Chapter 1 Gardening
One of the most common phrases I've heard over the years is “If things get bad I'll plant a garden.” It's a lovely thought, kneeling among the plants in the garden, feeling the rich, warm soil, plucking a weed here and there, savoring a ripe tomato right off the plant.
But if you’re planning to plant a garden when things get bad, we have to assume you don’t already have a garden and you’ll be working up a new plot. How much land will you need? There's no cut and dry formula. If you see an article, book, or website giving you an absolute number of square feet times how many people you hope to feed, disregard it.
Too many things have to be taken into account, and it varies considerably. Things to consider are climate: how long is your growing season? In a warm area with a long growing season you can plant a second crop after you harvest the first one.
In a cold area you may be limited in the types of food you can grow because some things simply won't ripen in such a short time, and you'll only have time for one crop.
You can extend the growing season by covering your plants in cold weather, such as on nights when frost is likely. In the spring you can put cans or buckets upside-down over the plants at night to keep them warm. At the end of the summer you can throw old blankets, sheets, tarps, newspaper, or whatever you have over the plants to protect them from the cold nights.
In hot areas you can cover the plants with newspaper or sheets during the afternoon to keep them from baking in the sun. In windy areas you can stack brush, branches, rocks, or anything that will create a windbreak to protect your plants.
How wet or dry is the weather in your proposed area? What about the soil itself? Is it sand, or clay, or is it black and loamy? In most places you’ll have to build up the soil with compost or other nutrients.
You can add leaves, grass, aged manure, straw, shredded newspaper, or sand to your soil. Sand won't add nutrients but it'll help break up hard soil so it will drain better. There are excellent books on composting and building up soil. But if it's an emergency and you must plant, then do so in whatever soil you have. It's better than doing nothing, and you never know, the soil might be good enough as it is to grow at least a mediocre garden.
You’ll probably be doing gardening with hand tools if it's a hard-times garden. If that's the case you'll want to have a good shovel for breaking up the soil. If your ground is hard and rocky you might want to have a pick for breaking it up and digging out rocks. A hoe and garden rake are nice but you can get by without them if you have to.
If you have a rototiller and the fuel to power it, you can use it to break up the dirt and 'plow' it for planting. If you're getting into gardening as a lifestyle and main food source, investing in a rototiller is a good idea.
Building raised beds eliminates the need for a rototiller. The soil doesn't have heavy equipment driving on it, and is never walked on, so it doesn't pack down hard like regular garden soil. It's pretty easy to work it with a shovel or hoe.
Next, you'll need seeds. Most seeds keep for one to five years, so tucking away seed packets for an indeterminate length of time “just in case” could result in reduced or no germination when the seeds are planted.
In plain English, you could have a lot of 'dead' seeds that won't sprout and grow. When I plant old seed I over-plant and then transplant extras into the gaps where plants didn't come up. I've successfully transplanted carrots, turnips, broccoli, and peas this way.
If you can get them, use open-pollinated or heirloom seeds so that you can save seed from the crop each year to replant the next year. A lot of gardeners swap seeds, so you might be able to get in on that. If you don't have seed to trade at first, see what else you have on hand that you might be able to trade for some seeds.
Hybrid seed isn't always sterile but sometimes the vegetables grown from saved hybrid seed aren't true to the plants you harvested them from. Whatever you end up with is probably edible, but each generation, or future crop, will continue to decline. This may be in vegetable size, amount produced per plant, or other variables.
Go ahead and plant the garden if all you have is hybrid seed. It's better than nothing, and it will buy you time for locating true non-hybrid seed for the next garden.
How much seed do you need? Enough to plant the whole space you dug up, right? Well, sort of. It depends what you're planting. Seeds for carrots and broccoli are very small, while seeds for peas and green beans are much bigger. Broccoli plants can take up as much room as peas or green beans though.
A single carrot seed will grow a plant that only needs about 2 square inches. A single squash seed can grow a plant that takes 30 square feet. A single carrot seed produces one carrot, whereas a single squash seed can produce 10 to 20 fruits.
A small wedge of potato with a single eye on it can grow upwards of 10 lbs. of potatoes and needs about 2 to 3 square feet.
Look at the type of vegetables you want to grow, see how much space they require, then do some math and figure out how much you'll need for each section of your garden. Most seed packets have information on the back which tells you how many feet of row it will plant.
If you're using home-saved seed you'll have to do some guesswork, but before long it'll become second nature. You'll be able to sketch a map of your garden and know how much space it will take for each of what you want to plant. You can tailor it to what you and your family like to eat, and to your climate and garden conditions.
Always save more seed than you think you'll need. The future is unpredictable. You might need to expand your garden, or be able to use seeds for barter, or have a germination disaster causing you to replant part of your garden.
You might have a crop failure. We've saved carrot seed and replanted for six years, and this year not one carrot came up. I don't know why. I'm grateful that we had more carrot seed saved so that we could replant.
Unfortunately we didn't have enough extra saved to replant the whole area. However, it's enough that we can save most of this year's crop to use for future seed. We had a good enough harvest of carrots the two previous years that we still have plenty of dried and canned carrots to see us through.
Other things that can destroy seeds are torrential rains that will drown a planting, or an unexpected hot, dry spell that kills the sprouting seeds or the young seedlings. If you have extra seed on hand you can replant the parts that were damaged and try again.
The amount of space needed for a garden would also vary depending on what else you have to eat, such as hunted or raised animals, fishing, and foraging.
Other things that affect how much you can grow in a given space are mulching and density of planting.
If you have access to straw, lawn clippings, newspaper, cardboard, or even lots of plastic sheeting, you can pack it over the dirt between your rows, snugging it up close to the plants. This keeps moisture in the soil and also protects the roots and lower parts of the plant from excessive cold or heat.
Density of planting refers to how close together your plants are in a row, and how close your rows are to each other. I've played around with intensive gardening, which is similar to square-foot gardening, and I've produced more in the same area as I have with traditional spacing.
By putting 2 or 3 rows closer together, then a wider row to allow for access, followed by 2 or 3 rows close together again, I was able to plant twice as much in the same area. It also helps keep down the weeds.
My husband prefers the traditional 3' wide space between rows so he can run the rototiller between the rows. It keeps the weeds down between the rows, but once we pack the plants with mulch he can't get the rototiller through between the rows for the rest of the summer.
We’ll assume that while you are waiting for the harvest you’ve had other things available to eat, because it takes a couple months from planting time before you get the first edibles from your garden, and most take longer.
If you have time, money, and opportunity to do so, plant as many edible perennials as you can. Perennials are plants that come back every year on their own, such as rhubarb, asparagus, or fruit trees and bushes.
Find out which fruits grow well in your area. If you're in the south you can grow things like peaches. In the north you can grow apples and cherries. Some things like plums will grow in just about any climate. Plant as many as you can, and as many varieties as you can.
You can probably also grow strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, or blueberries. There are other berries like currants, gooseberries, and elderberries, and you can find more by searching online or asking other gardeners.
Nut trees are great to grow or have available. The nuts provide protein, fat, and calories, which are a necessary part of the diet and hard to get from a garden or foraging. If you're a vegetarian, nut trees along with beans grown in your garden will be an important part of your self-sufficient diet.
Don't forget the perennial vegetables: rhubarb (which is sort of a fruit), asparagus, and bunching onions (called “Walking onions” in some areas). They take little care and come back every year.
A lot of herbs are perennial, depending where you live. Here in the north Oregano, Thyme, and Sage come back every year. Down south Rosemary is a perennial, as are other herbs, but they die with the first frost up here. You can grow them as an annual (one-year crop) and save seed to grow them again the next year.
So...how much land? As much as you can reasonably manage. It's better to start off with a smaller plot and work your way up, than to go huge and not be able to keep up with it. How much time do you have? Are you working a job at the same time? Don't exhaust yourself in the first year or two, and burn out.
There's a difference between having a desire to be self-sufficient and produce your own food, or having to do so because you'll starve otherwise. Starvation is a strong motivator.
Now, we're ready to talk about the harvest.