I've developed a problem with the concept of gardening

[mousewizard]

Years ago, back on LATOC, I posted a message that essentially asked how well fertilizer kept so I could lay in a stockpile if I needed to start a garden.

I clearly remember the response of rbrgs. Essentially, I was told that fertilizer wasn't going to help, and I needed to learn how to build up my soil as a set of living organisms that naturally produced the nutrients needed by my plants.

Sounded good, and so began my multi-year quest to build my skills and soil up to support plant life. I dug pits, carefully set up soil, installed worms, installed fences to keep the rabbits out, installed subsoil bricks to keep the gophers out, and every year I added composted manure and other amendments to get that rich, fluffy loam that every gardening magazine so carefully describes. I got good productivity from my square foot gardens, and even set up a hegelculture (is that spelled even spelled right?) pit and raised a good crop of corn first time out with it. My neighbor that grew up on a farm said it was surprising that I got a good crop of corn up first try. Said it usually takes a few years to get it right.

So finally, I've got good, productive square foot gardens up and running. But only after years of amending the soil, and that's just for that little set of garden spaces. In my mind I was doing all this to get the skills necessary to set up and keep a large, post-collapse garden going. Ok, so now I have some skills. I'm not the greatest gardener in the world, but at least plants don't die when I walk past like they used to.

I'm a survivalist. The whole reason I was working on gardening was so I could, in an emergency, raise enough potatoes, beans, cabbage, and other storeable, useful food that my family wouldn't starve during the upcoming collapse.

This year, as I was adding yet another pile of sacks of composted manure and peat to my little square foot gardens, I had a horrible thought:

This process does not scale well or rapidly.

If I want to feed my family during a collapse, I had damn well better have multiple acres producing well right now. Not sometime the future, but now. Why? Because it takes a while to get a piece of land to a state of good productivity. Sometimes years. From my experience, one needs to keep working the land to keep it productive. Tilling, aerating, testing and balancing nutrients, watering, weeding, wondering what disaster is coming up next, it's the never ending story.

I submit that not many of us have a garden big enough to feed our family year after year. Most of us don't have that kind of land. I was hoping to take my skills to a piece of newly available land post-collapse and make a go of it there.

But that's not going to happen. There is no fertile farmland just sitting around waiting for me to come along and poke some seeds into it. Whatever's available will require years of work to make it productive using organic techniques. I and my family will probably starve if we take that path.

And even if I did have a big patch of land, I'd have to be constantly working it to keep it in shape. I had one square foot pit that I let lie fallow for a year and this year I wound up aerating it with a pickaxe. Not what I expected from my soft, fluffy soil that grew onions and garlic with such abandon two seasons ago.

So here's the problems I foresee with farming post-collapse:

• No time to work acres of soil down 24 inches using a shovel and fork
• No tractor to work acres of soil
• No gas to run the tractor if I had one
• Massive water requirements forever
• No fencing in place to keep the animals out
• No feed and seed store to purchase acres worth of amendments from
• No gas for the truck to haul all the amendments in year after year
• Need food this season for sure, not maybe in a couple of years

So basically, unless you've got a full-scale farm up and running now, you're screwed.

You can't stockpile soil.

This is unacceptable to me, so I'm looking for a solution.

Any suggestions?

[Jesse17]

My theory is the more self-sufficient you are pre-Apocalypse the less 'prepping' you have to do for post-apocalypse. That doesn't do you much good if you plan on bugging out, but I don't plan on bugging out. I work on becoming more self-sufficient in my day to day life, gardening, chickens, growing chicken feed, etc. because the less I have to purchase now the better off I am NOW, and the more ready I'll be if the SHTF.

[zenobia]

You have some good points, but I think there's a piece missing. Right now you have the luxury of working at this "part time". If you had to grow all of your food, you'd be working at it more than full-time. That's what people did 100 years ago and all the centuries before that.

We modern folks seem to have this idea that work starts at 8 or 9 am and ends at 5, 5 out of 7 days a week, for 50 weeks out of 52. It doesn't.

Get to work!

[badkitty]

I think your first problem is that you are talking about square-foot gardening. That is a very intensive method, as I understand it, that does require huge amounts of amendments and water, and will likely never scale well. Conversely, last year we planted stuff right into plowed ground in a patch of what had been (extremely non-organic) canola field the year before, with no real preparation or fertilizer, did not water at all, weeded when we had time (which was never enough, and things got away from us frequently), and pulled out literally hundreds of pounds of food. We got 500 pounds of potatoes, over 200 pounds of carrots, over 50 full-sized squash, who-knows-how-many pounds of dried beans, etc. This was despite a total crop failure in the corn, and very poor yields from the turnips, beets, brassicas, and peas. We still have food from our garden in the root cellar and pantry right now (mostly potatoes, squash, onions, and dried stuff, though there are some canned tomato goods, and our freezer is still overflowing with wax beans, too). Now, it was a big garden (85 x 95 feet), and I planted enthusiastically, but it illustrates that you don't need great soil with a lot of amendments and water to get food out of the dirt. Our biggest issue here would be acquiring seeds, I think, and I am not good at seed saving yet.

I agree with your thought that you need to be working at things now, rather than waiting until after some 'Apocalypse' (which, I have to add, I don't really believe in), but there are things other than gardening that you can do to improve land now. Planting trees and perennial food, for instance, does not require huge investments of time. Based on our own gardening efforts, I am not convinced that even most prepared people, with big productive gardens, who know how to garden well, are going to be able to get enough calories out of vegetables alone, especially in harsher zones like my own (zone 2). I worked out the calorie count on my 500 pounds of potatoes (for just the 2 of us), and it was not promising at all; disappointing, considering they would be our main calorie crop. Outside of the tropics, you would likely need to supplement with grain, nuts, and animal products (eggs, milk, honey, meat) to stay healthy. Also, if you have chickens or rabbits (or other animals), you don't need to import nearly as much as far as garden amendments go.

In a collapse, I don't think I would bother shooting for a 'perfect' textbook garden. There would be no double-digging or hugelculture or raised beds. I would cut off the sod, turn the underlying dirt as well as I could in a hurry, and stick some seeds in. The productivity would not rival your intensive beds, to be sure, but I am certain I would get something, and I could make up for lack of productivity with size. I would be planting lots of the hardiest, weediest, most invasive things I had (potatoes, squash, etc) and not trying to coddle tomatoes or peppers along. I would space everything out, so that it needed less water, and would mulch things where I could, or do minimal weeding to keep the competition down to a dull roar. You would be amazed what we pulled out of some totally weed-choked and overgrown beds that got away from us last year.

We're on a good-sized rural acreage, with goats and chickens and plenty of space for gardens and trees, so there is a fair chance of being able to close the loop here. However, I doubt you could sustainably do that in the city. In a city in a slow crash (more what I am expecting), you would be more likely to be buying your grain and legumes (major sources of calories/protein), and supplementing that with backyard rabbits or chickens and fresh produce from your garden. Would your garden be able to fill that role? If so, you might want to focus on being good at growing the high-nutrient supplementation stuff, like tomatoes and spinach, rather than calorie crops like turnips and potatoes. Or, you could try to learn 'roughing it' gardening, which would probably give you more related skills (for an Apocalypse) than growing your food in heavily amended, watered, and carefully tended square-foot beds.

I don't think you should write gardening off entirely, though. Humans have been doing it for quite a while, so there much be some value to it...

Edited to add: Gardening is unreliable in a good year, as far as I can tell. That's why you put back as much as you can every single year, by canning, dehydrating, etc. It's also why a full pantry is a good idea. Even if you are a great gardener, with perfect garden beds, doing all the right things, one late frost, or a hailstorm, or drought, or flood, or whatever, can wipe you completely out. That's what your rice and beans and stockpiled chicken food are for.

[Ludi]

So basically, unless you've got a full-scale farm up and running now, you're screwed.

Depending on how you choose to grow your food, a "full scale farm" doesn't need to be multiple acres of plowed land. If you have water for irrigation, an almost complete vegan diet can be grown on as little as 4000 square feet per person, it is marginally adequate as to calories and nutrients, but not by any means optimum. This is the minimum amount of land per person determined by decades of study by Ecology Action. It includes the land needed to produce compost materials for the food-growing area. It does not include animals, which I think is a mistake, but as a basis for developing a diet based on the smallest space, it's a good place to start. Personally I think a permaculture-style food forest makes more sense for some situations. But these take years to develop (as most gardens do, especially in harsh climates). So if you're genuinely interested in growing your own food and not just blowing it off because it seems hard, you might want to study these disciplines, Biointensive and food forestry. And if you're a serious survivalist, what the heck are you doing messing around with a "little square foot garden" anyway....

http://growbiointensive.org/

http://edibleforestgardens.com/

http://permaculture.org.au/what-is-permaculture/

I agree with badkitty, if you're talking survival, you don't want to be messing around much with tomatoes and lettuce, you want to grow calorie crops and the most nutrient dense greens. Many of the most nutrient dense "vegetables" are actually weeds (including dandelions, pigweed, nettles, etc).

Small space diet: http://www.bountifulgardens.org/prod...umber=BEA-0370

Edible wild plants and weeds: http://www.foragingtexas.com/

[K.B.]

You can't stockpile soil.

This is unacceptable to me, so I'm looking for a solution.

Any suggestions?

Hi Mousewizard,

Actually there are ways to stockpile soil. Placing a deep mulch down and thoroughly wetting the material will keep the soil from drying back in to a hard material. If you don't have the time to work a piece of land this year or next, keep it thickly mulched with straw or wood chips until you are ready to use it. Unless you have access to locally grown straw or are making your own woodchips, it probably isn't the most sustainable way to stockpile soil, but for access to larger areas that are close to ready to plant for emergency use, it is what I would go with.

I see you are in central NM, which means your area is likely quite arid. If you don't get more than 10-15" of rain per year, there can be issues with deep mulch preventing some moisture from reaching the soil. However, I am assuming you have a reliable water source and a way to access it even in an emergency if you are in an arid climate.

Another alternative to brought-in mulch would be to grow your own. Start a plot of mulch crops that come back each year and can be cut several times a year. Some crops dig deeply and will help you avoid mineral supplements (comfrey, dock, yarrow, dandelion, etc...). Most of these crops are easy to propagate 10-100x each year and allow for rapid expansion of your mulch plot. They are also good fodder crops...

Square foot gardening is a great method for part-time gardeners to grow all of their own vegetables. I've used it before and had very good luck with it. Mel's mix (peat moss, vermiculite and compost) is a good starting point, and provides a stable growing medium. Once you prepare the mix, all you really need to add is some fresh compost each time you plant a new crop. The soil mix is stable, otherwise. It's not my first choice for sustainability, but it is intended to build beds for about a hundred square feet per family. From that hundred or so square feet, you really can supply most of your fresh eating veggies for the family if your in decent climate zone. Succession planting, zone extenders, continual preparation of transplants and strategic placement of crops to maximize vertical space allow this when combined with ideal "soil".

I wouldn't try and grow all my own calorie crops using the square foot method. A combination of things is my preferred method. Lots of perennial crops from trees, bushes, vines, mushrooms and herbs. Some annual beds to provide those crops we have become used to enjoying (peppers, tomato, carrot, beet, etc). Wild or "wild" (weeds and introduced crops that sow themselves freely) edible plants and animals (fish, birds and mammals). Livestock if they can be supported from locally produced feed. Raising a few rabbits for the manure rather than meat allows for you to replace your compost with fresh rabbit manure... no waiting necessary. Rabbits raised for manure don't need much, if any, high calorie feed.

Pocket gophers are a menace, to be sure. do you currently have raptors in your area? If so, there are ways to attact them to your gardening areas and use them to help control the gopher population. Snakes can also help. In general, if you avoid monocrop areas and interplant for diversity, you may have less trouble with them. It is working for our area so far.

Fences should definitely be put up sooner rather than later. Even if you are not using the land to grow crops, I'd still put up a good fence.

[Deckard1973]

Well crap! I wrote a big long post and the site said my log in session expired.
Sum up: Soil improvement is a never ending life long project, even if by chance you settled on a well fertile piece of land.
Diversification in the event one crop fails.
Sounds to me you are ahead of the power curve. What would it take to get your land working for you to meet your families calorie requirements in the here and now?

[Ludi]

Oh I meant to mention I think we need to find or develop locally-appropriate food-growing methods. Badkitty's method in Saskatchewan won't work for me down here in Texas, raised beds might work great in Mobile Alabama but be completely inappropriate in New Mexico. In some places a largely vegetable-based diet might make sense, in others you might want to be a meatatarian!

And as others mention, diversity is a survival strategy.

[Deckard1973]

What about your neighbors/community? The whole no man is truly a self-sustaining island thing? Got something you can trade, barter for? I think establishing those ties and a trade/barter mentality will help a long way in a post Kersplat world.

[Ludi]

Deckard, that's the only way I see folks in cities and suburban areas being able to make it, to work together. Each yard can't be a self-supporting fortress, there simply isn't enough space - and how would I protect my little fortress anyway? It might be possible to be self-sufficient in the country if you're some kind of mountain man, but anything more complicated than that and you're probably going to need some help. Homo sapiens is a social animal. (and I'm a near-total hermit so probably doomed! )

[Largus]

Although it's already been said, I'll add my agreement. Square foot, French intensive and similar gardening methods that pamper plants with ideal conditions are great for the urban gardener with strict space limitations, but they're not going to work for acres of crops. In a serious worst-case scenario, you'd be better off planting a variety of tough edible weeds that will survive in unimproved soil.

I recommend the book "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times" by Steve Solomon. He talks about what level of care and protection different sorts of plants require, and how to set up plants to take care of themselves with a minimum of care.

[badkitty]

Oh I meant to mention I think we need to find or develop locally-appropriate food-growing methods. Badkitty's method in Saskatchewan won't work for me down here in Texas, raised beds might work great in Mobile Alabama but be completely inappropriate in New Mexico. In some places a largely vegetable-based diet might make sense, in others you might want to be a meatatarian!

And as others mention, diversity is a survival strategy.

Seconded. In fact, what might be appropriate for one part of your own plot of land may not work so well elsewhere on the same plot. For instance, I can't put raised beds in my current garden area, because there is no way to water out there, and in my own climate (14-16 inches of precip per year), watering would be necessary in a raised bed. Conversely, raised beds would make sense up by the house, as they warm up faster in the spring, and they could be watered from the rain barrels, plus if they were close to the house, we could plant tender stuff in them a bit early (like tomatoes) and cover them for frosts.

Also, growing crops well-suited to your area makes sense. We're really pushing it with tomatoes, peppers, and melons, and have only had success with the tomatoes, and even then, they were seriously coddled - watered, carefully weeded, and covered for frosts on both ends of the season. Conversely, we normally do really well with asparagus, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, peas, wax beans, sunflowers, and short-season squash. Corn and mangel beets are iffy here - our season is not really long enough many years, as the soil does not warm fast enough in the spring. Brassicas (including turnips) usually get eaten by bugs, as there is a lot of conventionally-grown canola around here on short crop rotations, which means that pests really build up, and there are few good ways to really control them, short of using chemicals, which we aren't into. We haven't tried them (yet), but wheat, oats, and barley all grow very well here, too, as do short-season lentils, apparently. Chick peas (which we did try) did not fare so well, however.

Of course, your own area will be totally different. Finding out what grows best there, and adapting your diet accordingly, would probably take you a long way...in a survival situation, you would want to know which plants to ditch (because they are not worth the effort of keeping them alive in your own climate), and which are reliable producers with minimal inputs.

[Vinland]

In spite of the common perception that mineral fertilizers only destroy the soil, they can also be used to build soil if one goes about it the right way.

Get a soil test. If the soil is too acidic, add limestone. The standard advice is to add finely ground limestone, but that only helps for a few years - better off with a coarser grind. Most modern soil scientists erroneously rely on the average pH, but roots can find microzones of different pH levels around particles of limestone.

If phosphorous is low, add bone meal, rock phosphate or other slow-release products.

Nitrogen will stimulate the microbes to munch down on your soil organic matter - overapplication of nitrogen has given fertilizers a bad name - better off using legumes to build this slowly.

Look for fritted trace elements - these are made by dissolving the minerals in molten glass, then crushing it. Depending on the size of the particles, it will release essential minor elements over years or decades.

Modest amounts of water soluble fertilizers applied with a hose-end can will not destroy the worms, bacteria and fungi. Too much of this can cause the nitrogen/OM depletion issue discussed above.

Tomato fertilizer is lowest in total salt, which makes it a better choice in drier climates. Unfortunately, also more expensive.

[mousewizard]

Wow!

Too many responses to address individually.

To those who recommend getting a farm and living on it if I'm a true survivalist, or the ones that say just work harder - there are obviously unused hours in your day:

We're in a slow crash right now. That crash will accelerate and with climate change, there's no telling where our children will wind up. When the weather patterns change, even the most skilled farmers can lose everything. Look at the problems Old Horseman is working through.

As for the rest:

There's a good chance my children will at some point be wandering the wasteland until they can find a viable community to join. To join that community, they will need skills. I am teaching them several skills in depth, and one of them was to be raising crops. They need to have multiple skills to be of value to a community. Right now, all I can give them by example is square foot gardening, a skill I have learned the hard way is the wrong one. So I need to figure out something else. Buying or moving to a farm is not an option. The finances just aren't there, and that's not really a "survivalist" move.

So here are my current requirements for a crop-growing skill:

Once you have the knowledge in your head:

• No power machinery required.
• No electricity required that can't be supplied with a couple of 12V solar panels, no batteries, day use only.
• No outside infrastructure to deliver products.
• A good local community to help and receive help from.
• A good set of (mostly) hand and (a few) 12V electric power tools available.
• Everything done with what can be scavenged or salvaged.
• A good set of heirloom seeds in place. Enough to last through two crop failures.
• Absolute minimal water consumption (yes, I live in an arid zone).
• Scaleable. Once the basics are in place, the area under cultivation can be expanded without proportionally expanding manpower needs aside from harvest time.
• Can be implemented anywhere; city or desert, as long as minimal water is available.

Maybe I'm on the wrong forum, maybe not. There is certainly some deep expertise here.

[K.B.]

It sounds like you've got a good set of criteria. It is up to you to figure out what works in your climate and the land you have to work with. No one else can give you that info.

Just because I wouldn't choose square foot gardening for growing all my crops doesn't mean it is not a good tool to know and be able to use. Once established, it is very space and time efficient. You could keep using it for your annual veggies and start learning how to plant trees or some other food production method suitable to your area.

If you're a survivalist, you already know you can buy calorie staples for a long, long time for very little money right now. Hell, a few hundred dollars per person, per year will get you a long way if you have the input of your own fresh veggies and herbs. Food is still cheap right now.

[Largus]

Well, I think that careful plant selection can address many of your concerns.

Choose plant varieties that mature fruit over an extended season instead of a sudden burst. The plants that are most popular in commercial agriculture ripen the whole field simultaneously and can be harvested with a giant harvester (or a horde of cheap labor) in one fell swoop. But if something goes wrong at a critical stage, the whole crop is lost. For the small-scale farmer without machinery, you want just the opposite. Favor pole beans over bush beans, everbearing strawberries over June-bearing, indeterminate tomatoes over determinate ones, etc.

Better yet, choose plants that can be harvested whenever you're ready for them. Root crops are a great example. Whether it's high summer or the dead of winter, there are roots and tubers that are ready to eat.

Grow as many perennial food plants as you can. Perennials have a huge automatic advantage over annual weeds, and so don't require the constant care/weeding that young annuals need each year. You don't need to store seeds to insure the next crop. Their more robust and well-established root systems allow them to find water during dry spells. In arid regions it may even be desirable to use the bigger perennials for shade to protect more delicate annuals.

I love my heirloom seeds as much as the next gardener, but I also realize that they are ultimately inbred and don't always adapt well to different conditions. I would really like to breed my own adaptivars that are suited to the climate and soil of my area, and still variable enough to roll with the punches if something unforeseen happens. Breeding your own superior plants is serious survival tech that can improve your odds, and it requires no special high-tech equipment.

For arid environments, you'll certainly want to choose (or breed) plants that thrive under those conditions. But, just as importantly, there are techniques that can make your available water go much farther. Mulching has been mentioned, but you can also use ollas to deliver water directly to the root zone instead of letting it evaporate off the top of the soil. Water wise gardening techniques will allow you to grow a much wider range of plants... and having some favorite foods that would not naturally grow in an arid region can have morale benefits that are worth a bit of extra water.

[happydog]

mousewizard, you may be interested in The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. It's about survival gardening. It's been out for awhile, so your library should have it or be able to get it on an interlibrary loan. It talks about your concerns.

[cactus wren]

As I am currently on a small lot,I use raised beds. Lots of mulch, and then more mulch seems to work for me.

My tomatoes,cilantro,garlic, and onions do well. And Big Jim chilis.

A fellar up at the ranch raises great pigs,chickens ,and grows some pintos.

Between us,we`ve got "Red or Green" covered.

The pueblo near me has folks that raise great corn, something I haven`t figured out.

I feel that life will become a share and share alike or a barter type after TSHTF.

[happydog]

I've had the same experience as badkitty. My first big garden was a quarter acre. I paid a neighbor to till it, and then I mulched it heavily in hay (or maybe it was straw) ala Ruth Stout. It started out fine, I got everything planted, but then it all went south fast. It was a huge, giant, weedy mess that I tried to handle all by myself with no power tools.

By the end of the summer it was an overgrown jungle of tomato vines and weeds. The seeds in the straw attracted mice and that in turn attracted snakes. The kids were afraid to go in there. After the first month I gave up and just let the weeds take over.

I did absolutely nothing for soil improvement or fertilizing. I didn't weed. And still it produced an amazing amount of food. I hauled out huge amounts of food when I could get up the courage to wade in. I canned 200 quarts of tomatoes. And fed the chickens all summer. I canned and froze tons of peanuts, beans, and cowpeas. Basically all I did was plant and pick.

I don't listen to rbrgs.

[Ludi]

Personally, I suggest learning about permaculture. This is something that can be practiced in a small yard or a large acreage. Too big a topic to say much about in a single forum thread.

A couple resources:

http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/

http://www.sonoranpermaculture.org/