Survival Gardening Part 1 peak oil, food storage, TSHTFShow Video Details ↓ [silence]Narrator: And good afternoon. Welcome to the survival report. Today we're going to be talking about gardening when the stuff hits the fan or in the PAW, post-apocalyptic world, and some of the pitfalls and perils to gardening and growing your own food and such in such an environment. Seems to be a common conception amongst preparedness and survivalist minded folks that, oh I'll store a year's supply of food and after that runs out, well I'll just grow a garden. And if you've watched, over time, if you've been involved in some of the message boards and different things like that, that seems to be kind of the common thinking as folks just chalk it up like oh it's just going to be a piece of cake, no problem. I can take of it, no big deal. But there are many pitfalls and perils to that sort of thing. As I'm talking here what we're going to do also is I'm going to point out certain things to you. Little titbits with some of the stuff we'll be showing. One thing here is look at the difference in some of this corn. You'll notice the difference in size and also, and again we're always concerned about what actually does get shown on these videos and what doesn't get shown for offset purposes. So sometimes again we'll have to have funky camera angles and things like that. But look at the difference between that corn and this corn here. Alright? This is one of the things that we're going to talk about here in a little bit, but this would not necessarily be your best survival gardening crop, corn. It is a very useful plant, especially in the grain form, things like that, however it is very intensive on both water and fertilizer. You'll notice these greener, taller stalks, what's happened with those is they were fertilized several times now and they're probably about mid-way through their growing cycle here but they've been fertilized several times with high amounts of ammodium nitrate which, you know, if you don't have extremely, extremely high fertile soil, high fertility soil, you're going to have a problem growing corn without liberal amounts of fertilizer. So again, not exactly a survival crop. And you can tell the difference there between these really dark green, lush, taller stalks and these smaller, more yellowed stalks in that lack of nitrogen typically shows up in the difference in the color there. So hopefully, this camera, this is a new camera and, you know, to plug this into the TV it shoots some pretty awesome pictures but unfortunately by the time you get it loaded onto YouTube, sometimes it doesn't come out with the same high quality that looks like on the television. But I'm sure you can see the difference in color there between say for example this plant which has more of a yellowish green and some of these other plants back here where it is more of a darker type green and such. You'll also notice we have soy beans planted in between the corn rows, a little experiment we're doing with that for the fact that the soy beans actually will add back nitrogen into the soil if they are inoculated with this resoba. Basically it's a living, like an enzyme, what am I trying to say? Bacteria. Excuse me. Looks kind of like coffee, excuse me, copier toner and you mix the seeds around in that and such, coat the seeds well with it. It does happen to be in a lot of soils naturally but if you haven't grown them, grown beans with that on it in a while, it's always a good idea to do that. Beans, legumes will fix nitrogen in the soil, but more times than not they need that inoculate and any decent feed store can sell that to you. You'll notice one thing here. We don't worry a lot about the weeds in some of our garden areas like that. You'll see there's some weeds there amongst the soy beans and the corn and such. You know, between the corn kind of shading them and the soy beans taking up some of the different areas, we don't worry so much about those. And if you're going to survival garden it on a large scale, you'll find it's less and less of a problem, especially now-a-days when you don't have the kind of time to get out there and pick every little weed. And of course, Ed McMan is not coming to your door with a big check, nor is Better Homes and Gardens or Better Survival Retreats and hideouts going to come and do an article on your place anyways. So the aesthetics tend to get kind of thrown by the wayside sometimes when you're actually living this life. Getting back to the idea, the idea, the common idea where people think they'll just be able to garden right after something happens, there's several pitfalls that are going to preclude that. First and most important is experience. I would say that if you do not have a year to year, as in doing it now, ok, on a yearly basis, on a regular basis, if you do not have year to year experience of raising at least 50% of your own food, I mean fruits, vegetables, you know, meat, grain, the whole nine yards, do not count on being able to, quote grow a garden and grow everything you need right after something happens. That's just not realistic thinking, folks. Experience is going to be your biggest factor. We've been at it for about a decade now on a decent scale and every year is a learning experience for us. There's never any... Been any, you know, point where we felt like we've made it and that's important to consider as even folks that have been doing this a long period of time and are green thumbs and all that good stuff, they still maintain a decent amount of food storage. And that's something where I think some of the home-sitting type people, and even some of the, dare I say, environmentalists and, you know, folks that are into this for some of the peak oil reasons and the environment's collapsing and all that good stuff, you know the general idea there is that well I'll move to the country and I'll just, you know, plant some beans and corn like we have here and everything. And everything will be just Jim, dandy, hunky dory. You know, well, one bad crop or one crop failure and you're toast, you know? That's not how the pioneers did it. The pioneers always kept some food storage. So the food storage part is going to be very important to consider, I don't care how good of a gardener you already are. Several folks have emailed and asked, you know, why is there always such a high amount of sounds of birds in the background of your videos? Well, where we're actually located here is right next to a nationally recognized, or whatever, bird sanctuary. So we get a lot of bird activity in the area which can be helpful as well from a preparedness and survival standpoint. So the experience factor is going to be a big thing as far as hindering people from this idea of, you know, I'll just grow a garden and be able to become farmer Jones two days after the apocalypse. It's just not going to be that easy. The next biggest thing is going to be the availability of running water. The availability of running water is going to be a big factor as well when this sucker right here stops putting out water because your pressure is gone. It causes some serious problems for most gardeners. The thought of raising a substantial amount of food based solely off of what you drag in with buckets from the nearest pond of creek or whatever, is very limiting. So we need to plan accordingly for that. We used several types of irrigation here including drip irrigation which we've shown in some of the fruit tree videos and things like that and we also use the rain bird type sprinklers, you know the [noise] type sprinklers and things like that, but we've also setup our system to where it can run more or less off the standard water pressure type system. And that's something we'll cover in another video, is setting up water systems for your tree. But you have to factor that in as well too. And there's other things you can do like setting up some of your gardening areas in naturally lower lying areas that might stay more wet than other areas, that might be more convenient to garden in. |