It happens. The End Of The World As We Know It. Fortunately, TEOTWAWKI happens in the spring. (Really the best time for it; Universe please take note.) The intrepid prepper grabs his Can o Seeds, digs up his yard, and plants it full of good food plant seeds. Which promptly die, or grow anemically and yield sparingly. Because the soil is not right for garden plants.
Salty and I talk it over in this podcast:
Notice the soil starter plants come in? Your yard soil is probably nothing like that..and the plants know it.
Yard soil is not garden soil
Most homes have some sort of yard space around them. Often its planted with grasses and other ornamental plants. In many cases, the grassy areas are regularly sprayed with weed killer to keep the lawn beautiful.
The bad news: In the herbicide’s view, garden plants are weeds. Many lawn herbicides are meant to persecute ‘broad-leaved plants’ as opposed to grasses. Most food producing plants (other than grains, including corn) are broad-leaved plants.
Also, a decent lawn doesn’t take much fertilizer. We get perfectly good grass in our yard with no soil amendments at all. We don’t get a good garden yield when we just dig up that same ground and plant garden plants.
Making soil a garden will love
If you want that Prepper Can o Seeds to actually grow and produce, it’s going to have to planted in decent soil. The time to make that soil is Now, while the resources are available. They aren’t something that store well unless you have a Ton of storage space.
How? The best answer is to get the soil tested and go about it scientifically. We’ll go into that more in a later article. The good news is, there are much easier and still pretty darned good answers. That was the project at the Salty and Spice household today.
An example: Our annual soil improvements
Today was the day; when we drive the old farm truck out to our local greenhouse/garden supply place and have them load us up with two scoops of mushroom compost. It’s the bulk compost they happen to have on hand, primarily litter from the bottom of chicken coops that was left to compost for a year. It’s not super-rich but it’s been keeping our garden happy for years. $60 gets us a pickup bed full, which spreads over as much garden as we plant.
Two scoops of mushroom compost, about $50, will do a lot toward turning a whole lot of yard into a whole lot of productive garden.
Why add more every year? The fruits and seeds are the most nutrient-rich parts of the plants, and we remove hundreds of pounds of those from this garden every year. Also, rain will gradually leech the nutrients down and away. An annual resupply is necessary.
We also spread our home compost pile over the garden once a year. That by itself is not enough, as much of the nutrients we got from the garden ended up flushed down toilets rather than back in the bin. Facts of life folks; nutrients cycle.
The road not taken
There’s one soil amendment readily available in places that raise livestock that we didn’t take; and it’s useful to think about why. We have a livestock auction just a few blocks from our house (most people in small towns do). They have lots of nutrient-rich manure available for the taking. We don’t take any.
The auction house has big piles of nutrient rich material for free, but until it composts its not suitable for a vegetable garden.
We don’t use uncomposted animal waste on our gardens. That includes ‘night soil’ which is a polite term for human waste. Animal waste has great nutrients, but it’s also got microbes. Some of those microbes may be things we don’t want on our food, or handling when we garden.
Manure is a lovely fertilizer, but only after it’s been properly composted. A good compost pile gets so hot from the breakdown reactions that disease-causing bacteria are killed. You’ll need to know about this stuff if the toilets quit flushing and you go to a humanure system. You can read more about it here.
Soil improvement as a stealth prep
Making big chunks of your lawn open tilled and composted soil ‘just in case’ is going rather far, and maybe you don’t have the time to do much gardening now. Or perhaps your home owner’s association or whatever disapproves of useful plants. Are you and your soil out of luck? Nope.
Gardening is actually easier in small patches and strips than big blocks anyway, if you’re working with hand tools instead of tractors. Lots of small patches of improved soil can be put along borders, and in decorative ‘islands’ throughout the lawn. Circles of it can be prepared under trees; just don’t dig very deep there. (And always check where lines and pipes run underground before digging.)
Once you’ve got the nice improved soil, stick some nice ornamental plants in them. You can use perennials that don’t take much care to cut ongoing time cost. You can go with nice ornamentals that happen to be useful too, such as flowering herbs, roses with big medicinal hips, good pollinator attractors, flowering kale and the like. Now your garden prep is a bunch of pretty flowers, and everyone’s happy. Even the bees.
Good Morning Spice! A short version on how to FAIL in survival gardening and ways around them. Not knowing your growing zone, not knowing your dates of first and last frost, days of growing season. Thus not knowing what seeds will do well there. The generic survival can of seeds are unlikely to be best for your needs.
Not keeping records of successes and failures as well as establishing crop rotations. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers are all of the Night Shade family and your not to plant that area again with Nightshades for 3 years to control fungus and disease issues. Not knowing companion plants AND Bad plant companions. Potatoes and beans do very well together. Trying to grow a garden with out knowing your dirt. Do a soil sample, cheap just takes a little effort and time for the State to reply. Use that “Scotts Yard” spreader to add what they suggest to your lawn. Thus your future garden will bless you.
Look at your soil, has it been a “Scott Yard” etc. Odds are if you do not have dandelion “problem” you have a issue with Roundup-Glyphosate residue. Very hard on non “Round Up ready crops like Heirlooms. Using Roundup contaminated grass/straw or even sad to say Feed Lot Beef manure as most of their feed is “Roundup Ready” corn and thus has residual in it. A friend of mine used Roundup straw as mulch three years ago and it killed off everything in her raised bed garden. Studies vary quite a bit about how long it takes to eliminate Glyphosate from the soil. Cornell U said 1-174 days for half life. Other studies where folks have been working Roundup fields into Organics say increasing your good soil bacteria (compost) and planting Nitrogen fixing plants like Beans speeds it up. Personally I treat suspected Roundup contaminated manures/straws as a two years in the well turned compost pile project. Using Non-Heirloom seeds, where will you get replacements post SHTF? Not knowing how to Seed Save.
Not knowing how to compost. Everything useful needs to be composted as you MUST look at your garden like a Bank Account. What you add builds value there. What you take away and eat removes value. To feed yourself you MUST feed your soil.
Not knowing what kind of fertilizers are useful for what crops and thus not having chemical fertilizers on hand. Yes you will not be finding bags of 10-10-10 (an excellent General Fertilizer) much post SHTF thus requiring effective composting. Throwing fertilizer all around instead of intelligently side dressing your crops. I’m not rich enough to feed all the weeds too. Knowing what plants are accumulators like TREES. Knowing that pine needles work well on potatoes and that you need to shred oak leaves into your compost pile or they matt up and you can find dry soil (and no composting going on) under them like a plastic sheet. BTW Potatoes need low nitrogen fertilizer. Otherwise you get lots of leaves and few small potatoes. I use 6-24-24 or 8-24-24 on them. Bug spray for the worst pests. Just past SHTF is no time to be an Organic Purest.
Two animals I strongly recommend for successful gardening post SHTF Rabbits for both meat/fur and Vermiculture (best home made fertilizer tea I use) and Chickens. Most bug issues of gardening can be resolved by using chickens as post garden season clean up as the pests bury their larvae/eggs in the soil. The Chickens LOVE it and you get the most Yellow Yoked eggs you’ve ever seen. Win Win. BTW chickens can be Bell Trained to come to you STAT if you feed them a treat each time. Never chase a chicken doesn’t work. Bell training is useful if they are escapees or free ranging and a dog problem or storm brews up to get them back in the hen house. Works pretty well (except for strawberries SIGH) to get them out of your garden too.
Last but not least not having an effective way to clear grasses and weeds/small brush out of your garden. I strongly disagree with rototillers. Just stirs up the weeds. Chop down the high stuff cover over the soil with black plastic or my favorite carpet (reusable) for a few weeks and you have a garden spot available. Otherwise you will fight tooth and nail forever against the weeds.
The best Gardening reason to have a solar array IMHO is the post Gasoline ability to power a battery chainsaw, battery lawn mower (Compost!! best leaf shredder ever, bags it too!) and electric chipper to turn branches into the basis of mulch and compost material.
Hope this helps, sorry if a bit wordy.