To prepare for world collapse learn to at people. There’s plenty of them
@Hikermick
Am I doing it right?
This is unironically me. I sadly did the math on how long we can survive on my vegetable garden. Spoiler: not long!
Even potatoes don’t have all that many calories.
If you WERE to try to prep your way to sustainable. you’re going to have to buy/store starches in bulk and use the garden +canning for nutrients.
Yeah, I did think about how to make it in any way viable as just a mental exercise and came to a similar conclusion. If I didn’t enjoy getting my own veggies and fruits I’d probably just stop. I mostly started because I love very spicy peppers and was unable to even buy them most of the time. I eventually started growing all sorts of things of course, you can’t survive on superhot pepper pods for long, and if you could, you may not want to.
It’s not about just literally surviving off of them; it’s about spicing up life during the apocalypse! Your peppers could become very valuable trading commodities! Keep up the good work.
How many bottle caps do you think my dried Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers will go for? I bet the ghouls will love them!
breadfruit tree
I’ve never had it. what’s it like?
the taste is kinda in between that of potato and cassava
It’s really good imo. Love me some breadfruit. Taro too. That and fresh coconuts are what I miss about Samoa.
Aquaponics are the way. Simply buy property with a pond. Ez.
What you will have is the knowledge to grow food, which you scale up to feed yourself and can others for much longer. That is an extremely valuable skill.
Those four tomatoes will feed you, but only after you have harvested all the seeds, which will grow dozens of plants next season, and feed hundreds of people, and yield thousand sof seeds for an even larger crop next year.
Surviving through the first growing season is the trick.
Also print out that wikipedia article about crop rotation. And get a handbook about weeds.
Also my favorite gardening subject: COMPOST!
I love compost. I could write a book on compost.
Only if you grow heirloom tomatoes though. Modern tomatoes are all F1 hybrids so the offspring will be shit probably.
I’m so sick of dummies thinking they are going to survive the collapse of society or prevent it buy planting a vegetable garden.
And yet I see someone posting their anxiety cope on here once a week, at least. Asking for advice how to become a homesteader on their 1/4 acre lot in a city/suburb. They write a 1000 word essay on the topic, asking of r ‘advice’ how to learn a lifetime of veggie growing experience into a few sentences so that they can be coming ‘self sufficient’.
Grow plants if you want, for fun. But stop with the prepper bullshit. Stop being an paranoid egotistical idiot. If society collapses, you are fucked and there is shit you can do about it. You are not the protagonist of a apocalyptic movie, sorry to inform you. You are an extra whose only purpose in the story is to die or already be dead in the background of the shot.
Yep not to mention that if you manage to have a good garden when SHTF you’re just the first target for the raiders.
There is an excellent, practical book about surviving economic collapse by someone who went through it in Argentina.
How to avoid economic collapse:
Step 1: Sell book about it
Step 2: Profit
And I honestly would not want to live in a world where there is such instability. Even before electricity, one needed a stable community to thrive. Every time I watch an apocalyptic movie, I always think about how stressful and exhausting it would be to be a survivor, and hope to be one of the first to die. Even if things get better again, I will most likely never experience the levels of comfort I have become accustomed to within my lifetime. No thanks.
It doesn’t take much land to be self sufficient in vegetables if you are willing to limit your vegetable choices to your climate and to preserve them. However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder. Say you eat around 300g of grain per day. Then you would need about 219 square meters of grain if you have a typical organic yield. Replace your carbs with potato and maybe you can reduce that by 50%, but then you run into the risk of potato harvest failing, which they often do in organic systems. For proteins you would either have to have animals plus area to grow their feed, or grow a huge area on par with the grains to get enough shelling beans to meet your protein needs. But vegetables? Just a dozen or two square meters should be enough.
However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder.
Nervous pet noises
can keep chickens for eggs for protein
And what will the chickens eat? You still have to grow their feed. Buying feed from the feed store is not self-sufficiency
Assuming you’re able to produce enough for the off season and have a method to store said food.
It’s called “subsistence farming” and is a crapload of work.
I feel seen
That’s because we were never meant to be rugged individuals. It’ll be a lot more survivable if we build stronger communities.
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Yes they are jalapeno their communities. They are too spicy to ignore.
Selfish individually is a capsaicin.
Sometimes gardening is just a hobby, tho
Yeah but this meme is specifically talking about trying to survive after the world collapses
It is a self deprecating joke about the terrible output of their personal garden because they are not good at it, not gardens in general.
Yes but it was more joking that 4 tomatoes from your personal garden will not be enough to survive the collapse.
We were meant to be rugged individuals, but rugged individuals living in a community with other rugged individuals.
Also, farming has always been a hard job. People who garden are doing the kinds of farming that farmers did before automation became a thing, but they’re doing it on a tiny scale. One farmer using non-industrial methods is going to have to really work like a mule to keep just themselves and their family alive. So, gardening using those same methods is never going to produce enough calories and nutrients for anything meaningful.
I’ve got my bottle caps ready. I reckon I’ve got a good four minutes to hide them all around the house for a future wasteland dweller to find.
I call myself an aspiring farmer. I’ve been at it for about 12 years. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve lost a lot, for most of that I didn’t have much land and had to get creative. Now we’re in a decent spot with some good land and soil, I grow most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat, probably 70-80%, and raise quail for the eggs which we have a wild surplus of.
It’s a fucking fuckton of work and still I think if SHTF we would struggle big time. Most of what we do is pretty self sufficient, but we still rely on the grocery store for so many ingredients and products. I don’t have enough space to grow enough wheat to mill into flour to make bread, nor do I really want to. Also all it would really take is our water supply to be cut and we’d be done for.
I do think it’s a good skill to have though. And if I had the money fuck off I’d quit my day job in a heartbeat and buy more land to farm.
I think that last part is key, it’s a good skill to have. It’s easy to think it’ll be everyone on their own when the apocalypse happens, but people generally want to work together if it means better chances of survival.
It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be tribes of people popping up across the wasteland
no one is going to make it on their own. community effort is the only way survival is gonna happen.
Our natural state is to exist in collective communities. It is only capitalism that has atomized us into individuals competing against everyone else.
Spot on. I don’t think I alone could survive an apocalypse, but I think I could be an asset to a community of people who can.
My garden spits out three things en masse. Crazy hot jalapeños, lime, and mint. When the world collapses, I’m gonna mojito/spicy marg my way out.
all things considered, that’s better than most plans I’ve heard.
I looked into what it would take for me to grow tomatoes here in NM, and decided against it.
Huh? NM is well within the growing zone for tomatos. You can even grow them in 5gal hardware store buckets.
I consider myself a “prepper” I don’t prep for the apocalypse but for “next Tuesday” if we have a shelter in place, or some large utility failure, a big earthquake or volcano so I spend time in prepper spaces. The amount of people who are not prepper and genuinely believe they can garden their way to survival is SO high. When we look at places around the world dealing with long term hardships no one is surviving off their personal garden. Farming at scale exists for a reason, growing food is extremely labor, time and resource intensive, unless you’re doing it at scale you’re like net negative in calories for what you’re putting in versus what you’re getting out. Farming livestock that can live off the land like goats or chickens would be more successful but that also takes a good amount of time and labor and the willingness to kill the animals you’ve raised and know how to safely process them.
Anyone who’s worried about needing to provide for themselves in times of extreme hardship should do the research and start getting ready now, don’t worry about gardening, figure out how to get and store long term self stable foods and potable water and anything fresh is just a supplement.
You’ll have to trade with people who have more or other things. I’d wager things like salt, sugar, baking powder, yeast , spices, nails, screws, hand tools, will be in high demand come a large-scale long-term collapse.
I mean there was a Silk Road for a reason.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
At best it’s a supplement. I grow beans (lol) at my place because they really seem to thrive and grow practically like weeds. Beans freeze really well and can be dehydrated.
I bought a large dehydrator to compliment my dry goods food storage, which is up to about 8 months worth of dry goods, 3 months of tinned. I like to buy fruit at wholesale prices when it’s in season at the farms near me, and make fruit leather, and I make my own biltong. But I also get bags of frozen veg and dehydrate these right from the bag. They pack down much smaller than frozen and are very easy to do. I also have a bunch of citrus trees for vitamin C and easy sugars.
Very true, I love gardening, but its very hard to eke out a meaningful calorie count.
Potatoes.
Until you get blight, anyway, then you’re fucked.
Actually this is true. I grew potatoes once, in big tubs, and ended up with like 30kg from 1 square metre. I still have some boiled and frozen in my freezer
So grimly true.
We all know someone like this!
And all at the same time, with nothing the rest of the year.
That’s why I also have a slingshot
I think It always been like that in temperate climate.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part, preserving it so you still have food to eat at the end of winter is the hardest and most time consuming part.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part
And it’s anything but easy.
In colder climates you actually have to plan to eat preserved food until late spring, when everything that started growing when the snow melted has finally started to produce food.
Don’t tell me you can’t hibernate!
I wish I could
I’d love to century-nate, is that possible?
One tomato for every season
Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.
I mean it’s a hobby. It’s not cheaper or more efficient compared to large scale farming
It’s not cheaper or more efficient compared to large scale farming
This professor emeritus disagrees.
To begin with, it takes three acres of land for the industrial food system to feed the average American for a year, compared to maybe 5% of that area—or even much less—to feed a person for a year on a balanced diet of garden vegetables. So how is that three acres more efficient?
https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/home-gardens-vs-farms-efficiency/
That professor emeritus seems very light on sources. And including all sort of hidden costs industrial farming while handwaving the cost of actually running your own garden that could feed you throughout the year etc.
More advocacy for people have gardens than a serious study. And gardening is fun so no disagreement there
It can be cheaper than buying at the store if you plant things that match your local climate and if you are able to eat them fresh they are far better since they have the negatives of shipping.
Not the first few years though as the cost of tools/fencing/etc are an up front cost. But if you do it for a decade it goes down to the cost of seeds, water, and fertilizer which can be pretty cheap in moderate climates.
do you want to eat 20lbs of cucumbers and tomatoes in a week or two?
i love my garden when stuff comes in, but after the 3rd week of harvest I basically throw it all in the garbage because i’m so sick of eating tomatoes. I only consume maybe 10% of what I produce in a year because it all comes in at once, and I can’t eat 50lbs of tomatoes a few weeks as a single person.
And no, I’m not interested in setting up a pickling/canning operation, thanks. Which is always the ‘solution’ people come back at with me, and then they tell me I’m lazy and wasteful.
I had one friend who did setup a huge terraced garden, but then basically gave up because it was consuming his life and his neighbors got so pissed off that it was attracting wildlife. He killed like 8 groundhogs in one year, and he hated doing it but if he didn’t’ the fuckers would destroy his entire crop. So he just gave up because the entire thing was just too much work and too much misery. Now he’s back to growing a few tomatoes and other plants in plastic tubs because it’s simpler and it doesn’t attract wildlife.
Yeah, if you live in a rural are with a few acres, go wild and create your personal Stardew valley, but otherwise, just do it for fun and chill out about ‘cost efficiencies’. Your backyard plot of a dozen plants is never going turn you into a self-sufficient farmer. It’s a novelty for some tasty veg for the summer.
I think it saved my grandparents quite a bit of money. They didn’t need to can too much; mostly just canned pizza sauce and green beans. I don’t think they wasted much either. A lot of what they grew had a good shelf life (e.g. squash). The would also fry lawn weeds, like plantain and dandelions. It supplemented what they got from the food pantry.
It ‘can’ be cheaper for the quality, but it’s still a lot of work.
You need to preserve what you can’t eat outright.
You need to recapture/dry/replant the seeds
You need to compost.
You need to tend / maintain the soil.
You need to deal with pests.
You’re still not cheaper than farmer fred who’s sitting on literally 10 tons of squash.
You can literally work odd jobs and have more food security then trying to garden.
