A big thank you

[Little Lou]

I doubt anyone remembers me, but I was 'the woman who hadn't got a chimney'. I posted a lot some years ago, have lurked ever since, and just wanted to thank the members here for all the brilliant advice which has helped me enormously over the years, and made the present crisis (SO FAR!!!) a breeze.

Quick update: I realized from comments here (thanks especially to SS and BP) that my biggest problem was location, so I've basically worked like stink to make the money to relocate north. I now have a good size house in the country with chimney and giant woodburner, plus a garden full of fruit and vegetables. There still isn't room to grow as much as we'd really need in a major crisis, so I've kept up with the container gardening too, and have a large vegepod on the patio along with numerous potato bags, carrot and lettuce boxes, and trellised pots of climbing beans. I'd never really grown much before I started prepping, but have learnt so much from all of you guys - especially Mary - that I now have a really high success rate, even with cauliflower!

But your advice has really saved our bacon in the current crisis. We still haven't sold our original house (my husband still needs to do a lot of work down south so I spend a third of the year down there with him) and when Covid hit I found myself trapped in the wrong house! OK, I could have sneakily bugged out anyway, but it made sense both humanly and financially for us to ride out lockdown together, and thanks to all the prior prepping we had no difficulty at all. I always took to heart the motto that a crisis doesn't wait for you to be ready, and all the time I was working towards getting that new house I was also making sure the old one was still functional as a survival sanctuary. I'd always kept compost, topsoil and fertiliser stashed here in case we ever needed to rip up the flowerbeds and start a proper kitchen garden, and I'd also kept my seed stash up to date. Result = a jungle of container-grown vegetables all round the garden, which easily kept us going till I could get back up north. I also had all the obvious supplies of food, drugs (and bog roll!!), not to mention two boxes of Silverline respirators and gallons of sanitiser - we never went near the shops in lockdown, and went without nothing at all.

So, thank you to everyone. Even when you don't see members posting, you should know that we're still listening, and your wise advice helps more than just the people you're talking to. There's still so much I need to learn, and there are already a couple of questions I'm hoping to ask elsewhere, but I never really knew what 'be prepared' meant until I came here.

Thank you all.