Comment by ccallebs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccallebs | Hacker News Reader

It's very sensible to prep for small or extended periods of supply-chain breakdown. My wife and I have taken the following precautions:

- We have a few LifeStraw personal water filters [1]. These things are awesome -- one of them filters up to 1,000 liters of drinking water. Very reasonable price too ($20, you can get them for cheaper occasionally on sites like woot). I'd argue these are the most important items we own.

- We have an abundance of canned goods. This isn't primarily meant for "prepping", but we always buy more canned goods than we need when we find them on sale.

- This won't apply to everyone, but we have a large amount of heirloom seeds we've collected over the past few years. We have ~9.5 acres of land, so if things were to ever get rough (and plants still grew) we'd be able to get food that way.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/LifeStraw-LSPHF017-Personal-Water-Fil...

> we have a large amount of heirloom seeds we've collected over the past few years.

Don't seeds get unviable (if that is the right word) after a few years? I've done gardening in the past, and seen that seeds a few years old sometimes do not germinate. Might want to test with a few of each kind and date range, periodically.

Seed viability is indeed the correct term.

Commercially bought seeds usually have a "best before" date on the packet.

There's some information here, but it's pretty technical: http://data.kew.org/sid/viability/

Had a quick look. Technical indeed :) But good to know - thank you. Heard of the Kew Botanical gardens in the UK. I guess that site will likely be a good resource for other related info and will explore it some.

Kew also runs the Millennium Seed Bank, which is keeping seeds from all over the world in a nuclear-bomb-proof vault in a relatively remote bit of southern England -- tests they run there is where the seed viability data comes from.

http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/millenni...

Correct, and we're not planning on storing them for a decade. We have the year they were acquired on each paper bag of them. Old ones will get removed, new ones will take their place.

Got it.

Iodine tablets are super cheap too.

This. A trace amount of bleach is also a highly effective purifying agent, though it's trickier to get that right.

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