What if supplies run out?

what to do..

I'm with Smithy, my church is well stocked and pools resources.

I am guilty of living in a McMansion on 5 acres on the grid. My neigbors have boats and all the McToys. I have an orchard, a chicken coop, a 1/4 acre garden and next summer I am putting in a cistern and the following summer a well. In my garage window I have a coleman solar panel hanging to charge up my battery bank. This year I put in a wood stove and put up 4 cords of wood. Next year I will put up 8 cords of wood. In my freezer I keep a can of garden seeds and in my basement a year supply of dehydrated canned foods. My wife and I can foods. I am reforesting my property to provide a long-term source of firewood.

We may be the neighborhood McCrazies. But we live a comfortable and stressfree life. We smile and wave and serve our neighors in need.

Only an Earthquake could get us, we are in a safe out of the way area in the Pacific Northwest.

I plan to stay away from those who are looting unless everyone is dead anyway. I don't trust anyone who keeps looking over their shoulder. By the time my supplies run out I will have established mutual links with other surviving locals (Read the books ALAS BABYLON and MALEVIL)

If I get chased off my property I will just go RED DAWN on their ass. WOLVERINES!

This is why I'm planning on putting in some caches. First, I don't like the idea of all my eggs in one basket. If I have a year's worth of food at the house, but my house gets burglarized, burns down, or is in an evacuation zone, I'm back at zero for preps. If I call 911 for a kitchen fire and the fire department reports that I have suspicious items in my kitchen like a food dehydrator, grain mill, wheat, and a solar freezer, I don't want to have to explain when the cops come back to talk to me and they find that I have a year's worth of food, fuel and ammunition. Even if it's legal, it makes the papers and that makes me a target of both ridicule and crime.

My goal is to spread out. I want to have enough at home to get through a long, harsh winter, but I see real benefits to getting anything more and caching it off site. Some stuff I'm planning on storing in a friend's basement. Other stuff may end up buried on public lands.

Ultimately, I'd like two kinds of caches, resupply and restarting. Resupply would be the obvious, focused on food, batteries, and other consumables. Restarting caches would assume that either my home was destroyed or I could never return. That would mean I'd need to the tools to rebuild some reasonable quality of life. Obviously food is important, but shelter is critical. Having somewhere I could start over with the tools to build a cabin, till the land, seeds to grow crops, and materials to barter would be better than having nothing at all. If I get to the point of putting together a restart cache, I'd want it out of the area entirely. Ideally in opposite directions since I may not know now which direction I may need to get out of dodge.

I've started a few lists of items I'd consider valuable for each type of cache and if there's an interest, I'll post them. But I'd be interested in some feedback on the whole concept of caching first. Obviously there's risk that a cache could get stolen (although there's some obvious precautions to minimize the risk), but so could everything in your home, especially in an urban/suburban setting.