I felt impressed to write a short post while I was watching the coverage of the Japan earthquake. I see some similarities to the images we all saw after hurricane Katrina…people living in the streets, no possessions, no food or water. There is no way that I could come close to imagining myself in their situation…but I find myself trying to do just that.
I want to encourage all of you to take a moment, look around your house, and think about what you would do without any infrastructure for 3 or 4 days. How would you get clean drinkable water? Could you keep up with basic hygiene? Would you have a survival kit capable of helping your family? This is an opportune time to watch the Japanese situation unfold, and assess your disaster preparedness efforts. Are you thinking about starting or adding to your emergency preparedness needs but aren’t sure what’s available? We hope you never need to rely on your emergency survival kit. However, when a disaster occurs, make certain that you and your loved ones are ready.
I recently became aware of something I had never thought about before when I was getting my survival kits and food storage together and that is preparedness seeds.
When buying and storing preparedness seeds for your survival needs it is not hard or expensive. First off, you want to use only heirloom seeds, not hybrid seeds. Heirloom seeds are open pollinated. You will get the same type of plant year after year by saving the seeds. With hybrid seeds, the plants are derived from two different plant varieties. The problem with seeds from hybrids is that when you save the seeds and replant them, you typically get one variety and not the other. That is, if you even get anything from the hybrid seeds.
Before you start ordering any kind of preparedness seeds, sit down and figure out which varieties you want to plant and which ones you may want to plant in the future. Make a list before you start shopping for seeds. Make sure that you’ve actually grown the variety in your area to ensure that it grows well in your local climate. Now that you have your own list of heirloom seeds made out, go shopping. Depending on the variety, I try to buy all my preparedness seeds in bulk. I like to have at least several hundred seeds of each type in my bank at any one time. I will also add seeds throughout the early spring as they become available and I also add some of my own seeds that I saved.
Why Store Emergency Preparedness Seeds?
Many people question why anyone needs to store seeds for survival. If you find yourself asking this, you need to do some more research on hybrid seeds. I’ll just quickly give you my opinion here. First, many genetically enhanced hybrid seeds produce great food. But I’m not real big on genetically enhanced anything and I prefer food from good ole heirloom seeds.
