Here’s a Catch-22 for the prepper: Many disasters might make it necessary to produce one’s own food to have all you need. Also, many disasters make it harder to produce food by their impacts on the weather. How can preppers make their food production weather-proof?
Paranoid Prepper recently wrote an article on Volcano Weather, about how a strong volcanic eruption anywhere in the world can have a long shadow, causing complete disruption of weather in its entire hemisphere for a year or more. Here are some steps you can take to weather-proof your food supply for these kinds of situations.
Weather-proof food by storing plenty
Well, the first answer’s pretty obvious, since canned and dehydrated foods are naturally weather-proof: Store a lot of food. This helps whether the problem is complete collapse or economic disruption that makes food really expensive. What you can do depends on budget and space, but at least consider if it makes sense to you to have a very deep larder.
Storing food in bulk could get you through a long food shortage.
Weather-proof with diverse plantings
I’ve been putting in perennial food plants (fruit and nut trees and vines) both here and at The Place for years, a bit at a time. I hate the fact that one really bad year could wipe out a lot of them; but them’s the facts. We reduce the risk of that by choosing a wide selection of species and strains.
If there’s one kind of apple tree, for example, that’s resistant to drought and cold and the diseases that thrive in wet conditions and heat, I’ve never heard of it. So we plant some that are drought resistant, and others that are disease resistant, some early bloomers and some late bloomers, etc. Whatever the problem is, we’re likely to lose some but not likely to lose all.
If you plant some that are cold tolerant and some that are heat tolerant, *something* is likely to survive.
The same thing applies to each year’s garden plantings. Not only does the diversity protect us from total failure due to bad weather, but it reduces pest problems since no one pest is happy with all of our choices. As a bonus, it tends to stretch out the harvest, since some varieties come ripe earlier than others.
Weather-proof with extra seeds
At any given time, I have at least two years worth of garden seeds on hand. Bought right — say, in the fall when stores dump their stock for pennies on the dollar — even a big garden’s worth of seeds is dead cheap. When I restock in the fall sales, I dump my oldest stores. (Or, you know, I mean to. Throwing away workable seed is hard….but I at least mark the old stuff.)
This way, should a species or even an entire garden be felled by unworkable weather, and I can’t refresh my seed stock (ok that’s an unlikely combination of events), there can be another attempt.
Most of my garden comes from seeds bought fresh or stored seed from the previous year, but I’ve tried older seed enough times to know a decent percentage of seeds will still work after a couple of years if properly stored.
Weather-proof with weather proofing!
There are lots of constructions one can use to alter the micro-habitats of garden plants to improve their growing conditions. We don’t have the space for a full-on greenhouse, but have experimented with other options. Hoop tunnels, cold frames, cloches, and even the low-rent district cut-up plastic jugs do a lot to protect plants from cold. Shade cloth, lots of mulch, and good watering solutions weather-proof against other problems.
Big cold frame systems take some building, but they greatly extend the growing season.
Weather-proofing only goes so far, so be flexible
Some not-too-rare planetary events, especially big volcano eruptions, have a history of causing the following months to be especially cool in their hemisphere. Well, unless you’re already very far north, there are crops that usually grow to the north of you. If a big volcano erupts north of the equator, I’ll be planting more like people in Minnesota or southern Canada normally do than I usually do in Missouri. I’ll be putting in what are usually spring crops in mid-summer months.
If a volcano pops off, you might want to plant cooler-climate crops the next year.
Nothing’s guaranteed, but being ready to deal with bad weather situations is a lot more likely to work than ‘business as usual and hope for the best’.
You might also consider keeping a stock of seeds for sprouting & growing micro greens indoors as an addition to this plan.