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
So people who want to kill you for having to take all those zucchinis they didn’t want
Each zucchini has a note carved into it that says that if I do not send at least five zucchinis to people in my friends list then the zucchini ghost will come and fill my fridge with zucchinis and I don’t want that
We didn’t even grow zucchinis this year so many people have extra zucchinis.
That’s because we were never meant to be rugged individuals. It’ll be a lot more survivable if we build stronger communities.
Sometimes gardening is just a hobby, tho
Yeah but this meme is specifically talking about trying to survive after the world collapses
It is a self deprecating joke about the terrible output of their personal garden because they are not good at it, not gardens in general.
Yes but it was more joking that 4 tomatoes from your personal garden will not be enough to survive the collapse.
Post-collapse society is going to be boring af. You better have some hobbies.
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
Yes they are jalapeno their communities. They are too spicy to ignore.
Selfish individually is a capsaicin.
We were meant to be rugged individuals, but rugged individuals living in a community with other rugged individuals.
Also, farming has always been a hard job. People who garden are doing the kinds of farming that farmers did before automation became a thing, but they’re doing it on a tiny scale. One farmer using non-industrial methods is going to have to really work like a mule to keep just themselves and their family alive. So, gardening using those same methods is never going to produce enough calories and nutrients for anything meaningful.
This is unironically me. I sadly did the math on how long we can survive on my vegetable garden. Spoiler: not long!
Even potatoes don’t have all that many calories.
If you WERE to try to prep your way to sustainable. you’re going to have to buy/store starches in bulk and use the garden +canning for nutrients.
Yeah, I did think about how to make it in any way viable as just a mental exercise and came to a similar conclusion. If I didn’t enjoy getting my own veggies and fruits I’d probably just stop. I mostly started because I love very spicy peppers and was unable to even buy them most of the time. I eventually started growing all sorts of things of course, you can’t survive on superhot pepper pods for long, and if you could, you may not want to.
It’s not about just literally surviving off of them; it’s about spicing up life during the apocalypse! Your peppers could become very valuable trading commodities! Keep up the good work.
How many bottle caps do you think my dried Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers will go for? I bet the ghouls will love them!
breadfruit tree
I’ve never had it. what’s it like?
the taste is kinda in between that of potato and cassava
It’s really good imo. Love me some breadfruit. Taro too. That and fresh coconuts are what I miss about Samoa.
Aquaponics are the way. Simply buy property with a pond. Ez.
Options for the end of the world:
- Learn to farm and become self sufficient
- Learn to shoot a gun and map out where all the farmers are
Nice version of number 2) offer your services to protect them from raiders and get paid in food
That’s just being a raider with good PR.
- Beef Jerky and Canned Beans.
A lot of people really think they’ll figure both out the same day the world ends.
So if you already know how to do #2, you can take all their stuff, too.
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.
So grimly true.
I call myself an aspiring farmer. I’ve been at it for about 12 years. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve lost a lot, for most of that I didn’t have much land and had to get creative. Now we’re in a decent spot with some good land and soil, I grow most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat, probably 70-80%, and raise quail for the eggs which we have a wild surplus of.
It’s a fucking fuckton of work and still I think if SHTF we would struggle big time. Most of what we do is pretty self sufficient, but we still rely on the grocery store for so many ingredients and products. I don’t have enough space to grow enough wheat to mill into flour to make bread, nor do I really want to. Also all it would really take is our water supply to be cut and we’d be done for.
I do think it’s a good skill to have though. And if I had the money fuck off I’d quit my day job in a heartbeat and buy more land to farm.
I think that last part is key, it’s a good skill to have. It’s easy to think it’ll be everyone on their own when the apocalypse happens, but people generally want to work together if it means better chances of survival.
It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be tribes of people popping up across the wasteland
Our natural state is to exist in collective communities. It is only capitalism that has atomized us into individuals competing against everyone else.
no one is going to make it on their own. community effort is the only way survival is gonna happen.
Spot on. I don’t think I alone could survive an apocalypse, but I think I could be an asset to a community of people who can.
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.
How come fertilizer is routed through the Strait of Hormuz? I can’t think of a reason why it would need petroleum to be made
The foundation of the vast majority of agricultural fertilizer is urea and DAP, and the gulf countries make about 40% of the world’s supply with Iran being the single largest exporter in the world.
Sulphur is also a critical phosphate production, and most sulphur these days comes from petrochemical refinement.
Literally every single production chain on the planet uses petrochemicals at some point in the process.
And all at the same time, with nothing the rest of the year.
I think It always been like that in temperate climate.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part, preserving it so you still have food to eat at the end of winter is the hardest and most time consuming part.
Growing enough food to survive a year is the easy part
And it’s anything but easy.
In colder climates you actually have to plan to eat preserved food until late spring, when everything that started growing when the snow melted has finally started to produce food.
Don’t tell me you can’t hibernate!
I wish I could
I’d love to century-nate, is that possible?
One tomato for every season
Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.
That’s why I also have a slingshot
oh man, when I lived in a house with a yard, I LOVED gardening. I grew so much of my own produce. I had so much pride over my garden.
I live in an apartment building now (with no balcony), and I don’t think I’d be allowed to use the communal gardens for my own personal garden. But if i ever move to a house with its own yard, I will be the first down to the shops to get some seeds!
I was able to grow a lotta stuff in just a couple of garden beds on my roof. Sure, my back probably hates me for carrying all that dirt up two flights of stairs. But I have herbs and veggies aplenty. Haven’t even covered 20% of the roof yet.
Wet dirt can have a lot of weight. You may want to verify the roof can handle it.
It was made to withstand a whole 'nother floor, which never got built. It can handle a foot of dirt.
Err the next floor would be resting on the walls below, your beds are sitting in the middle of the suspended ceiling just saying
We all know someone like this!
I’ve got my bottle caps ready. I reckon I’ve got a good four minutes to hide them all around the house for a future wasteland dweller to find.
Lol. Day R taught me to save bottle caps, and make sure I had plenty of Vodka for the radiation sickness.
What you will have is the knowledge to grow food, which you scale up to feed yourself and can others for much longer. That is an extremely valuable skill.
Those four tomatoes will feed you, but only after you have harvested all the seeds, which will grow dozens of plants next season, and feed hundreds of people, and yield thousand sof seeds for an even larger crop next year.
Surviving through the first growing season is the trick.
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Only if you grow heirloom tomatoes though. Modern tomatoes are all F1 hybrids so the offspring will be shit probably.
If we’re talking about post-Armageddon dystopia, a tomato is a tomato. We aren’t worried about quality, just quantity. Tomatoes produce a lot of seeds, just grow them. Toss a bunch of hybrids together to cross-pollinate, watch for the best ones, and in a several generations you’ll have a super tomato.
Also print out that wikipedia article about crop rotation. And get a handbook about weeds.
Also my favorite gardening subject: COMPOST!
I love compost. I could write a book on compost.
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I grow suplimental stuff.i do supplemental stuff because feeding yourself at home is basically a full time job. Herbs, strawberry, peppers, various lettuce. Things that enhance my meals with fresh foods.
Trying to sustain yourself is a good errand. Your time is better spent elsewhere.
It doesn’t take much land to be self sufficient in vegetables if you are willing to limit your vegetable choices to your climate and to preserve them. However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder. Say you eat around 300g of grain per day. Then you would need about 219 square meters of grain if you have a typical organic yield. Replace your carbs with potato and maybe you can reduce that by 50%, but then you run into the risk of potato harvest failing, which they often do in organic systems. For proteins you would either have to have animals plus area to grow their feed, or grow a huge area on par with the grains to get enough shelling beans to meet your protein needs. But vegetables? Just a dozen or two square meters should be enough.
Assuming you’re able to produce enough for the off season and have a method to store said food.
It’s called “subsistence farming” and is a crapload of work.
However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder.
Nervous pet noises
can keep chickens for eggs for protein
And what will the chickens eat? You still have to grow their feed. Buying feed from the feed store is not self-sufficiency
I have quail and I grow/make my own feed + a little meal worm setup. Although when I run out of my current supply I plan on buying from the feed store in town. I don’t think it saves me any money once everything is factored in and it’s a good bit of extra work that could go towards stuff I actually want to eat.
food waste, and theyll forage a bit too
breadfruit tree for carbs
