I was able to grow a lotta stuff in just a couple of garden beds on my roof. Sure, my back probably hates me for carrying all that dirt up two flights of stairs. But I have herbs and veggies aplenty. Haven’t even covered 20% of the roof yet.
The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.
It has barely reached 33%.
This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.
The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.
It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.
I call myself an aspiring farmer. I’ve been at it for about 12 years. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve lost a lot, for most of that I didn’t have much land and had to get creative. Now we’re in a decent spot with some good land and soil, I grow most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat, probably 70-80%, and raise quail for the eggs which we have a wild surplus of.
It’s a fucking fuckton of work and still I think if SHTF we would struggle big time. Most of what we do is pretty self sufficient, but we still rely on the grocery store for so many ingredients and products. I don’t have enough space to grow enough wheat to mill into flour to make bread, nor do I really want to. Also all it would really take is our water supply to be cut and we’d be done for.
I do think it’s a good skill to have though. And if I had the money fuck off I’d quit my day job in a heartbeat and buy more land to farm.
I think that last part is key, it’s a good skill to have. It’s easy to think it’ll be everyone on their own when the apocalypse happens, but people generally want to work together if it means better chances of survival.
It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be tribes of people popping up across the wasteland
no one is going to make it on their own. community effort is the only way survival is gonna happen.
Our natural state is to exist in collective communities. It is only capitalism that has atomized us into individuals competing against everyone else.
To prepare for world collapse learn to at people. There’s plenty of them
@Hikermick
Am I doing it right?
Yes, and:
- skills to grow things
- community of people you have been giving extra zucchinis to
- skills to prepare meals using the things that you grow
So people who want to kill you for having to take all those zucchinis they didn’t want
We didn’t even grow zucchinis this year so many people have extra zucchinis.
I’ve got my bottle caps ready. I reckon I’ve got a good four minutes to hide them all around the house for a future wasteland dweller to find.
Lol. Day R taught me to save bottle caps, and make sure I had plenty of Vodka for the radiation sickness.
And all at the same time, with nothing the rest of the year.
Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.
I think It always been like that in temperate climate.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part, preserving it so you still have food to eat at the end of winter is the hardest and most time consuming part.
In colder climates you actually have to plan to eat preserved food until late spring, when everything that started growing when the snow melted has finally started to produce food.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part
And it’s anything but easy.
Don’t tell me you can’t hibernate!
I wish I could
I’d love to century-nate, is that possible?
One tomato for every season
That’s why I also have a slingshot
That’s because we were never meant to be rugged individuals. It’ll be a lot more survivable if we build stronger communities.
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Yes they are jalapeno their communities. They are too spicy to ignore.
Sometimes gardening is just a hobby, tho
Yeah but this meme is specifically talking about trying to survive after the world collapses
It is a self deprecating joke about the terrible output of their personal garden because they are not good at it, not gardens in general.
Yes but it was more joking that 4 tomatoes from your personal garden will not be enough to survive the collapse.
Post-collapse society is going to be boring af. You better have some hobbies.
We were meant to be rugged individuals, but rugged individuals living in a community with other rugged individuals.
Also, farming has always been a hard job. People who garden are doing the kinds of farming that farmers did before automation became a thing, but they’re doing it on a tiny scale. One farmer using non-industrial methods is going to have to really work like a mule to keep just themselves and their family alive. So, gardening using those same methods is never going to produce enough calories and nutrients for anything meaningful.
I consider myself a “prepper” I don’t prep for the apocalypse but for “next Tuesday” if we have a shelter in place, or some large utility failure, a big earthquake or volcano so I spend time in prepper spaces. The amount of people who are not prepper and genuinely believe they can garden their way to survival is SO high. When we look at places around the world dealing with long term hardships no one is surviving off their personal garden. Farming at scale exists for a reason, growing food is extremely labor, time and resource intensive, unless you’re doing it at scale you’re like net negative in calories for what you’re putting in versus what you’re getting out. Farming livestock that can live off the land like goats or chickens would be more successful but that also takes a good amount of time and labor and the willingness to kill the animals you’ve raised and know how to safely process them.
Anyone who’s worried about needing to provide for themselves in times of extreme hardship should do the research and start getting ready now, don’t worry about gardening, figure out how to get and store long term self stable foods and potable water and anything fresh is just a supplement.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
At best it’s a supplement. I grow beans (lol) at my place because they really seem to thrive and grow practically like weeds. Beans freeze really well and can be dehydrated.
I bought a large dehydrator to compliment my dry goods food storage, which is up to about 8 months worth of dry goods, 3 months of tinned. I like to buy fruit at wholesale prices when it’s in season at the farms near me, and make fruit leather, and I make my own biltong. But I also get bags of frozen veg and dehydrate these right from the bag. They pack down much smaller than frozen and are very easy to do. I also have a bunch of citrus trees for vitamin C and easy sugars.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
Potatoes.
Until you get blight, anyway, then you’re fucked.
Actually this is true. I grew potatoes once, in big tubs, and ended up with like 30kg from 1 square metre. I still have some boiled and frozen in my freezer
You’ll have to trade with people who have more or other things. I’d wager things like salt, sugar, baking powder, yeast , spices, nails, screws, hand tools, will be in high demand come a large-scale long-term collapse.
I mean there was a Silk Road for a reason.
So grimly true.
Most people with home gardens have so much produce that they can’t even give it away lol. I grew tomatoes last year and it was all I could do to keep up with three plants in the late summer.
I grow tomatoes because they taste infinitely better than what you can buy.
Yes, I end up with more tomatoes than I can consume. For about one month. For about 8 months of the year if I want fresh tomatoes I have to buy them still.
Learn canning, return to the Old Ways
But we’ve abandoned germ theory, so it’ll be more interesting. Spicy canning.
Why don’t you can and freeze your extra tomatoes?
Why do you think I don’t?
I’m just confused about how you can have more tomatoes than you could possibly eat during grow season, but still have to buy tomatoes for 3/4 of the year
They said they have to buy them if they want fresh tomatoes, not just in general. ie frozen isn’t fresh
I said fresh tomatoes. You can’t make a salad with frozen tomatoes.
What, everyone loves crunchy salad
If I don’t crack a tooth eating a salad, it wasn’t a good salad.
Because you said you buy them from the store off-season.
I said fresh tomatoes.
You don’t make a tomato salad with frozen tomatoes.
Not with that attitude.
But no, really, you made the right call here.
Fight fight fight!
We can have a UFC match at the white house. It’ll be awesome. Wait…
The information was never withheld. It was never asked for.
…still, tho. That whole back and forth for one gag?
I wonder, could you freeze a tomato salad? I make mine with a ton of oil and vinegar (plus they are sliced, so a ton of tomato juice) to the point where it’s almost like a soup. I’ve never tried but I wonder if that would freeze ok.
It would not. If you want to stick it in a freezer, you’d have to displace all the water with anti-freeze first, otherwise mush. Bonus, antifreeze is delicious. A tasty last meal!
If it were possible and safe to freeze raw tomatoes for salads, you would have seen packages of them in your grocer’s freezer. If you’re willing to use them for soup/stew, here’s how to do it without making anyone sick:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
There’s links on the page for a lot of other garden vegetables as well.
If you decide you want to save on canned tomatoes for pasta and use the cash to buy winter salad tomatoes, here’s the safe way to freeze some of your extras: https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
That’s true, but it’s also nowhere near enough to live on.
They get a huge batch of something all at once, and then it’s a scramble to eat it, give it away, pickle it, can it, etc. But, the total number of calories produced throughout the season isn’t enough to even keep one person alive.
How large is your garden mate? Or alternatively how bad are you at giving produce away? My grandparents have quite a large garden and have never had issues with too much stuff
Depends on what you grow.
I had a half acre, and something like tomatoes means you have to can them because you can’t eat them all once they are ready, and a pear tree that would produce wheel barrows full for weeks so I had to start brewing Perry.
But in the city with only a 10x10 plot it was pretty slow going except for cherry tomatoes…those grew like wildfire up and over the fence etc. So many we had to give them away.
I wonder, do they can stuff as well? Thats the only way to fully utilize a large gardens produce I think. And yes, I did eat all those tomatoes.
They sure do. Freeze a lot of it as well. Leeks, raspberries, drying spices, making cherry/apricot kompot, making marmelade…
The only thing they complained about this year has been too many cherries. I’d know I had to pick like ⅓ of them.
It’s really quite a blessing to have people with such a wealth of knowledge about gardening in the family. It takes a lot of seasons to learn how to be so good at it.
My dad has all sorts of fruit trees and vegetables, I’m over here now trying to keep a rosemary alive, its supposed to me super resilient but it keeps drying up so I water it but maybe the clay dirt is too much for it.
Poor thing has been planted and removed like 5 times due to different house projects. Its like as soon as I plant it all of a sudden they want to use that space
I’ve seen rosemary grow in the desert without needing much other than an automated lawn (drip) sprinkler, on a timer like 3(?) times a week?
Definitely! For example, a zucchini plant might give you a fruit per day for about 3 weeks, which is more than my family can eat. The options for us then are a) canning such as zucchini relish (highly recommend!) or b) grate it and freeze it for future baking (zucchini bread, egg bites, etc.)
One tomato plant can be too many for a family of 4. You don’t need a large garden to have too many tomatoes (or zucchini)
What kind of monster tomato plants are you growing? We are a family of 5 and we have 10+tomato plants which often don’t feel enough.
I had 1 tomato plant that made 4 huge tomatoes per day. I had to prop it up from sagging, it was a monster. It was great though, I made so many tomato based meals, that one plant basically fed my whole family for months. All I did was, good soil, in a pot, watering it every day, in a sunny but not burn-y location. I think that’s all plants though, and I know my advice is equivalent to “draw the rest of the owl”, but gardening really is just doing the basics very well
And we all know families survive off of just tomatoes.
Amazing how many of you believe growing enough for for 5kcals a day is some hobbiest task.
Timing is hard. They product like mad in a very short window.
Canning is a layer of hell.
Freeze dryers are slow, expensive and consume a lot of electricity.
If I had the time/space, I’d stagger my planting, start it indoors, start another batch on time and another late.
I live in a town house but I don’t actually have a grassy backyard, just a small shared deck. I’ve filled it with as many planter boxes as I can but last year I was only able to get two tomatoes to grow and both were stolen by squirrels 🥹
I feel so seen. I ended up making pizza sauce with all of my tomatoes. I would have homemade pizza about once or twice a month, and that is after using as many tomatoes as I could for sandwiches. In my experience, I would say 3 plants is just before the threshold of “too many”.
I can’t get anything to grow because the dumb animals keepnwating everything, despite my efforts.
Lol yeah, I have dozens of tomatoes sitting out there on the vine right now because we can’t eat them fast enough.
You probably could if it was all you had
It’s a weird split. I’ve tried to have a garden and would get like five fruits.
I was about to say. Everyone I’ve ever known who grew tomatoes always had significantly more than they could personally use.
My mom fills an upright freezer with salsa and tomato sauce from like 5 plants each year.
Because they buy the actual substance food at the store. Ignoring the macros, you’re eating 80 tomatoes a day person to just keep up.
Yeah good luck outsmarting the squirrels on the tomatoes…
build a cage. if you leave a small flap on top it doubles as a trap and you can have “free” protein.
This is unironically me. I sadly did the math on how long we can survive on my vegetable garden. Spoiler: not long!
Even potatoes don’t have all that many calories.
If you WERE to try to prep your way to sustainable. you’re going to have to buy/store starches in bulk and use the garden +canning for nutrients.
Yeah, I did think about how to make it in any way viable as just a mental exercise and came to a similar conclusion. If I didn’t enjoy getting my own veggies and fruits I’d probably just stop. I mostly started because I love very spicy peppers and was unable to even buy them most of the time. I eventually started growing all sorts of things of course, you can’t survive on superhot pepper pods for long, and if you could, you may not want to.
It’s not about just literally surviving off of them; it’s about spicing up life during the apocalypse! Your peppers could become very valuable trading commodities! Keep up the good work.
How many bottle caps do you think my dried Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers will go for? I bet the ghouls will love them!
breadfruit tree
I’ve never had it. what’s it like?
the taste is kinda in between that of potato and cassava
Aquaponics are the way. Simply buy property with a pond. Ez.
What you will have is the knowledge to grow food, which you scale up to feed yourself and can others for much longer. That is an extremely valuable skill.
Those four tomatoes will feed you, but only after you have harvested all the seeds, which will grow dozens of plants next season, and feed hundreds of people, and yield thousand sof seeds for an even larger crop next year.
Surviving through the first growing season is the trick.
Only if you grow heirloom tomatoes though. Modern tomatoes are all F1 hybrids so the offspring will be shit probably.
Also print out that wikipedia article about crop rotation. And get a handbook about weeds.
My garden spits out three things en masse. Crazy hot jalapeños, lime, and mint. When the world collapses, I’m gonna mojito/spicy marg my way out.
all things considered, that’s better than most plans I’ve heard.
Ouch. This hits home as for the last 3 yrs my veg garden has cost me as much to sow as it would have if I had just bought the damn handful of veggies from the store. Might replace it with a koi pond because I hear meditation takes your mind off of hunger pangs.
It took me weeks to finally grow like 4 strawberries. Was it worth it? No. Was it satisfying? Also no.
sucks. my strawberries i started years ago are pretty dope. but the harvest is inconsistent every year, due to weather. some years I get a lot, some years I get virtually none.
There’s a farm store near me. When stuff hits actual season, you can walk over there a buy a 25lb box of peppers for $15. The rest of the year it hot house, which is still damn good, but nowhere near as cheap.
it’s also cost you a lot of time
