Home food production is one of the most versatile preps. It serves every situation from ‘money’s tight’ to ‘there’s no food that can be bought’. It also is a stealth prep and one that offers benefits even if there’s no emergency at all; because there’s no tastier source of vegetables. To get these benefits full force though, you have to plan a garden. Just poking some seeds in the ground only works if you like weeds. (Turnips might qualify.)
Winter is a great time to plan your garden. Salty and I talk about it in this podcast:
Plan a garden now, or in an emergency?
The most effective prep is to be a regular gardener. It gives you the necessary skills, which is critical for a good yield. It solves a lot of the problems discussed below, as you’ve dealt with them before the emergency. But it’s not an answer for everyone.
Maybe where your life is now, you’d rather spend money on buying than time and effort on growing. To an extent, that’s fine … but that only reaches so far. For starters, although some greens will start coming in after three weeks, it’ll be 2-3 months before many species bear fruit. That’s not a biggie if you have the stored foods to tide you over.
The stinger is being ready to put in a good garden. You’ll need more than a patch of lawn, shovel, and can of long-storage heirloom seeds. Like What, you might ask?
Plan a garden that doesn’t rupture any utility lines
If you’ve never put in a garden but plan to do so in an emergency … do you know where you can safely dig it? Rupturing a gas line with a metal shovel could Seriously ruin your day. Make a map now of where the utilities run through your ground and you won’t have that problem when the time comes. We talk about that more here.
Plan a garden that has fertile soil
Do you put weed-killer on your lawn? Did you know that it’s really ‘non-grass plant killer’ rather than being weed-specific? Plant a bunch of garden seeds in weed-killed lawn soil and you might have some very unhappy plants.
Also, all those nifty minerals you hope to get in your food have to be drawn from the soil. You have to make sure it’s there. Maybe it is; the ground is just naturally good in some areas … but not everywhere. The Place, for example, has Miserable soil below the first two inches and I have to amend the heck out of it to get my trees to grow.
Plan a garden that has appropriate supports
Modern garden plants are super producers. Some of them will literally break themselves with the weight of their own fruit if not supported. Other things, like many beans and peas, are natural climbers. Appropriate supports also allow better air circulation through the plant and reduce soil contact, which means you get less predation and disease.
One of my raised-bed garden plots with a cattle panel along the north side. It supports peas early and tomatoes late.
Do you have the tomato cages, trellises or whatever you’ll need for good support? Cut cattle panels and re-purposed chain link fencing run through my garden patches. They hold up a Lot of food. Which reminds me:
Plan a garden that has good positioning
Some of that chain link fencing not only supports my peas (I had black-eyed peas for New Years yesterday and it came off that fence, thanks much), but in doing so makes a shaded area that lets the greens grow another two weeks before they go to seed.
Some of the ‘what will go where’ planning has to be done early in the process, well before planting, so you know how deep you have to dig, where the fencing has to be most aggressive due to the attractiveness of the plants, and how to set up the water supply. What fencing, you ask?
Plan a garden for you, not the other local garden predators
I learned every bit of this part the hard way. You can read about some of the learning here. The take-away is that you have to plan on how to exclude the small mammals, and sometimes turtles and birds, to keep your crops. That means, at a minimum, having the plan and the materials at hand.
This is the fencing system I had to go to to keep the deer from stripping my orchard trees.
Plan a garden that will get water
If it Is an emergency, will that water just run freely from the tap? And if not, how are your plants to make it through dry spells? Planning where the garden will be relative to the the available water sources will save Tons of labor and much cussing. Not, um, that I ever learned That the hard way…
Here I am setting up the drip irrigation line to run from the roof rain barrel to a garden bed. Saves Much labor and water!
Pro tip: Gardens should be downhill of your collection site. In our case, we use our rooftops (that’s legal here) and collect in barrels and deliver with a drip irrigation system. It’s a beautiful answer, but not one you pull out of your pocket in an hour after an emergency arises.
Plan a garden that has things to plant
Yes, you Do need to have seeds. That’s the easy part. Way *too* easy for me… I’ve probably got spares if anybody needs some.
In sum
You might suspect, reading this site, that I love gardening. I don’t. I love good fresh vegetables, absolutely, but the gardening itself? It’s just ok.
What a garden is though, is a magnificent prep for many problems. It just requires some planning.
Good stuff!