One Of The Best Survival Garden Foods

If you asked me what is the best garden food for survival, I would answer, potatoes. Why? Because they’re pretty easy to grow, and are high in calories for a vegetable (important for survival!). A high caloric yield per square foot. I’ll link to an article below. So what’s this talk about beans then?

I also want to mention beans / legumes as a survival garden food. They are not super high in calories (somewhere in the middle-ish). But they’re also easy to grow. They are nutritious with a pretty good balance of carbs and protein. And a source of Calcium, vitamin A, C, and Iron.

Legumes are plants that produce pods which split open naturally along a seam, revealing a row of seeds. Legumes (beans) produce their own nitrogen, and in fact they return nitrogen back into the soil when they die off.

Beans are a great crop rotation plant. They help maintain soil quality by replacing nitrogen back into the garden soil where the nitrogen has been depleted by other crops.

Beans are rich in fiber, protein, and antioxidants. They are a good food for the human diet. Beans can be a healthy substitute for meat, given its protein content.

Beans are easy to grow. I suggest that anyone who is experimenting with growing their own survival garden food, to be sure and learn to grow, harvest, and store beans.

The picture above is from way back during 2010 at a previous location. I grew a lot of pole beans that particular year. During that time we lived in a typical house on a suburban lot. So not too much room for gardening lots of sprawling plants. So I had decided to try plants that would grow “up” so as to utilize space more efficiently.

Shown are two of several trellis’s that I used to assist their upward growth. I have seen pole beans growing up makeshift strings attached between a ground support and a higher support. I’ve also seen simple tee-pee structures built of small wood poles which nicely support the upward growth of the pole bean plants. I suspect that you could also plant them along side trees and they would follow the tree trunk upwards.

Anyway, do any of you grow pole beans? Or another variety? The most recent type that I’ve grown here have been regular green Bush Beans. We canned them all. Tried a few different varieties. Some taste better than others.

Beans, beans, the magical fruit…

[ Read: Survival Garden Calories List of Vegetables ]

[ Read: Potato Survival Food ]