I’ll Just Garden When Food Runs Out…

[AZ Prepper]

I’ll Just Garden When Food Runs Out…
http://www.azprepper.com/blogs/ill-just-garden-when-food-r.html (http://azprepper.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/ill-just-garden-when-food-runs-out/)




When the topic of preparedness comes up, there is a statement that is almost guaranteed to come up from the unprepared… “I’ll just garden when food runs out.” And then they continue to say that they have seed they’ve been storing for 5 years in their garage. And more often than not, this same individual has never gardened and wouldn’t know where to start.

If you are one of those that have made this statement, I’ll let you in on a little secret… You’ll Starve To Death!

Yip, if you’ve never gardened before, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening when the time comes.

First of all, anyone who has done any vegetable gardening will agree that gardening isn’t just a motion like making your bed or taking out the trash, it’s a skill that is learned through trial and error over many seasons. Beginning gardeners may quit out of frustration the first time they try it. Others get extremely lucky and have a bountiful harvest the first time they try it by sheer dumb luck. But most often, in the beginning you have some success and a bunch of failure. Some of the reasons are:


Type of soil (too sandy, too much clay, too acidic, etc.)
Seasons (what to do to protect your garden in various weather conditions, what to plant and when)
What grows good/bad together
Quality of seeds (stored seeds do not have a high percentage of sprouting, particularly ones stored in high heat over long periods of time)
Watering amounts and frequencies
When to harvest
How to propagate your own seed supply
How long from planting seeds to harvest time
How to store your harvest

First of all, you must know what kind of soil you’re dealing with in your backyard. What changes need to be made in advance to prepare that soil to be able to support a garden. Bad soil makes it nearly impossible to reap good produce and is extremely wasteful in resources such as water, time, effort.

What kinds of plants do you plant during which months of the year? This changes based upon elevation, temperatures, etc and must be known for your specific area. For instance, you don’t plant winter-type plants in the middle of the summer in Arizona. There is a time and season for all plants and knowing this in advance is extremely important.

There are also certain vegetables/herbs/flowers that compliment one another when growing side by side or together. There are also plants that hinder each other’s growth. Do you know and understand these?

What kinds of seeds do you have? How long have you been storing them? What percentage of them will sprout or are they all bad? Are they heirloom seeds which will allow you to harvest seeds from this season to use the following season?

How much water do your plants need? When is the best time to water them and how often? This all depends on the season, your climate, the soil and the type of plants in your garden. And in tough times, water may be very limited so you’ll want to know how much you need and not waste.

What about when you should harvest your plants. This seems kinda silly, but for those who are just starting out, it’s a big deal. If you pick too early, it may not be ripe or you may miss out on the potential growth. Or if you pick too late, you could miss the time and it may go to seed or get a bitter taste or even spoil without you realizing it. So when is the optimal time?

And how do you continue to supply yourself with new seed? Remember, if times are bad, you most likely won’t be able to go down to the local nursery and buy more seed. You’ll have to know how to get them yourself. If you’re starting out with hybrid seed, you may not be able to gather seed for the following year. And if you have heirloom seeds, where and how do you collect and store seeds? Where do you get seeds from carrots, lettuce, broccoli, etc. etc.? Sure we can all figure out how to get them from tomatoes, squash, etc that have seeds within, but what about the others? If you’re just starting out when “food runs out” then you’re going to be in for a big surprise and wonder where the seeds are.

What about the time frame from planting to harvesting? Do you know how much time that takes? Will you be sufficiently prepared to plan ahead so that you’ll have a consistent supply of food coming in?

And if you don’t plan correctly and your harvest comes all at once, how will you store this food? Will you simply feast for a week and then either run out or have it all spoil? How do you store your produce so that you can eat it throughout the year?

This article is not a “how-to” article, but just some thoughts to get you thinking about gardening and how it isn’t something you just do. It’s a skill that is learned by do-ing over and over again, learning tricks, what works, what doesn’t work, etc. So if you’re one of those who say you’ll garden when the food runs out, change your mindset today and garden before it runs out so you’ll eat and live instead of starving to death… especially if you have a family to look after as well. Better yet, make it a family activity and teach your children as you learn yourself!

[Garnet]

As a permaculture farmer, who lives on their own farm, and tries to produce 90% of the food our family eats, I cannot stress how dead on this article is. If you don't aquire the skills now, you and your family will indeed starve to death.

I live in the Pacific Northwest. We've had the summers that didn't happen. Meaning it rained all summer long, but for two day. All the plants rotted off at the ground....and I'm a skilled gardener. Do you know what OP means? Are your seeds OP? If not, you will starve. If you do not have the gloves, and gardening tools, you will be very, very unhappy. Hint, quality tools that will last year after year for real gardening work do NOT come from WalMart, and are NOT made in China.

If you do not have livestock, or access to their manure, your garden will produce very poorly at best, and decline rapidly year after year. Livestock can be rabbits. It does not have to be large stock, like cattle. Rabbits can be safely raised, and hidden from prying eyes inside a garage. They make almost no noise other than some cage rattling. They will give your family vital protien via their flesh, and vital manure for your garden. You have have a vermaculture bin (worms) under one hutch as well. That gives you ultra rich soil and worms to add to your garden each and every year.

Fruit trees can take 4-10 years before they start to produce, after being planted. How large is your current orchard? Are you waiting for TSTHTF, before planting your first apple tree? How will you know what apples will keep 6 months in a cool area of your house, and which one start to rot in just a week? Not all are created equal. Some are simply excelent for storage, others start to turn within days.

You also need to keep this in mind, if you are reduced to depending on gardening as your sole source of food, things have gotten very, VERY bad. TEOTWAWKI type situation (The End Of The World As We Know It). If you live with a single gas tank driving distance from a city you are unlikely to be able to garden the first year. You will need to stay mostly inside, so people don't snipper your or your family. A few plants up close to the house, but not a major well tended, obvious garden that is going to draw the mobs in. So have enough food storage to get you through that first year and into the second year to the next gardening season.

Year two comes along, most of the dangerous people will be quiet thinned out by now...yet gardening is still likely to not be a viable option. I can hear alarm bells going off in your head!!! Now you have to deal with the second scurge. If you live anywhere close to a city, the rat population will have exploded to plague proportions. Once they have finished scavenging food in the cities (that includes corpses), they will begin to leave the cities by the thousands, to millions, depending on how large the city was.

That wave of rodents may reach your home. Your garden might be eaten within minutes or over a few days. Not to mention you are going to have the plague of birds, and insects. Conventional commercial farming is going to stop cold turkey. Fields, nearly entire states worth of fields will sit unharvested. Birds will have no problem taking adavantage of this boon of food, and their population will skyrocket. The insects, like grasshoppers which were normally sprayed for and killed by commercial farmers will suddenly explode in population. Those insects will find a feast of planted, but unharvested fields.

There is every chance you could be loosing your garden to rats, birds, and insects in years two and three. Then nature will correct, and the populations of those animals will nose dive. If you are lucky, year three, unlucky, it might not be until year four that you get to put a really good garden in and reap a good harvest.

So now we are up to five years worth of food storage for your family. That means you have a single shot to get your garden in, and reap a good harvest, if you have an entire five years worth of food storage. Personally, our family of experienced farmers and gardeners is shooting for 7 years food storage. That way if we have the summer of rain, and darkness again, we will still have another shot at getting a good harvest in and replacing our food stores.

Get some banty chickens and a few ducks. They both go wild eating grasshoppers and other insects. The chickens will even hunt, kill and eat smaller rodents which would feast on your garden.

Think about your next family dog. Get a smaller (but not tiny!), long lived, healthy, tough, terrier type dog. That's the dog which will be able to kill rats in tiny corners, keep rabbits, badgers, foxes, weasels, opossums, and possibly raccoons off your property, and from destroying your garden, or eating your chickens. A terrier will also help with crows in the garden. Don't pamper your dog, and make him into a fat little priss of a dog. Keep him actively, healthy, athletic, and doing what dogs do best (helping to guard their family).

You also need to learn how to pollinate and collect your garden seeds to save year after year. That in itself is a major art. Do you know what tomatoes to grow, which are acidic enough to be safely canned? How many different ways do you know to grow potatoes? Do you have plastic sheeting to go over your garden plants to protect them from frost in the early spring, and sudden hail storms? Is that bug a good bug, or a bad bug? What flowers do you need to plant with your garden to help keep insects way? What flowers are edible and taste sweet, or have a nice peppery taste to them?

There are so many vital things you need to learn over the course of many, many years. Start gardening this year! Do it small, so it's a success, and build on that next year.

A word of warning too....you may well find you actually LIKE gardening! To be out in the fresh air, to take a bite of a juicy tomato while standing in the garden...to see the plants coming up, and then bearing fruit. Oh it's a REALLY wonderful feeling! To see it happen right before your eyes, and know that you were able to bring wholesome food forth from the dirt (with the help of the Big Guy upstairs), can be the most amazing feeling! So much joy and happiness. I can tell you from personal experience, it's different when your family sits down to a meal and says grace over food you yourself produced.

It's hard to describe, but it makes you feel closer to your family, and closer to God.

~Garnet

[fuzzy]

Man! I wish I had started our garden sooner!