1. Following the wrong advice: Many new survivalist become fixated upon the advice given by others. They read the latest preparedness book or blog post and automatically assume the advice given is best them, without considering their individual needs, skill level or location. In order to be self-reliant you need to learn to think for yourself.
2. Not eating what they store: Many new survivalist fill their pantry with unfamiliar foods, thinking they will adapt their diet “when the time comes” this is nonsense. You need to learn how to prepare and use these foods now, so they become a familiar staple.
3. Relying only on their food storage: Many new survivalist think once they have their one year supply of survival foods, that’s the end. Don’t get me wrong, having a deep larder is important, just don’t overlook the possibility of needing to replenish your supplies, and obtaining the skills and resources needed to do that.
4. Not storing enough salt: Many new survivalist fail to store this staple in the quantities needed. Don’t discount the importance of salt. I suggest at least ten pounds of iodized salt per person as a minimum. For baiting game (illegal in most areas), I’ve put away several salt blocks. These can be found at any agricultural feed store and are sold for cattle.
5. Building an arsenal: I see this all the time. Many new survivalist spend thousands on weapons and related gear, yet have only a two-week supply food and no water filter. This is stupid. I love guns and gear as much as the next person – but I know food and water are more important to my survival. Sure; we need weapons to protect what we’ve put away, just don’t neglect the other stuff.
6. Relying on bugging out: I’m not a fan of the “grab a bug out bag and head for the hills survival strategy”. In most cases you’re better off staying where you are. Having a bug out bag is a good idea, just don’t make bugging out your only plan or first priority.
7. To much stuff not enough skill: Many new survivalist believe they can be saved though buying. This fantasy has been promoted by self-serving survival gurus for years to fill their pockets with cash. Sure supplies are useful and some are needed – just don’t become dependent on stuff instead develop your skills.
8. Storing only one type of food: More than a few new survivalist have made this mistake. I can’t remember exactly where I read it, I think it was on another survival blog – but the author suggested his readers store hundreds of pounds of wheat and nothing else. While wheat is the backbone of my food storage, storing only one type of food, no matter how versatile is foolish.
9. Not taking care of pet needs: Many new survivalist fail to consider the needs of their pets. If you have pets you must plan for their needs by laying back the necessary supplies to keep them fed and healthy.
What was the biggest mistake you made when you were a newb?
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I bought flour(s) instead of grains. It made sense to me at the time, I didn’t want to spend money on a grain mill. This was dumb.
A loaf of bread stores for a week, a pack of flour 18 months, and whole grains store well for decades.
I wound up giving away most of the flour shortly before it expired. Grains have gone way up in cost since then so I paid a lot more for the grains to replace my flour. I bought a Country Grain mill while I was at it.
This error cost me about $475 total. Thats a lot of flour, but then it was for a lot of people.
Sam,
Don’t feel bad I did the same thing when I first started my food storage. We all make mistakes as long as we learn from them it’s not a total loss.
I live in suburbia just outside NYC. I live in a 2 bedroom apartment, so storage is a minimum. Using the theory, store what you eat and eat what you store, I buy whole grain and white flour instead of grains because I will use them for making bannock mix for camping, etc, and replace the flour periodically when shopping. My theory is that if things in suburbia just outside NYC get very bad, “bugging in” is not necessarily a good option because the refugees (locusts, as they are called by a fellow prepper) are going to pilfer anyway. M.D., I know you are not a huge proponent of bugging out, but here, if it gets bad, it is not an option, it is necessary. Although, I am sure that could be a whole conversation unto itself…
I wish I recognized what our mistake is. At the moment I see only deficiencies that need propping up. We need a back up power supply, useful at least in the short term. Living in the semi-arid west I don’t see how you could store too much water so more would be nice. Other than that, we’re good. We even have six months set aside for the dogs and my wife is talking about more rice because they could eat it too.
Biggest mistake is that I’m still living in the Metromess with about 6 million other people. I’m looking for that retreat now while hoping the crisis doesn’t occur until after my retirement in 18 months. Then Ozarks here I come.
The Ozarks are great, however, look out for a few things: super-diverse weather (plus tornadoes), rocky soil (due to limestone) which really only allows for raised-bed gardening, not to mention that ticks and chiggers are omnipresent. However, the hunting is good and the people are generally very open and kind-hearted. You’d be more than welcome!
Our Ozark land is relatively flat & rock free but the clay…we could open a brickworks with the amount of clay the soil has.
The biggest mistake I made when I was new as a survivalist was definitely not eating what I stored or even knowing how to prepare it. I spent lots of money on stuff that I ended up giving away to the local soup kitchen when I moved out of the city. That was a some time ago.
I now store what I eat and I eat what I store. Finally, I have learned how to prepare all of what I store. My food storage consists of three elements: (1) canned goods and dry foods – grains, beans, pastas, etc. (2) MREs – for eating without preparation and for transport. (3) freeze-dried and dehydrated foods. I have a small library devoted to food preparation and the equipment to prepare it. By integrating each of these elements into my regular diet, I have learned how to use and prepare them all.
The second biggest mistake (when looking back over the years) is not storing enough WATER!
I had been prepping for about a year when I lost my job. I spent the next five months living off my supplies. I discovered that there are things your buy that you will never eat… you will starve before you will eat them. I highly recommend that once or twice a year everyone just live off their supplies for a month and ensure that you really will eat what you have worked so hard to store.
I also learned that you can never have too many spices or condiments – things like soya sauce, ketchup and djon mustard…
I assumed reading about a skill was sufficient and that practice wasn’t necessary. Big mistake. The articles are usually written by “experts” who make it look easy.
I’m learning that right now with gardening. Just stick the seed in the ground and water it, right? Turns out there’s a lot more involved than that, and a lot of it is specific to your location.
Last year’s garden (our first year gardening) sucked. Hopefully this year’s will suck less. With any luck, we might have a pretty decent yield in another year or two. Glad we’re getting started now when we don’t need it.
Tarnation, I see two outright ‘Thats ME!’ and two sorta-kindas. I was a gun fanatic way before prepping was in mindset, so I just fell into that one, lol.
The salt one, I have, but CANNING SALT – not really. Non Iodized is I believe required for that need.
Food preps, I’m lucky. I’m not picky at all, and can eat the same thing for quite a spell without tiring of it. Having said that, spices are part of my preps – if nothing else but for trade goods. I know plenty of folks who can’t eat the same meal twice without going bonkers.
Good subject – Thank you M.D.
You can us the iodized salt for canning it will just make your pickles darker color than most people like. Think of iodine & how it reacts with starch – get a dark blue/black color.
Stephanie, loved your blog – seems rich in family values, the endangered species in America.
Try to “Crock” your cucumbers for pickling instead of canning. Uses less salt. Sugar will be the big issue for canning if “something” should happen. Look at jelly/jam/conserve/fruit – lots of sugar used. Experiment with honey if you can now. (Good excuse to get hives.)
The non-clumping agent in Morton’s (it pours when it rains) salt will frequently make home canned good look cloudy. Nothing is wrong with it, and it’s edible, but it looks slimy and icky. Many won’t eat what looks icky. (perfect example is home canned bacon. Boy it looks bad, but fry it up a little and it’s just lovely.)
Most of my biggest mistakes were made before I started prepping! I’m sure I still make mistakes, but I kick myself a lot for decsions I made earlier in life when I seemed to think that I would always have a good job that pays well (i.e. better to have some land than a damn boat…oh well).
Water is still a problem & I should add more salt as you say. Make sure that salt blocks are salt only. Don’t buy the mineral blocks.
One thing I see many folks do is buy a bunch of seed and think that is sufficient to having a garden. Like everything else, gardening is a skill that takes time to learn. I’ve been doing it for 30+ years but would be hard pressed to live off what we grow right now.
Not practicing my skills or the skills I try to learn enough. Being an “armchair survivalist” is not really being a survivalist…
How come no one has mentioned a financial emergency fund? IMHO, it’s one of the biggest mistakes all preppers make, not just noobs. Financial emergencies happen all the time and to not be prepared can be tragic now and for a long time to come. I know it may not be considered a “survival prep” but it should be!
This is EXACTLY why I read this blog daily. This is such a simple concept but most of us forget it. You simply can’t just start living this life. You can’t go from having TV dinners and watching Sportscenter to living without water, power, and growing/producing everything you need. There is a huge learning curve to this thing. I am guilty of being an “armchair” survivalist myself. Buy buy buy, but in the end all I have is stuff and good intentions. I have food storage that I don’t eat. I just do like many people and assume that I have a couple of books to teach me as I go when I have to use them but this is a flawed concept. I just realized today that the tomatoes I planted this year aren’t doing very well. Is it too much water? Too little water? Sun, bugs, disease, ?????? I have no freaking idea. Lucky for me I can go down to the store and buy some if I want but what happens when I no longer have that safety net? If these tomatoes were from my seed bank and they all died in a true TSHTF scenario, well then I’m screwed. I think we all get this Jeremiah Johnson syndrome where we think we can just learn as we go and come out doing great. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t but why take that chance? Start now! You don’t have to have 100 acres in Montana to start gardening in your backyard. You don’t have to be rich to buy a wheat grinder and some wheat and start making your own bread or having wheat berries for breakfast sometimes. I have been doing this for a couple of years and still feel like an idiot sometimes for all the mistakes I make. I’m more guilty than most of puting some of the time consuming/difficult survival skills off until tomorrow. But I also know that at some point, tomorrow will be to late to start learning.
Spudfarmer – Try sprinkling some epsom salts on the soil around your tomato plants. Epsom salts contain lots of magnesium that tomatoes love. It also helps to prevent your tomato plants from being eaten by slugs. I have heard that it also prevents some diseases common to tomatoes, but I can’t confirm that.
I will get some today. Thanks for the help.
http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/min-def/index.html
There’s a resource for troubleshooting mineral deficiencies in soils. It contains some color slides that show what a plant looks like with each deficiency. It’s a little dated, but I haven’t found any recent information that contradicts what is contained here.
One thing I do is a few weeks before sowing, I gather up all my expired herbs and break open the capsules and return them to the soil. They’re usually packed with trace nutrients that are rarely found in worked soils and store bought organic mixes.
A big pitfall is the assumption that home gardening ensures nutritious food. This is not always the case, if a mineral is not present in your soil, your diet is going to be deficient in that mineral as well if you’re living off your garden produce. Take care of your soil, make it as nutritious as possible.
Nice post, Spudfarmer. I think you hit a lot of us right between the eyes with it. I’ve got a years worth of food put by, and still stocking up, but our gardening efforts have yielded poor results. I don’t know if it’s too much sun, or my wife overwatering for fear of the sun. It’s a challenge growing vegetables in Arizona, even with water. When it’s 110 out, you feel you should water, but if you do it too often, the plants don’t bother to deep root, so it’s a matter of discipline to control that urge. I shudder to think how it would be if TSHTF, and water was scarce. I store around 300 gallons, but still don’t think it’s near enough, and I need to become more disciplined in refreshing it. I have a Katydyn water filter, but it won’t do much without something to filter. I’ve got about 40 great fruit trees on my property, but if the irrigation canals go dry, they’ll be toast in a few months.
I’d move somewhere more sustainable, but Arizona took a kick in the crotch as far as house prices go…. about half the homeowners here are upside down on their mortgages.
Thanks to M.D. we can all learn from each other, and be supportive. I know I come here every day to see what’s new. Thanks MD!
My biggest mistake is still living in the communist state of Illinois. My wife won’t move so I’m stuck here. The most important thing is to never stop learning and as Prepared N.D. says practice your plans and skills. Get out of debt,prep,and buy more ammo.
flour power—-i’ve laid in alot of wheat berries and need some variety in the way I use it.
Excellent book called The Amazing Wheat Book. Has quite the collection of info on what to do with all that stuff. Also a lot of recipes on-line. Be sure to check out some of the LDS (Mormons) home storage blogs. They’ve been at it for quite a while, and they have a lot of good advice.
My biggest mistake is allowing the subject of making water drinkable , an afterthought. I am putting in a shallow well in the next 3 weeks and will be buying berkey water filters for my home made filtration system.
I hope that was me recommending only wheat. My point- buy your wheat and grinder. This provides a better than nothing stash. Then you can add the expensive items later. If the collapse happens before you can afford $3k in freeze dried foods, you have nothing. If you have your wheat at least it is something. Just like saving up to buy an expensive semi-auto. Come the Apocalypse you have one half of a gun. Better to have gotten a surplus bolt right away. Peace.
My biggest mistake was not “dry running” the system. It wasn’t until we had a flood that left us an ‘island’ with no power for 10 days that the little things started showing up. I “thought” I was ready. I was not. It was a good thing it was early summer and not mid-winter or the unplanned exercise would have turned ugly. Note to self: Make SURE the stabilized gas is rotated through and verified to work before you need it.. :-)
I haven’t made any mistakes; I observed blogs like this to learn from others mistakes, obtaining good advice. My best mistake was telling a few others to join in my prepping, as they sounded really interested, but no action. Now I may have a few others with knowledge of my stockpile of prep supplies. I really didn’t think this scenario out very clearly until I read the patriots & reading survival blog sites.
I made the typical mistakes. When my eyes first opened, i went around my house looking for all things survival. I threw them in a backpack (with no food) and said “Hey! I have a BOB!”. What i didn’t have i bought. I built the whole thing around wilderness survival too because that’s what it looks like everybody does. Problem is i don’t live around wilderness.
Then i went out and bought the coolest guns i could afford. I didn’t have any place to shoot them but i had them. I only have one of those now.
I started buying foods that i thought i would eat (but never have) because i figured they stored well. Gave that all away. I wasted SO much money lol.
Sometimes you gotta pay for lessons i guess.
Over-thinking the problems and solutions rather than acting. Or, as has been noted, acting without thinking at all and over-buying. BTDT, still do at times.
Learning when “good enough” is better than “better”. One needn’t have the top of the line model when it’s out of reach.
In some ways, over-zealousness is as bad as not preparing at all.
Shy III
Jim,
With age brings wisdom. Identifying & being satisfied with the real essentials of life is the trick & you won’t learn it from the Lindsay Lohan’s of the world.
Thank you for your wise input.
Working too long as an employee and relying upon a weekly paycheck instead of developing passive means of income. When the SHTF there is a good likelyhood ‘normal” employment opportunities will vanish.
Being mostly prepared for one area & moving to another. There’s a big difference between plenty of water that needs filtering (rice fields) and not easily available at all.
Garbage disposal – the ice storm taught us that paper plates & cups (preps) do save water but when there is a burn ban are just more garbage. (No power = no municipal water = no fire departments = burn ban, even for those with a well). We do not create near the trash that most people do but after three weeks of no pick-up, it was apparent we needed to rethink the plan.
Always tank flush even when hauling water – or it won’t all go down & backwash is nasty after a few weeks. AND do not put bleach in the commode to help keep things sanitary ESP is bucket flushing. Ammonia & bleach do not mix after all. Just saying…
Most esp. thinking that all the skills learned will transfer well in a move. Gardening is a good example. The best green thumb will be brown for awhile if moving into a new zone.
I’m guilty of a few of the things MD and commentators have noted. When I first started, I was prepping for a possible civil war, not for long term survival. I have everything firearms related, and not enough related to gardening, water purification, etc.
The South lost the War for Southern Independence because they didn’t have a reliable means of Salt production, and Salt is used in EVERYTHING. Bread, Cheese, Butter, Smoked and Cured meats, Leather, certain metal hardening and preservation techniques (Browning), and in a pinch, the treatment of wounds. Behind water and Whole Grains, Salt is the most important thing you can stockpile, and I certainly don’t have enough of all kinds (maybe 5 lbs total).
I have yet to master the maintenance and use of a straight razor.
I am guilty of storing flour instead of grains. I DO eat what I store, and I find myself less inclined to eat grains because of the extra prep work and the need for a grain mill.
I have no where near enough herb, spices, and seasonings.
Water Purification and storage is a likely weak spot, as I have few containers, and no way to manually access water in my well.
One of the big ones is I probably have 3 months worth of TP left, and we all know what a problem that could be. Plus, I have no (yeast or Citric acid?) way of disposing of solid waste other than as fertilizer. How about an article about that?
Books on gardening and pest id and cures. Never have too many books to get information for fixing things including people. livestock, pets and mechanical and electrical basics. Tools, never have enough tools. Ability to produce electricity. Basic food stuffs and chemicals. Pesticides. Farming and gardening tools. Windmill with spare parts. Compressed gases such as oxygen, acetylene and lpg. Liquid fuels. Spare tires. Grains can be stored in barrels lined with barrel liners with tops that bolt on tightly. They’ll keep right out in the weather. I’ve done it before but it’s best to have them inside. Acetic acid that makes many things including vinegar. Buy the strongest type you can find. Spare parts for things you depend on. More than one ax with a couple extra handles. Wood stove. I live in an arid region where the first pioneers live in dug-outs. They are warm in the winter and cool in the summer and a great place to avoid a tornado. All types of paper goods and something that will always start a fire. Someone mentioned living in arid country so having a well and a windmill is always a good thing with spare parts for the pump. An overhead tank makes life much better since the higher it is, the more pressure you have. Tanks as big as you can afford to catch rain water from roofs. My next project is going to be a wind powered generator. Batteries and inverters. The last time I replace the batteries on my diesel pickup I bought Optima spiral wound batteries since I was replacing with the same exact thing it had on it that lasted 8 years with no maintenance. That’s a long lived battery. Emergency radios. As many small batteries as you can afford. Plenty of medicine of all types and bandages as well as syringes, the re-useable type with many types of needles, forceps, betadyne, alcohol, etc. Cloths, thread, scissors, needles thimble. As much footwear as possible including different types of socks. Your canvas shoes in the snow and ice aren’t that great. Your 2,000 gram water-proof thinsulate leather boots aren’t too great in the summer either. Gloves of every sort and buy at least some cheap welding gloves for dealing with hot things. Just a few things that come to mind. Of course a shotgun, a rifle and ammo for each is necessity. I keep a herd of cattle. If you have some acreage, figure out how many head you can support. I have a hog pen and chicken pen also. Hand saws and bow saws. I am not looking to bug out since I am already in the middle of nowhere. If you know someone who lives out in the country, try to make a deal ahead of time to supply extra supplies and may items the farmers or rancher can’t afford. What older people know and what younger people can do can often be a good symbiosis.
Great info great help…
Biggest thing i learnt is – can only move to the slowest and weakest in team… ie when we had to move out on foot; its wife and kids set pace and load capacity. Another time another place looked at using transport then weakest assumption was will get away; reality routes were conjested… Bike has new appeal to me…
Also think outside your square – with regard to growing food i have started a Aquaponics project 1000L tank, 50 fish and 2 growing beds… Great results so far. Am learning now for later. Will duplicate at retreat which is in the oz bush land.
And lastly I have learned is to get my MIND right and decide before hand what exactly i will do in a given situation. Its me and my family first and we choose life. So my fist act is to grab the BOB and get out with family from harms way till situation is resolved or has inproved… IF not resolved or no chance to be resolved then have decided aggreed with family to move offshore especially if dark storm clouds form like they did in the 1930′s.
The biggest immediate problem I face in my area is bushfire. Almost every summer we come under threat from fires. The hardest thing I find when trying to prep for a worst case scenario is I would most likely have to evacuate and only be able to take the BARE ESSENTIALS with me which makes stockpiling years worth of food a worthless expense if it all gets burnt. I really do struggle with this as I want to be prepared but find it hard to know where to start.
Can you store your preps underground? That might save some of them.
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