Preparing Your Homestead for Survival: Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home

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Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home? This is important for so many reasons but mainly to be able to access your homestead when you actually need to if there is a disaster.

Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home article cover image with a small plastic read house

Your first step in your own disaster preparedness should be to find out what types of emergency situations you need to get ready for. Take a few minutes to review the types of disasters your area is prone to. This is particularly important for a natural disaster.

Preparing Your Homestead for Survival: Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home

If you live in Florida or the South Easter US coast, you should prepare for hurricane season. If you live in the North East or south of the Great Lakes, you should get ready for big snow storms. If you’re in the Mid-West, or South West, chances are you’ll come across a tornado or two. In California, you may prepare for earthquakes.

Next, think about possible man-made disasters. If you live near a dam, you may need a plan of action for flooding. If you live near a nuclear plant, you should think about a way to get out quickly if something were to happen at the plant. You get the idea. What disasters we prepare for will be different for a lot of us and what sort of emergency plan you have will depend on those variables.

Once you have your list of disasters that you need to prepare for, it may be a good idea to consider if and when you would try to prepare to stay at your home and ride it out, and when it may be time to evacuate. Obviously, those decisions may be outside of your control, such as in the event of a mandatory evacuation, but there will also be plenty of times when the decision is up to you.

Think about what makes the most sense to you and your family. If you are able to stay put, you can take care of issues as they pop up and prevent further damage. If a storm blows out a window, you can board it up and prevent water from coming in for example. At other times, it may be safer and more convenient to get out of the disaster’s way.

These are all things to consider when planning where to place your homestead. There are a few other reasons to make sure you keep within some distance of your home if you aren’t living on your homestead full time.

You have to keep your homestead clean

Proximity to your homestead is essential as you’ll be making somewhat regular visits to your property to make sure it’s all in order. You will have to make sure no one is squatting on your property. If you have a place that looks inviting, yet abandoned? It seems like an open invitation to visit.

Squatters are a real problem -and they thrive on it!

Squatting 101 – an actual video teaching people how to do it!

You don’t want to put all that hard work into your property to have someone else rifle through your belongings and eat your stored food. It would be a paradise to them and a disaster for you.

You will want to visit often to make sure the flora is trimmed down enough, etc. Again, that will help prevent the abandoned-property vibe that may seem an invitation to others.

Catching problems quicker is important too. I had a friend who had a leaky pipe – that actually froze in winter and became a broken pipe. That broken pipe caused an awful lot of damage that was not only costly to repair, but created a horrible black mold issue.

Don’t want to go too far in an emergency

We have talked about how you will want to get out of the city – be away from the crowds in a SHTF scenario. Ideally, you will want to be able to escape on about a tank of gas. One tank.

Yes, this is a good time to talk about living off the top half of your gas tank. Never let your gas go below half full in your vehicle’s tank means you never have to be in that desperate line at the gas station in an emergency.

Gas stations will be too crowded in an emergency because the average person will be in line, trying to fill up their tank so they can drive to anywhere but there. Driving way far out from your original location would be a gamble if you can’t do it in one tank of gas.

Why you don’t want to run out of gas – it’s bad for your vehicle! – he cracks me up but knows cars

Before you let that freak you out – let’s talk about how many miles that might be. I have a 2018 Kia Sorrento. It has an 18.8 gallon gas tank and gets 21 in the city, 28 on the highway for milage. )

That gives me 394 miles on the low end – and 526 on the high end. That is if I have a full tank of gas and run it until I am just about empty. Cut that in half if I live in the top half the tank theory.

That means my destination should be within 200-300 miles tops from my location…a 2-3 hour drive.

If I have to walk? It can be done in a day or two. It is yet another thing to consider about trying to Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home.

What does your homestead need?

Get our FREE Printable Resources that you need to have worksheet to add to your homesteading binder!

More familiarity

The more time you spend at your homestead, you’ll be more accustomed to the basic conditions.

Weather

You will have an idea of what it is like under all weather conditions. You will know roughly where the snow is prone to drift. What areas of the field flood when it rains too hard or too many days in a row. You get the idea.

temperature

You will also get a feeling for the different temperatures that the location holds. Is it much cooler in the shade than the open areas? Are parts of the stream cooler than others? Is it so incredibly cold in the winter that you will need a decent stash of extra warm clothing items and possibly additional wood to burn?

Wildlife

Frequent visits will also clue you into the wildlife you find at your homestead. Do deer go through it often? What other small animals do you see? Are there larger animals that you need to be aware of like bears or cougars? Are there a lot of rodents that will be counterproductive to your gardening efforts? These are all things that you will be able to observe, if not by seeing the animals as they visit, but by seeing the traces they leave behind.

If you Keep Within Some Distance of Your Home when planning out and preparing your homestead, you won’t have any surprises when the SHTF.

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