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Of all of the places you might want to store food for an emergency, the backyard may not be at the top of the list. But there are actually some good reasons to think about it that are both practical and sensible.
What you’re essentially doing is storing food in a box in the ground. Think of it as a mini root-cellar. Root cellars have been used for centuries as a way to store food both safely and securely.
And security is one of the considerations for this type of storage. It’s hard to know how good or bad things can get in an emergency, but if things take a turn for the worst, it makes sense to think ahead.
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It’s All About Caching
A cache is a place where you store something both out of the way and out of sight. It’s pronounced “cash.” It’s a common practice with many preppers, and it’s a way to always have something available and on hand that’s out of sight and secure.
Some people cache things in and around bug out locations. There are articles about people caching things on the road towards a distant bug out location or survival shelter. Why not use your backyard the same way?
The average depth of most caches is usually 3-feet deep or less. That’s about the length of an adult arm and allows you to reach things towards the bottom. It’s also a reasonable depth for digging. Any deeper and a one-day project can become a week-long exercise.
Reasons for Backyard Caching
The reason anyone would bury emergency food in their backyard varies. A lot depends on where you live and your situation.
No Available Storage
Basements and pantries are the usual storage locations for emergency foods. It’s possible you don’t have a basement, or all pantries and closets are full. At that point, a backyard cache makes sense if you want to store some emergency food on your property.
Out of Storage Space
It’s also possible that you have plenty of storage space but it’s either filled with various things, or you have future plans for the space. In that case, a backyard cache lets you build your own space to expand your supplies.
Bad Neighborhood
Regardless of the quality of your neighborhood, looting is often a common occurrence especially after an evacuation. When there’s no one around, every home has the potential to become a target for looting. Once again, a backyard cache can be out of sight and out of mind.
Caching 101
Caching usually starts with a hole in the ground, but stop and think before you dig. Avoid low-lying areas where water can pool or puddle or could simply become flooded in heavy rain. Look for high ground where the odds of water infiltrating and collecting in your cache are minimal.
Thoughts About Soil
Soil varies. Sand is best. It’s easy digging and not as wet as other soils. Sand is also quick to drain after heavy rains or when the snow and ice melts in the spring.
Loamy soils are also good and present good temperature management the same way as a root cellar. Loamy soils are also easy digging but don’t always drain well, so make sure you’re on that high ground.
Clay is tough stuff. It’s hard to dig deep and tends to hold a lot of moisture, particularly towards the bottom of a hole. It might make sense to line the bottom of a cache dug in clay with stone. That will at least give you a fighting chance if any water collects.
If digging in clay, you might want to dig shallower than the 3-foot depth we mentioned earlier. A good tip for digging through clay is to sharpen your shovel and peel the clay as you dig.
Rocky soils are the toughest. It seems like you’re constantly maneuvering around a rock as you dig. A pick helps and even a horseshoe stake can help you pick and pull out the rocks that stop your shovel.
Just keep an eye on the bottom of the hole you’re digging. If you see any water pooling -find somewhere else. Some areas simply collect and hold water and that’s the last thing you want.
Lining the Cache
Just digging a hole and filling it with bottles, cans, and boxes is not the best idea. You want to give your cache some structural integrity, and you want to think about ways to insulate and keep things as dry as possible. There are various ways to do this. Here’s are some ideas:
Building the Box
This is the most ambitious approach. What we’re basically going to do is build a box in a square hole in the ground. The depth should be the length of your arm. You want to be able to lift the lid and reach down to grab anything you might need. For most of us, that means your emergency food cache should be buried no deeper than 3 feet.
You could build it as wide as you want, but remember you need to put a lid over the top. It seems to make sense to make the box 3X3X3 feet. If you need to store more food, dig another hole and build another box. There are other ways to do this as well that we’ll cover later.
It’s also wise to have some shelves built into the side of your box. It’s kind of like those things that get lost in the refrigerator. If it’s way in the back or underneath a bunch of stuff, you either don’t see it or forget about it. You need to keep track of where things are and remember they are there. That’s up to you and depends a lot on what you’re storing.
You don’t have to go overboard buying wood to build your box for your buried food storage. Sure, it makes sense to buy treated wood, but you could tear apart a pallet and use the boards and they’re free if you have or find a pallet somewhere.
Lining the Box
Think plastic. And don’t use the thin stuff. You should line your emergency food cache with plastic that’s at least 8 mils. That’s a measure of plastic thickness in sheets.
Staple the plastic to your wood frame all around and seal the staples with some silicone sealer. Keeping moisture out is very important and it will not only cause some containers to rust but could cause mold and mildew to grow in the food.
After you have your plastic spread and stapled into your box, put some boards down at the bottom. You’re just trying to keep things from direct contact with the bottom of the box. You could also lay a sheet of Styrofoam or construction siding in the bottom as an extra insulation layer.
It Doesn’t Have to Be a Box
40-gallon plastic water barrels are an option for food caching. They should have a lid that seals tight and the plastic will keep the water out. You just need to dig a hole that will fit the barrel and drop it in place.
You’ll probably want to backfill around the barrel and tamp it in place, but a plastic water barrel can make short work for an emergency food cache.
5-gallon plastic buckets with a lid are another option. You probably want to dig and place more than one in the ground, but they are sturdy and with a proper lid can lockout moisture, insects, and anything else that might compromise your food.
You could also sort various foods by type and put each one in a dedicated bucket. That lets you pick and choose what you need when you need in an emergency.
In fact, some emergency food kits come pre-packaged in large 5-gallon buckets. They are sealed and can be simply placed in and around your backyard cache. That may be the easiest and quickest way to do this.
Other possibilities include plastic crates or lockers, especially crates that lock at the top. If the container is big enough to hold what you want to store and is waterproof, it’s an option for an emergency food cache.
You could also use a large length of PVC pipe with locking caps at either end. Some have a diameter up to 8-inches and more.
The length is up to you. The caps unscrew so access is fairly easy, and you can mark on the outside what the PVC contains.
When All Else Fails
Dig a hole and throw a plastic garbage bag filled with various canned and jarred foods in the hole. This is definitely not the best approach nor typically recommended, but in an emergency, it may be all you can do.
The shelf-life will be a mystery. All you’re trying to do is get something done fast. Hopefully you recover soon, and the crisis is over. If you use a couple of bags to contain the food, you might be surprised. Hopefully, the surprise is a positive result.
The Importance of Packaging
In spite of our best efforts, a hole in the ground can attract and hold water if not a lot moisture. Many references to food storage recommend a “cool, dry and dark place. A hole in the ground is certainly going to be cool and dark, but that dry part may get a little tricky.
That’s why it’s worth thinking about packaging for any foods you are going to bury in your cache. Plastic packaging is actually the best. It doesn’t rot or degrade, It doesn’t rust and it’s often waterproof.
Metal packaging can be a problem. Over time, condensation can lead to oxidation or rust. This is especially true for metal cans. One possible solution is to simply wrap any metal can in plastic and tape it. That sounds like a lot of work, but #10 cans are large, so you don’t have to wrap as much, and many of them have a metal rim.
Worse, many #10 cans have cardboard sides around the circumference. Put them into plastic garbage bags and wrap them with tape. Cardboard and metal don’t do well in moist environments.
Forget about things in cardboard boxes. You’re better off dumping the contents in a large plastic container with a tightly sealed lid. You may want to put tape around the lid as well. This is an option for things like oatmeal, rice, pasta and other cereals and grains.
Foods canned in glass jars are another idea, but metal lids on canning jars are subject to the same level of oxidation that any metal can would be exposed to. Place tape around and over the lids.
Some of the best foods to store underground in a buried cache are freeze-dried foods in foil Pouches. Here again, you would be wise to put them into large plastic bags or buckets with a locking top, but they will tolerate any moisture much better than metal. This is a common packaging form for backpacking foods that have been freeze dried.
Other food packaging that survives well underground include plastic bottles or containers.
Everything from peanuts to peanut butter, jelly, or any other type of food packaged in plastic will survive the challenges of condensation underground.
Just be mindful of the expiration dates. Burying something underground actually delivers some good preservative properties, but it’s not magic. If the stuff won’t last long in the pantry, it’s not going to do much better when you bury it in the backyard.
Foods to Avoid Burying in Your Cache
In spite of you best packaging efforts, some food just doesn’t do well when buried underground. Flour is a good example.
If you want to bury something for baking, skip the flour and bury whole wheat berries in sealed plastic containers. You’ll have to grind the wheat berries into flour at some point, but for some reason flour just picks up a lot of mold and mildew even in the best packaging.
Pasta is another challenging food to store underground. Pasta just seems to absorb any ambient moisture. You could try sealing it in a plastic bottle, but pasta just isn’t made to be buried.
Rice is another challenge. Rice collects moisture like a magnet. Most rice comes in plastic bags. Putting the plastic bag into a large plastic jar and taping the lid might work. Just be sure to smell the rice before eating it. The odds of mildew in the rice after being buried underground is quite possible.
The best way to avoid some of these problems is to consider buying one of those pre-packaged emergency food kits we mentioned. They are hermetically sealed, and most will survive a long-time when buried underground.
Marking Your Underground Food Storage
Some of us have small yards and some of us have acres of property. Don’t assume you’ll remember where you buried your emergency food storage. Especially if you have more than one cache or have buried various plastic buckets and barrels around the yard.
A map is a good idea, especially in a large yard or if you have multiple caches. You just have to remember where you put the map.
The simplest way to mark the location of a cache in a yard is with a rock, or a small pile of rocks. Rocks aren’t uncommon in a yard or property and will remind you where things are without telling the world.
A flowerpot is another option. It’s not a surprise to see a flowerpot on a piece of property and it makes it easy to find. Just be careful when you’re watering the flowerpot. You don’t want to add water to your secret compartment under the pot.
Maybe think about plastic flowers or a cactus which won’t need a whole lot of water.
Testing Your Buried Emergency Food
Eventually, the day will come when you retrieve your underground food storage. Dig carefully and remove everything if you can. The idea was to store it long-term and if it’s time to use it, use it.
But before you start to eat, it’s wise to do some basic food quality assessments. The standard test for any food in storage is to assess its appearance, smell and taste in that order.
If it doesn’t look right, it’s worth paying special attention. The next step is to assess its smell. This will be a quick giveaway and if you notice a mildew smell or off odors it’s not worth the risk. Toss it.
Finally, give it a little taste after cooking. If the taste is off or unexpected that’s another clue. Toss it. An emergency is a bad time to add a food born illness to the list of challenges.
With any luck, and if you packaged and stored everything properly you should be in okay shape. It may be safe to assume the food will be as safe as the package indicates if stored properly. Just be sure to test everything before making any assumptions.
Here are some links to more information all about emergency food caching:
It’s Not Hard
Burying some food in the backyard is not a big deal. It should take no more than an afternoon. It’s even easier if you’re burying foods packaged in 5-gallon plastic buckets. Just remember to make a map and maybe stack some rocks over the location. That way you’re not digging up the backyard trying to remember where you buried that food.
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