I Encourage You To Go ‘All Out’ With Your Garden This Year
One of the most important aspects of higher level preparedness is to be successful at gardening / growing your own food.
Why? Because self-sufficiency is more important the higher you go with preparedness. Improving self-sufficiency is a cornerstone in my opinion. And putting food on the table is huge.
We are all at our own stages of gardening development and expertise. Some are newbies and others already have farms that produce ‘tons’ of food.
That said, it’s okay if you’re just starting out with a handful of tomato plants to see if you can manage to succeed. It’s okay if last year’s crop was a failure (I had my share of big issues last year!). Don’t let it get you down.
If you feel that you need to make some changes, go ahead and get it started!
Here’s the thing… The calendar keeps on flipping those days one by one. Don’t wait too long to get your growing season underway.
If you live in the south, you’re fortunate to have a very long growing season compared to me who lives up here not too terribly far from the Canadian border!
If you live way up north like me, you’ve got to get those seeds started pronto! If not weeks ago already.
I can’t safely put out plants in the ground until end of May. And that still is risky up here. But my plans and actions are in motion and at this moment I can hardly wait to get things going outside (even though there’s still a foot of snow on the ground out there!)
Gardening For Uncertain Times
Okay, many of you know that we’re living through uncertain times.
The more uncertain the times get, the more self-sufficient the better. The less we have to rely on uncertainty the better for us.
Growing a nice big vegetable garden (push yourself on this one) will have positive effects on you personally and positive for your preparedness.
– Even if you fail or partially fail, you will have learned valuable lessons. Most all of us fail to an extent! Embrace it as learning.
– When you grow more than you can eat, you can preserve the rest for later consumption! What a preparedness concept!
– Grow vegetables that you enjoy eating.
– Home grown vegetables are probably a lot better tasting and maybe even more nutritious than your grocery store.
– Every preparedness-minded gardener must at least try to grow calorie-dense vegetables. This is very important. Vegetables inherently don’t contain lots of calories. However some vegetables are significantly more calorie-dense than others such as potatoes and corn.
– Every year you should try to experiment with something new in your garden! Maybe it’s a new garden bed technique. Maybe it’s a few new vegetables. Maybe it’s the way you try and hold up your tomato plants (good luck with that!). Maybe it’s a different irrigation technique.
– Grow MORE than what you originally planned. Why? Because it will force you to preserve it by home canning, or whatever other method you choose.
This year I’m going to experiment with my potatoes. I’m going to try a technique of growing potatoes in a big barrel and I’m also going to build a frame that I can stack higher as they grow. I’m looking for a method with optimum yields versus work input.
I’m also building at least one new garden bed, 2 feet tall, closer to the house than the actual garden. Will do some ‘square foot gardening’ in there.
And, I’m going to add a bunch of container gardening on my deck (e.g. 5 gallon buckets and such) to see how it goes…
I know that lots of you regulars already are experienced gardeners. Do you sometimes get the feeling to step it up a notch? If yes, why?
