Survival Garden Food

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Juicy Tomatoes

Grow Your Own Food To Rely Less On ‘The System’

Growing your own food is the absolute single best way to begin to liberate yourself from the system, to help you be prepared to survive hard times, to be more self sufficient, and to add high quality nutritious food to your diet and food storage preps.

Spring is rapidly upon us. It is time to start planning a survival garden, no matter how big or small your yard. Even if you don’t have a ‘yard’, you may have space for some planters, pots, or containers. We have been gardening for several years now in our typical sized suburban lot here in California, and have been amazed at the production and taste of home grown foods and vegetables.

For us, gardening is very rewarding, therapeutic, satisfying, almost spiritual, and it just feels ‘right’. The feeling of accomplishment when the plants grow and then produce, is liberating.

It is amazing to realize that it doesn’t take much space to grow a significant amount of food. The amount of money to be saved is also potentially quite significant. One example is our tomato harvest from last year. We harvested 250 pounds of tomatoes on just 6 hardy vines throughout the year! At lets say, $2 per pound at your local grocery store (prices vary widely – usually more…), that is $500 worth of tomatoes!! The trick is to preserve them since there is obviously no way you can eat them before they rot. What we did was made lots of sauce for the freezer, and we also dehydrated some. We’ve been having delicious pasta and sauce each week during the winter months with the awesome flavor of fresh home grown tomatoes.

The Best Survival Food To Grow

Choosing the best ‘survival’ foods to grow will rarely involve the same choices from one person to the next. If someone is just getting started with gardening, better choices may be easy-to-grow vegetables while more experienced gardeners will likely choose a wider variety with other considerations in mind including nutritional balance, caloric viability for survival purposes, long term storage capability, etc…  What you are able to grow will depend on your experience, your particular grow zone, climate, location, soil, sun exposure, and so on.

Having said that, a Reader had emailed a wise suggestion regarding good choices for a survival garden, as follows -

“One’s survival garden should be heavy on calorie foods such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, dry beans, root crops and nuts which provide a lot of protein while being able to be stored for many months at a time. Tomatoes are tasty and full of vitamin C, but they won’t keep you alive in a food shortage situation and don’t keep well unless you’re planning on canning or dehydrating them. Peanuts are a good calorie food which also improves the soil. Hazelnuts can be grown on bushes used as landscaping in your yard. Sunflower seeds are another good choice for protein. If one has a lot of space, wheat, corn and oats can be grown which can be stored for years if done correctly.”

Here is a list of high-calorie garden vegetables.

The following is a short list of several easy foods that you can’t go wrong with, for starters.

Tomatoes

Oh my, do I love tomatoes. There are lots of great varieties to choose from, and they are VERY EASY to grow.  All they need is sun and some water. There is simply nothing like picking a fresh ripe tomato off the vine and biting into that juicy sweet flesh and feeling your taste buds zing with joy. Now compare that to biting into a typical store bought tomato these days. Very bland, and not much taste. Pretty disgusting when you think about it.

Pole Beans

Pole beans produce nearly twice as many beans as bush beans, they taste sweeter, and are more tender. They provide great nutritional value, and are beneficial for the soil because they provide nitrogen back into the ground.

Zucchini

This summer squash is another easy to grow survival food to consider in your survival garden. It is one of the most common vegetables grown in gardens.

Onion

We have been growing onions for several years now. We plant about 100 onions, which we then slice and freeze to be used throughout the winter and into the following spring.

Get Started With Your Garden Plan

I could go on and on with recommendations, but at least start with one or two items and give it a try. Be careful not to go overboard and do not do too much if this is your first time (to avoid frustration) Start with the easy vegetables like tomatoes, beans, and zucchini. You will be rewarded beyond your imagination.

This is my simple survival garden plan for this year

Italian Pole Bean
Belstar F-1 Broccoli
Imperial Black Beauty Eggplant
Forellenschluss Lettuce
Brandywine Purple Slicing Tomato (I can’t wait for this one!)
Fox Cherry Tomato
Monica F-1 Paste Tomato
Dark Star Zucchini
Buttercup Winter Squash
Kurota Chantenay Carrot
Valencia Onion

Nematocidal Marigold (beneficial flower)
Slow Bolt Cilantro (beneficial)
White Sweet Alyssum (beneficial)
What I mean by beneficial’s are flowers that attract the right kind of ‘good’ insects that eat the ‘bad’ insects.

Now go on, get started!


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