Garden As If Your Life Depends On It

One easy thing to predict about after TEOTAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It), survival is that you will need to provide your own food. Even if you are the best hunter in the world, you are going to want some green stuff and maybe some grains. 


Since most grocery stores won't exist, won't be able to get groceries, or both, if you want to eat it, you will have to grow it. If ,like most of the people in the world, you don't know much about gardening, it might be a good idea to learn it ahead of time. 


Green thumbs can take a while to develop. If you make a very bad mistake in your gardening, you may have to wait another year to do a better job. It could take years to really get the hang of it. You could get pretty hungry during the learning process.


You don't have to have a vast plantation to learn how to garden. Anything that you learn now is bound to help when we get TEOTAWKI.


You may not be able to afford all of the seeds that you might want, but you can make a wish list and start out with the most important seeds. If you have not read many of my previous posts, you need to learn more about kinds of seeds. 


The short version is, heirloom seeds can be saved from year to year, saving you the cost of buying more seeds every year. This will be even more important after TEOTAWKI because you may not be able to buy any seeds, so the only way to get them will be by saving your own seeds.


In a TEOTAWKI  situation, you may not be able to find seeds. It is good to have them before the need arises, and you will have them every year.


A plan ahead item for post TEOTAWKI is to always keep a reserve of seeds in case of crop failure. If you have a crop failure, the reserve seeds will still be there for the following year and all the years after that.


Seeds keep better if they are cool. When seeds get constant cycles of cooling and heating, a certain percentage of them will not germinate. Ten percent failure to germinate is the usual amount to figure. If you do not keep your seeds cool, you may not have any that will germinate after ten years.


A glass jar with a tight lid is a good seed container to protect them. Some of my family members have kept their reserve seeds in a  glass jar buried in the ground to keep them cool. They have grown after many, many years, when stored that way.


Since I have a freezer now, I like to keep seeds in a glass jar in my freezer. Putting seeds in a freezer improves the germination rate according to some things that I read. Seed banks do that to preserve seeds for a TEOTAWKI world. They keep their seeds at very low temperatures, but we have to use what we have available.