Freezing Spinach – Unlocking its Durability and Versatility

If you had to build a compound to survive the apocalypse what kind of defenses would it have (realistically)?

Excellent question.
I assume by “compound” you don’t mean your shed in the back yard of an urban home. I assume you have some land.
There are varying degrees of preparedness, and expense. There is a “better than nothing” approach, a “good enough” mindset, a good, better, and best way to do anything. I will describe the best way, but every strategy or action can be adapted.
Survival, short, medium, and long term, has prioritized considerations. All crises have the same prioritization, though what’s of immediate concern, may give way to longer term objectives as you go. Preparing for a specific crisis makes you better prepared for any crisis. If you live in Florida, hurricanes might be your immediate concern, but preparing for hurricanes will make you better prepared for an apocalypse.
Every crisis plan has the same priorities
1 – Physical security. Is someone shooting at you, is the wind blowing really hard, is it -40°, is it flooding … you need fortified shelter more than anything, and unless you’re in the tropics, you need heat. My compound is high above sea level, in the Rocky Mountains, way up north. A source of heat is my number one priority. You will need weapons for a variety of reasons, but we’ll address that as a separate subject later.
2 – Clean air. Your shelter needs a source of clean, filtered air. Your heat or cooking will need it too, or it will use all of yours. You should have more than one intake, and they should be remote, surreptitious, hidden, unapproachable, secret. If your shelter is under assault, you don’t want your assailant to simply gas your air, or seal it off.
3 – Clean water. You need a source of fresh water, AND the ability to filter all water, AND an ability to boil water. Store as much as you can. If you’re in a house in the city, start with some 5 gallon jugs, and rotate them. If you’re building a compound, buy a 100,000 gallon water tank if you can afford it, 5 thousand gallon is common and will provide a years worth of cooking and drinking water. Bury it at a higher elevation than your shelter. Water doesn’t keep forever, it becomes stagnant, grows bacteria, or becomes otherwise contaminated. So you need purification. If you can keep it frozen, it will stay fresh. You should have a very well secured source, and more than one source is better. Water can be sabotaged like air. Have the ability to regularly test your water.
4 – Food. In the short term that means calories, in the longer term, that means nutrition. In a perfect world, you will have the ability (knowledge, seeds, fertile soil, and security) to grow your own food for generations to come, but there are many scenarios that you will not be able to. Buy dehydrated, or freeze dried, rations that keep for 25 years without refrigeration. Bulk products like dried beans, rice, corn, lentils, oats, hard wheat … are cheapest, but there are commercial products that sell MREs in Mylar packages and sealed plastic pails. Do the math of how much you’ll need, and how much you can afford. Google “Pemmican”, learn how to make Spam, or just buy a bunch. If you can keep it frozen at -40° or colder, you should can, “fresh” (frozen but you’d never know it) meat, butter, sauces, … you name it. You can have “fresh” meat for 25 years too, without hunting or ranching. I’ll tell you how to build a cryogenic freezer that will keep at -80° without any electricity. You will need to periodically recompress the nitrogen. Store vitamins, and concentrated vegetable and fruit capsules. You can and freeze them too. Buy frozen fruit concentrate to make juice. Vegetable juice too.
5 – Health and hygiene. Although this isn’t an immediate concern, it is at least as important as the rest. Let a cut get infected and all the compound, guns, stored food, and preparation in the world isn’t going to save you. First aid supplies, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, bleach, SOAP, toilet paper, wet wipes, Vaseline, hand and body lotion, mercurochrome, colloidal silver, any cleaning and disinfecting products. Water treatment and sewage are top priorities.
6 – Duct tape. I’m not kidding. Bailing twine, cotton string, hemp, jute, para cord, stainless steel tie wire, steel cable.
Anonymity and secrecy is by far your best defense. No one breaks into a paupers home. So camouflage everything, hide, don’t brag, never give locations, keys, codes, to anyone, and never share pictures.
Inconvenience is the next best defense. Choose property off the beaten path, on the way to nowhere. If no one drives by your property, they aren’t wondering what’s up that road. If a marauder has to walk 10 miles across a barren field, or over a mountain, or through a swamp, or through the desert, he’ll find easier targets.
Natural barriers. My compound is protected on three sides by the Great Divide. You MIGHT be able to approach from that flank on foot, if you’re an expert mountaineer, but you won’t risk it, or expend the energy if you’re an expert. National, and State parks, forestry land, make great neighbors. Indian reservations are ok too, if you make friends with them. Farms and other preppers are the best neighbors, you’ll need each other eventually. My several hundred acres are on a virtual island. It’s located in the bite of a river bend, is almost completely encircled by the river. My own moat. The banks of that river are 10’ – 100’ and sheer. No vehicle can get onto my property except through the front gate. I have the ability to seal that gate off too. The road to that gate will have huge trees felled across it, another location will be washed out. When you get to my gate, it will be sealed by boulders and you’ll need a crane, or A LOT of dynamite to move them. The gate itself is a steel rail car on 60’ of track. When in place, it lowers hydraulically to rest on its spiked feet that bite into the ground. Steel I-beams hydraulically raise and mate into the rail car. The rail car is filled with sand bags. It would take an engineer days to figure out how to move it, and days more to get the equipment up the mountain. With enough explosives you could move it, but will it be moved out of the way? 🤷🏼‍♂️ The point being, there will be NO surprise attack, and almost certainly not a mechanized one. There’s also nowhere to land a helicopter anywhere near my home, it’s too heavily timbered, and it would mean a 100’ rappel. Still no surprise.
My modest cabin is steel frame, shrouded in stone, with poured concrete. No SWAT team, has the equipment or training to breach its perimeter. Every window and door is powder coated stainless steel frame and lattice, welded to the steel beams, before the concrete was poured. All the glass is bullet proof. The doors are like a vault door, steel frames and skin, with poured concrete core, six feet of 1” hinge, and six 1” bolts securing it. A steel shutter can be instantly closed to protect every point of ingress (windows and doors), they aren’t much defense, but it will take a lot of effort, time, noise, and explosive to even expose that vault door. That just gets you into the foyer, then you’ll have to do it again. In fact, although only the exterior doors are vault-like, every room and hallway will require explosives to open. It would take a truck load of equipment and explosives to clear my home. You still wouldn’t have found the entrance to the bunker though, and when you do, you’ll be faced with a 40’ concrete hallway with a lot of fire power pointed at you through the concrete wall at the end of it.
The bunker. Go to an oil field auction, or most any industrial auction, and buy shipping containers. Sometimes you can get good ones for as little as $200 bucks. Shipping will cost you more than the container. So much so, you might want to consider buying your own bed truck. It can be crappy, you won’t need it long, and then you can sell it. Park that water proof, virtually indestructible steel container on a flat surface and bury it under 3’ (or 30’) of soil. [Note: shipping containers can carry immense weight on their four corners, straight down. They are not designed for side loads, or center-top concentration. They can buckle. 3’ of soil won’t be a problem, but 30’ will. You need to know how to reinforce them, and the four story structure buried in 30’ of soil I describe is completely encased in reinforced concrete. Please contact me or do your research before anything extreme.] You now have a bullet proof, bomb resistant (bomb proof for any civilian explosive), weather proof, zombie proof, FBI proof, ATF proof shelter. Put a wood burning cast iron stove in it and you’re toasty warm. You now have a chimney however, and that’s a vulnerability. You also need fresh air intake, also a vulnerability. There’s ways to mitigate that however.
If you’re rich, or serious, pour a concrete pad with in-floor radiant heat to park your container on. For pennies more, do the same in a vertical wall. That concrete will stay warm for many hours after you turn the boiler off. It works so well, I have to pinch the boiler way back, and increase cold air flow to keep from dying of heat stroke. If you’re rich, or serious, park 4, or 6, or 30 containers on that pad. Stack them up, make it 3 or 4 stories high. Put a water tank at the top. If you’re rich, or serious, encase that all in concrete. Then bury it, as deep as you can manage. Make sure you have at least two means of ingress and egress. Next to that structure, at a lower elevation, do the same thing, but instead of radiant heat, wrap each container in 5000psi steel pipe, and fill that pipe with liquid nitrogen, each container on a separate line. Encase in concrete, pour an additional roof, with the same plumbing, and fill that too. You now have a cryogenic freezer. If you bury that structure in a wet slurry, you’ll create an permafrost buffer to mitigate degradation. Bury in 60’ of soil.
At a higher elevation than your bunker, or surface structures, secure and plumb your water tank, and bury.
Close to surface, build a steel Quonset hut, as big as you can manage, this will be for bulk cold storage, equipment, etc. burry that too.
Over all these buried structures, plant as dense a thicket of thorny, flowering, fruit bearing shrubs as you can. On my compound, I have 20,000 sq ft of bunker and you would never find it if I drew you a map. You could stand right on top of it, (if it weren’t for the thicket), and never know it.
Next to, or on top of that, build a home. Modest, unassuming. Build some outbuildings like a garage, a tool shed, a barn, …. And build a concrete, stone, or brick wall between each structure. The space between those structures could be covered by greenhouse. You now have a weather proof, combat resistant fort.
Long term food. Like, for generations to come. There are many “wild” animals that can be kept. They are suited to survival without tending, all they need is the environment. If you have the land, that grows the food they desire in abundance, provides them with natural shelter, water, and ideally predator free, you almost don’t need a fence, they won’t be inclined to ever leave. Where I live, that means trout, bison, elk, goats, sheep, turkeys, boar, chickens, rabbits. 100 people could live on those animals and never deplete their population. My lake is small, and manmade. It’s about 60’ deep, and has a tunnel that runs 100’ and then straight up 15’, into the greenhouse between my house and garage. That 10’ pool is where I stocked the trout, and where I feed them. Any time I need fish, I grab a net and scoop out as many 4lb trout as I need. Summer or winter, I don’t even need to go outside.
The “fence” that surrounds my “island” property, that keeps my “wild” animals from wandering off, is a 10’ chain link with four feet of chicken wire. On the outside of that fence, is an impenetrable hedge of thorny bush that grows 14’ high. On the inside of that fence, is an impenetrable hedge of fruit bushes. Mostly Saskatoon berry, the most nutritious food on earth. No bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, badger, or wolverine could get over, through, or under my fence. And that’s only if they crossed the river and scaled the cliff first. A professional landscaper with all his equipment would take all day to cut through that hedgerow. No Navy seal could.
While a third of my ranch is heavily timbered, the rest is grassland, meadow, groves of trees and shrubs. There are dozens of hardy crab apple trees, some apple trees, cherry trees, peach trees (under glass – There’s a reason Georgia is the Peach State, and not Montana) raspberries, strawberries, rose hips, huckleberries, blueberries. The local bears LOVE when I dump unused fruit crop in the woods across the river.
I have three Bee hives (structures, a dozen hives). Heated concrete pads, steel shipping container, louvered windows and skylights, buried under soil, with water fountains, and enclosed in a chain link dome, and bee hives inside. They have amazing bee hives these days. You can harvest the honey without ever contacting or disturbing the bees. Honey keeps forever and provides natural (if partial) inoculation to viruses in the bees environment.
My garden, in a greenhouse, grows enough fresh potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, corn, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, … to feed a family of 8 for a year, the livestock get most of it. I can easily expand that garden to feed 100. If they help with the labor. Vertical, hydroponics can grow these year round.
If you were smart, you chose one of the million locations on this continent where you have coal, right at surface. A shovel and a wheelbarrow, or a front end loader, and you can fuel a boiler to provide heat for an entire town. You’ll also be able to generate steam for your steam powered electrical generator, steam powered mill, steam powered log splitter. Or use that timber to fuel the boiler. Firewood is invaluable, cut and split thousands of cords of wood to sell, trade, or use. I have an entire Quonset filled with it. I trade it to my neighbor for fresh milk, cream, butter, and eggs. I also let my neighbors come and harvest my fruit crop, and they help me preserve my share.
Electricity. However extensive and diverse you can be, the better. Solar panels, windmills, hydro, steam generators, diesel generators, natural gas generators, even gasoline generators. Natural gas can be stored forever, diesel for many years, and if you know how to treat it, decades, you can also grow and manufacture biodiesel, gasoline only keeps for a year or two, maybe three if you don’t care about the engine it fuels. Store as much fuel as you possibly can, buried. Wood and coal can be safely stored in huge quantities, forever.
A very possible scenario of an apocalypse is an EMP event. All of your electric, and especially electronic, equipment MUST be shielded or it will be garbage. Every machine, pump, camera, motion detector, light, electric heat, generators, communications equipment, vehicles … ALL of it will be garbage if it isn’t shielded. Because your entire infrastructure is grounded steal boxes buried under several feet of soil, the perfect Faraday protection, that equipment will be fine. Every piece of electronic monitoring (cameras, motion detectors etc) and all exposed electronics on the surface, like windmills etc, will have to be replaced after the pulse, so have replacements underground.
All of this is invisible, unassuming, hidden, camouflaged. You could be 100’ from it and never know, you could fly a helicopter over it and might not notice. Infrared is a problem, though much of that is cloaked too. But unless I do something to become a high value target, no one will be paying a helicopter to surveil my lonely ranch in the middle of nowhere.
As long as there is commerce, you can make a living selling or trading eggs, honey, jam, fruit jerky, meat jerky, fish, fresh meat, wild game, animal skins, beer, whiskey, wine, alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, tinctures (grow a lot of dandelions), and firewood … and if there isn’t commerce, you’ll have plenty to survive on.
With all of this stationary investment, a go bag is useless (although a secret, small, sub-bunker in the back 40 couldn’t hurt), so in for a penny, in for a pound. You’ll need to protect all this, especially if you got drunk and bragged about it at the bar in town. Every hungry loafer will know where to go when SHTF. Secrecy is (or was) your best defense, being inconvenient and hidden is next, being fortified and impenetrable is gold. But eventually you may need to shoot something.
Stealth will still be you’re best friend. A bow and arrow is ideal, if you know how to use one. Regardless, make sure you have one, at least. More would be better, they don’t last forever. Bows that is. Make sure you have dozens, or hundreds of arrows. And dozens, or hundreds of bow strings. You can hunt any animal with a bow.
A .22LR rifle with a suppressor is almost as quiet as the bow, and if you get close enough, and shoot well enough, you can kill most anything with it in almost silent fashion. You can hunt rabbits all day long for sure, or any grounded fowl. You can also afford a huge stock pile of cartridges, and carry 1000 of them in a backpack.
Simplicity is the number one predictor of success in any human endeavor. People get too complicated, and too diverse, and the next thing you know they’re trying to jam a magazine of .308s into a .300 gun, because the zombies are climbing the wall.
For survival, especially in the wilderness, especially in bear country, you want the most reliable, robust, durable, simple, most easily serviced or repaired weapon you can find. They’re won’t be gun-shops, gunsmiths, or parts suppliers to order knew o-rings for your crappy glock 9mm, or AR-15. So you better have all the spare barrels, springs, o-rings, seals … that you’ll ever need for it. But hopefully, you chose a better gun besides. You’ll also need to store all the ammunition you’ll ever need too.
12 gauge, pistol grip, collapsible stock is the perfect defensive weapon, against men at close range, or wildlife, and you can hunt with it too. You’ll never confuse the ammunition with your .300 WinMag hunting rifle either. Stock up on bird shot, 1 & 4 buck shot, and slug.
In small arms combat, line of sight frames the battlefield. 90% of all such battles occur under 300M, and 90% of those in less than 100M. In my mountainous, dense forest environment, that would be even more true. I’m a one shot, one kill kind of gunman, and there was a day I could kill a gallon jug of water at 2000M, 10/10 times. But a sniper rifle would be of limited value, and any quality .308, 30/06, or 300 WinMag bolt action rifle is the perfect compromise, a great hunting rifle, and one of the last guns the commies will regulate. But it isn’t the best combat rifle and I don’t need to shoot a deer 800M away, when I can get within 50M. So I have those rifles, and a few hundred rounds of ammunition for them, tucked safely away if I ever need them. If you’re rich, get a .50BMG rifle to tuck away too. In case there’s a helicopter or engine block that needs killin. But don’t think of it as part of your day to day security.
Carrying a weapon can mark you as a threat, or a target, so concealment is desirable, and close combat has its own frame of battlefield, so handguns are desirable, and ubiquitous. What is the simplest, most reliable, most robust and durable handgun you can think of? If you were facing a charging Grizzly, and he was 20M and closing fast, what handgun would you wish was in your hand? What guns, in general and handguns specifically, will be the last ones regulated, or the least likely to raise concerns of the ATF?
For me, there is only one choice for a hand gun, anything else is a compromise. A revolver, a big revolver. A matching lever action carbine that shoots the same cartridge too. Bighorn Armory’s model 89 Lever action rifle, and their semi auto AR500. Paired nicely with the Smith & Wesson 500 revolver. They all shoot the same cartridge (the AR shoots rimless), so you don’t need 10 different calibers and casing configurations for 10 different guns. Inside of 200 yards they’re as accurate, and more powerful, than any other. And there is no gun I would rather face a 1,200 pound Grizzly with. Other than the twelve gauge, it’s the only gun within instant reach. Simplicity equals higher probability of success. And it will kill an engine block too.
.50, 340, 500, or 700 grain, 1,500 ft/sec, 3,500 ft/lbs of kinetic energy, and a ton of inertia and momentum blowing a huge wound channel through any foe.
One of the most neglected aspects of survival is the legal obstacles government imposes. The law. Get out of debt. Everything you own could be seized by a creditor. Pay your taxes. In fact, when you get your property tax assessment, move the decimal point. If they want $5,000, pay them $50,000. They will try and refund it, but refuse. Tell them to keep it and show a credit toward future payment. By law, they’ll still send a bill every year, showing $5000 owing, $5000 paid, and $40,000 credit. Pay them the owing anyway, so you always have a $45,000 credit. That’s 10 years of not being able to pay before the taxman starts looking. See if you can make arrangements with your bank, or a lawyer, to establish a trust to pay any unforeseen levees or encumbrances on your behalf. So if the government decides to pass a law, and levee a tax on “water rights” or whatever, the trust will pay it. Have a lawyer already on retainer to handle, or at least stave off, or delay any unforeseen legal shenanigans. The longer you can keep criminal organizations like the government from noticing you, the better.
So where to start? It took me a lifetime and a fortune to do this. I could have spent 10 times as much, or 100 times. But there are much simpler, and cheaper ways to secure your future. A pail of MREs, vegetable and fruit capsules, multi vitamins, beef jerky, fruit jerky, water purification tablets, a life straw water filter. 10 gallons of bottled water, a propane camp stove, spare propane bottles, a empty plastic pail, and plastic bags to line it, and some toilet paper, soap and hand sanitizer, A 12 gauge shot gun, 100 shells, a camp knife, a folding survival knife, an axe, a multi purpose camp shovel, and you’re prepared to survive for a month. $500. True, you won’t survive an apocalypse with that, but you’ll be set up for a hurricane, or ice storm, or earthquake, and it’s just your first step, keep building. At least you’ll have a month more than most people to figure it out.
Every journey begins with the first step.
There’s A LOT more, but brevity is the soul of wit, so we’ll leave it at this brief outline. Anonymity, inconvenience, sustainable self reliance, fortification, clever defense, and overwhelming fire power. In that order.