Category: Gardening

Three Letters Re: The Winter Salad

James, Just sending a note to remind your readers that the time to plan and plant a fall vegetable garden is right around the corner. Check out the USDA Hardiness Zone Maps for your area to find out what generally grows well in your area. Even better, check with your local Land Grant College Extension office for specific varieties as well as gardening tips and techniques for your area. In Oklahoma, mine is the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service. See their home page for the Fact Sheets. For example, see the Fact Sheet for Fall Gardening. Here is a quote from …


The Winter Salad, by Tom in Colorado

Most of us reading SurvivalBlog have some amount of food stored. We are aware of the problems with the most commonly stored foods as well: sufficient nutrition, a large enough assortment to provide variety, and a good enough taste to keep people eating. I’m going to offer another alternative here to help provide these three things in the dead of winter while sparing our stockpiled food. If you have a window that receives a decent amount of sunlight (south facing is best in the northern hemisphere) then you may well be able to provide entire fresh salads or ingredients for …


Letter Re: Growing Your Own Tobacco

Dear Mr. Rawles: I know…I know…I know…it is bad for you. But I do enjoy my two cigarettes a day. I am also tired of reading apocalyptic books and watching movies in that genre where everyone is running around hunting down tobacco. So, last year I bought 250 tobacco seeds via the Internet. A fine blend of Virginia Gold for $5.00. The seeds arrived. Each seed was the same size as a grain of salt. Thinking it would never grow I planted them in a corner of my greenhouse in late February. They sprouted. In May I had about 75 …


Letter Re: A Survival Suburban Homestead: A Prepper’s Twist on the Homestead Movement

Jim, The community described by DMT seems like a nice place to live and I wish I could share his optimism and his faith in human nature. It seems to me that a community like he describes would take years to form. It might have a chance if everyone could be persuaded to store a year or more of food and stock up on agricultural equipment, but it seems to me that it would be a superhuman task to get everyone to go along with it in an emergency unless you could feed them until harvest time. Also, unfortunately, my …


A Survival Suburban Homestead: A Prepper’s Twist on the Homestead Movement – Pt. 1, by D.M.T.

Swimming in a Sea of Humanity A homestead will not survive isolated in a sea of desperate humanity.  Nor will man survive in a desert void of it.  For many of us surviving in place (the suburbs) is going to be a fact.  With it carries tremendous risk and dangers yet imbedded within it, also a cornucopia of resources and individuals with critical skill sets and life saving knowledge.  Unlike urban areas, there is a small enough degree of separation between people, enough so to actually define and scratch out a living independently.  Current Homesteaders have proven it is possible …


A Checklist for Beginning Gardeners by AK in Texas

You’re sure there aren’t any bugs in the garden.  The plants, the few that grew, don’t look like there’s an infestation or fungal problem.  There’s no odd spots or discolorations.  And yet, the radishes and carrots, with their deceptively lovely tops, haven’t produced anything more than pencil-thin roots underground.  The tomatoes produced one or two extremely delicious globes of fruit so that’s encouraging, but they never got to the height you expected or produced the amount you thought they would.  And forget about the lettuce.  It didn’t even show.  In fact, the only thing that seems to be doing well …


Letter Re: A Suburban Bug-In Problem (Or Maybe a Resource)

Since the 1950s many homes have had them. Since the 1970s many building codes have required them. What? A sump pump. Yeah, that thing in the hole in the corner of the basement that kind of hums every once in a while. You don’t think about it much do you? But it keeps your basement floor dry. If the electric goes out, for any reason, for very long, you may have a big problem. I have seen over a foot of water in a 30×25 foot basement after just a mild spring rain. They make “battery back up” auxiliary pumps, …


A Perennial Food Supply, by L.H.

The end of the world may happen tomorrow or who knows when.  Hard times are happening now and may get even harder.  A food storage system and MREs act as a life jacket when times get tough.  But you need to have a plan for when things get even tougher or if your finances or food supplies run out.  Once established, perennials can be a simple, minimal labor answer to a permanent and reliable food source and first aid kit.  Perennials have the advantage of being planted once and then being around to enjoy for many years without the limitations …


Three Letters Re: The Un-Secret Garden–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Grow my Garden

Mr. Rawles, Jason’s good ideas the other day with his “five C’s” for garden safety brought to mind the old-timers who grew up during the Depression. By the time I was growing up, life was comfortable for them. But many of them, elderly by now, would grow large gardens as they always had, producing more food than they could possibly use even after they canned and preserved enough for winter, gave quantities to neighbors, friends, and relatives, and fed some of the excess to livestock. A couple of my relatives even had multiple gardens — one close by the house, …


The Un-Secret Garden–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Grow my Garden, by Jason A.

For a lot of survival-minded folks, gardening is one of the first, most logical steps to take toward self-sufficiency.  Most of us agree that when the Schumer hits, the thin veneer of society will be removed so fast that in weeks we won’t even remember it was once there.  Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that during hard times, a garden could become a prime target for theft, destruction, raids or other attacks.  The most discussed hypothetical garden raids include a Golden Horde or Mutant Zombie Bikers who, like locusts would descend upon your garden and rip it to shreds, …


I Thought that I Had a Clue, by K. in Florida

So since the balance of power change in the Federal Government I thought I was sitting pretty good for my ability to survive a possible TEOTWAWKI . Man was I so wrong. I have learned in the past three months that I am so far behind that if The Collapse happens in 20 years I will still not be as prepared as I thought I was. Yes I have some basics and am a bit off of the beaten path, but there is still so much more that I am not ready for. Let me explain. I have lived in …


Living Like TEOTWAWKI Could Come at Any Time, by Mrs. C.J.

If you even so much as glance at the news or if you’re like me and check out The Drudge Report every morning, you can’t help but realize the world is becoming more and more uncertain. It seems that anything could happen at the drop of a hat and without little, if any, fore-warning. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods seem to be changing or taking the lives of unsuspecting people almost daily. The threat of nuclear warfare is always just beyond the horizon. If we ever experience an EMP, we could be without power and [utility-supplied] water for months. Most …


Letter Re: Some Gardening Comments from a Northern Gardener

As a gardener of over 30 years, I garden for the most produce from my limited garden spaces. I can tomatoes, salsa, beans, relishes, corn, applesauce, pickles, etc. At this point in time I have no illusions that I could feed our family of four on our gardens. I’ve been growing what we like to eat versus what will give us the best nutrition and can sustain us year round. The SurvivalBlog site has been a wonderful wealth of information and the books they recommend have enhanced my gardening knowledge in ways that lead to being self-sustaining. I’ve used the …


Use the Ground You Live on for More Than Walking, by John Z.

I’ve learned that the best way to obtain much needed resources is to look on the ground. Food We grow a large garden at two sites for my family. We can and preserve what we will use later and eat the stuff from the grocery now while it’s cheap. The fruits and veggies we consume come from the ground. We box in one area, add proper compost, manure, sand and dirt and then till until we get the proper texture for the different plants we grow. All the while the ground is the entire reason for this. Everything we use …


Letter Re: Thoughts on Practical Self-Sufficiency

Hello Jim: For supper tonight we are having a meal made with ingredients that I gathered from our place, with the exception of the meat which was purchased. I put a smoked ham hock in the crock pot over night. I also soaked some leather breeches (dried green beans) and some horticultural beans over night. These were added to the crock pot this morning along with a couple of hands full of ramps that I had dug yesterday and a couple of hands full of dandelion greens that Abigail had picked last week. Lastly some red potatoes from our garden …