what would you grow

[Sunna]

so theirs been some sort of event , you have stored food but it will run out.

so what foods are you going to TRY and grow that can be stored through winter and give balanced goodness .

[Barneyboy]

spuds,kale,cabbage,chickens,rabbits
I forgot onions

[Skean Dhude]

Spinach. My most successful plant, fed us, the chickens and some lizards throughout the year and still going strong.

[Mortblanc]

The key now, as it was in days of yore (not sure when YORE was but I see it referenced often) was and is to grow a variety of crops as insurance against failure of a one crop system.

You will need a source of large scale carbohydrate as a filler, and you will need a source or several sources of vitamin/nutrient rich foods in smaller scale.

Something to fill you up and something to keep sickness/vitamin deficiency away.

Every culture developed around those two elements of the agriculture system. Both the carb crop and the nutrient crop needed to be easily preserved with little or no technological assistance. You need crops that can be easily air dried or just put away until needed.

Here in North America, at the prehistory time frame, we had the "Three sisters", maize, squashes, beans. In its variations those three crops gave all the nutrients needed to sustain life. All can be air dried and preserved for years. They were augmented by various other cultivated and foraged crops in different climate zones such as potatoes, manioc, artichokes and acorns along with seasonal greens.

In other areas it might have been rice as filler with cabbage as a backup and the traditional veggies of the area, wheat, barley, rye, oats, turnips or any other traditional crop suited to the climate.

Cabbage has always been a big nutrient crop due to being easily stored, pickled or preserved.

The key is that you can not just pick one crop. The Irish lost 1/3 of their population through dependence on the potato, the Germans lost almost half their population during the 100 years war due to dependence on grains which were trampled/stolen/burned by roving armies.

And you will need more of the crop than you now suppose. You are talking harvest to harvest sustenance and that takes some acreage. More acreage than is shown on the little homestead diagram that is so popular. We used to put a whole acre under vegetable cultivation for a family of 7 and that did not include a subsistence grain/carb.

That might seem a lot but we ate a wide variety of vegetables in our house and were not a meat, bread and potatoes family. Almost every meal had three or four veggies on the table in green, yellow and red varieties.

Also remember that the old medieval crop system (subsistence?) had a broken up pattern with each peasant having a small patch here and another over there and a different crop in each one. If one patch were ruined, trampled, flooded the others might survive and produce. Different plots will support different foods even though only separated by a few yards due to drainage and soil.

This is one of the reasons why backyard crops are so important. A backyard garden is normally not going to support your family long term, but it will teach you what will grow in your soil, how to grow it and how much a specific area is going to produce.

[Straight Shooter]

potatoes, swede , parsnips , leeks , onions , cabbage, broad beans , peas and chickens ..right now that is...in the near future goats and rabbits even ducks, I also have a full seed bank of pretty much everything i will need to survive including grains and herbs....and green houses and poly tunnel...but there again I always grow veg, fruits as part of my preps and general living ..do not forget you have to have a crop in the ground at all times....if you do not have enough food to see you through until your crop is ready...that may be the difference of surviving or not, it might be easy for me to say this because i have the ground to grow stuff....if you live on a estate or flat with no ground....try storing some containers buckets and some bags of compost..if you can ...not forgetting seeds , make sure of your choices...winter spring summer even autumn....worse case stock of sprouting seeds.

[Mortblanc]

We have several cities here in the US that have experienced a severe reduction in population in the past 50 years. Detroit is one of the most famous. It was once one of the 4 largest cities in our nation and now is an empty hulk where the revenues will not cover the expense of running the services.

Entire neighborhoods have been abandoned and have reverted to forest. Other areas have been converted to urban farmsteads.

This might be a situation such as one would face after a severe event or a large die off. Using the urban space for sustainable farming is possible, and it is not a far fetched dream, it is being done right now.

http://www.miufi.org/

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Just scroll through the photos and see how many media stereotypes you can see being busted!

[bigpaul]

potatoes, leeks, broccoli, cauli, squash, broad beans, Brussels, chickens, rabbits, maybe guinea pigs, pheasants, ducks, geese-make good guard dogs!!

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and a couple of donkeys or maybe a small pony if I had enough land.

[SecretPrepper]

Pots, kale, carrots, parsnips, fish

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Also preserving in a pressure canner can keep toms etc if you grow enough

[bigpaul]

we are too far inland to make sea fishing either sustainable or safe post SHTF and all the fish in our rivers are tiddlers, might be a few crayfish though.

[Devonian]

(14 April 2015, 13:09)bigpaul Wrote: we are too far inland to make sea fishing either sustainable or safe post SHTF and all the fish in our rivers are tiddlers, might be a few crayfish though.

You could always try dumping a few goldfish in a local lake.....

http://news.yahoo.com/3-000-goldfish-dum...54294.html