Even if SHTF does not happen this year, you NEED to make sure you have a vegetable garden! I have heard rumors of skyrocketing food prices this year! So get your garden started. Here are a few tips.
1) Learn how to, and use, composts.2) Make your garden as big as you can sustain. Make sure you can water it, or have an alternate way to water.
3) Layout your garden on paper. Determine what types of plants will grow better in shade vs sunlight.
4) Have an alternate way to cultivate. If you don’t have a cultivator, get hoes, hand weed pullers, shovels,…etc. If it runs on gas, don’t depend on it.
5) Fence and/or protect your garden area.
6) Grow only the types of food that you and your family will eat.
7) Be ready to can and or store your food. If you can’t keep it good, no sense in growing it.
8) If you have room for a garden, you have room for an herb garden. Take one of your flower beds and make it an herb garden. Grow food taste enhancers (ie..basil), and medicinal herbs. Get on the net and learn more!
9) Grow roses in your flower beds. Rose Hips are edible!
10) Tell no one what you are doing. Op Sec is key to not having thievery.
11) If you don’t have room for a large garden, then learn micro gardening, and bucket gardening. Grow in buckets the plants that produce year round. Take them inside in the winter.
I don't have a complete set of garden tools but I still manage to take care of my garden. It also have a beautiful landscape design that I really love.
ReplyDeleteDenver Landscape
I love this post! We need to think differently. Sure, include a few of your most loved heirloom non-GMO plants; potatoes, peas, carrots, radishes, but intersperse them with the unknown but nutritious ones of old. Those country gardens weren't just pretty, they were edible! I’d include unusual plants, not normally known or fully realized to be edible at all, both annual and especially perennials like tradescantia, prickly pear, dandelions, Siberian pea, millet, pig weed, Good King Henry, arugula, sorrels, patient dock, purslane, wild lettuce, lovage, Golden Alexander, sea kale, lupine, goldenrod, roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, hollyhocks, hostas, chicory, and my favorite: sunflowers...and start eating them NOW!. Why? We are 60 & 70 and have been at it for decades and now learning to love ‘stealth’ gardening on 1/24 acre, hiding food in plain sight, but it has become a struggle with health and mobility. We use perennials like lemon balm, onion, and garlic chives to deter bugs, plus sea kale, cardoons, hollyhocks, and sunflowers, that all have edible leaves, roots, buds, flowers and seeds, the non-gardener would not know that they are 90% edible! They may steal a few heads from the sunflowers and cardoons but leave all the rest of the plants for us to eat! Good protein and caloric numbers. Potatoes, winter squash, tomatoes, and beans are great calorie annual items to plant amid roses, wisteria, and Oregon holly berries but with sunflowers you get 745 calories in 1 cup of seeds. Sunflowers do make great micro-greens! You can eat the baby sunflower leaves as salads, older ones in stir-fry, or dried into powder for long term storage, the stems can be eaten like celery, the roots like sun-chokes (cooked like potatoes) or dried, roasted and powdered for a coffee-tea, the heads prior to blooming boiled slightly and then stir-fried or eaten like Brussels sprouts (not same flavor but yummy) or even pickled... then, of course, there are the seeds to eat raw, roasted or powdered for flour.... super versatile... and nutritious... Use last year’s ‘annual’ stocks for bean poles, trellises, fence posts, or toss into your core bed for regenerating the soil. Use the Core method in your raised beds in very early spring to dispose of food scraps, egg shells, clean up the yard by tossing in leaves, branches, and stems. Bury it all and when the last frost of winter has come and gone, plant your bed. I would give this plant a second thought ... they need next to no attention with next to no watering... using heirloom, perennial, drought tolerant plants for SHTF before (and if) it ever hits the fan! Use urine 1-10 ratio for fertilizer. Plant everything super close for deterring weeds. Plant your edibles in containers, the ground, in your house, or even in the shade. You can use an outdoor dehydrator set up to preserve them and sun ovens to prepare the meals. We invite you to visit our site for recipes and more info on annual and perennial sunflowers: http://eat-sunflowers.weebly.com.
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