David the Good - Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening

To Great Grandpa Greene.

Thank you for the seeds and encouragement long ago.

I wish you could see my gardens now.

Theres something strange going on right now.

Theres a feeling that life is going to take a turn for the worse.

That the current recession is in fact a big-D Depression and its not going to get better.

People who used to hate guns are now buying ARs and truckloads of ammo.

Folks who never saved a dime are buying silver dollars.

Canned beans and bags of rice are getting stuffed under mattresses.

And gardening is no longer a hobby.

The zeitgeist has shifted from prosperous optimism to a pervasive unease mixed with distrust and outright fear.

If youre ready to quit worrying about the future and pull up your fears by the roots, you need to start gardening. You need to know how to feed yourself should the doomsayers be correct. In good times its easy to outsource your food production to thousands of miles away in bad times, relying on far-off farmers and tenuous shipping conduits is worse than foolish.

Im not a brilliant investor or prognosticator. Im not a tactical guru or a doomsday prepper. I am, however, a really good gardener who grows all of his familys vegetables and a sizable portion of their roots and fruits. If youve read my book Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting, you also know that Im willing to try and test almost anything to see if it works.

The gardening advice youre going to read in this book is based on my own research and on years of tweaking methods in order to get the most food for the least amount of work. When things get ugly, you dont want to rely on books written for hobby gardeners or the advice of folks who are interested in selling fancy tools, fertilizers, and overpriced hybrid vegetables starts at the local garden center. Ive killed more plants than most people have ever grown. If theres a gardening problem, Ive probably encountered it and slapped it silly.

Yeah, Im totally bragging.

My desire is for you to feel the same way I do: confident in your ability to grow what you and your family will need to survive no matter what the future holds. I want you to view your hoe the way a soldier views his rifleas insurance against whatever comes around the next corner.

Despite claims to the contrary, we are not short on land.

We are, however, short on land that is being used for food production.

A lot of crummy suburbs of over-inflated vinyl-clad houses were built on what was once prime farmland. Worthless grass now covers good soil that could easily be pressed back into use in an emergency.

Your yard may be one of those patches of worthless grassbut if things get ugly, that grass will have to go.

Lets picture a scenario.

Imagine a nuke goes off in the Middle East, causing the price of oil to soar. Because of the resulting explosion in gas prices, trucks are no longer transporting food and supplies as far across the country, and local grocery stores are rapidly emptied in a panic.

Most Americans (with the exception of Mormons and preppers) have very little food stored up for an emergency. Those that do have food stored up often dont have enough.

And besides, the idea of storing food, rather than growing it, is much like living off your savings account and not getting a job. Eventually youre going to run out.

Within a few months of a crisis event that shuts down the food supply chain, a lot of people are going to be very hungry. Squirrels and deer will disappear from the woods, followed by raccoons, tortoises, armadillos, and anything else remotely edible.

Those that do not convert their grass into food plots are going to be in trouble.

In this book I will show you how to convert a typical yard into a food-producing machine using only simple hand tools and homemade fertilizers. Its not going to be easy, but you can grow enough to stave off starvation. You need to start now, however, rather than waiting for things to crash before you start gardening. Experimentation and preparation are key.

If youre ready to plant a garden that will get you through tough times while feeding you better produce than anything you can buy, this book is for you.

Read this book, then build on what Ive already discovered. Just dont wait to start gardening. Start right now before its too late.

There is an endless search for the easiest way to garden. The fool-proof method. The no-work approach. The incredibly productive strategy.

Heres a sample of ideas you may have encountered:

• Self-watering Earthboxes

• Tower Gardens

• Plastic bottle hydroponics

• Gutter gardening

• Trash-can potatoes

• PVC pipe gardening

• Straw bale gardening

• Gardening in bags of soil

• Olla pot irrigation

• 4-season greenhouse gardening

• Strawberry barrel gardening

• Drip-line irrigated rows

and lots more

Now Im not going to condemn all these methods. Many of them are quite clever and may be perfect for your area, particularly if youre in a marginal food growing area. My main problem with most of these methods is that in a grid-down situation, or in a post peak oil scenario, or even during a time of runaway inflation or a shipping strike of some sort, you may get stuck.

A lot of these methods purport to be easy short-cuts to growing your own food. The concern is, however, that the methods are too complex or driven by outside inputs to work well in a crisis. The ideal survival garden is a dead-simple garden.

Before I go further, let me say this: if youre growing your own food, however youre doing it, youre better off than the many people who arent growing anything at all. If it takes an irrigation system divided into carefully timed sectors and automatic sprinklers to keep you producing edibles, thats a lot better than doing nothing.

That caveat aside, I have some worries.

Lets pretend youre on city water and electricity. Lets further pretend that youve set up the coolest danged tilapia-raising/cabbage-growing/self-filtering aquaponics system this side of Star Trek. What do you do if the power goes off or your access to easy water dries up?

This isnt a hypothetical question. I have a friend who raises tilapia and salads in a greenhouse. Its cool as heck and totally worth seeing. Yet on two separate occasions, hes lost a bunch of his fish because of minor flaws that werent caught until it was too late. At one point his aeration valve locked up while his pump continued to empty water from the system. A tank drained overnight, and by the time he saw it the next morning, he had a bunch of dead fish.

This is sad but not life-threatening right now. But if those fish were needed to feed the family because there were no other options left, he would have been in big trouble. Sometimes one little problem can really mess up a complicated system.