One Persons Opinion on Gardening and Survival:
The best thing ANYONE with even a tiny patch of sunny land can do is to start planting perennial food crops now. One semi-dwarf apple tree can produce 10 bushels or more once it gets well established (although you need two for pollination, as long as there is another variety- even wild- in the neighborhood, you'll get apples.)
Apples have the advantage of not needing any type of processing to preserve them for at least a few months. Pick a "keeping" variety, and if you have - or can contrive- a root cellar of any description, you should have fresh apples from October to April. If you have some left when they start getting soft, dry the rest, or make a bunch of pies and freeze them, or can the rest up into applesauce or apple pie filling.
Culls... you'll ALWAYS have culls, even if you spray the heck out of the trees (NOT recommended) or do your best with the various organic alternatives to keep pests down. Culls can be fed to almost any livestock.
For those who suddenly are faced with TSHTF (even if it's just your own personal oscillating device which has suddenly started spattering stuff), concentrate on high yielding crops, and crops which keep well and easily, crops which have a lot of uses, and a high vitamin content.
That means grow winter squash, not zuchinni. Tomatoes instead of eggplant. Potatoes, absolutely. Onions and garlic will spice up the rest of your food, can be replanted the following year (especially if you keep at least a small patch of multiplier onions growing), and can be used as herbal medicine as well.
A person CAN survive- and stay healthy- on potatoes and milk. It sounds odd, but that combination provides all the amino acids and vitamins needed for health. The poor of Ireland did just that until the potato blight hit so hard. If you have a few pots of chives and other herbs in the windowsill, they'll provide some extra vitamins and seasoning as well.
Dry beans are nutritious, and can be grown in quite small of an area, if you pick pole varieties and give them room to climb. Ditto the various pole "snap" beans.. and if you've canned up all the green beans you need, you can leave the rest on the vine to ripen, and either save the seeds to plant, or use them for soups and bean dishes.
Given a small patch of land, FATS will be your biggest problem. That probably sounds downright odd, given our society's current obsession with everything low-fat, but it's true. Fats are absolute necessities for health, and it's very difficult in a "hunting and gathering" situation, or a small gardening- vegetarian diet situation, to get enough.
One drawback to raising rabbits for meat is that they are essentially very lean. Not quite as lean as the wild rabbits maybe- the old saying is a man will starve eating all the rabbit he can stuff into him- and it's true.
Chickens are a better choice, if you can manage it. Their eggs are extremely high quality protein, and their meat is higher in fat.. when I butcher chickens and make soup stock out of the backs and necks and other trimmings, I often end up with many pounds of clear, yellow chicken fat skimmed off. It makes the best biscuits on earth!
For vitamin C in cold climates, either spruce tea (made from the tips of branches from any of the spruce trees) or rose hip tea (made from any of the fruits of roses that weren't sprayed) will add enough of the vitamin to your diet.
Other potential high yield and high nutrient content crops are carrots and cabbage. Both will store for many months in a cellar, and will give you "fresh" veggies when nothing else is available.
If I were in a suburban situation, I'd plant hedges between my backyard and the neighbors- one would be blueberry bushes, one would be blackberries or raspberries. Both can be easily contained with a bit of judicious pruning (and even the brambles won't spread if someone is mowing on both sides of them), and a 50 foot row of each will provide a LOT of fruit in season. Blueberries dry well, raspberries don't- but you can freeze them, or make jam from them. The Amish even can them.
You will need a source of sugar. I'd strongly suggest that you stock up at least a couple hundred pounds NOW, while it's readily available and relatively inexpensive. That at least could get you through the first year while you figure out alternatives.
It's going to take a lot of maple taps to provide enough sugar for both baking and general kitchen use, and canning and preserving. Sugar isn't just flavoring when you're making jams or canning fruit. It adds significant preservative power, preserving color, flavor and texture.
My next project (probably NEXT summer- this summer is establishing a flock of heirloom turkeys for breeders, and getting my daughter married off ) is going to be a couple of hives of honeybees. I've noticed the wild bees are coming back around here, for whatever reason, but that's only a help with pollination. For honey, you need (if at all possible) your own tame hives which can be harvested without killing the bees or losing the colony. Harvesting wild honey is possible, but not something I'd do voluntarily unless there wasn't any choice!
The other absolute basic, which most of us are not going to be able to produce at home, is salt. Again, it's cheap, it will keep literally forever if kept dry, and a couple hundred pounds- or a ton- isn't going to take up much room. Heat and cold don't bother it, so you could store it literally anywhere, once it's packaged up well. I can envision a time when salt is accepted as currency again, all too easily.
The details are endless, and if anyone reading this is getting discouraged, that's not the point. The point is... START NOW!
The old time rule of thumb, which I've followed for years, despite having access to myriad seed catalogs and other sources, is never plant more than HALF your available seed. If a crop failure occurs, you've still got seed to start again. Many crops only take half the growing season, even here in the frozen north. If you replant that year, again, only use half the seed you have left.
It may mean a lean winter, or one subsisting on a small variety of food, but at least you'll have seed for the next year again.
I wonder if many people here can even conceive of the way people in the not-very-distant past worked for years to get to the point where they had the means to grow most of their own food?
There is a great passage in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books (Little Town on the Prairie, maybe?) where they've been given a hatching of chicks by a friend who already has poultry. They're looking at these tiny balls of fluff and thinking "if they survive- if we can keep hawks and other problems away from them, next year some of them will start laying eggs".. So, did them plan on EATING any of those eggs? Nope.... it goes on "the hens will set on those eggs, and produce chicks, and later that summer, we'll be able to have a few of the cockerels for fried chicken. Then, the next year, we'll have all the eggs we want!"
THREE years from a "gift" of chicks to the point where they have a steady supply of eggs and some fried chicken for Sundays and feast days.
No, subsistence farming is NOT easy. Possible? yes. And definitely rewarding (unless you've swallowed all the 21'st century bulls**t about what constitutes "success"). But very, very hard.
BUT... that is EXACTLY why I think that hoping or relying on "trade" of some mythical surplus is dangerous. There won't BE a surplus, not until all the kinks get worked out on how to change back the big farms- completely dependent on fuel and electricity- to simpler, less energy intensive- but FAR more labor intensive- methods.
We currently produce almost 750,000 pounds of milk in a year. (that's not quite 100,000 gallons). With two people doing all the labor. Given a scenario where we'd have to go back to Amish methods, we wouldn't be able to produce 1/10th of that. But cutting hay with the horses, and then raking it with them, and stacking it either in the field (for easy access for the beef cows) or putting it in the shed or barns is certainly not the biggest problem we'd have.
If you're going to be trading for food, you're going to have to have something at least as valuable to exchange.
Skills like shoemaking, or metal working, or even carpentry, may come in awfully handy.
But someone's idea of "having precious metals" and "hoping" that someone will be willing to trade food is awfully tenuous, in a real disaster situation. Because without gasoline engines, or other labor saving devices (including a draft animal and the harness AND tools to hitch it to) growing enough for any one family is pretty much a full time job. Growing extra is going to be more luck than anything else. And trading food your family needs for something like silver or gold- unless you KNOW of someplace you can then trade those for needed food and other items- is downright silly.
You're correct, of course, that not everyone can homestead.. at least under current conditions. It's entirely possible that we see those conditions crash back far enough that everyone who wants to eat is either going to grow their own, or hunt and harvest their own from the woods and fields. Again, it's unlikely that people will have much extra under those conditions.
I had to laugh about "not having cattle, because they're too much work". I have cows because they are LESS work per calorie that you get back than any gardening I've ever done. Sure, my dairy herd of 40+ cows, plus another 50 young stock, is a full time job. But my herd of little beef cows is simplicity itself... as long as there is pasture inside the fences (and we do a lot of intensive management to maintain the quality of those pastures, but it takes very little time- a few minutes a day to move fences) they're happy, and their calves are packing on beef like crazy.
And ONE milking cow isn't a lot of work- less than 15 minutes per day can take care of feeding, cleaning and milking, once you've got some experience. Making butter and cheese and all the rest from the milk IS very time consuming, but you can't blame the cow for that!
But for one person, a cow is definitely overkill. A cooperatively owned cow, though.....
I guess what it comes down to for me (besides the fact that I truly love this life, and enjoy the sense of independence growing everything I can gives me - and the IRS hasn't figured out a way to tax our gardens yet!) is that under tough circumstances, I want to depend on people I KNOW I can trust, and that is my family, pretty much. I want to know that I don't have to worry about whether or not someone will have extra food available for me to trade for, or whether we'll have something extra that someone will be willing to exchange for food. Once we have enough to eat- and fuel for heat- then we can start looking at helping rebuild society, including setting up trade. But if we don't survive the first year or two, that won't be in issue.
The best thing ANYONE with even a tiny patch of sunny land can do is to start planting perennial food crops now. One semi-dwarf apple tree can produce 10 bushels or more once it gets well established (although you need two for pollination, as long as there is another variety- even wild- in the neighborhood, you'll get apples.)
Apples have the advantage of not needing any type of processing to preserve them for at least a few months. Pick a "keeping" variety, and if you have - or can contrive- a root cellar of any description, you should have fresh apples from October to April. If you have some left when they start getting soft, dry the rest, or make a bunch of pies and freeze them, or can the rest up into applesauce or apple pie filling.
Culls... you'll ALWAYS have culls, even if you spray the heck out of the trees (NOT recommended) or do your best with the various organic alternatives to keep pests down. Culls can be fed to almost any livestock.
For those who suddenly are faced with TSHTF (even if it's just your own personal oscillating device which has suddenly started spattering stuff), concentrate on high yielding crops, and crops which keep well and easily, crops which have a lot of uses, and a high vitamin content.
That means grow winter squash, not zuchinni. Tomatoes instead of eggplant. Potatoes, absolutely. Onions and garlic will spice up the rest of your food, can be replanted the following year (especially if you keep at least a small patch of multiplier onions growing), and can be used as herbal medicine as well.
A person CAN survive- and stay healthy- on potatoes and milk. It sounds odd, but that combination provides all the amino acids and vitamins needed for health. The poor of Ireland did just that until the potato blight hit so hard. If you have a few pots of chives and other herbs in the windowsill, they'll provide some extra vitamins and seasoning as well.
Dry beans are nutritious, and can be grown in quite small of an area, if you pick pole varieties and give them room to climb. Ditto the various pole "snap" beans.. and if you've canned up all the green beans you need, you can leave the rest on the vine to ripen, and either save the seeds to plant, or use them for soups and bean dishes.
Given a small patch of land, FATS will be your biggest problem. That probably sounds downright odd, given our society's current obsession with everything low-fat, but it's true. Fats are absolute necessities for health, and it's very difficult in a "hunting and gathering" situation, or a small gardening- vegetarian diet situation, to get enough.
One drawback to raising rabbits for meat is that they are essentially very lean. Not quite as lean as the wild rabbits maybe- the old saying is a man will starve eating all the rabbit he can stuff into him- and it's true.
Chickens are a better choice, if you can manage it. Their eggs are extremely high quality protein, and their meat is higher in fat.. when I butcher chickens and make soup stock out of the backs and necks and other trimmings, I often end up with many pounds of clear, yellow chicken fat skimmed off. It makes the best biscuits on earth!
For vitamin C in cold climates, either spruce tea (made from the tips of branches from any of the spruce trees) or rose hip tea (made from any of the fruits of roses that weren't sprayed) will add enough of the vitamin to your diet.
Other potential high yield and high nutrient content crops are carrots and cabbage. Both will store for many months in a cellar, and will give you "fresh" veggies when nothing else is available.
If I were in a suburban situation, I'd plant hedges between my backyard and the neighbors- one would be blueberry bushes, one would be blackberries or raspberries. Both can be easily contained with a bit of judicious pruning (and even the brambles won't spread if someone is mowing on both sides of them), and a 50 foot row of each will provide a LOT of fruit in season. Blueberries dry well, raspberries don't- but you can freeze them, or make jam from them. The Amish even can them.
You will need a source of sugar. I'd strongly suggest that you stock up at least a couple hundred pounds NOW, while it's readily available and relatively inexpensive. That at least could get you through the first year while you figure out alternatives.
It's going to take a lot of maple taps to provide enough sugar for both baking and general kitchen use, and canning and preserving. Sugar isn't just flavoring when you're making jams or canning fruit. It adds significant preservative power, preserving color, flavor and texture.
My next project (probably NEXT summer- this summer is establishing a flock of heirloom turkeys for breeders, and getting my daughter married off ) is going to be a couple of hives of honeybees. I've noticed the wild bees are coming back around here, for whatever reason, but that's only a help with pollination. For honey, you need (if at all possible) your own tame hives which can be harvested without killing the bees or losing the colony. Harvesting wild honey is possible, but not something I'd do voluntarily unless there wasn't any choice!
The other absolute basic, which most of us are not going to be able to produce at home, is salt. Again, it's cheap, it will keep literally forever if kept dry, and a couple hundred pounds- or a ton- isn't going to take up much room. Heat and cold don't bother it, so you could store it literally anywhere, once it's packaged up well. I can envision a time when salt is accepted as currency again, all too easily.
The details are endless, and if anyone reading this is getting discouraged, that's not the point. The point is... START NOW!
The old time rule of thumb, which I've followed for years, despite having access to myriad seed catalogs and other sources, is never plant more than HALF your available seed. If a crop failure occurs, you've still got seed to start again. Many crops only take half the growing season, even here in the frozen north. If you replant that year, again, only use half the seed you have left.
It may mean a lean winter, or one subsisting on a small variety of food, but at least you'll have seed for the next year again.
I wonder if many people here can even conceive of the way people in the not-very-distant past worked for years to get to the point where they had the means to grow most of their own food?
There is a great passage in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books (Little Town on the Prairie, maybe?) where they've been given a hatching of chicks by a friend who already has poultry. They're looking at these tiny balls of fluff and thinking "if they survive- if we can keep hawks and other problems away from them, next year some of them will start laying eggs".. So, did them plan on EATING any of those eggs? Nope.... it goes on "the hens will set on those eggs, and produce chicks, and later that summer, we'll be able to have a few of the cockerels for fried chicken. Then, the next year, we'll have all the eggs we want!"
THREE years from a "gift" of chicks to the point where they have a steady supply of eggs and some fried chicken for Sundays and feast days.
No, subsistence farming is NOT easy. Possible? yes. And definitely rewarding (unless you've swallowed all the 21'st century bulls**t about what constitutes "success"). But very, very hard.
BUT... that is EXACTLY why I think that hoping or relying on "trade" of some mythical surplus is dangerous. There won't BE a surplus, not until all the kinks get worked out on how to change back the big farms- completely dependent on fuel and electricity- to simpler, less energy intensive- but FAR more labor intensive- methods.
We currently produce almost 750,000 pounds of milk in a year. (that's not quite 100,000 gallons). With two people doing all the labor. Given a scenario where we'd have to go back to Amish methods, we wouldn't be able to produce 1/10th of that. But cutting hay with the horses, and then raking it with them, and stacking it either in the field (for easy access for the beef cows) or putting it in the shed or barns is certainly not the biggest problem we'd have.
If you're going to be trading for food, you're going to have to have something at least as valuable to exchange.
Skills like shoemaking, or metal working, or even carpentry, may come in awfully handy.
But someone's idea of "having precious metals" and "hoping" that someone will be willing to trade food is awfully tenuous, in a real disaster situation. Because without gasoline engines, or other labor saving devices (including a draft animal and the harness AND tools to hitch it to) growing enough for any one family is pretty much a full time job. Growing extra is going to be more luck than anything else. And trading food your family needs for something like silver or gold- unless you KNOW of someplace you can then trade those for needed food and other items- is downright silly.
You're correct, of course, that not everyone can homestead.. at least under current conditions. It's entirely possible that we see those conditions crash back far enough that everyone who wants to eat is either going to grow their own, or hunt and harvest their own from the woods and fields. Again, it's unlikely that people will have much extra under those conditions.
I had to laugh about "not having cattle, because they're too much work". I have cows because they are LESS work per calorie that you get back than any gardening I've ever done. Sure, my dairy herd of 40+ cows, plus another 50 young stock, is a full time job. But my herd of little beef cows is simplicity itself... as long as there is pasture inside the fences (and we do a lot of intensive management to maintain the quality of those pastures, but it takes very little time- a few minutes a day to move fences) they're happy, and their calves are packing on beef like crazy.
And ONE milking cow isn't a lot of work- less than 15 minutes per day can take care of feeding, cleaning and milking, once you've got some experience. Making butter and cheese and all the rest from the milk IS very time consuming, but you can't blame the cow for that!
But for one person, a cow is definitely overkill. A cooperatively owned cow, though.....
I guess what it comes down to for me (besides the fact that I truly love this life, and enjoy the sense of independence growing everything I can gives me - and the IRS hasn't figured out a way to tax our gardens yet!) is that under tough circumstances, I want to depend on people I KNOW I can trust, and that is my family, pretty much. I want to know that I don't have to worry about whether or not someone will have extra food available for me to trade for, or whether we'll have something extra that someone will be willing to exchange for food. Once we have enough to eat- and fuel for heat- then we can start looking at helping rebuild society, including setting up trade. But if we don't survive the first year or two, that won't be in issue.
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