Survival Gardening Lessons Learned

Received this e-mail from a reader: My wife and I started a survival garden this year. I learned so many things which will come in handy if I have to rely on growing my own food. Not only do we learn good lessons, but we can stretch our shrinking dollars and get just tickled seeing things grow.

UrbanMan's comment: Absolutely. I highly encourage growing a survival garden to help reduce food costs, gained lessons learned and have those skills when it IS a life and death struggle.

1. Give pests more credit than not. Use rabbit proof wire - this is a one time purchase as it can be used time and time again.
2. Pull weeds as soon as you see them. Don't wait or you'll be over whelmed. I can see that on a Survival Team, a designated person primarily responsible for the garden with labor from the rest of the group is the way to go. You have to have some in charge that knows what they are doing. Heck our lives may be in the balance.

3. Buckets cut in half to make two donuts are good containers in the ground as they direct water directly over the roots and won't let any seeds gets washed away. You can buy store bought edging to make a donut and they can be used over and over but if you are trying to make your garden as monetarily efficient as possible then improvise with buckets.



4. During 100 degree heat most plants require watering in the morning AND evening. So be as water efficient as you can.
5. Be creative for your soil. In my sandy area I use horse and cow manure that I get for free, minus the gas for my truck to go get it, to mix with the sand. My wife is now used to saving vegetable leftovers and skins for our compost heap.
6. My experience is if the seed packet says "fruit in 60 days", plan for 90 days, or even more. Most of our vegetables produced very late.
7. Beans too much water and care for the output.
8. Onions easy to grow and do not use a prohibitive amount of water.
9. Squash and cucumber are easy to grow, produce good product for the required care and water.
10. Corn - easy to grow. Be careful where you grow it as other people can see the stalks,....they may be thinking "where there is corn there may be other vegetables as well."
11. Carrots, for me, were hard to grow. In fact, this endeavor was a failure. Could be the soil and lack of nutrients, but then again most of the other crops grew. Next, I'll start the carrots in- doors until they sprout.
12. Finally, my tomatoes are my prize vegetable. They are growing well in half shady area. I am growing two different types.

Our plan is to can some of the vegetables and dry others so we developed lessons in the preservation techniques. I have a canning setup with 24 mason jars and a dehydrator.