When people ask me how much food I have prepped, I always say just about 18 months. It’s an odd number to many, and I often get asked why. The answer is, if the apocalypse begins right in the middle of summer and it’s too late to start planting, that’s the “worst case scenario.” From there to a finished crop is just about 18 months, give or take a few weeks. So 18 months is the longest I can expect to be with no food.
That assumes, of course, that I know how to make a garden grow. Now, I do know, and I’ve practiced. At one point, we had a small farm with an acre of kitchen garden that friends and I tended. I raised chickens and we hunted, and we traded with locals for things we didn’t grow or hunt. It was a lovely way to live and I miss it terribly. Sadness aside, I spent four years or so learning how to grow a garden of sustainable size. I’ve done the practice, though I need to continue to practice.
If you’ve never grown anything other than a few flowers, you need to begin learning how to grow crops now. This is not something you can “learn as you go” during an emergency. You need to know how to do all this stuff before an emergency. Do you know what to grow? Do you know how to grow it? Do you know how to harvest it? Do you know how to preserve its seeds, or otherwise get a crop the following year without getting seeds from a store? You must have the answers to all these questions and more before the SHTF.
The first and most important question to ask yourself is what kind of food you can grow, and what kind you want to grow. You should focus on learning how to grow the things that are in the middle of that Venn diagram. I usually suggest people start with garlic, green beans, herbs, and some sort of squash. All four are easy to grow, and require only a bit of attention to keep the weeds and predators out. I can tell you that my family can eat 100 feet of green beans each year. That’s a LOT. Most people plant about half that, if they’re planning on growing all their beans rather than purchasing. What that does NOT include is seed for next year, and that’s an important thing to remember.
I find that the best information for beginner gardeners comes from the Victory Garden networks out there (like these: Plant a Victory Garden and Vintage Victory Garden booklet). Victory Gardens were grown during WWII as a patriotic method of keeping commercially grown food for “the boys across the water.” Today, they’re an act of rebellion, because growing food makes you less dependent upon The Man. The idea of a Victory Garden is to provide enough supplemental food for your family that you don’t rely as heavily upon the government and commercial farmers to feed you. I suspect that this is a very good practice for all conservatives to begin as we move into a time of frugality and less government spending.
How do you decide how much to plant? The Victory Garden guides will help with that. The internet is full of information about it (How Much to Plant Per Person). But the biggest way to figure out what and how much to plant is to begin by figuring out what you eat. For a week, write down everything that goes into your mouth. Note what goes into the garbage, as well, because in an emergency that will have to stop. At the very least, you’ll want to switch to compost, or feeding scraps to domesticated animals. Once you know what you consume, you can figure out ways to grow it. If you know that your family eats a pound of green beans a week, you know that you’ll need 52 pounds of green beans for a year. You can discover you get about a half pound of green beans per plant, which means you need to plant 104 green bean plants. Oh, and several extra, because drought, flood, bugs, and critters will all want their fill as well. And you’ll need extra for the following year’s seeds. Factor all that in, and you probably want to plant about 110 to 115 green bean plants.
Of course, once you have all those green beans, you have to preserve them. There’s no sense in harvesting 50+ lbs of beans, and then having them all go to waste because you didn’t know how to keep them fresh. But that’s another article…
Keeping with the green beans as an example, you need to know what green beans like in their soil. I know that green beans like loose, rich soil which is slightly acidic (about a pH of 6.0 to 7.0). That will tell me the best part of my garden to plant them in. I may need to amend the soil to make it work for the beans. Beans also need “full sun,” meaning 8 hours a day of sunlight on their leaves. While they may produce with less sun than that, you won’t get a good harvest. Then you have to figure out what other vegetables you’re growing, and which ones can and can’t be planted near the green beans. Beans and alliums (onions, garlic, chives, shallots, etc) do not get along at all, and need to be planted as far apart as possible. On the other hand, beans get along great with peas, broccoli, cabbage, and a few other veg.
I think you can understand why gardening people spend so much time in January and February figuring out where everything is going to go in their gardens. There is an order to everything, and if you want to do subsistence farming, you need to know this. There are books out there to help you, and I’ve included a list below.
Harvesting is a whole other battle when it comes to gardening. Some plants require daily or near-daily harvesting, such as green beans. But others use different schedules. Tomatoes, for instance, come in two types: determinate and indeterminate. Determinate tomatoes will grow to a certain size and then produce a lot of fruit over 4 to 6 weeks, after which they’ll die back and can be removed from the garden to make space for something else. Indeterminate tomatoes will begin producing fruit early, and will keep producing fruit until the first frost. You need to know which kind you have before you know how to treat them. Some other plants follow similar harvest schedules, so you have to know.
When you harvest green beans, you can just pull them off the plant. The plant is hardy enough to take that kind of abuse. Cucumbers, on the other hand, should be cut off the plant at the stem (and some people claim leaving a tiny bit of the tip of the cucumber helps the plant produce more cukes, but I’ve never tried it). Tomatoes should be twisted off, if you can, or cut at the stem. Berries can just be yanked by the handful.
Once you have your veggies (and fruits), you need to store them. Again, that’s a whole other article. It’s information you need to have on hand, though. There’s no point at all to growing a garden full of food, if it’s just going to go to waste.
Gardening is a commitment, both to yourself and to your family. It’s also a commitment to survival. It’s a commitment to health, both because you’re eating fresh food that you produced yourself, and because you’ll be outdoors weeding, watering, harvesting, and otherwise caring for your garden. The good news is that you can trade in an hour of internet/television time per day for a good garden haul. The bad news is, you might get addicted.
Books of use to new gardeners:
- The Practical Guide to Raised Bed and Container Gardening
- Beginner’s Survival Gardening Guide
- The Backyard Homestead
- The New Garden Survival Bible
- Companion Planting Made Simple
- Companion Planting for Beginners
- The Seed Saving Bible
- Seed Saving Secrets
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