Ready Set Prep

Part of being a prepper is learning to be self reliant, something easier said than done in today’s world.  I urge everyone to learn about growing food, its not as easy as it looks.  I vaguely remember helping my grandmother do some planting and weeding and I remember helping my parents raise a small garden.  More recently I have read online articles, blogs, and a few books on the subject over the past year or so.  Despite having had a feeling of knowing what I was doing, none of those resources were as useful as actual hands on experience.  I’m storing food why do I need to grow a garden you ask?  A ton of  reasons come to mind: 1) You can only store so much food.  If the stuff ever hits the fan in a major way your supplies will only last so long.  2) Fresh produce will prove invaluable for supplementing your existing stores.  You will get tired of eating the same things every day, gardening would be a great way to get some variety and make your supplies stretch further.  3)  Gardens will help supplement much needed vitamins and minerals.  Multivitamins only keep for so long.  4) It’s healthy for you.  Not only does home grown food taste better but its better for you.  Gardening also helps provide some physical activity.  I earned a lot of sweat equity putting in those fence post! 5) You can save some money.  The cost of everything is increasing at the grocery store.  6) Growing a garden served as a good family activity.  We sweated and learned together and are a closer family for the experience.  I could continue on but I think you get the point.

As I mentioned earlier reading about gardening is no substitute for actually doing.  We made many mistakes and hopefully learned from them, a grid down situation is not the time to learn those lessons.  Now is the time to be practicing because if we make mistakes the grocery stores are still open and we won’t go hungry for our ignorance.  We also learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work in OUR area.  Keep in mind there is no one size fits all guide to gardening: location, timing, rain fall, temperatures, soil conditions, wild life, etc. all come in play.  You don’t have to start with a huge garden, begin with some basics and work up from there.  Tomatoes, squash, and zucchini are all fairly easy to grow.  We chose to use raised beds at our home and have been very pleased with the results thus far.  We have had good yields per bed and weeding has been a breeze.

Our carrots and potatoes have done surprisingly well in barrels too.  We also made a “portable” trellis to use with our peas.  We grew strawberries in planters on the porch and they did very well till the birds got involved, lesson learned with those.  We also planted several berry bushes around our property and hope next year we will be able to begin harvesting those for jams and jellies.  We also have a small raised bed on our porch where the wife grows some herbs and lettuce that are readily accessible.

It is not to late in the year to get in on the action either.  Many cool weather plants (peas, broccoli, cabbage, and lettuce) can still be grown.  You don’t have to have a large area to garden.  You can grow some out of small raised bed or even a 5 gallon bucket for that matter.  As I stated earlier every little bit you can learn now the better off you will be.  Make time and put in some effort, you won’t be disappointed in the experience.