Moving Toward Self Sufficiency: A Beginners Guide

There are certain skills and knowledge that you would not use until disaster strikes, but on the other hand, there are things that can be and should be done before disaster does strike. One of those things that should be ongoing is gardening. Keep in mind during a crisis you will not be able to run to the nearest home and garden center. You will need the skills, tools and materials for gardening well before something happens.

Prepping is not just about stockpiling supplies, it is also about gathering the tools, materials and equipment to sustain life for an extended period. This means that at some point you must have the ability to produce your own food.

Begin Now Planning For Tomorrow

The essentials for gardening are good soil or some other form of growing medium, quality seeds, and nutrients, certain tools, materials and patience. It will certainly help to have experience and certain skill sets but nature has the technique down pretty well. Start by paying attention to how nature does it. Then begin gathering facts about frost dates, types of plants and maturity dates so you can match your plants to your growing season. Then, and this is important, pick out fruits and vegetables that your family will actually eat.

You can of course if you have the space raise food that can be used for bartering/trading when the SHTF. You will likely have to can the foods in most cases so keep this in mind when considering space for foods your family will eat and storage for foods for bartering.

Results Are Not Overnight

Establishing a garden takes time, so you will need enough emergency supplies to sustain you until your garden begins producing. There are never any guarantees when it comes to gardening.

Things that can cause a poor harvest are inferior seeds, poor weather conditions, lack of rainfall/water, not enough nutrients, and insects/pest to include grazing animals such as rabbit, deer and others.

The quality of your seeds plays a big role. Seeds stored at room temperature (the range from 68 to 74ᵒF is widely considered room temperature) will typically have a shelf life of three years from date of processing the seeds after harvesting them. The garden center may have had the seeds in their warehouse for a year or more and you may have purchased them last spring. Essentially, you do not know how old your seeds are unless you harvested them yourself.

If the seeds were stored at 10 degrees cooler than room temperature, this would have doubled their life span to six years. This means seeds stored at 52ᵒF would have an approximate shelf life of 12 years.

Some of you may be concerned about your garden being a target of marauders during a crisis and this is a valid concern. A crisis can create a paradox because on one hand to survive, you will need to stay close to your renewable food source and on the other hand, you may be forced to evacuate, which means you have lost your food source.

To ensure you always have the means to raise your own food you should build up a seed bank using heirloom seeds. If you rely on harvesting seeds every year from the plants, you do not have a surplus of seeds, and you do have to evacuate this means you have may lost your seeds for the next season if you cannot ever return.

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