A lot has been written on this blog and elsewhere about the importance of gardening in order to grow your own food in a post-TEOTWAWKI world. When you think about a survival garden, the first question you need to ask is “What should I grow?” I’d like to suggest that most people are missing some important factors when they try to answer that question.
I’m going to walk you through some serious ideas to consider when it comes to survival gardening. If you are new to the whole idea, I hope this will get you started in the right direction. If you’ve been successfully gardening for years, I hope this will give you some new perspectives and perhaps lead you to consider some new crops next spring.
Along the way, I’m going to introduce you to what I call ‘the wonder crop’ and explain how it is an amazingly good candidate for inclusion in a survival garden.
Consideration # 1: Producing Calories
I’ve been gardening for years now and have also spent time talking to other gardeners. Unfortunately, most of us garden for fun. We grow crops that are exciting or things we love to eat fresh. We usually don’t approach our gardens with an eye toward feeding ourselves, only toward producing something that tastes great. For example, ask almost any gardener what they grow year after year and tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce are almost certain to be on the list. To get enough calories to sustain ONE hard-working man for a SINGLE day, you’d need about 187 tomatoes (2” diameter whole raw tomatoes), 67 cucumbers (8” whole raw cucumbers), or 375 cups of shredded lettuce (iceberg)(1). I don’t know about you, but I’ve never produced that much in an entire year.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against these foods. They provide some vitamins and minerals, but they lack calories. When the stores are closed, you’ll die from a lack of calories long before you’ll die from a lack of Vitamin A. How many calories do you want to invest in preparing the soil, weeding, watering, and picking bugs off that row of cucumbers when you know you’ll never make up those calories with the food you eventually harvest?
In my part of the country, the one big exception to the rule of low-calorie garden veggies is sweet corn. It has been estimated that corn yields more calories per acre under cultivation than any other crop. Sounds great, right? But there are very serious drawbacks to corn, which I’ll discuss throughout this article. So I’m going to recommend that people who really care about survival gardening consider an alternative: the second highest yielding crop per acre(2). This is the wonder-crop I hinted at: Jerusalem Artichokes (a.k.a. sunchokes, sunroots, or Helianthus tuberosus). As a side note, Jerusalem artichokes have nothing to do with the city of Jerusalem or with artichokes… but over the years that is a name that has stuck.
What makes Jerusalem artichokes a “wonder crop”? Well, they do have some vitamins and minerals in them (especially potassium, iron, vitamin A, and vitamin C). They’ve also got some protein (3g per cup). But more importantly, they have calories – 114 calories per cup to be exact (22 calories per ounce)(1). That is comparable to corn or potatoes and is far beyond most garden veggies. Sunchokes are well suited to be a staple crop (and, in fact, were a staple crop in Europe many years ago). A day’s worth of food translates to only about 9 lbs of Jerusalem artichokes. Of course, you couldn’t live on any one single food 365 days a year, but a couple pounds a day would be a powerful supplement to your stored/hunted/gathered foods.
Continue reading“Jerusalem Artichokes for TEOTWAWKI Gardening – Part 1, by Soli Deo Gloria”