Prepped & Ready Weekly, Issue #18

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Good morning. There's a gap in a lot of households that has nothing to do with what's in the cabinet. The supplies are there. What nobody has done is decide, out loud and ahead of time, who does what when it actually matters.

We spent this week on that gap, plus a few October jobs that are a great deal easier now than they'll be in November.

3 quick things this week

• A first aid kit is supplies. A first aid plan is decisions, and the decisions are the part most families are missing.

• 1/4 inch hardware cloth is the one mesh size that excludes both mice and rats. Half inch only stops one of them.

• Cooking neutralizes some plant toxins and does nothing at all to others. The toxin class decides that, not the heat.

This week

Nearly every preparedness email in my inbox this week has been a discount roundup. Amazon's fall sale is running, and 3 of the newsletters I track sent gear deals inside the same 48 hours. No argument from me if you actually need something.

Just notice what the fixes in this issue cost. A roll of hardware cloth. A thermometer to find out what your dehydrator is really doing. A sheet of paper with your kids' current weights on it. The boring purchases are usually the ones that change an outcome.

How to Build a Home First Aid Plan

Most households pass the supply test. Open the cabinet and there's a kit in there, probably 2. What almost nobody has done is decide who calls 911, who carries the kit to the person, who stays with the other kids, and where the medication list lives.

That sounds like paperwork right up until the night you need it. In a real emergency at home, the delay is almost never about gauze. It's 4 adults looking at each other, and a phone nobody has picked up yet.

This one walks through assigning the roles, where kits actually belong (3 places, and one of them surprises people), the quarterly 15 minute check, and the one page medical sheet that travels with your family. The American Academy of Pediatrics has a clear position on one detail of that sheet, and plenty of parents have it backwards.

Compost Pests: Keeping Rats, Flies and Raccoons Out

October is when the leaves pile up and the rodents go shopping for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Your compost bin, from their point of view, is a heated studio apartment with meals included.

Most of the advice out there is about what you put in the pile. That part does matter, and burying scraps under browns is genuinely good practice. But burying doesn't solve the real problem, because rats dig. Exclusion is a hardware question, and there's exactly 1 mesh size that answers it for mice and rats at the same time.

We went through it pest by pest. What to stop adding, what the pile's own heat handles without your help, and why those fat larvae you found in there are probably not the thing you think they are.

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Plant Toxicity Explained

A hard boil makes elderberry safe to eat. The same hard boil does nothing whatsoever to foxglove. If that seems arbitrary, it isn't, and the reason behind it is the single most useful thing a forager can understand.

Plant toxins sort into classes, and the class decides whether heat, soaking, or a change of water accomplishes anything at all. Learn the 4 or 5 classes that matter and you stop memorizing lists of plants and start reasoning about them instead.

This one also makes the case against the universal edibility test, which is still taught in survival courses and should not be. There are specific, documented ways it fails. One of them involves feeling completely fine for 36 hours.

How to Dry Wild Fruits

If you got out at all this month, you're probably looking at rose hips, elderberries, crabapples or wild grapes on the counter, wondering what to do with them before they turn.

Here's what trips people up: those 4 don't want the same treatment. One needs its seeds dealt with for a reason that has nothing to do with flavor. Another is still not safe to eat straight out of the jar even after it has dried perfectly, which catches anyone who assumes drying and making something safe are the same job.

Temperatures, pretreatment species by species, how to condition a batch before it goes into storage, and how long it really keeps once it's in there.

Greywater Irrigation for Urban Gardens

Your washing machine moves more water in a week than most rain barrels catch in a month, and right now every drop of it goes down the drain.

3 gravity fed methods put it on your garden instead. No pump, no tank. The no tank part isn't a cost saving, by the way. It's a rule, and there's a 24 hour number behind it that explains why every good greywater system looks suspiciously simple.

We covered sizing a mulch basin to your soil, how many plants 1 washer can honestly feed, the detergent switch to make before you touch a pipe, and the permit situation, which varies by state more than almost anything else we've written about.

Home Remedies for Bloating and Gas

This one is less dramatic than the rest of the issue and a lot more likely to come up at your house this month.

The internet's advice on bloating is mostly folk wisdom in confident packaging. We sorted it by what the research actually supports: what to change at the table, which over the counter options do something and which have thinner evidence than their shelf space suggests, and 1 popular remedy that carries real risks without the results to justify them.

There's also a short list of symptoms that mean stop treating this at home and get it looked at. Worth reading even if your digestion is fine, because that list is the genuinely useful part.

Worth a watch

Amy Alton, ARNP, walks through first aid kits and medical supplies for the situation where professional help isn't coming quickly. It pairs well with this week's first aid plan piece, since she's answering the supply half of the question while we were working on the decisions half. The Best First Aid Kits and Medical Supplies to Have When There Is No Hospital, from Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy.

Before you go

If somebody forwarded this to you and you want it in your own inbox every week, that part is easy.

And if this issue was useful, forward it to the person in your life who owns 3 first aid kits and has never once talked about who grabs them. That's the whole plan, really. Start with what you have and build from there.

Stay ready,
Logan