Practical Prepping with Mark Lawley

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Today I'm talking with Mark Lawley at Practical Prepping. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Mark Lawley at Practical Prepping in Alabama. Good morning, Mark. How are you? Good morning, Mary. Doing well. How's the weather there this morning? This morning, it is fairly nice. We're at 83 degrees right now, which is a whole lot better than that 98 we were at last week.

00:30
Oh yeah, no doubt. It is exceedingly muggy in Minnesota this morning to the point that we had ground fog in our door yard this morning. We have had the exact same thing. I just looked over here at the weather station and we've got 76 % humidity here right now. Yeah, it's so gross. I can't wait until mid-September. Yeah, I'm ready for Thanksgiving.

00:55
I'm not quite there because I really do want our tomatoes to keep producing because we are going to be swimming in tomatoes by midweek next week. Well, we have some grandsons playing football and it's just not some, there's something not right about sitting at a football game wearing a t-shirt. You need to be wearing a jacket. And so I'm looking for football weather at least. Yeah. It's been.

01:21
I mean, I don't want to spend 20 minutes talking about the weather because it's boring, but the last two years have just been insane. And I really, really, really would like Mother Nature to become more moderate for next growing season because it has really messed with our farm. Yes. And not just the growing seasons and such, but you look around at some of the things that have happened this year. The floods, the earthquakes, the

01:50
The fires, the wildfires are somewhat normal. We're accustomed to having those. But we've been having more floods. We've been having, and in places that never flood, we've had hurricanes 200 miles inland that have caused floods, caused major power outages that have lasted four to six weeks in some areas.

02:16
And that's one of the reasons that we are trying to get people to be prepared. Yes, absolutely. And since we're talking about the weather, that actually was a really good lead-in to this particular episode. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Well, I'm retired law enforcement and have a long history of being involved in disaster relief.

02:46
I talk disaster relief, I've been on many disaster relief scenes coming in, in a number of capacities. And one of the capacities is chainsaw teams and mud out teams and such as that to help folks to recover afterwards. And what we actually do is we teach people how to be prepared for life's emergencies. That's what we do. Yep.

03:16
And really what we do from a prepping standpoint and you do from a homesteading standpoint is we live like our great grandparents and grandparents did in a lot of areas. Now, they didn't have all the modern conveniences that we have, but they prepared food for the winter. They had tools if something happened.

03:41
I have a house on the old home place where my dad grew up and where I grew up as a small kid. And when dad grew up, that was a working farm. When I grew up, it was a hobby farm. you didn't, if something broke, you didn't just jump in the truck and run to the store. You had to have on site what you needed to fix it or to deal with it. And it was just life for them. And so what we try to do.

04:12
is pretty much have everything that we could need. Well, to give you an example, last year I had a limb fall, poked a hole through the roof. So I got my ladder out, I got my things out, I went up there and I patched the roof. And about six months later we had a new roof put up. But I had those things to be able to do that. Something breaks, I want what I need here. And I learned some of that from my dad.

04:39
You need to have whatever you need to fix a problem at home. If it breaks at 10 o'clock on Tuesday, on, Saturday night. And that's plumbing, that's electrical, that's whatever. But I also have the skills to do those things. Yeah. I'm going to jump in just for a second. I am so baffled by the fact that so many young people don't have.

05:09
this information, you know, as part of their upbringing because I'm 55. Okay. My dad just turned 82 on July 30th and he acts like he's 55 still and he still acts like he needs to be ready for anything coming down the road. And he does, everybody does. Right. And they taught my siblings and I how to prepare for things that we couldn't see coming. Right.

05:39
And I taught my kids because they watched me do it when they were growing up. how in heck did we lose this? Well, we're two generations into soft. Let me call it that. We're two generations into being able to just call a plumber, call an electrician, call somebody, go to the store and get it, you know, whatever.

06:07
but we're into the quick fix. I joke about, we live in a microwave society. When my dad popped popcorn, that was a 20 or 30 minute process for us to have popcorn once a week, one night a week. And it was good. It was good popcorn. Well, today we have these packets of popcorn that are not all that bad, but you pop them into the microwave for 90 seconds.

06:37
And you know, that shortcuts the process quite a bit, but then here we are, we get impatient with it taking 90 seconds for our popcorn to get ready. So that's why I call it a microwave society. We're into instant gratification and we want that popcorn right now. We don't want to wait that 90 seconds. Yeah, which is just crazy. I, I understand that this is a thing that, that people

07:06
do. And we used to have an air popper, you know, the one that you plug into the wall. And I don't like it that way. I like it in a pan that has oil in the bottom and a little bit of salt and some corn kernels and you throw them in and you put the lid on and I like listening to it pop. And that may just be me, but it tastes really good when it's done. I think it tastes better. I really do. the, and Krista and I will do that once in a while.

07:36
But more often, if one of us wants some popcorn, we'll pop one of the little mini bags into the microwave and do that. Yep. I don't do that because there's stuff in there that I don't really know what it is and I don't want to put it into my body. will pass. I'm becoming more and more that way, but I've not completely made that transition.

08:02
Yeah, and it probably won't kill you, but I just, don't know. I like doing things from scratch and that's just, it's just me and my family. I was gonna say that I was listening to your podcast, one of the newer ones about food storage, you know, for having stuff for three to seven days or whatever it was. And one of the things that I didn't hear in that podcast is where

08:31
you can store stuff. Have you covered that on your podcast? We have covered that. We, when Krista and I first married 10 years ago and moved together and we were more or less starting over, we lived in an apartment for a couple of years and we did an episode on prepping in small places. And one of the things that we did in that apartment is we stored under beds,

09:01
We stored literally behind the couch, we had two of these columns that we had used in a display somewhere and we had a large glass top that went on top of those. So we put that behind the couch and Krista put a cover over that and we slid the couch back against it. And so we had all of that room under that particular table to store things.

09:28
We did the same thing with the round table that our television sat on. We put a floor length covering on it and we use the area under that table. But under bed storage is great. We stored in pretty much every corner in the closets. We stored things in the top of the closet. Some things we actually stored in the back of my pickup truck that was in

09:57
the parking lot, like 20 pound bottles of propane. They got real snippy about you having 20 pound bottles of propane at the apartment. I bet they did. I stored those. I had a locking cap on the pickup, so we stored those in there. And they just rode with us anywhere we went. We found all kinds of storage places. You can store under furniture.

10:26
I've known of some folks dedicating a couple of drawers out of dressers or chest of drawers and using those for storing food. You can store a lot in a small space. I didn't go back far enough in the episode to find it, but I just wanted to ask because that's a big thing for people who live in smaller spaces. Oh yes, definitely. And the other house that we have that's on the

10:53
old home place, the entire house is only a thousand square feet. and I raised a family there, but we had to have kind of unthought of storage. We stored a lot of things under the back porch. Now it was enclosed. Now I say the back porch, it was closed in, but we stored things under there. We stored things in the top of the closet in the laundry room. So,

11:22
You just have to get creative with it. Yep, absolutely. And I just wanted to hit on that because I lived in a really small house with my four kids and my husband up until five years ago. And we always bought things extra and put them away in case we needed them. Because Minnesota gets real cold, real icy, and real snowy in January. And sometimes you can't get out of your driveway. And so we've always planned ahead. We've always been.

11:51
Preppers in the true sense of the word, we are preparing for stuff that is going to happen. Right. And in Alabama, it doesn't take inches. Half inch of snow and the city shuts down, but we're not equipped to handle it. And it happens really rarely. Okay. It's not like this happens every year. Right. But every five to 10 years, we'll get one that will

12:21
have a lot of ice in it and maybe we're stuck inside for a week. So we were like you, we want to be able to not have to try to get out. Yep. Absolutely. And the other reason that I was very much looking forward to talking with you is I saw on the news either yesterday or today, I can't remember, that because of the tariffs that are going into place, coffee is going to go up.

12:51
And I, I am a coffee fiend addict. Pick any word that says I love coffee. I'm right there with you. Yeah. I don't measure what I drank by cups. No. I drank a pot in the morning and a pot in the afternoon. I used to, I have no cutback. I drink about a half a pot in the morning and a cup in the afternoon because

13:16
It was starting to make my stomach hurt and I was too jittery and I'm like, nope, I'm not young enough to keep putting away two pots a day. I promised the sheriff that I would never see the public without having had at least two cups of coffee. So that's, that's how people stay alive. Yes. Either way, anyone who loves coffee should probably start buying an extra bag or two when they go shopping. Cause you can still get it at the price it's at now.

13:45
Another short period of time. Yeah. period of time. Yeah. I'm very sad about this because I don't want to give up coffee if I don't have to. Well, that's one of those things that I will find a way to afford the coffee. They're just certain non-negotiables. Good coffee. And I want the good stuff when it comes to toilet tissue. don't want the cheap stuff. So we will find a way.

14:15
Yup. I'm also concerned about salt and sugar because salt and sugar are really, really important things in your diet. They make food worth eating. And I don't know if there is a really good sugar, cane sugar producing place in the States because I'm not, that's not what I focus on. And I don't know about salt, but I'm guessing we import a lot of salt and sugar. We do.

14:44
Now I do know when I was a kid, there were a number of folks that raised sugar cane and they actually had the cane mills at home that were driven by the donkey and they would make sagam, we called it, sagam syrup. And it makes a great sweetener. does change the taste of some things, but

15:11
grandmother used to use it all the time when she was cooking cakes. She would use that instead of sugar. so there are some alternatives, but I don't know about salt. I don't think we produce any salt in the United States. Yeah, I'm going to have to Google it. I could be wrong on that. Yeah, I don't know, but I...

15:38
really feel like we all should maybe start stocking up on the things that are everyday usage, like coffee and salt and sugar, because it's going to get real spendy here real soon. And that's what we've said for years. We talk about storing food and we say over and over and over again, stock what you eat. That way you will eat what you normally eat.

16:08
Rather than going, and I don't have anything really against the emergency foods, the freeze dried, they have their place, but that you don't want to have to dig into that because of a tariff. You don't want to have to dig into that because of a 10 day snowstorm. Right. Or a week long snowstorm. When we wrote our second book, Practical Prepping for Everyday People,

16:36
was doing some research and at that time, think this has changed now because people are waking up, but at that time, 45 % of households in America did not have three days worth of food in the house. Yeah. That'll get us in trouble. That'll get us in big trouble. Yep. I can't imagine that. We haven't lived that way in over 25 years. I can't.

17:06
I cannot begin to imagine that we have, I don't want to go into too much detail, but we probably have enough food to last at least three weeks, if not a month. And that's just because of the way that we do it. It would get really old and really boring after the first two weeks. Well, it wouldn't for us and we could go a lot longer than that, but it would not get boring because we store what we normally use.

17:35
And Christa can make things from scratch using what we have. She can pull out a recipe book and she can pull out canned vegetables. She can pull out, you know, dried meats or canned meats, things like that. So she can feed us what we normally eat. And here for a while, what we've been doing, we've been trying to eat through some of our preps and

18:03
One of the things is she's pretty much when, when she does grocery runs, she's buying perishable. She's buying bread and fresh fruits, fresh vegetables. but we do have those things canned if we could not go. Yep, absolutely. And we have, we have some things canned. we don't can a lot of green vegetables because my husband doesn't eat them.

18:29
And so there's always some for me, but we don't do a lot because he's never gonna eat them and I can't eat enough of them to rotate them out. But yeah, I don't know where I was going with that. It doesn't really matter. I just feel like there are so many things up in the air right now in the world that if you aren't thinking at least a month to six months down the road right now, you're kind of doing it wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

19:00
If you have to go to the store when they mentioned the snow word, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. Unless it happens to be the day that you go to stock up every two weeks and then you're doing it right. Well, when we go to stock up, we're down to where we normally are. when, um, Krista and I were both diagnosed with COVID at the same time, early on, and the county said,

19:29
You can't come to work for five days and Krista couldn't work for five days. And so we looked at each other and said, wow, we're stuck in the house together for five days. And it was a bad case of sniffles is really what that particular one was. Now I had, I think I've had it five times, something like that. But the first time in December before they really identified it, I was pretty sick with that one.

19:59
My son and I were too, actually. But a couple of times there, it was like, oh, okay. And one time they had to tell us we had COVID and I wondered if the test came preloaded with COVID, but that's a different discussion. Uh-huh. But we didn't have any problem during that. mean, us going five days without going to the grocery store, that was nothing. That really, I mean, it's just, okay, what do you want to eat today?

20:29
And we had what we'd normally eat stocked up. So we advocate and I tell folks, know, FEMA and what have you recommend three days. Red Cross recommends having three days, 72 hours. And 72 hours is a good start. But if you go back into the fifties and early sixties, the civil defense had a program called Grand Malice Pantry.

20:58
And they encouraged every family to have two weeks worth of food. Now, where did we drop off of the two weeks? And I understand what that program was for. And it was really to show the foreign actors that, hey, America is preparing to survive a nuclear war. had the duck and cover drill, so you're not quite old enough.

21:27
probably to have done those. I actually got under the desk and put my hands over my head, my rear end sticking up in the air. And that's how we joke about, I bought a nuclear shelter and it's an old school desk. But what it did is it said, hey, we're preparing to survive a nuclear attack.

21:56
Yeah. It wouldn't do any good if you were anywhere near the blast, but if you were certain distance away in school and all it did really was blow the windows out, you were kind of protected under that desk. You really were. So, you know, if they dropped it 75 miles from you, 50 miles from you, it might actually protect you. But we joke about that today, the duck and cover.

22:24
and Burt the Turtle. And if your listeners aren't familiar with Burt the Turtle, go to YouTube and look up Burt the Turtle. It's cartoon things that we actually watched in school and it was about surviving nuclear attacks. have a question for you. That was when you were a kid. That was when I was a kid. Did it give you nightmares? No, not really. Okay, good. And here's the

22:52
One of the reasons behind that is that my dad was good about saying, look, this is probably not going to happen. But on the other hand, they're teaching us what to do to stay safe. So we were old enough to understand that we're doing something to keep us safe, but we weren't old enough to understand that getting under the desk is useless.

23:22
Uh, we, we did not have nightmares. I don't know of anybody that actually had nightmares about that. Okay. Well, I feel like I grew up in the golden age of being alive because I started kindergarten in I think 1975, 76, and I graduated in 1988. And I, I mean, we talked about the cold war, but that was starting to ease up.

23:49
There were no getting under the desk drills. had fire drills. Everybody does, but that wasn't scary because that was just like, okay, yeah, we're going outside. It's a drill, whatever. The thing that was scary for me is when my kids started having to do the lockdown drills at school and that will scare the living hell out of you as a parent, especially when it's not a drill. When you get the message that your school is actually under lockdown, whether there's an active shooter or not. And so.

24:19
Like I said, I feel like I grew up in a golden bubble of feeling like the world was safe. And it probably wasn't any safer than it is now, but it felt that way. Yeah. I don't know that it's any safer today. Probably the closest we've ever come was the Cuban nuclear, the Cuban crisis. And I do remember that. Yeah. I had already graduated high school when you went to kindergarten.

24:48
Yeah. But, um, yeah, I'm old. Okay. Um, some of the guys that I used to work with. not old, you're experienced. Well, yeah. Some, some of the guys I used to work with thought that I was in, thought that I was in the revolutionary war. And they joked around. I told them when I went to the police academy, they taught us where to park our horse when we got to the car. And, you know, very important.

25:17
tie up your horse so he doesn't wander off. Yes. But that, I do remember a lot of things that a lot of this generations today may have studied in school or may not. In fact, one private school has me come and talk to the history class because I actually did duck and cover drills and they don't

25:43
Even their parents didn't do that. They have to go back to their grandparents for that. But I have a, you know, I have a granddaughter that turned 33 yesterday. So yeah, I'm kind of on the old side, but it's fun getting old fun. Old folks and clowns can do a lot of things that general public can't get away with. That is true. And.

26:10
getting older is a privilege denied to many. I hope to get old someday. Yeah, I'm shooting for 106. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. I would tell you what my dad is shooting for, but I don't talk politics on my podcast. I will tell you afterwards. He me the other day and I was like, that's not a long time to shoot for. You want to live to be like a hundred, right? He said,

26:37
If I manage to get another three and a half years, I'll be thrilled. was like, okay, good. As far as politicians, if I could live long enough to see an honest politician. That would be sweet, wouldn't it? What would I be 500 years old? I hope it's sooner than that. I really do. Yeah. All right, Mark, I try to keep these to half an hour and I want to make sure that I get your

27:02
what you're doing to get the information out to people. So you have your podcast, you have blog posts, what else? We have a Facebook group with 115,000 members in that and it's called, it's called Practical Prepping. That's a free group. We have a newsletter that will go out later today. That's a weekly newsletter.

27:27
We've designed courses to teach people to be prepared, how to do things. One that we're finishing up now is building a get home bag. We have built a getting started in food storage and coming up in September, September the 4th, I believe it is, we're doing a live webinar that is teaching you how to get started in prepping.

27:57
And building a 72 hour kit. Now this is not a get home bag. This is not a bug out bag. This is how to build what you need to survive 72 hours at home. This covers the power being out and the snow storm and you can't go out. That's kind of the idea there. I asked the question of people you wake up tomorrow morning, there's 48 inches of snow on the ground. No power. You're not going anywhere.

28:26
How long can you keep your family fed and warm? And that's what we're about. And everything is at practicalprepping.info. Just one word, practicalprepping.info. And you can sign up for the newsletter there. There's a waiting list at practicalprepping.info forward slash workshop.

28:53
because the registration for that will open August the 14th, I think. But you can get on that waiting list and we'll email you when we do that. So we're just trying to get folks to be prepared. You have a very good heart and so does your wife. Well, thank you. I want to have you back when Krista has time to join us because

29:18
Your wife has the most beautiful voice and I think that people would love to hear her thoughts on all of this too. Not only does she have a beautiful voice, she is a lot better looking than I am. So those that do video really prefer having her than me. I was going to tell you before we started recording that you two are a very handsome couple. photo on your Facebook page. was like, wow, are they cute? Well, thank you.

29:48
That was shot at the Huntsville, Alabama Space and Rocket Center under a Saturn rocket. Nice. And that was actually a selfie and it turned out to be one of the best photographs of the two of us ever made. It looks like a studio portrait. Well, I did photography for a number of years, so I'm pretty good with Photoshop. I can put hair on me and I can take wrinkles off women.

30:16
I can take 20 pounds off of anybody. So I didn't have to do much to her at all, but it's almost virtually unretouched. She did some things with the background, but we do appreciate that. She would enjoy this and you would enjoy talking with her. She can talk more about the food storage and what we store and how we store and how she rotates. One of the things that she does, now we

30:46
We call it our prepper room. It's just a closet that was built so that the air handling unit for that heating and air unit could be in there and not be right out in the public area of the house. And it's just a large closet. So she uses that, there's shelves in there. And so she has her small pantry in the kitchen that is her kitchen pantry.

31:13
And when she runs low there, she shops our prepper pantry. And so she goes and she gets what she needs there. And then from the store on the next trip, she'll replace the things that she used from the prepper pantry. And it goes to the back so that it's first in, first out. It rotates and she'll rotate through it in well less than a year. Probably every six months or so that everything in there.

31:43
Almost everything in there turns over. There's some things in there that we don't have to. Some rice, some beans, things like that, that will last almost forever. Infinite shelf life. That's actually a good tip if you're going to start storing food for prepping. You want to make sure that you actually use it as you go because stuff will go bad.

32:12
It will. And, you know, they call it a best buy date on the can. That's when it's supposed to be at its peak. Yeah. But can goods even will last years beyond that date. And a lot of people don't realize that, but it will last years beyond that date. Tomatoes or high acid food is one of the exceptions. You don't want to go too far past that. No.

32:42
No, you do not. reasons is the acid will eat into the lining of the can and you wind up with other issues. you know, we've got a lot of that kind of information on our website as well. I love it, Mark. I'm so glad that you were willing to come chat with me because all of this is really important and it's so sad that we've lost all of this history and skill regarding how to take care of ourselves. Yep.

33:12
Exactly. And being self-sufficient. Now we're not really homesteading here. We have grown some of our own food. We actually did not do a garden this year because of some other issues, but we're about to build a greenhouse and Krista wants to try to grow some winter vegetables in a greenhouse. So we've got the space here and we've got a

33:38
concrete pad that's not being used and it just looks like an ideal place to put a greenhouse. So that's one thing and next year we're planning to have a large garden here. Our in-laws, my in-laws, this was actually their house. They passed away a number, several years ago and we purchased the house from the family and father-in-law had a huge garden out here. I mean, he fed everybody he knew.

34:06
out of that garden and it was just the two of them here. But I don't know that we're going to go that big. mean, he had about a third of the property in garden and we just, you know, we want to do a small garden for us and family and start putting some things up that we can, that we grew. And then like you said earlier, you know what you're eating. The ingredients are beans and water. Yep, exactly.

34:36
Okay. Tell me your sort of tagline about no zombies, no whatever. Oh, oh, the introduction to the podcast. And Krista always does this, but it's the podcast where there's no bunkers, no zombies, and no alien invasions. And then we drop a little, when no bunkers, you hear this door slamming, no zombies, you hear this zombie squeal.

35:05
Uh huh. And no alien invasions. That is actually a little clip from one of the 1950s alien movies. So it's just a real cute thing. And then she says it's just practical prepping because we're not prepping for zombies. Right. If we ever do have zombies, we'll address it. We'll deal with it. I can only hope it's the slow walkers, not the runners. Oh, you and me both, darling.

35:36
But it just, you know, it's about the practical stuff. We prep for next Tuesday. We don't prep for, you know, nuclear holocaust and all of those kinds of things. The reason I asked you to tell me is because I heard it and giggled, but mostly because if people want to learn about practical prepping, you can go to practicalprepping.info and get information without feeling like the world is going to end.

36:02
tomorrow, and that maybe you'll be prepared for something that is going to happen tomorrow. Somebody said one time that, y'all just pedal fear. You haven't listened to the podcast or looked at the website. No. We don't pedal fear. We pedal peace. We want people to have the peace. It's like when we had COVID, we went, When the shelves were empty, okay. You know, we've got what we normally eat.

36:33
That's just, it's personal responsibility is what it is, Mary. Absolutely. We have to take care of ourselves. Yes. Because help's not coming. And if it does come, and in a lot of disasters, it is coming. But I can tell you, you're on your own for the first 72 hours anyway. I've even heard FEMA say that, you're on your own for the first 72 hours. So we've got to be our...

37:02
our own providers, we've got to be our own first responders, we've got to be our own medics, we've got to have the things to address whatever could happen to us in a disaster. Absolutely. All right, Mark, thank you so much for your time. Again, people, if you want to learn about prepping, go to practicalprepping.info and you can find all the Mark and Krista Lawley stuff you ever wanted. And you can find me at attinyhomesteadpodcast.com.

37:32
Thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate it. You are very welcome. And if people have questions, drop us an email. We're glad to answer questions. There's even a way to put up an audio message on the podcast if you want to ask a question on the podcast and we can answer it there. But we communicate with people all the time answering questions. Glad to do it. All right. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Thank you, Mary. You have a great day too. All right. Bye.