Starting out as a suburban, renting prepper

My advice: less reading/watching/listening, more doing.

I'm not sold on the 'all preppers must have a home garden' mantra. If you took an hour per day normally spent in the garden, and invested that hour in overtime to buy extra food, your yield per hour of effort, and your food store would be significantly greater.

Prepping is about building resilience. Being able to withstand interruptions to your supply of food, water, energy, income. It is about going without some luxury items now so that you have the basic items you need in the future. You don't need a bugout bag unless you have somewhere safer to bugout to, you don't need a collection of knives or machetes or gas masks. What you do need is a store of food and water and other niceties (some would call necessities).

What are the risks.  Blackout, no food in the stores, water systems get contaminated, flood and fire.  

Blackout
I would start with a means to cook without electricity - small propane stove $20, $10 for propane
Torches, candles, hurricane lamp ($15) with oil ($10).


Food

Like $300 can get you 3 months food supply.

Long term grain storage 10 x 10kg rice, beans, wheat. Put them in the freezer for a week to kill any bugs/weevils etc… then into a food grade 10L bucket, with oxygen absorbers – will store for decades..


Water
Learn how to sterilize water and keep containers handy when power trip to fill up. know local water sources - bores, dames etc...

Emergency kit.
Does not have to cost much – even if just a list of what to pack in an emergency can make a big difference.
www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/plan-and-prepare/prepare-your-family/emergency-survival-kit


Security
Have a password with family members and a meeting location if have to evacuate.

Hi gl

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If you are logged in as a guest you can't see it - have to log in as a member.

Gday Glenlivet and welcome to the forum 😊 good to have you here

We have moved 8 times in 11 years and we once we had to ditch a few hundred $ of tinned food (interstate move, tight space... ended up donating it to a food bank. Our loss, their gain).

I hear you on not having a lot of space and what it looks like when you need to move (again).

I have thought about getting a storage unit for a few weeks across a move and dumping preps into that, then getting help with the actual move, then grabbing preps back from storage after the move...

As for inspections and stuff, our food and supplies stash isn't all in one place to make them less obvious. We have storage boxes under our bed with a few days of food (and I mean everything for a few days: oats and powdered milk for breakky, pasta, tin veggies, pasta sauce for dinners etc). We also have a (rat proof!) container of rice tucked into a plant stand and other bits and pieces like that.

Prepping isn't just keeping extra supplies on hand, either. It's also making sure you have a pair of good boots that are gonna go the distance if the music stops and cheap imports aren't happening- same with things like a good pair of gloves, work clothes, well made stuff that isn't gonna fall apart in the washer in 6 mths.

Same with skills - such as building practical skills so you have a fall back if your main line of work falls through. Volunteering with the SES is a really good way to learn practical skills that makes you way more useful in times of disaster.

Oops that was a longer post than i meant 🤦🏻‍♀️ sorry! But hopefully there was something in there you can use

Welcome. If you're able to work remotely I would distance myself from the burbs as much as is practicable. Further from the city, your lease renewals are probably more secure and you'll have more space to sort/develop your preps. That move equates to a lifestyle change. Contemplating that change makes one consider just how serious you are about the threat of (your vision of) SHTF and what you're prepared to do about it. Speaking from personal experience, it was life changing, but I/we were at a point in life where life changing was a possibility.

I get your point but that one hour per day to tend to a garden to help grow food when one day you may run out might be a good learning experience. Not having that education might be detrimental to long term survival. Growing simple veg like potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic,chillies, toms and herbs and spices etc. Staples.

Welcome to the jungle! lol.


I too am an urban prepper dealing with reduced storage space. It's a pain in the neck sometimes but there's definitely ways to do it if you're creative. How you manage storage and your options really depends on what you're prepping for, and what the plan is in the event that your situation actually occurs. A lot of folks (myself included) are concerned with economic crisis and food/supply shortage. Others are worried about war on our shores, environmental disaster etc. etc. The reason that I bring this up is that as an urban prepper you'll have to be a bit more selective about what you prep to maximise the space that you do have. Some things you won't necessarily need depending on what your concern is. 
I prep for the things that I think are likely, then possible, then unlikely. In that order. But my list of possibilities might be different to someone else's. That's the personal opinion piece and you're not wrong no matter what you consider important because at the end of the day any preps are better than none in almost every situation.


Do you want to bug in, or out? Do you have a family (partner/kids/furbabies) to consider in your planning? Do you know where you'll go? How long will it take to get there? All of those things will answer to how you use the space that you have. It can feel pretty overwhelming at first, so I started with the simple stuff.



I started with a basic get home bag in my car. I added the things that I thought I would need to get home from the farthest distance that I might travel from my home. There's heaps of lists online of things to include, but don't get roped into buying expensive items straight away if money is a consideration. You've made it this far without needing a get home bag. You'll survive a few months more with less than optimal kit or even waiting to buy something more expensive.
The only things that I refused to scrimp on when getting started was a good knife, a good torch, and good shoes. Everything else I was ok with spending a little less on as I knew they were only temporary and I gradually replaced them with more durable items as time went on. 

Then after that I started working on the stores for home. You said you don't have much space as you're in an apartment, that's an annoying to deal with. I would consider buying a water-tight chest from a disposal store or the like where you can get ones that are very rugged and designed to stay outdoors in the weather. Whack it up one end of your balcony and you can start to build a store of things that you can rely on if times are hard. Rice, dried beans etc. That kind of thing you'll need to store carefully because of the chance of water, and you'll need to check seals regularly and chuck in something to absorb moisture just in case. But you can get a good bit of storage that way, and as a bonus it's all in one moveable container if you need to throw it in your car to get out of dodge.
Under your bed behind couches and void spaces between furniture (like next to your fridge) can all be used. As for moving every six months, having things in pre-organised containers like crates does make life a lot easier. You can also stack them to use space in rooms that you might otherwise not use. I hate visual clutter in my home so I tend to not do that but I also have the luxury of a full garage to store things so it's what you're willing and able to tolerate I guess.

As for reading/watching/listening, a few I'd recommend are The Casual Preppers podcast - They're pretty down to earth and go at it with a sense of humour which I really appreciate, and on Youtube City Prepping and The Urban Prepper, Canadian Prepper, older Guildbrook Farm videos (they've become a channel about their house build but some of their older vids are really informative), Mary's Nest (for pantry/stockpiling tips and ideas), and purely for resilience/defence style videos I'm a big fan of the Warrior Poet. 
Most of those content creators are relatively benign when it comes to political leanings and religion. But when they do go a bit sideways I just ignore that bit and go for the useful info. I do watch a couple of more conservative creators but to be honest I've mostly cut those away as the ranting rhetoric became a bit tiresome. There's a lot of books and the like out there but I find videos and podcasts tend to be a bit more easily digestible as I can watch/listen while doing other things.

That's probably the main things I would look at to get started. It's a lot of info and it can be easy to feel swamped initially so having a plan of how you're going to tackle things can help. But there's plenty of folks out there (and here) in the community who will be happy to help and share their experience. 

When we moved to our bug out location about 16 years ago, we bought a used 20 foot shipping container to pack the other farm into. Now its a ideal storage unit for food, spare electronics as its probably pretty well emp proof, and easy to move around if we need to.
You may be able to get a container, and put it in a storage unit so its easy to get to if needed, then when u get some land, just hire a truck and move it. Its could even be already set up with shelves etc ready to go.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks - Old Indian proverb.

I suppose given the right conditions anyone can be a gardener, ive often just thrown seed in the ground and watered intermittently and had good results with a few veg varieties like snake beans and squash to name a couple. Depends on the area though, where i am everything seems to grow well south eastern qld. I truly believe anyone in an urban setting when shtf kicks off is going to be in a hard situation, if wrol then every man, woman, child, cat and dog for themselves and its gonna be absolute chaos !