The survivalist's bucket list: skills worth learning before you need them

Preparedness is easy to confuse with shopping. Shelves of stored food and a garage full of gear are useful, but in a long disruption the households that cope best are the ones that know how to do things. Goods can be bought. Skill has to be earned through study and practice, and it keeps working after the pantry is empty.

A shelf of good manuals helps, and every household should have one. Reading how to do something is not the same as having done it, though. No family wants to depend on someone learning to set a fence post, can tomatoes or stitch a wound for the first time in the middle of a crisis, and some of these skills take seasons or years to get good at.

What follows is a bucket list to pick from. It is not complete and not ranked.

Around the house

• Sewing and clothing: mending, patching, knitting, crocheting, quilting, spinning and weaving, and making simple garments from patterns. An old treadle sewing machine runs with no electricity and can often be found cheaply secondhand.
• Home repair and maintenance: basic carpentry, plumbing, painting, masonry and safe electrical work. For rural households add well drilling and maintenance, land clearing, simple surveying and building.
• Soap and candle making, including making simple oil lamps.
• Metalworking: welding, casting and blacksmithing, along with machining and other ways of fabricating parts.
• Auto and engine repair: oil changes, brakes, tune-ups and common part swaps such as a water pump or alternator, plus small engines like chainsaws, mowers and generators.

Food

• Gardening. This is the clearest example of a skill no book can hand over. Every yard has its own soil, sun and pests, and building healthy soil takes years. Start now.
• Food preservation: canning, pickling, smoking, dehydrating and curing. Use tested recipes and methods from the USDA and the National Center for Home Food Preservation; improvised canning is how people get botulism.
• Butter, cheese and yogurt making, with the cultures, rennet and other supplies kept in storage.
• Cooking from storage and off the grid: turning bulk grains, beans and powdered milk into meals people will eat, on a wood or charcoal stove, over a fire pit or in a solar oven.
• Animal husbandry: chickens, rabbits and goats, where space and local zoning allow.

Outdoors

• Wilderness and primitive skills: identifying local plants for food, medicine and materials; building shelters; finding, storing and purifying water; lighting fires by modern and primitive methods; fishing; and trapping where it is legal.
• General outdoor skills: knots, map and compass navigation, tracking, climbing and ropework.

Communication and community

• Radio: CB, the family and business bands, and above all a ham license, which opens up long-range communication when phone networks fail. The ARRL explains how to get licensed.
• Bartering: trading and negotiating well are learned skills. Flea markets, swap meets and yard sales are good places to practice.
• Entertainment: an instrument, songs, stories, card games. Morale sinks in hard times, and someone who can lift a room is worth a great deal.

Nobody learns all of it

Looking down that list, it is obvious that any one of these could take a lifetime to master. That is the argument for community. A common saying among outdoor instructors holds that training beats gear, and community beats training. A circle of friends and neighbors who between them can garden, fix engines, treat injuries and run a radio is far better placed than any one family trying to do everything.

Time is the usual objection. Most people find it once the television goes off. Many of these skills can be learned together as a family, a garden or a car repair becoming a weekend project instead of a chore. Pick two or three, start this season, and add more as they stick.