How to cache?
Costly method:
Buy a military ammo box, clean it, rust spray it and coat it in epoxy. Then bury it. For larger caches use open top steel drums. Be advised those SOBs weight 400 pounds when full of dry food AND they need a big hole to bury. You can also set the metal container on the ground and throw some dirt/forest debris on it to cover it. This is the best way to go for people with heavy coin to put into preps. At this level you are using gps, compass triangulation, secret code stones, cloudy-nighttime deploys. This is what one can aspire to. For now I recommend:
Cheap Cache Method.
Of all the cheapo methods I’ve tried, this is by far the best. It will last just as long as a metal container and is free (if you desire). All you pay for is rice and beans.
You have literally no excuse to cache. Actually, maybe you do. I’d love to hear it.
Take a 2 liter pop bottle and empty it of pop (or grab one from your neighbors recycling bin). Dry it out (optionally clean it if it was yours, bleach your dirty, dirty neighbors’). You can leave the residue in the bottle as it isn’t harmful. Just ensure it is dry. That, however, is important.
Now you need to fill it with a mixture of rice and beans (the cheapest food available). I know, I know you’re thinking ‘boring’. Trust me it will be tasty. Hunger really is the best spice. Plus, it doesn’t smell strongly so bears and raccoons aren’t attracted to it.
Now to fill the container there is a slow, frustrating messy way or the ultra awesome method I’m about to describe: Take another 2 liter bottle of pop. Cut off the top to use as a funnel (actually just cut off the bottom as the extra length will help later).
Take two caps and cut large holes in the middle of the caps (so they are pretty much just the threads). Take your long funnel and screw one of the caps to it. Take the other cap that you cut a hole in and put it on the bottle you want to fill. Set the funnel on the bottle and align it carefully so that both caps touch/align. Now use silicone or just good quality tape and tape the two caps together. Now you can remove the funnel by unscrewing it from the bottle. Try it, you’ll be please with yourself.
Now you have a funnel that you can screw on to any bottle you want to fill. Simply screw on the funnel and poor rice and beans into the empty bottle below. Once you have filled the bottle you can jiggle it to settle the contents. NOTE: You will never be able to settle the contents as much as cereal boxes do. Those finks manage to bypass physics to ‘settle’ away half of the package.
Jiggle, refill, repeat, shuffle step, jiggle. Now you have it full right? No. Now you add either sugar or salt and jiggle. You will be stunned at the amount of salt or sugar that you can add to an already filled container.
Now there is an easy way to seal it and the likely-unnecessary-and-harder-methods. Let’s explore the harder methods I’ve used first. You could seal the food off with a layer of melted wax, then use plumbers non-toxic putty, then the lid. OR you could use wax then silicone and seal the lid. Both work perfectly.
Of course, much to my surprise just screwing the cap on also works perfectly. Faster and cheaper, but I still can’t do it that way. It seems too easy…..like a trap.
Seriously, I just bought the food for 20 seconds more work I’m going to have a second seal on it.
The good news is your cached food isn’t going bad any time soon. Dig a hole and put your bottle in it….maybe place a rock over it. It will be there when you return. Ten years is nothing to these.
If you think about it, it makes sense. The plastic is designed to keep high pressure carbonated beverages in, so it will keep the water out for an incredible amount of time.
For an extreme test I took 3 year old cache bottles and I put them in a weighted plastic bag and sunk them in a beaver pond (I am in Canada). I let the bottles sit in that slimy leach infested swamp all summer, then all winter, then spring, and (you guessed it) summer again.
All ten bottles were perfectly dry (on the inside) and intact. Even the three bottles that I just screwed the cap on without special extra work. Now, you’d want to dip the top of those bottles in boiling water to sterilize then before emptying them as they were slimy, but all of them had survived the crushing weight of the pond (I put them only a foot deep to ensure they got a full winter freeze crush). The only point that I should mention, and a curious one at that, was that some of the bottles looked to have ‘melted’ a bit. Obviously, this would be due to pressure and not temperature. The containers that weren’t ridiculously full (like my ground caches) didn’t have the odd distortion. So, if you are underwater caching don’t fill them up the entire way. I’d also recommend a strong plastic bag as you can hook them with a stick to retrieve them. I wouldn’t want my face in that water. To deploy tie a string to a tree when you drop your cache in the water. Simply walk to the end of the string and drop the cache. Bury the synthetic string near its tree (it will last forever). Mark the direction you walked from the tree. When you want to retrieve the cache use the string tied to the same tree. Walk to the end of the string and start trying to hook the bag while walking the arc the string provides. This is just an easy way I found to save time on retrieval. It is faster than trying to triangulate a location while knee deep in leach infested waters.
Semi-cheap-AND-LAZY-cache method:
Stainless steel water bottles from dollar stores or from thrift markets. These make excellent 1 liter caches. They are water proof and impact/rodent resistant. This you can set on the ground (not having to dig a hole to protect from rodents) and they’ll sit until another human picks them up. They can be painted in camo colors, hung up in trees or in the hollows of trees. Cheap, fast, fun.
Using the tricks listed your food cache will be safe for decades. You will, however, be very lucky not to need it within the next five years.
Summary, caching is cheap and doesn’t take much work. It can save your life. It can buy you time to get setup for procuring food. At VERY least it will push back the panic envelope and allow you to think clear headed for a time. Even if all it does is give you a few extra weeks of life, I have to ask, what is that worth to you? Is a week of your life worth $5 ($3.80US)? What about your children’s or grandchild’s life?
You will never have more discretionary money than you do today and food will never be cheaper than it is right now. Plan accordingly.