memes

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.

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

That's because we were never meant to be rugged individuals. It'll be a lot more survivable if we build stronger communities.

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.

This is unironically me. I sadly did the math on how long we can survive on my vegetable garden. Spoiler: not long!

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.

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.

And all at the same time, with nothing the rest of the year.

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.

Options for the end of the world:

1. Learn to farm and become self sufficient
2. Learn to shoot a gun and map out where all the farmers are

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.

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 grow suplimental stuff.i do supplemental stuff because feeding yourself at home is basically a full time job. Herbs, strawberry, peppers, various lettuce. Things that enhance my meals with fresh foods.

Trying to sustain yourself is a good errand. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

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.

It doesn't take much land to be self sufficient in vegetables if you are willing to limit your vegetable choices to your climate and to preserve them. However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder. Say you eat around 300g of grain per day. Then you would need about 219 square meters of grain if you have a typical organic yield. Replace your carbs with potato and maybe you can reduce that by 50%, but then you run into the risk of potato harvest failing, which they often do in organic systems. For proteins you would either have to have animals plus area to grow their feed, or grow a huge area on par with the grains to get enough shelling beans to meet your protein needs. But vegetables? Just a dozen or two square meters should be enough.

I mean it's a hobby. It's not cheaper or more efficient compared to large scale farming

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.

oh man, when I lived in a house with a yard, I LOVED gardening. I grew so much of my own produce. I had so much pride over my garden.

I live in an apartment building now (with no balcony), and I don't think I'd be allowed to use the communal gardens for my own personal garden. But if i ever move to a house with its own yard, I will be the first down to the shops to get some seeds!

I’ve got two of those survival food buckets from Costco, so that’s about how long I will last after the apocalypse, before I start selling myself to stronger people who will protect me.