[ccallebs]

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...

[vram22]

> 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.

[Symbiote]

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/

[vram22]

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.

[Symbiote]

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...

[ccallebs]

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.

[vram22]

Got it.

[mrfusion]

Iodine tablets are super cheap too.

[sp527]

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