We all know someone like this!
The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.
It has barely reached 33%.
This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.
The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.
It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.
Yes, and:
- skills to grow things
- community of people you have been giving extra zucchinis to
- skills to prepare meals using the things that you grow
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.
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
Yeah they produce insanely well.
Potatoes for calories / nutrients + beans for protein / nutrients + (I havent tried this yet but) high-producing grain like Amaranth for calories seems the best combo, but you’ll still need community to survive no doubt
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.
To prepare for world collapse learn to at people. There’s plenty of them
@Hikermick
Am I doing it right?
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.
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.
I’ve got two of those survival food buckets from Costco, so that’s about how long I will last after the apocalypse, before I start selling myself to stronger people who will protect me.
Hey
Yeah good luck outsmarting the squirrels on the tomatoes…
build a cage. if you leave a small flap on top it doubles as a trap and you can have “free” protein.
I feel seen
I looked into what it would take for me to grow tomatoes here in NM, and decided against it.
