Our garden has passed its peak. After harvesting more than 20 pounds of cucumbers and producing two batches of pickles, the harvest dwindled, and we pulled the plants out, tossing them on the compost pile. The green beans were done and gone before then. The zucchini and eggplant continue to produce, as do the red peppers, and we have a volunteer pumpkin vine that has fruit. Before the heat of summer, we harvested peas, lettuce, and other greens. All in all, it was a small but successful and productive garden.
Yet it was nowhere near big enough to feed us for very long because the vegetables we produced are good to eat, but not good for subsistence living. They don’t produce enough calories or nutrients to sustain us because a human cannot live on salad alone.
And that’s what no one tells you: a few raised beds will not support you after the SHTF. It may add some variety and vitamins to your diet of stored food, but if you want to live off your prepper garden, I recommend at least an acre. You need rows of potatoes and root crops that can last through the winter and into the next spring. Depending on the number of people you are feeding, I’m talking hundreds of pounds of potatoes plus carrots, onions, winter squash, and less familiar vegetables such as rutabagas, parsnips, turnips, Jerusalem artichokes, and Daikon radishes.
An acre is a good start, but for food self-sufficiency, you need another acre split between grain and beans. And then you need a third acre where you can grow a cover crop while it rests so you can rotate your crops between the three fields.
Five Acres and Independence
In 1935, M.G. Kains published the book Five Acres and Independence to help Americans survive the Great Depression and the problems caused by the dust bowl. It became a bible for self-sufficiency if you have a nice plot of land, and back in the 1930s, far more people did.
His system was not limited to vegetables. It included an orchard, berries, nut trees, and other perennial sources of food that needed little maintenance but provided a bountiful harvest.
It also included animals: chickens, a dairy cow or dairy goats, and pigs to provide meat and milk. Almost 100 years later the formula still holds; surveys show that the homesteads that provide more than 70 percent of their own food do so thanks to dairy animals that produce not only milk, but cheese, butter, cream, yogurt, and other high-protein and high-fat dairy foods. Plus, their manure is useful for fertilizing the garden and ensuring you do not wear out your soil after repeated harvests.
You cannot bug out to your weekend getaway and set up a system like this overnight. To do it right, you need to get started before the grid goes down, the gasoline and diesel stop flowing, and every goat and chicken triples in value.
This is why I think homesteaders make the best preppers, and why the best preppers have homesteads. It is certainly why I live on one.
Living Like it’s 1935
When I discuss the grid going down, I often talk about returning to life like the 1880s, before electrification, before radio and TV, and before the automobile. For the garden, we don’t need to go back quite so far. And we can use all the modern techniques and learnings to improve our garden production and make home-canning safer. But to get that going, you need two things: time and practice.
It is rare that your first garden is a magnificent success, but as you practice and gain experience, your yields will improve. The key is to start while it is safe to fail; before your life depends on your harvest.
Now is the time to practice and to learn, the time to enhance your soil, and the time to put up your fences. Start while society is still in decent shape, and you can still buy fence posts instead of cutting them from the forest yourself. Act while you can buy seed stock rather than saving it from the year before. Start while you can have a local farmer till or disc your field while he still has diesel. For animals, you can buy a pre-made shed or at least the lumber to build your own goat barn or chicken coop without cobbling one together from logs you had to harvest yourself. And have you ever tried to make wooden shingles? Why bother when a metal roof is a car ride away?
After living here six years, we have apple trees, blackberries, hickory nuts, walnuts, and the neighbor has blueberries and grapes. We have chickens and honeybees, but no room for dairy animals. Our readiness has improved significantly since our arrival, but we will never be 100 percent ready for TEOTWAWKI.
Plant Potatoes, If Nothing Else
Maybe you love tomatoes, or you think winter squash is the way to go. Maybe the idea of eating a diet of rutabagas or turnips doesn’t excite you. (I can’t blame you for feeling that way.) That’s fine, plant what you want, but to produce the most calories per acre, you need to plant potatoes for post-SHTF survival. Lots of potatoes.
Potatoes produce three or four times as many calories per acre as wheat or field corn. You can’t make flour or meal from the potato, but it will still fill your belly and it goes well with any game you might hunt. Potatoes are easy to harvest and store and doesn’t need to be winnowed or ground; you can bake it whole in the ashes of your campfire, slice it and fry it, boil it, or cook it any number of other ways. Just dig them up before it freezes, allow them to cure, and eat them as needed. And they store well, too. Just be sure to save some seed potatoes to plant the following year.
There are downsides to potatoes: they will leave the ground depleted and should not be planted in the same plot year after year. You need to rotate your crops and plant a cover crop over the old spot that will help rebuild nitrogen and potassium. They are also susceptible to blight and pests. (Letting your chickens into the potato patch to pick off the insects can help with the latter.) To avoid getting caught in a potato famine like the Irish, plant multiple varieties with different harvest times and disease profiles to help minimize loss.
Bugging Out
Ideally, you have a large, fenced garden plot, tools, supplies, and seeds at your intended bug-out location. If not, grab a couple of bags of organic potatoes (which are not treated with chemicals to inhibit sprouts) on the way there, plus a shovel and a few other implements, and plant your potatoes in the spring. The results won’t be ideal, but it beats living on watercress, mushrooms, acorns, and whatever else you can gather in the wilderness.
