What does fall mean to you? For many of us, it represents the welcome relief of cooler temperatures following a hot summer.
We also love fall colors as leaves in our area and in neighboring states turn beautiful shades of red, orange, and yellow.
Fall is a great time to get outdoors and enjoy the weather, the sights, and the sounds of the season. It’s also a good time to think about how our fall activities relate to preparedness.
Today I’m going to provide you with 13 fall activity ideas and their connection with getting ready for a crisis. In each case, I hope you can combine family fun with survival preparation.
13 ways to fall in love with preparing
- Take a hike in the woods or in a state park. While getting back to nature, you can practice for a potential bug-out in the woods. Including distinguishing between safe and unsafe plants and berries.
- Go on a camping trip. This will be good practice for preparing to take care of your power, food, and shelter needs in the outdoors. It will remind you of which portable items you most need when you’re on the go.
- Get lost in a corn maize. Then use your deductive reasoning and any tools at your disposal such as a GPS to practice escaping from a situation in which you feel trapped in order to reach safety.
- Walk or run a fall 5K. This is a great way to help build up the stamina you will need for a bug-out and/or survival scenario.
- Visit a farmer’s market and purchase fresh fruits and vegetables you can freeze for meals in the winter when it may be too cold to go to the store.
- Plant fall crops in your garden for harvesting later in the year or in the spring. Some plants do very well in the fall, including carrots, beets, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach.
- Carve pumpkins. This is good practice for using a survival knife, as you may be out of the habit of using it regularly.
- Set up an apple toss. Aiming for a basket will help improve the physical dexterity you will need to deal with an emergency.
- Rake leaves. Does that sound more like work than play? Well, think about some of the preparedness uses you could have for leaves. Including composting for your garden, saving for tinder, cushioning your feet to avoid blisters, and insulation and padding for a sleeping bag,
- Take family fall photos. You can enjoy these outdoors photos now, but also save them for potential identification purposes should your family get separated during a disaster.
- Go to the library on an inclement day when you can’t enjoy the outdoors and check out a couple of books on survival and preparedness.
- Get a jumpstart on holiday shopping. This is also a very good reminder to get ahead in your preparedness efforts.
- Use a mini solar-powered generator to power a slow cooker to make a hot meal or heat up your apple cider during a power outage. This will be good practice should a blackout last longer than normal this fall or winter.
Fall is a wonderful season to enjoy the outdoors. But why not learn a few things about preparedness along the way?
