It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to think about one of the more disturbing threats to a hearty survival stash: less-prepared people. Not everyone has a armored doomsday bunker to stash their food and supplies, so here are a few simple tricks for hiding the things that will be highly sought after-and potentially even banned or confiscated-after SHTF.
Use Decoys
When people are scavenging, they’re going to grab the first things they can find. So consider placing small amounts of food or less valuable supplies in more obvious places, while using the more ingenious hiding places for your longer-lasting and more valuable food and supplies. For example, if you have your stash buried under the floor boards of your shed, make sure to keep some things above ground that would appear to be a jackpot should anyone come looking. One particularly clever suggestion is if you are hiding guns and ammo, bury them underneath some old junk, so if someone is using a metal detector they’ll get a “false positive” and stop digging once they find the scrap metal.
Think Like a Scavenger
If you were hunting for food, would you look in cabinets and boxes and buckets, or would you look in old TVs or old bottles of bleach or broken down appliances? Yes, odds are if you were really hungry you’d look everywhere, but this is an elaboration on the method of using decoys: think of the most-likely places one would look for hidden food and supplies, but your decoy stash there, and hide the rest elsewhere. Get creative and try to think as counter-intuitively as possible. Decorative pillows, covert furniture, old shampoo bottles, inside a lamp or in the wall are all possibly unlikely hiding places.
Camouflage
Obviously, when hiding something, concealment is key. And sometimes the best hiding places can be in plain sight. Painting containers camouflage and hiding in some weeds that are unlikely to be searched, or painting a PVC tube like bark and placing in a tree are good examples; taking advantage of the appearance of the natural landscape and hiding supplies in out-of-the-way places is a very good option, but probably better for supplies rather than food as wildlife can be considerably harder to trick than humans after all.
Creativity
This is essentially an elaboration on all of the above, but creativity is probably the most crucial element here. Everyone’s supplies and house and resources available to them is going to be different-just try to think outside the box, work with what you have, experiment, etc. As with anything in survivalism preparedness is key, and you’ll thank yourself later if you think ahead today.