5 Great Sustainable Projects Your Family Can Implement Over the Weekend

With so much going on in the world today, emergency preparedness and survival sustainability are essential to ensure our families get through any rough patches. Beginning this weekend, we should do everything we can to protect tomorrow for the sake of our kids. Let's start today with fun-family projects.

1. Plant fruits and vegetables - you don't have to have a green thumb, you just need to try, seeds almost grow by themselves. Take your kids on a quick trip to the dollar store for seeds (in-season), a couple of pots, and potting soil.

Mix the potting soil with backyard dirt, throw in a few dead leaves, coffee grounds, and crushed egg shells for a quick, nutrient-rich, and moisture-retaining compost/soil mixture. Follow planting directions on the back of the seed packets, then water and tend your garden pots. Within 1½ to 2 months your family will be eating homegrown garden delights.

2. Go to the park - you can take your kids to the park for a quick lesson in imaginative play, necessary to recharge your spirits. One or two hours at the park playing with your children will give your family a happy time-out together, away from everyday stress.

This kind of nonsensical play provides exercise, family unity, and allows all family members a chance to get away from (and temporarily forget about) the everyday pressures of past-due bills, unemployment and/or foreclosure. If you live near water (and you're not already preparing for a hurricane) take a harbor cruise, rent a catamaran, or picnic on the shore, and let the water soothe-away tensions.

3. Go shopping for emergency supplies - have your children help you create an emergency kit by filling up a backpack or ice-chest. Again, the dollar store is the best place to shop for band-aids, topical creams, and any other relevant supplies for an emergency medical/first-aid kit.

Other things to stock-up on would be canned foods, as well as high-protein beans and/or tuna in light-weight foil pouches, along with bottled water. Many stores have sales over long weekends or won't charge customary sales tax. Combined with cents-off or dollar-off coupons, your family can enjoy big discounts.

4. Search online for reference books - begin with www.Amazon.com or take your kids to a local second-hand book store for family reference books. Every member of your family will need an age-appropriate reference book, creating a portable library of survival skills and reading material, should power be interrupted.

You may want to begin with a family Bible, Farmer's Almanac, cookbook, or American atlas (road maps bound together in book form - used prior to GPS devices). Your son may want a science book or mischievous-boy book with instructions for making batteries or learning Morse-code. Your daughter might enjoy a doll-making book, or beginner's guide to judo and karate self-defense.

5. Have your holiday barbecue - but try grilling over natural wood-burning flames, or try digging a pit in the back yard, and heating rocks to cook your meat overnight, island-style. Research how long you need to cook your meat (or vegetables) over an open flame, or buried in the ground.

Try cooking both ways to create family grilling projects for hands-on training. I guarantee your children will enjoy your new culturally-experiential preparedness ideas, for backyard barbecuing, together.

If you make preparedness fun, your kids will take part in emergency survival plans, even if you call it camp-training. Check ahead for qualifying Scout merit-badge participation, or church missionary training to maximize the effectiveness of your family-fun survival-preparations weekend-training session.