Guest Post by Crimson Avenger
In “How You Got Screwed” I suggest that people start doing things for themselves: Learn to cook, change your own oil, sew, or do other things that build your skill set and make you more self-reliant.
Among other things, I garden. And honestly, I’m really bad at it. I spend a lot of money and grow mostly weeds. I’ve had a handful of successes – the occasional bounty of carrots or tomatoes or lettuce – but never approaching consistent greatness. Mostly I have a handful of true successes, a decent number of adequate outcomes, and more than my share of total failures.
But I have learned a few things, namely:
Doing something yourself is humbling, and thought-provoking.
Before I started gardening, I just assumed it was something I could do: If the economy got really bad, or something worse happened, I figured I could just throw some seeds in the ground and we could grow our own food. I think most people share that delusion. But the reality is that if we tried to live on what I can grow, we’d starve in short order. Which leads to the thought-provoking part: If we can’t live off what I grow, how will we eat? And what will the millions of similarly deluded people do when they find they can’t feed themselves?
Building skill takes time and focus
I talk about how bad I am at gardening, but I am admittedly better than I was when I started. I had theory – all kinds of books – but it wasn’t until I invested actual time in the garden, over the course of years, that I actually gained some skill. Through trial and error I’ve learned about overwatering and underwatering, how to make compost, and how weeds can suck the life out of your productive plants. And I’ve learned how to counter the little bunnies that would come in and decimate my seedlings. Even the best book can’t prepare you for the realities you’ll face in your own little plot.
You need to work with your environment, not shape your environment to you
We have a lot of trees in our backyard, so some parts of the garden get full sun (afternoon sun, the worst), some get partial sun, and some get very little sun at all. And what makes things even more challenging is that the sun’s path changes over the year, so the amount of sun each area gets changes from spring to fall. When I started, I knew what I wanted to plant, and so I planted it regardless of the conditions. That meant tomatoes in partial-shade areas for example. And I failed. I’ve only just now learned to look at the reality of each garden plot in terms of sun levels and make decisions based on what that plot can do, rather than what I want.
My experience to date makes me appreciate that skills are hard-earned: It takes time and effort to become competent at something, and probably a lifetime to reach mastery. The thought that people will suddenly being able to provide for themselves if need be is fantasy, and it’s a fantasy probably shared by a lot of people – which scares the hell out of me given the consequences if those beliefs are ever tested.
My garden plot here is a mess. I have six tomato plants that survived, giving up the odd tomato over the summer if I got it before the deer.
Putting in a garden is a labor of love and it is a task that will wait for next year.
But, I appreciate your comments because when I was in the Family of Families and we were bulk buying all kinds of things, heirloom seeds was one of the purchases. I have a five gallon bucket of heirloom seeds in cool storage so that when Monsanto’s plan to control food production through genetic modification of plants (Prepper Propaganda) goes fullscale, we can grow our own plants and harvest our own seeds. At least I managed to get a few to germinate and grow. Some of the folks in the group just put their seeds into the closet or garage (BAD CONDITIONS for seed storage) in case they need them. Well, if you don’t know how to grow food before you need it, it ain’t gonna happen when you do.
But, I got a ways to go before I manage to be able to get the whole garden going. We started on this land from scratch with everything, so tilling and prepping a garden spot is still on the “to do” list. You are probably way ahead of me right now in that department.
However, I have bunny meat and eggs to trade you for carrots and lettuce.
Maggi,
A simple and inexpensive deer deterrent. I have a 30′ x 70′ garden that I fenced in using landscaping timbers and bird netting (7′ x 100′) and I put orange tape streamers on the netting. This has worked wonders for the deer, bears don’t give a shit, and also keeps the smaller animals out as well. I also put a two strand electric barrier 3 to 6 inches high about 6 inches outboard the netting. My only pest now are Mexican bean beetles. I don’t mind the deer that get my low hanging apples and pears, and they do help clean up the chestnuts in the fall. The squirrels take care of walnuts and hickory nuts and my winter yard cleanup is easier. There is some harmony in this world after all.
Neem oil and liquid organic soap for pest helps, and good calcium in the soil helps with tomatoes. I have had good results with compost tea…wife said we had too many tomatoes to can this year, and they are still producing.
Maggie,
Much like prepping a room for fresh paint, tilling soil and
improving it may be 90% of success in a garden.
I grow my own plants from seed. This year I had something new…
ground cherries. What fun!
Lest I sound braggadocios, full disclose, I was a full month behind,
The flowers are good enough, but the tomatoes are lagging.
Consider multiple strategies. Gathering cheapo bins from the
Goodwill and planting potatoes in there. A sweet potato sprouted
and I planted it, then I discovered the leaves are edible.
BTW, Martin Armstrong predicts: today included links to how
to grow food in the basement. A foretelling if anything is. Food
will be too precious to allow the deer to get it.
Doing as much as possible for yourself also gives you the full value of your labor instead of paying someone else to do it with tax diminished money at an inflated price because their money is also taxed and diminished as well.
Say you repair your own home that needs a minor repair and pay someone several thousand dollars to do it, you pay with the several thousand that you have left over after taxes have been taken from your income so it actually costs you maybe 30 or so percent more than that in terms of your labor earnings.
Or you do the repair yourself for 500 worth of materials and your own labor giving yourself the effective gain of several thousand dollars you won’t be paying any taxes on.
It pays to be versatile and competent with your life.
I have a small garden, but I’ll start changing my own oil the day I start growing my own wheat to make a sandwich.
“You need to work with your environment, not shape your environment to you.”
That, my friend, is a gem of an observation. It took me years to figure that out and I was really trying to do a good job. Watch nature and imitate the hell out of it. Wherever you live, whatever thrives in that environment, focus on that or relocate to find the right environment for what it is you want to do.
Try these two, they are awesome shortcuts to a better gardening experience and have been proven to be successful.
Thanks, HSF – can’t wait to watch these videos.
HSF,
the first video requires vimeo, but the second one played.
Fantastic short! How absolutely beautiful and inspirational.
I have one thing in common with the family…square foot or
“square inch” gardening. I place things half again as close as
instructions suggest. The soil just loves that, and the plants have
many close friends. Raised beds are so great for controlling soil
conditions. We have tons of compost brewing as the Mr. gets
the coffee grounds from a place every week. Slowly I am seeing
earth worms, and my soil is starting to come alive.
Thanks for the videos.
Suzanna
Gardening is not easy. It definitely fits some folks more than others – but I’m getting better at it. Here are some of my tips,
Fertilize your soil and amend with peat or pro-mix/etc. in the fall and for me, I fertilize the hell out of my soil very early in the year, hand breaking clumps and removing the rock hard shit. Then I DO NOT fertilize the entire summer. Why? Aphids – they are attracted to the nitrogen and make mooslims coming over the border looks like amateurs.
Calcium (ground up oyster shells from Tractor Supply, etc.) prevents tomato bottom rot.
Tomatoes, water routinely – especially as fruit appears because they uptake water so efficiently if you just water the hell out of ’em every fourth day you’ll get huge skin splits and have to toss ’em.
And lastly, remember, mosquito’s gotta eat to…….
At the age of 54 I’m not sure what skill set I could learn. I got enough food to last about a year. I got my commercial truck and I just bought my own 53 trailer .I will find some kind of work .
The question is if it gets this bad in America would life but worth fighting for ?.Maybe , maybe not.
54 is young, dude. Your mind works, you’ve got a lot of mental energy you could start to turn towards the physical world and now you have shortcuts- watch the two videos above- and you have the entire working system of the Creator working for you once you throw in with Nature.
There’s probably not much you can’t learn- and be a success at- if you want it.
Good luck, bb.
Thanks for the videos HF. Have you ever used mushroom compost? Plants get so big they look like they were nuked.
I make my own aact (actively aerated compost tea). Maybe I need to add some mushrooms to the brew?
bb,
yes life will be worth living! Get some hobbies and learn some
new things…if all else fails/a serious rainfall? Put your feet up
and read. Actually, this is the best medicine…but at times, man’s
inhumanity can cause any person to have a grief state. Yet,
tomorrow will be a new day. Start again.
We live way out in the desert which provides many gardening challenges, especially when we leave for any length of time. Drip irrigation failures have cost me fruit trees and grapes over the years. The poor native soil has become rich and dark however with years of composting & mulching. While we never get amazing quantitites, it’s nice to know that if we had to ramp things up due to a crisis, we could do it. We always buy seeds, many which just age & are eventually tossed, but it’s cheap insurance. Every year we learn more…
When I was a kid we were would have been what was considered “working poor”. I wore my cousins hand me downs etc (big family so always lots of old clothes available) and we did everything we could to get by and have as good a life as possible. We lived on an old homestead near the edge of the small northern prairie town where we worked and went to school. The homestead was what was left of a farm that had been severed by the railroad and later developed into the local golf course. The yard was about two acres in size with a very old garage and an old farm house with a basement that flooded in the spring if it rained before the run off had a chance to slowly melt away.
Dad built a meat cutting shop on the property and supplemented our income by butchering livestock and game. Mom and we kids tended garden May through August. The garden was roughly half an acre or more in size and we did it all by hand. The amount of food we could grow was almost unbelievable. The soil was a beautiful rich, dark loam and grew an abundance of root vegetables – potatoes, beats, turnips and carrots – more than we could eat so we canned and pickled some (beats and carrots) and put some into cold storage for the winter (turnips and potatoes). It produced giant onions and mum would grow a few herbs – mostly dill for pickling. Peas and a variety of beans also grew very well and one of my fondest childhood memories is of sitting around a wheelbarrow of pea pods and shelling them into mum’s canning pot while we chatted and well, ate fresh peas! Mum would blanch and freeze the rest.
Lettuce and cabbage would grow but mum was constantly battling bugs like moths etc and would frequently lose half of these plants to them.
Rhubarb grew so vehemently you couldn’t kill the root systems without maximum effort and time so mom made rhubarb everything – jams, jellies, pies, cobblers and loaves. God I hate rhubarb. Whenever I see it in the grocery store for sale I laugh. It’s like paying for dirty bottled water in my mind. Crab apples grew in abundance behind the garden and she would make juices and jellies from them too. Raspberries were planted in rows outside of the garden and picked for freezer jam and fresh eating.
Corn was always hit and miss – we generally didn’t have enough heat that far north to make it grow properly even with the quality soil but some years it would grow for fresh eating (we never planted a lot because of the risk of losing square footage to something that might not grow). It was my dads favourite when we could coax it out of the ground.
Cucumbers, squashes, zucchini etc grew well in the soil and mom pickled the cucumbers and made baking/loaves/cookies out of the latter. Tomatoes were hit and miss. Some years good and some years not depending on the weather. We never had a greenhouse so they were not a priority.
The garden also produced a tremendous amount of weeds. My brother and I would spend most of the summer keeping it clear of them. We’d cordon the garden off into sections and work on one, then moving onto the next and by the time it was finished it was almost time to start again in the first zone. As kids we hated it.
The key to it all was soil quality and knowing what you could grow and what you couldn’t. We never had to fertilize much because the soil quality was quite rich to begin with.
Now – living in the PNW – I have ideal weather conditions to grow almost anything I want. My garden now is a small hobby garden that only produces enough veggies and fruit for fresh eating. The key here is also soil quality. The soil in this part of the world is sandy and poor in comparison to back home. I use mushroom manure in the spring to give it a boost (and that it does) and spend the rest of the summer battling slugs, earwigs and a few other pests. It rains so much here that the soil is quite moist which means creepy crawlies. I lost an entire crop of lettuce to some little grub bastards this summer because I caught them too late. Such as it goes.
Soil is key though – take care of it, water often and watch for signs of bugs. AS HSF says – watch nature and pay attention to what grows well where you live then focus on that. Sage advice my mum would agree with 100%.
I’m in the south, so we have lousy soil (red clay) and long, hot summers. The soil you can either amend, grow poor-soil crops (sweet potatoes), or do above-ground boxes (which is my choice). The boxes are good, but you need to water more because the soil dries out faster with the withering heat, and that heat also punishes young plants. I’ve learned a lot and still know so little 🙂
I feel the same way still. Every year I learn something new.
Our house is near a major mountain stream and the ground is very rocky and gravelly as result. I have gone entirely to above ground planters because what little soil there is will not grow much. I have hauled in soil from a variety of places locally – mostly a local gravel pit that sells what is brought in when they are scraping it off land to make a new development. It is poor quality and has to be fertilized. I’ve spent years improving the soil in all of my boxes. I’ve even added some earthworms to keep the soil alive and well and will occasionally dump in the carcasses of little critters (mice and my daughters pet hamsters that eventually die) and bugs etc. into the mix.
Because our yard is small (typical of the PNW) I have built some of the planters in tears. Every year I come up with something new and add more. I have two planters with three levels that I can turn into green houses with sheets of poly if the weather cools too much. My neighbours look over my fence in the summer with a sort of mystified curiosity at my little project. One cannot understand why and the other asked me the other day if I could point him in the direction of some of the blue prints I used for my multi level planters. I laughed and pointed to my skull. Not sure how to download the PDF for him from there…..
The garden grows enough fro a variety of fresh veggies once or twice a week spring through fall. Because of its size I have learned how to grow stuff close together. I grow a type of carrot that is long and skinny to increase my yield. As I pick lettuce and radishes (which offer a high, quick growing yield) I plant more behind them. Once the snap peas are done for the season I pull them and plant a fall kale behind them. I grow grape tomatoes instead of beef eaters because I can grow multiple hanging baskets of them and they take up virtually no room as they hang from the bottom of my deck. And so on a so forth.
[img
[/img]
Where was this place, I get the feeling I’m near it.
The home of my childhood is in “The Land of Rape and Honey.”
Three years and I still lose my zucchini every year to vine borers. My co worker says, easy, just put Sevin on it. I don’t think he gets that we’re trying to reduce pesticides….
When you plant the Zucchini ( I have used seedlings) wrap a small piece of aluminum foil around the stem as the plant grows or when you plant the seedling. This will get your plants off and running. They can’t get in through the foil.
Wrap the stems and base with pantyhose also works well, and it expands as the plant grows. And when you have the bt out for your brassicas (cabbage, br. sprouts, brocolli etc), soak the base of the zuccini plant with that also.
Also in june, look for the red flies that lay the eggs and kill them by hand.
Last resort is to look at the base and if/when you see the sawdust appearing stuff, slice it open and dig out the white grubs.
Vine borers – better than zucchini ass borers.
Easy, just put food grade diatomaceous earth flour on them.
You will need an applicator of some kind and have to reapply after it rains or you water but it’s 100% natural, no chemicals and will not harm you or your pets. Read up on it.
Message to the bunny farmers, black gold under those bunny hutches. Composted bunny manure mixed into your soil is a winner, no matter what type of soil. And if you don’t have bunnies there’s my personal favorite, miracle gro
I’ve read a bunch about permaculture, and one of the techniques favored by some is “hügelkultur” (don’t know if that’s the right German spelling). Basically a giant mound of wood and brush covered by soil, into which you plant stuff.
Looks messy, so what I did is made “hügelbeds”: I built raised beds with three courses of 2x6s instead of one or two, and I filled them halfway up with a mixture of old wood from a pile we found out back and freshly-cut stuff, then dumped soil and compost on top. We almost never have to water these: the wood soaks up and holds the moisture from any rain. If you’re in a desert, you’ll still have to water some, I imagine… But it is worth looking into.
What I didn’t think to do was to line the bottoms of these first with hardware cloth, since the initial nooks and crannies at the wood level invited burrowing critters, one of whom ate all my celery from below. One day I had nice proud stalks, and the next day they were all droopy.. Plenty of water, so wtf? Ohhhhhh….. (headsmack).
Most places You can get 3 good crops most years. Plant something leafy fall & spring. About a thousand sq. ft = about 60 tomato plants = abundant salads + 100 quarts of thick tomato sauces, and a the freezer full for Winter. The math says 100 quarts of sauces = less than 3% of your diet & calorie needs. A human would take acres of grain to feed if it ate only pasta & beans. Quite a bit more if you add eggs, meat, coffee and a few buckets of ice cream. 40 acres and a mule fed a family and the mule with nothing leftover at all.
I would venture for most, gardening is a loss and a pain in the ass. Reading the above posts, most everyone is dealing with adversity: poor soil, bugs, weather, etc. Gardening is just a romantic idea.
Between the fucking rabbits / squirrels / deer (and I’m in a Midwestern city), and the weather, pest control, and the weeding, and the time it takes to start the plants from seed, or the cost of buying them – I’m sure it’s a complete monetary loss in time and materials.
Buy your food from a pro – a real farmer.
I’ve been married 50 yrs and my wife is just learning how to cook. Every time she burns something she say we’re havin’ Cajun food. We had Cajun food three times this week.
The pretty lady and I have been building our gardening skills the last few years, lots of effort, some success. We eat some of our home produced food every day, and some meals that’s all we eat, what we have produced or shot and processed. We do maple syrup in the spring, followed by 50 chickens for meat, of which we can most. We can almost all the deer I shoot. The gardening is coming along. Lots of disappointment but lots of learning. Potatoes were pretty good last year, even had enough left in the spring to plant for this year, this year the potatoes look better than last. I think we’ve canned about 75 jars of beans so far, and more to come. Have had success with a rutabaga that I think is out of this world for taste. We are no where near self sufficient, but I found out I enjoy producing some of my own food. I found that once I started trying to learn gardening skills that there are lots of people willing to share their knowledge.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from gardening is to expect the unexpected. I have three different little plots of corn this year. All look good and are producing plenty of corn but I walked outside yesterday and the patch behind the garage was all laying down on the ground! WTF? We had 40 mph winds come though and for some reason it leveled that patch. I propped it back up and tied it but about half is now drooping due to being broken/bent at the base.
My tomatoes this year are crap. Maters are always hit and miss around here. We’ve only had about 7 nights all summer that did not require a light jacket to sit outside. The days have been warm enough but the night time temps have been dropping into the 50-60’s all summer and according to my reading, that is bad for maters. I think I have about a dozen total and they are buried deep in the centers of plants that are nearly 8 feet high and literally yellow from the profusion of blossoms.
My garlic crop turned out great. Taters are a bumper crop this year. This is the best year I’ve ever had for asparagus. I’m still harvesting stalks with each plant having produced 50-100 stalks I let grow. You can’t even stick your hand through the profusion of stalks for two feet above the ground!
I started gardening with the back to eden method posted in the video above. Next year I’ll be laying soaker hoses on to of the woodchips with quick connect fittings to more easily manage watering and I’ll run them on a timer.
Even when the garden doesn’t live up to expectations in terms of food, it exceeds expectations in the simple peace and harmony it brings as the dogs and I go about pruning, trimming and nibbling. I throw tennis balls for the dogs everyday and eat fresh green peas while doing so. As a result, peas never make it into the house!
SaamiJim. – – – A young couple neighbor and I are going to try canning chicken for the first time. I am well familiar with vegetable canning but not meat. How would you advise a first timer? I’m also familiar with Joel Salatin and will review his advice for canning meat but any advice you might share given your wealth of experience I will appreciate!
I wasn’t asked but make sure you follow a proper procedure to avoid botulism.
Yep, every location is different and requires different techniques. I live in a desert area and there’s plenty of sunshine: too much heat makes it tough though, the water evaporates from the plants faster and some (zucchini, cantaloupe, butternut squash) get so much sun and heat they won’t set fruit. Mom (88) says tomatoes won’t set fruit above 90 F, like it 60 to 80 F, and that seems about right from my observations. The cheap dirt I bought from Big Lots and similar came with its own crop of snails, which have to be collected and disposed of; I send mine to play out in traffic, which generally cures the problem (city street in front of my house). Finely-broken eggshells also discourage snails, it hurts their little pseudopods but you have to have an unbroken perimeter around the plants you want to protect.
No corn this year, didn’t even germinate. Cherry tomatoes worked well, beefsteaks not so well. Carrots pretty good; green peppers coming along, Had a fair crop of spinach in the spring, we’ll see what happens for fall; broccoli a disappointment. Try try again. Newspapers laid out around the seedlings help keep down the weeds, hold moisture in longer. Live and learn.