Daily Survival: 9 Useful Prepping Lessons I’ve Learned After 60

When I was younger, I measured my preps by how much I had stacked in the basement. Back then, a full shelf of buckets and batteries felt like all the safety a family could need. But somewhere past 60, I noticed that the plan I built at 40 no longer fit the man who had to carry it out.

I’m past 80 now, and those last twenty-some years taught me more about getting by than the forty before them. My knees started complaining on the cellar stairs, and a full water jug got heavier every summer. So I went back to the old ways my grandparents lived by. Turns out, they solved most of these problems long before anybody called it prepping. And the older I get, the more sense their way of doing things makes.

9. Grandma’s Pantry Beats a Survival Bucket

I’ve bought my share of freeze-dried buckets over the years, and I still keep a few around. But they cost a small fortune, and I realized that my stomach couldn’t handle all that salty, tasteless food. So I’ve gone back to the foods my grandmother relied on during the Depression, when a lot of families still kept their food without a refrigerator.

As you might already know, pemmican is one of them, and making it is a lot simpler than the name lets on. You dry lean beef until it snaps, then pound it into a powder and mix it with rendered tallow and dried blueberries. A single pound packs around 3,500 calories, so one small brick covers more than a full day of hard work. On top of that, a well-made batch can last up to 20 years. I’ve been making it since long before anybody called it a survival food, and my son still helps me pound the meat every fall. So if you’ve never had it, try my pemmican recipe and put a few bricks away, because it has never let me down.

And rendering your own lard and tallow belongs right next to it on the shelf, because good fat is the first thing a lean pantry runs out of. My grandmother never threw away a scrap of beef fat, and now I understand why she guarded that crock like it was money.

Then, if you own a pressure canner, canned beef gives you a ready meal that never needs the freezer. You can start with my burger in a jar recipe, and from there work your way through other long lasting survival foods, such as MREs that last for years.

8. Water Has to Fit the Back You Have Now

A gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds, so a full 5-gallon jug comes in at over 40 pounds. I used to carry two at a time without thinking twice. Then one day, a single jug was enough to remind my back how old it was. So these days, I let my setup do the lifting for me.

That’s why my water plan changed more than any other part of my preps. A year’s supply still makes sense, but it has to sit close to where you’ll use it, so you aren’t hauling heavy jugs across the yard every day. Rain barrels raised on cinder blocks help a lot, because gravity fills your bucket right at the spigot without any lifting.

What made the biggest difference for me was setting up the 3-barrel water harvesting system, since it catches far more rain than a single barrel ever could. For the shallow well, I went with a simple hand pump like the ones folks used long before electric pumps came along, and it fills a bucket with very little strain on my back.

Smaller containers help too, since a 2.5-gallon jug weighs about 21 pounds. That’s half of what a full 5-gallon jug weighs, so your back only takes half the load on every trip.

7. A Small Garden Can Feed More Than a Big One

My father plowed a big garden every spring, and I kept that habit going for years after he was gone. But bending over long rows got harder with every season, and at my age a fall between the bean rows is no small thing.

So I started growing up instead of out. A pallet fence turned into a vertical garden can grow beans and leafy greens at waist height, right along the property line. And because it looks like an ordinary fence, it doesn’t tell the whole street that you’re growing food behind it.

Dwarf fruit trees work on the same idea, since they stay low enough that you can pick most of the fruit with both feet on the ground. That means the ladder stays in the shed, which suits my knees just fine.

The old-timers also knew that some plants do better when they grow side by side. My grandmother always tucked marigolds between her tomatoes, and she planted beans at the foot of her corn so they could climb the stalks and feed the soil. If you want your small beds to give more food with less spraying, take a look at which plants protect each other from pests, and you’ll also see the pairings that ruin a harvest when they share a bed.

From there, I picked a handful of small-space projects that let an old man keep gardening without wearing himself out:

Aquaponic tower that can produce up to 200 pounds of fresh food. The fish feed the plants with their waste, and the plants clean the water for the fish in return. Since the tower stands upright, you harvest standing up instead of kneeling in the dirt.
Straw bale garden. Each bale works as its own raised bed, and it sits high enough that you barely have to bend. Then, once the season ends, the old bale breaks down into compost for next year.
Vertical pallet garden. An old pallet stood on its end holds lettuce, herbs, and strawberries between the slats. So you get a full bed of greens in a spot no wider than a doorway.
Regenerative garden. You build the soil up with compost and mulch every year instead of tilling it. That way the ground gets richer each season, and you never have to fight a tiller again.
Self-sustaining garden. Perennials like asparagus and rhubarb come back on their own every spring, while plants like dill and lettuce reseed themselves if you let a few go to flower. So the garden keeps feeding you even in a year when you can’t do much planting.
Self-watering raised garden beds. A water reservoir sits under the soil, and the roots pull up what they need. I can’t drag a hose around the yard like I used to, so the bed does that work for me, and I only top it up every week or so.

6. A Blackout Plan Needs More Than a Flashlight

In a grid-down situation, the nights get long, and that’s when folks our age are most likely to get hurt. Falls are already the leading cause of injury deaths for Americans over 65. Worse, lighting researchers have found that a 60-year-old needs about three times as much light as a 20-year-old to see equally well. So with the power out and 911 swamped, a dark hallway can leave you on the floor until morning.

My grandparents never had a light switch by the bed, so they planned their nights around the dark. The matches and the oil lamp always stayed in the same spot on the nightstand, and I’ve kept that habit my whole life. I never gave up oil lamps either, since they haven’t failed me once since I was a boy, and you can make an Amish oil lamp at the kitchen table in no time. Just keep the flame well away from curtains and bedding, and only burn the oil the lamp was made for.

On top of that, battery motion lights in the hallway and glow tape on the stair edges show me where to put my feet at night. But batteries run dry in a long blackout, so my backup is a 3D solar sphere out in the yard. Its round shape catches sunlight from more angles than a flat panel, and you can build your own 3D solar sphere to keep your lights charged long after the grid goes down.

Still, no light helps if nobody knows you’ve fallen. So my neighbor and I worked out a simple signal during outages, and I open the front curtains by nine every morning. If they’re still closed by ten, he walks over and knocks. In a long blackout, when you can’t count on 911 answering, a neighbor who notices is worth more than any gadget in the closet.

5. Summer Outages Are Harder on Us Than Winter Ones

For years, my blackout plan was built around winter, with plenty of firewood and wool blankets. But heat is harder on an older body, because it doesn’t cool itself as well as it used to. The CDC lists adults over 65 among the people most at risk from extreme heat, and some common medicines make it even harder to handle.

So I’ve relearned the old ways of cooling my house without electricity. Closing up the sunny side of the house in the morning and opening the windows at night pulls cooler air through, just like my grandparents did. A wet sheet hung in an open window cools the breeze coming in, especially in dry country.

Then there’s the food that needs to stay cold. An evaporative cooler made from a clay pot set inside a bigger one, with wet sand packed between them, can keep vegetables fresh for days without a drop of electricity.

4. Looking Confident Keeps Trouble Away

Criminals pick their marks the way a coyote picks out the slow calf, and gray hair can look like an easy target. Back in the early 1980s, researchers showed prison inmates videos of people walking down a street. The inmates chose their likely victims based mostly on how those people moved.

That’s why I pay more attention to how I carry myself now than I used to. Walking with your head up and meeting a stranger’s eyes sends a message most troublemakers read in seconds. And when someone tests you with an insult or a pushy question, the first few seconds of your answer often decide how they’ll treat you from then on.

It also helps to notice the people who are noticing you. A car that rolls past your house twice at the same slow speed deserves a second look, and so does a utility worker with no truck. Pioneers went a step further, stringing trip lines with cans or bells around the homestead so nobody crossed the yard at night without being heard.

3. Old Remedies Earned a Forever Place in My Stockpile

Do you know why my grandmother always kept a jar of garlic cloves covered in honey on the kitchen counter every winter? Or why she kept giving me this mysterious pine needle tincture whenever I came in cold? Or why she made mullein drops every time my throat started aching? As a boy I never thought to ask, but years later I understood that her kitchen was the family’s medicine cabinet.

And she knew her remedies better than anyone I’ve ever met, but she never wrote a single one down. So over the years, I worked them out again by memory and by trial until each one came out the way she made it. From there, I wrote every recipe down as a legacy for my family, because the world I’m leaving them in is more uncertain than the one I grew up in.

Still, at my age, my quality of life also depends on prescription meds. A crisis can cut you off from the pharmacy for weeks, so I ask my doctor about a 90-day supply and rotate it like the rest of my pantry. Then, for the small stuff like a nagging cough, the old remedies let me save the real medicine for when it counts.

2. Know How to Stop Bleeding Before You Need To

Plenty of folks take a blood thinner these days, and that changes what a simple cut means. A slip with a pruning saw or a hatchet will bleed longer and harder than you’d expect, and in a crisis there may be no ambulance on the way.

Firm, direct pressure is still the first step, and nothing replaces it. But for the smaller cuts, what has always worked for me is my famous stop bleeding powder, which I picked up in the army nearly seven decades ago and have been making ever since. Over the years I’ve used it on my kids, and later on the grandkids who came to the farm every summer and always found a way to scrape a knee. And it has patched up more than a few of my cows and goats too.

Even so, I keep a modern pressure bandage and a tourniquet in the kitchen and in the truck. An old remedy makes a fine backup, but the first few minutes after a deep cut matter too much to rely on a backup alone.

1. Pass It Down While You Still Can

My grandparents could cure a ham and patch a roof, yet very little of that reached my generation intact. I spent years relearning from old books and older neighbors what they could have shown me in an afternoon.

So at some point, I stopped putting it off. Whenever the younger ones in the family come by, we pick one skill and work through it together with our hands. Kids remember what they do far better than what they’re told, and a skill learned beside someone they love tends to stick for life.

Written notes help too, because memory isn’t as reliable as we’d like to think. For years now, I’ve kept a notebook in the kitchen drawer with every skill I’ve tested, step by step. That way, whoever comes after me won’t have to start from scratch. By now it’s thick and dog-eared, and it may be the most useful thing I leave behind. I’d guess the same is true for a lot of us.

The Notebook That Became a Book

Some of you may already know my new book, The Lost Skills of Independence, which grew out of that kitchen-drawer notebook. I wrote it for the younger folks who never had a chance to learn these things. But I wrote it just as much for those of us who did learn them and want them all in one place.

Keep in mind that most of the projects inside are ones I can still do myself, slow knees and all. The off-grid refrigerator that runs without electricity is a weekend afternoon’s work, and the pallet fence garden goes up one board at a time. Others need hardly any strength, like the honey and garlic remedy or the plastic bottle heater that uses the sun to warm a room.

I also made sure every one of the 200 skills comes with full-color drawings made by human hands, since so many pictures these days are made by a computer that has never held a hammer. Each one starts with a list of what you need, so you’re never halfway through a project and missing a part. And it’s spiral-bound, so it lies flat on the workbench while your hands are busy.

I’ve seen too many skills buried along with the folks who knew them, and my grandmother’s remedies nearly went the same way. So have a look at the book, and pick one project you can work on with your grandkids this season, while you’re still around to show them how it’s done.

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