I suspect there is no single answer, though if someone wants to feel pretty secure (out side of multi year depression), look at what was the single worst disaster to cause serious disruption. I think that Ice storm 15+ years back was a good example to look at...no power meant no heat...Wernt there people without power and heat for as long as 2 months or so, I cant remember for sure, so if someone knows better they can say. If you can provide for yourself through such a situation then you are covered for the worst that has happened so far.

Though my thoughts are, really 6 months, if everyone could and would prepare to that level, this would cover you through a full winter, and is also a good buffer to carry you through a job lay off, a broken leg or some such thing.

Also don't feel handycaped by a small city lot, I have known people doing incredible things will small yards, including raising rabbits for food, infact in a very upscale area in Edmonton one person has a rabbit farm in the back yard, not because they are trying to live cheap but because their family loves the meat and not one of their neibours knows.

I didn't quite know how to answer this. It depends on your goal. Food storage is only really part one...of...um...food storage. Food sovereignty is the goal. At least my goal.

I wrote about how my house was looking at thanksgiving. http://internationalpreppersnetwork.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=5953
Some people take personal pride or worth in their muscle car or Harley . Others, their career, trophy wife or trophy children. For me, its my food storage...and production.

I was thinking of this Fantabulouse quote today by John Michael Greer over at the Archdruid Report for a different project I am fleshing out. It changes the direction of your question. This mirrors my own experience and always gives me a chuckle. Skeletons by seedbanks. LOL

-" A practical example, again, will be useful here. In my experience, it takes around five years of hard work, study, and learning from your mistakes to become a competent vegetable gardener. If you’re transitioning from buying all your vegetables at the grocery store to growing them in your backyard, in other words, you need to start gardening about five years before your last trip to the grocery store. The skill and hard work that goes into growing vegetables is one of many things that most people in the world’s industrial nations externalize, and those things don’t just pop back to you when you leave the produce section of the store for the last time. There’s a learning curve that has to be undergone.

Not that long ago, there used to be a subset of preppers who grasped the fact that a stash of cartridges and canned wieners in a locked box at their favorite deer camp cabin wasn’t going to get them through the downfall of industrial civilization, but hadn’t factored in the learning curve. Businesses targeting the prepper market thus used to sell these garden-in-a-box kits, which had seed packets for vegetables, a few tools, and a little manual on how to grow a garden. It’s a good thing that Y2K, 2012, and all those other dates when doom was supposed to arrive turned out to be wrong, because I met a fair number of people who thought that having one of those kits would save them even though they last grew a plant from seed in fourth grade. If the apocalypse had actually arrived, survivors a few years later would have gotten used to a landscape scattered with empty garden-in-a-box kits, overgrown garden patches, and the skeletal remains of preppers who starved to death because the learning curve lasted just that much longer than they did.

The same principle applies to every other set of skills that has been externalized by people in today’s industrial society, and will be coming back home to roost as economic contraction starts to cut into the viability of our externality systems. You can adopt them now, when you have time to get through the learning curve while there’s still an industrial society around to make up for the mistakes and failures that are inseparable from learning, or you can try to adopt them later, when those same inevitable mistakes and failures could very well land you in a world of hurt. You can also adopt them now, when your dependencies haven’t yet been used to empty your wallet and control your behavior, or you can try to adopt them later, when a much larger fraction of the resources and autonomy you might have used for the purpose will have been extracted from you by way of those same dependencies."