You must have food in order to survive an Ebola outbreak. You should start now planning on how you’re going to feed yourself and your family in the event that the outbreak reaches a crisis level in your area like it’s reached in its host country.
Remember that it’s always better to be prepared and not need it than to need it and not have a way to get it. Food security can go a long way toward easing the stress and fear that always accompanies a pandemic.
There are three ways that you can prepare to feed yourself and your loved ones during an Ebola outbreak. You can use gardens, both indoor and outdoor and you can begin to store food right now for survival.
Indoor Survival Garden
Growing food indoors helps you be able to keep an eye on the growth rate and watch out for any potential risks. It’s one of the easiest ways to grow food. There are some foods you can grow indoors that you want to pay special attention to because of the way the foods can help strengthen your immune system.
You’ll find many of these foods in the fruit family. One of these foods you can grow indoors is blueberries. Blueberry plants can grow to a good height, so 
you’ll need some room – but what they give you back in return is worth it. Blueberries contain antioxidants that help your body. The berries can be eaten as a snack or added to other foods. They can also be canned. Strawberries are another fruit you can easily grow inside your home.
They give your body some great benefits, too, and can also be added to other foods and made into preserves. Tomatoes also grow well indoors. Many of the foods that you can grow outside can be grown inside the home.
That includes green foods such as broccoli and kale. Squash can also be grown in an indoor garden. It can take some time to grow a sustainable garden, so you don’t want to waste any time getting started.
Go ahead now and gather the supplies you need such as soil, containers, lighting, and whatever the plants need to grow well. You can pick up starter plants or use seed packets.
Some places offer packets of starter plants or seeds already bundled for a survival garden. To get the number of fruits and vegetables you have to have to take care of your needs, you have to provide for the plant’s needs.
This means that you need to be sure you have a way to give the plants the amount of sunlight they need to use for growth. Most people don’t have enough windows that let in the sunlight for the number of plants they want to grow.
So what some of these indoor gardeners do is use lights that can mimic natural sunlight. This helps the plant grow as if it were planted outside. The best choice for the type of lighting to use is to pick up on the metal halide ones.
Hidden Gardens
When a pandemic hits, life can quickly get into an uproar. The risk of martial law is high because ordinary citizens will often become desperate in their attempts to get what they need to survive.
This means that people who would normally obey the laws of the land won’t – because they’ll be looking for a way to survive, too. The unprepared won’t hesitate to come after the goods of the prepared.
So you don’t want to make it obvious that you’re well prepared for an outbreak. These kinds of gardens blend in with their surroundings and don’t look noticeable to anyone who might happen to be passing by. It’s tucked away right in the middle of natural vegetation, so it just looks like a brush. But you can grow foods from hidden gardens, also called permaculture gardens, with minimal effort.
These types of gardens don’t take a lot of room or time to build. And they’re capable of more yield than a regular garden. It can feed you for a good length of time without you having to use any kind of pesticide treatment and without you having to pull out any pesky weeds.
These kinds of gardens use natural compost so the soil is always rich and ready. Nature knows how to protect itself and how to thrive what it grows without any help from man.
This is what you can tap into when you’re using hidden gardens to grow food. If you’ll notice, in nature, there never seems to be a shortage of rich, vibrant plants in shady areas.
That’s because that’s what those plants need to thrive and you’ll use the same concept when you’re planting. You’ll put things that need shade closer to the taller plants and trees that provide it.
For plants that need more sunlight, you’ll lay them out beyond the shade scope. You’ll also put into place plants that will naturally protect your garden from animals that would eat it.
Every animal has a type of plant, flower, vegetable, or fruit that it knows instinctively to avoid. You’ll plant these items in a way that will circle and protect your items.
When planting a hidden garden, you don’t lay one out the way you would a regular garden. These kinds aren’t planted as row after row of plants or seeds. Instead, they’re planted as layers.
So when someone walks upon it, all they see is ground cover – but what can actually be there is something like beans, cucumbers, blueberries, and more. To someone who doesn’t know what he’s looking for, it all looks like overgrown nature.
The way that you’ll make sure that your garden has enough water to sustain it is by using natural rainwater. In nature, rain always runs from higher ground to lower ground.
You can use water runoff from above your garden to collect and water your plants from the ground up by using ridges to keep the water where you need it to be.
Survival Food Storage
You want to stockpile food while there’s still time. The stuff that you get from the grocery store isn’t going to last forever, but there are ways you can store food so that it keeps for several years and helps you and your family survive.
If you start now, you can have your supply on hand before there’s a rush in grocery stores and the supplies you want are gone. The way that you store food will determine if it will make it for the long haul or not.
Food can keep in dry, cool storage for many years – even beyond the expiration date labeled on the product. Extreme temperatures and moisture are culprits that cause food to begin to break down and make it inedible.
Store foods that have a long shelf life. These are foods like beans and grains. Meats may not be as plentiful during a pandemic, so beans will give you protein and grains will help you feel fuller.
The best kinds of grains to store are ones like cornmeal, flour, wheat, and brown rice. Since dairy may be an issue if you don’t have a cow that produces milk, you’ll want to lay aside a supply of powdered milk.
This is a product that can be safely kept for decades before being used. Always get your staples first. You can survive a long time with just staples and while it might not be a fancy feast, it will keep you from going hungry.
So if you have to financially choose where to start, begin by stockpiling your staples. This is how people in the olden days managed to make it year after year on very few items purchased from the general stores.
The foods you want to start with are foods like flour, peanut butter, sugar, seeds, honey, tea, lard, oils, coffee, and canned goods. While some people don’t necessarily think of canned goods as staples, when it comes to surviving, they are.
Canned goods are foods that have one of the longest shelf lives and can also last for many years. Make sure that if you have small children or an infant, that you take into account their nutritional needs such as if you need baby formula.
The powered cans of formula can also last for many years – long enough for a child to be weaned. The place you keep your food should have a temperature of right around 50-58 degrees for maximum storage length.
There are containers that you can buy specifically to store the food. You’ll want to do this to protect foods that come in bags because rodents can gnaw through the bags.
Place the foods into the container and seal them up. Always label every container in your storage area so that you don’t have to open them to find out what’s inside.
Oxygen is not a friend to your stored food and will quickly spoil your supply. Don’t rely too much on freezer foods because you never know how long you may or may not have electricity to keep your refrigerator and freezer in working condition.
Even in the event of a pandemic, you might have power outages because the people running the grids will be susceptible to disease, too – and there may not be enough people to keep things running smoothly.
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