happens.

To prep there must be hope and it seems only natural that hope extends far into the future and includes more souls than I could possibly just prep for. Many of which I may never even meet in person. A future requires more than just stored goods. It requires community, stability, knowledge, trust and security along with cooperation and many other things as well. To help provide those things in the future one must often look to the past and then add another aspect. Preserving those skills you find there.

The collapse is happening. It may not be hitting each of us the same. Indeed many have yet to feel it's effects to any significant degree but it is slowly grinding our current way of life down. The big picture shows that even if some pieces don't. If nothing else the last few years of stagnant decline should prove that a collapse this slow will be enough to grind any simple preps into dust which leaves us only one option. Adapt to a sustainable lifestyle or be ground up in this slow decline.

In a sense to me adapting to a homesteading lifestyle is the only natural progression of prepping under today's circumstances. A fast collapse, one where the powers that be didn't push the pain as far down the road as they can, would make simple hording and storing viable. That type of crash would happen and the recovery would begin but that it not the path our politicians or their bankers have chosen for us. Every day they keep kicking that can the worse the collapse will be and the longer the recovery. Five years ago I would have believed three years of stored food would get a family through what's coming these days I believe that will fall far short of what's needed.

We are now prepping for generations not a few years.

So keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!!