Make Your Garden into Your Main Food Source to Survive Societal Collapse

How does your garden grow?

Most of you have only ever known a life where an abundance of food is readily available and fresh water is on tap. We live in an era of luxury where everything works at the flick of a switch or push of a button. If this is all you have ever known, it gives the illusion this is how life will always be — easy! A way of life alien to virtually all of human civilization throughout history. We are the anomaly. So you probably don’t know how to make your garden into your main food source (like I didn’t). And why should you!?

The recent pandemic gave rise to problems unforeseen by many of us. One of those problems was food shortages. And with the threat of environmental disasters and climate change, the possibility of food shortages in the future is a real concern. Plus, for the food that is available, inflation has it shooting up in price, all while the demand for food increases with an ever-growing population.

Have I persuaded you to make your garden into your main food source yet?

Okay, you don’t have to be a doomsayer or a prepper to want to make your garden into your main food source, free from the supermarket-food chain. You might merely want to be self-sufficient and reduce your carbon footprint, or save money on food. But let’s run with this possible scenario: there are food shortages, and you sniff the air to see what’s coming — the eventual collapse of the food-chain supply. This buys you a little time to think and prepare for the worst.

So what can we do?

Stockpiling will only delay the inevitable

It’s all well and good stockpiling food, but that will only get you so far, with your cache eventually running out. And when food shortages happen, the likelihood is the government will ration the amount of food each household can buy, preventing people from hoarding supplies. So what can we do? We need to produce our own food.

Grow to survive and make your garden into your main food source

Only an infinitesimal number of us have the knowledge and skills to grow our own food anymore. This once life-sustaining knowledge, passed down through generations, each adding newer and better methods to plant, grow and harvest food, is lost to the many. We now rely on the logistics of complex food-supply chains to deliver food to us. But we can change that!

Can you answer these questions to survive?

What soil do we need to grow vegetables? What crops do we rotate? What grows in our climate? How do we till the land without a plow or machine? Should we till the land? What should we plant? When should we plant? When should we harvest? What are natural pesticides? What crops complement each other by planting them next to one another? How should we irrigate our crops? What distance should we plant to ensure roots search out water? Do you need to use raised beds?

How much land do I need?

We don’t all own big plots of land we can convert into the fertile ground to grow food. Some of us are lucky enough to have a garden. A 4,000 sq ft garden of calorie crops should be big enough to give a family of four 2,600 calories a day each. You’ll need tight beds and high-yield root crops to do this.

The Dervaes family produces a staggering 6k lbs of food per year on their 4,000 sq ft of land, enough produce to feed them all and sell the rest as a business.

Here in the Uk, we don’t have as much space as in the US, so if the shit hits the fan, you might not be able to make your garden into your main food source. Time to make friends with your neighbors.

You could make an agreement with your neighbors to knock down the bordering fence that separates both gardens and make a communal garden. You could extend this to a terrace of houses. After all, when you’ve got to eat and you’re starving, everything changes.

What food do I need to grow to survive?

You want to grow root-based foods such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, pumpkins, squash, true yams, etc. Roots stay in the ground after a harvest and are hardier than above-ground vegetables. Plus, stored in the right conditions, they stay fresh months after they’ve been harvested, which is more than can be said for the tomato. Kept in the right conditions, pumpkins, and squash will last for 6 months or longer.

Tools you’ll need to survive

I’m not going to list every tool to own — only the bare essentials to get you started.

You probably have most of these tools in your shed already, but you'll certainly need them if you don't

The short-handled spade. You’re not going to be able to do any gardening without one of these. When you pick up a short-handled spade, you want one with a D-handle and footrest to put your body weight on if you’re digging ground that’s particularly tough.

A spading fork. This is necessary to aerate the ground and break up compacted earth. You’ll need one of these for double-digging — but more on that later. Along with a shovel or spade, the spading fork will punch holes deeper into the ground than any rotary tiller, and this holds moisture in the ground and allows air to get to the root, to prevent it from rotting. A spading fork is kinder to the soil than a plow or machine; it will help to preserve the layers of soil and cause minimal disruption to the microorganisms, and won’t compact the earth. They also do a stronger but heavier contractors version of the spading fork.

There’s a whole family of hoes for various different needs in hoeing. I’m only going to suggest two, but the book Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening (which I strongly recommend), lists all the various hoes needed for gardening.

Your standard hoe is needed for weeding, hilling (shaping soil around a plant), and digging shallow furrows for planting seeds and bulbs. Make sure you keep the blade well sharpened and have the gooseneck bent to the right angle for chopping into weeds at their root. Along with the regular hoe, there is the Scuffle hoe.

The Scuffle hoe is used when you have looser soil. It uses an oscillating blade that cuts into weeds that are just below the surface. You can’t go deep like you can with the standard hoe, but you can cover much more ground in a short space of time. This tool is for regularly weeding ground that is already well maintained and in need of shallow weeding for maintenance.

Wheelbarrows once had their rightful place in people’s gardens. But since paved gardens are in vogue, and lawns are on the way out, the humble wheelbarrow has lost its spot in the garden. A wheelbarrow is a staple tool for any gardener growing her own food. It’s essential for double-digging and carting the dugout top layer of soil from your first trench to fill the dugout layer of your last trench; and transport compost, leaves, harvested crops, tools, and anything that needs to get from one place to another.

The bow rake. I’m sure you know what this is used for: leveling dug beds, burying seeds, and pulling up young, newly grown weeds.

Water barrels have become a trendy feature and a focal point in people’s gardens. But when things collapse, she with the water barrel that works best is king. Forget aesthetics and buy the one that collects ample water, keeps the pests out, and stops algae. This one can be connected to other water barrels

Hard rain areas, insects, and debris can clog up the pipes in your barrel and contaminate your water. If your water barrel doesn't have a screen with it, you need to buy one. They’re small, mesh screen filters that fit on top of or right inside the barrel that prevent algae and debris from passing into your water supply. They filter all but the most minute particles.

There are other nuanced tools, but these are the essentials to get you growing and make your garden into your main food source.

To Fertilise or Compost, that is the question

Water? Check! Soil? Check! Fertilizer? Erm…

Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) are all needed for healthy, flourishing plants. Without these nutrients, your crop will suffer from stunted growth.

A good fertilizer contains 10% each of all three of these life-enriching elements (NPK) in a bag. There’s no denying fertilizer makes plants grow quicker and in the soil where other plants fail to thrive. At first blush, it may appear a better option than its organic counterpart: compost. And it’s certainly the way to go if you are in survival mode and in need of putting food on the table quickly. But growing crops for a quick yield is different from growing to feed yourself for years to come. And for the long term, fertilizer may not be the way to go.

Apart from the NPK in fertilizer, it can have filler that contains heavy metals and other toxins. These will damage the soil and kill off organisms that play a role in healthy plant life. And this is the reason organic food tastes better: it’s healthier! We’ve all eaten the strawberry on steroids, bigger than a child’s hand and pumped up with water, only to be disappointed by its bland taste when we bite into it.

Fertilizer has a blind spot when it comes to other macronutrients needed in the soil. There are interactions with microorganisms such as fungi, worms, and other earth creatures that play a role in creating fertile ground for your crop to grow. And fertilizer burns the little earthworms and stops them from doing their magic. And this is what compost has over fertilizer: it feeds the soil and earth life as well as the plant, creating harmony and balance in an ecosystem rich in nutrients to grow healthier food for you to eat.

As well as traditional organic fertilizers like manure, urine is used for its high levels of nitrogen. A person’s urine content depends on their diet, and a diet high in salt can produce urine that would damage the ecology of the soil. It’s best, then, to dilute the urine at a 6 to 1 ratio of water to urine, to avoid any damaging effects from salt in the urine.

Another natural way of adding nitrogen is by planting shell beans between your crops.

In my next article, I look at the survival crops to grow to keep you alive, and then the more indulgent crops to give you variety.

The book Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening answers all the essential questions you need to make your garden into your main food source

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