Home food production is an important prepper ability. It’s also one that takes preparation on the front end, both in having materials and knowing how to use them.
The best way to be good at gardening is to keep one regularly. Not everybody can do that though; or wants to.
Here are some ways to up your food gardening game without planting a food garden every year. It’s a great stealth prep, since it doesn’t look like you’re building the ability to burst forth in food!
Salty and I talk it over in this podcast:
Vegetables and flowers often like the same ground, but perennial flowers take less work and please the neighbors. *
Stealth prepping good garden ground
We’ve talked before (such as here) about the need to prep the soil to grow a good garden. How can you reasonably do that without actually tilling up a bunch of your lawn and putting in a garden plot?
Well, all good well-behaved landowners put in ornamental flower beds, right? And if you pick low-care perennial species you can put in the work once then mostly just leave it to look pretty year after year.
Now, I’m not going to pretend it’s not actual work to work up the soil and get it fertile. You’ll probably have to add amendments such as compost. It’s mostly a one-time job though if you’re just growing flowers. Stick in some pretties and mulch around them heavily to keep weeds down and you’re good to go.
When it’s time to grow food, the flowers can come out. Garden vegetables usually like the same kind of soil, so you’re ready to roll. I checked my manual, you don’t *have* to grow the vegetables in a rectangular plot. I started food production decades ago by planting tomato plants in a fencerow. A previous owner of the home had used it as a flower bed and it was Super productive.
The patio as a stealth laboratory
A lot of what you need to know to grow food in your area is …what works well in your area. Also, how plants look when they are or aren’t doing well.
These things don’t take massive multi-year, labor intensive experiments to discover. You’d learn a whole lot by sticking just a couple of plants a year in patio pots. Plus you’d have a few fresh tomatoes or whatever. It takes very little time or effort to grow just a couple. You could even use a couple shovelfuls of your yard dirt and see how that works.
Moreover, a small number of potted plants are stealthy. Your Homeowners Association, should you be so unfortunate as to have one, won’t notice. You can always stick a pretty bush into the hole any experimental dirt came from.
Pollinators as a stealth garden prep
Many of the food-producing plants in the garden require pollinators to set seed. Pollinators, especially bees, have been struggling lately, in case you haven’t noticed. Having enough of them around is not a given.
If you want pollinators to help feed you at need, help feed pollinators now. Most houses have some flowering ornamentals around. Why not make sure your are pollinator friendly? There’s lots of great flowers that both people and bees love.
You can also put up little bamboo houses for the helpful beings. (Wasps, who are often jerks, don’t like these bamboo houses.) These houses attract mason bees. This kind is not aggressive, so there’s no chance of Africanized honeybees (who are also jerks) moving in even if you live in areas where those invasive beasties are found.
Hanging one of these doesn’t make you look like you’re prepping a garden. It makes you look like you support a healthy environment.
Chatting at the farmer’s market as a stealth prep
Many gardeners love to talk shop. They just wish there were more people around whose eyes didn’t glaze over when they started talking cultivars and row covers! Find some of these sharing souls at your local farmer’s market and you can learn boatloads about local growing. Pro tip: Admire their veggies first. It’s the best pickup line in the gardening world.
Growers often love to tell people how they work, so go to a farmer’s market and ask?
This approach is very fruitful. (YES I punned you on purpose, Muahaahaa!) It’s also completely natural, almost de rigeur at a farmer’s market. It costs nothing more than a bit of time and the cost of the veggies, and ya gotta eat anyway. As a bonus, you can taste test varieties. Hey, I think I’ve just talked myself into this one!
In sum
The point is, you do need to be prepped to garden successfully. You don’t have to spend big piles of time and effort to make real progress with these preps though. You don’t even have to annoy your HMO or make your neighbors think you’re odd. So go for it!
* Photo by icon0.com from Pexels
I often hear people say “I have a brown thumb and kill everything I touch”…. BS, it takes a lot of brown to make Plentiful Green.
Being a Gardener is a passion not a chore.
How can anyone claim to be Prepared and NOT Garden? Do you think that 1 year of food you have all Freeze Dried and Stored is going to last a year? Ohhhhh that’s right, your going to live off the land like the other 350 million people when ‘Lights Out’.
Good article Spice.
Thanks, NRP. I did have a fairly brown thumb when I started. I named it ‘inexperience’ and kept handling plants. Turns out the green rubs off on you if you keep trying. I still don’t *love* gardening. I love the food though.
A smart woman I knew many years ago gardened on the concrete balcony of her apartment by mounding up potting soil and planting in it. Beautiful greens and tomatoes and never a weed…
The idea of growing your own food is great, unless the SHTF event is something like the Klebsiella Planticola (look it up, fascinating) fiasco that almost happened in the 90″s. Then the freeze-dried food is going to look good.
We keep food stores, absolutely. It takes a lot of time — almost a year if the timing is bad — to seriously ramp up home food production even if you’re ready to roll with it (and most people won’t be). There are also emergencies where producing a lot of your own food isn’t a good answer. Health problems and severe weather change (say, a very cold year following a massive volcanic output) are two that aren’t that rare.
The Klebsiella (renamed Raoultella) planticola thing is not on that list. If I lived next door to a Monsanto test plot, perhaps. It isn’t that I have faith in the thoroughness and safety consciousness of all genetic engineers. It’s that even if that sort of thing got loose, it’s likely to take a very long time to spread. Some risks are just too low for me to bother about.
On the subject of probabilities … I find the kinds of emergencies where home food production would be important to be the most likely kind. They range from the mundane and personal (sudden lack of spending cash) to the economic (inflation making nutritious food more expensive) to the catastrophic (EMP causes grid collapse and the groceries close). Also, if food gets tight or expensive, the tasty food that’s mostly shipped from somewhere distant – like fruits – becomes an income source. That’s why I promote it here on 3BY. Store ready to eat food? Of course. But also be ready to at least partially self-supply; that’s my philosophy.
Spice, your comment about income source is so true. Applied knowledge is power. Some of my Great Grandmothers family stories from the Great Depression showed how knowledge of taking cuttings from herbs and flowers allowed them to sell plants enough to buy things they could not grow and MOST IMPORTANT Pay their Taxes. Folks please remember that a SHTF economic downturn does not mean they will stop collecting taxes or your bills will not be collected. Many folks lost their home and farms for lack of dollars even though they could feed themselves easily.
Very true. Even in the 1980s, a lot of people lost their farms to the taxes even when their bankers were willing to give them some grace.
A serious question to my friends. Are you ready for food prices to jump 30% or worse? Already just from a week or two ago when I did that Wal-Mart 2 bucket 30 day food supply I had the receipt still in my car so I checked Wal-Mart today. Everything except iodized salt went up between 2-4%. A LOT of real life damage to our food supplies between last falls hurricane and the current flooding. Even my buddy a store manager at Tractor Supply said their feed prices are climbing.
If you cannot do chickens right now, make a friend with a couple of chicken folks and BUY Trash Cans and fill them with Whole Corn. Kept dry good for years and can be eaten by us Humans after a quick grind or boiling. I BET you could trade a Chicken buddy for chickens with some of that feed later.
Get it ON friends! The price of food is historically low and climbing quickly. Do you need Joseph to prophecy 7 fat cows and 7 lean cows to you?