Growing Food after an Apocalypse

Kenny posts a letter from a reader about growing you own after a breakdown. I highly recommend reading it, however it does leave out a few things I'll detail after the link.

"Over time there’s been a few posts concerning aspects of survival, post TSHTF beyond beans, bullets and TP, so I thought I would throw out something for your consideration.

Have you ever felt you had something in the bag only to wake up one night at 2 am, in cold sweat, with the realization the bag has a hole in the bottom big enough to drive a Mack truck through?

Or how about recognizing that as far as you went, it wasn’t quite far enough?

Another one that hits home is, You don’t know what you don’t know.

With the three above thoughts in mind the following is a discourse of an overlooked facet of extended (measured in years) survival when you are doing it all, or at least most of it, on your own. I am going to examine a relatively narrow aspect of the act of growing and producing your own food."



One thing left out was that “Organic” farming is extremely labor intensive, requiring twice if not more acreage to be planted for the same yield. So when everything does GTHIHB, once you secure home and hearth, you will need to lay out your garden for at minimum twice as much land area as you may have planned on. This will require also twice as much ground preparation, twice as much, irrigation, and twice as much labor. If not MORE.

Look to the Amish, and how much work they do, and how much arable land they have to use to feed their families.

I'm not saying that I am an expert on farming.  I'm just a kid who spent many many summers on my uncle's farm, visiting other uncle's, aunt's and cousin's who also farmed.  I helped raise cattle, hogs, chickens, horses, mules, and even a couple of emu's and turkey's.  I helped harvest soybeans, sorghum, rape, feed corn, barley and other grains in the field, and fruits and vegetables from the gardens and orchards.  I spent many hours talking to my various relatives, asking questions and learning by doing.  And while they "Industrially" farmed to have product to sell, almost every garden plot, averaged 2-3 acres just to ensure there was enough food to help last through winter until the first harvest.

Several of my relatives farms, had 2 or more large root cellars dug into the earth.  And by large I mean 8 or 10 feet wide by 25 or more feet long.  I remember playing in one root cellar outside of Thayer, Missouri that could have fit 2 or 3 pickup trucks and a couple tractors in.  It belonged to a neighbor of one uncle's, who had 9 kids, and it was being built to replace 3 smaller root cellars that had started to collapse after some really heavy rains.

So if you are making preps, don't just buy a pack or two off seed and think that's all you need to do.  There is a LOT more that you need supply AND knowledge wise.