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.
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.
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.
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.
Building strong communities is like rule number one in serious pepper communities
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.
breadfruit tree
Aquaponics are the way. Simply buy property with a pond. Ez.
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.
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
However vegetables are the by far easiest part of being self sufficient. Getting your carbs and your proteins is far harder.
Nervous pet noises
breadfruit tree for carbs
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.
Most people with home gardens have so much produce that they can’t even give it away lol. I grew tomatoes last year and it was all I could do to keep up with three plants in the late summer.
That’s true, but it’s also nowhere near enough to live on.
They get a huge batch of something all at once, and then it’s a scramble to eat it, give it away, pickle it, can it, etc. But, the total number of calories produced throughout the season isn’t enough to even keep one person alive.
I live in a town house but I don’t actually have a grassy backyard, just a small shared deck. I’ve filled it with as many planter boxes as I can but last year I was only able to get two tomatoes to grow and both were stolen by squirrels 🥹
I grow tomatoes because they taste infinitely better than what you can buy.
Yes, I end up with more tomatoes than I can consume. For about one month. For about 8 months of the year if I want fresh tomatoes I have to buy them still.
If you decide you want to save on canned tomatoes for pasta and use the cash to buy winter salad tomatoes, here’s the safe way to freeze some of your extras: https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
Why don’t you can and freeze your extra tomatoes?
Why do you think I don’t?
I’m just confused about how you can have more tomatoes than you could possibly eat during grow season, but still have to buy tomatoes for 3/4 of the year
I said fresh tomatoes. You can’t make a salad with frozen tomatoes.
What, everyone loves crunchy salad
They said they have to buy them if they want fresh tomatoes, not just in general. ie frozen isn’t fresh
Because you said you buy them from the store off-season.
I said fresh tomatoes.
You don’t make a tomato salad with frozen tomatoes.
Fight fight fight!
We can have a UFC match at the white house. It’ll be awesome. Wait…
Not with that attitude.
But no, really, you made the right call here.
I wonder, could you freeze a tomato salad? I make mine with a ton of oil and vinegar (plus they are sliced, so a ton of tomato juice) to the point where it’s almost like a soup. I’ve never tried but I wonder if that would freeze ok.
It would not. If you want to stick it in a freezer, you’d have to displace all the water with anti-freeze first, otherwise mush. Bonus, antifreeze is delicious. A tasty last meal!
If it were possible and safe to freeze raw tomatoes for salads, you would have seen packages of them in your grocer’s freezer. If you’re willing to use them for soup/stew, here’s how to do it without making anyone sick:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
There’s links on the page for a lot of other garden vegetables as well.
Timing is hard. They product like mad in a very short window.
Canning is a layer of hell.
Freeze dryers are slow, expensive and consume a lot of electricity.
If I had the time/space, I’d stagger my planting, start it indoors, start another batch on time and another late.
How large is your garden mate? Or alternatively how bad are you at giving produce away? My grandparents have quite a large garden and have never had issues with too much stuff
I wonder, do they can stuff as well? Thats the only way to fully utilize a large gardens produce I think. And yes, I did eat all those tomatoes.
Definitely! For example, a zucchini plant might give you a fruit per day for about 3 weeks, which is more than my family can eat. The options for us then are a) canning such as zucchini relish (highly recommend!) or b) grate it and freeze it for future baking (zucchini bread, egg bites, etc.)
They sure do. Freeze a lot of it as well. Leeks, raspberries, drying spices, making cherry/apricot kompot, making marmelade…
The only thing they complained about this year has been too many cherries. I’d know I had to pick like ⅓ of them.
It’s really quite a blessing to have people with such a wealth of knowledge about gardening in the family. It takes a lot of seasons to learn how to be so good at it.
My dad has all sorts of fruit trees and vegetables, I’m over here now trying to keep a rosemary alive, its supposed to me super resilient but it keeps drying up so I water it but maybe the clay dirt is too much for it.
Poor thing has been planted and removed like 5 times due to different house projects. Its like as soon as I plant it all of a sudden they want to use that space
I’ve seen rosemary grow in the desert without needing much other than an automated lawn (drip) sprinkler, on a timer like 3(?) times a week?
One tomato plant can be too many for a family of 4. You don’t need a large garden to have too many tomatoes (or zucchini)
What kind of monster tomato plants are you growing? We are a family of 5 and we have 10+tomato plants which often don’t feel enough.
And we all know families survive off of just tomatoes.
Amazing how many of you believe growing enough for for 5kcals a day is some hobbiest task.
I feel so seen. I ended up making pizza sauce with all of my tomatoes. I would have homemade pizza about once or twice a month, and that is after using as many tomatoes as I could for sandwiches. In my experience, I would say 3 plants is just before the threshold of “too many”.
It’s a weird split. I’ve tried to have a garden and would get like five fruits.
I was about to say. Everyone I’ve ever known who grew tomatoes always had significantly more than they could personally use.
My mom fills an upright freezer with salsa and tomato sauce from like 5 plants each year.
Lol yeah, I have dozens of tomatoes sitting out there on the vine right now because we can’t eat them fast enough.
You probably could if it was all you had
Because they buy the actual substance food at the store. Ignoring the macros, you’re eating 80 tomatoes a day person to just keep up.
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.
Yep not to mention that if you manage to have a good garden when SHTF you’re just the first target for the raiders.
There is an excellent, practical book about surviving economic collapse by someone who went through it in Argentina.
You’ll do well for about 2 weeks, so you got that going for you…
My garden spits out three things en masse. Crazy hot jalapeños, lime, and mint. When the world collapses, I’m gonna mojito/spicy marg my way out.
all things considered, that’s better than most plans I’ve heard.
Ouch. This hits home as for the last 3 yrs my veg garden has cost me as much to sow as it would have if I had just bought the damn handful of veggies from the store. Might replace it with a koi pond because I hear meditation takes your mind off of hunger pangs.
It took me weeks to finally grow like 4 strawberries. Was it worth it? No. Was it satisfying? Also no.
sucks. my strawberries i started years ago are pretty dope. but the harvest is inconsistent every year, due to weather. some years I get a lot, some years I get virtually none.
There’s a farm store near me. When stuff hits actual season, you can walk over there a buy a 25lb box of peppers for $15. The rest of the year it hot house, which is still damn good, but nowhere near as cheap.
it’s also cost you a lot of time
I feel seen
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.
Beherens cans are rodent resistant and cheap at home depot and lowes.
Costco sells 25lb and 50lbs bags of rice and bulk vitamins.
Bulk dry beans and mylar bags are cheap.
Supplement with some ebay freeze dried eggs/veggies.
Hey
I mean it’s a hobby. It’s not cheaper or more efficient compared to large scale farming
It can be cheaper than buying at the store if you plant things that match your local climate and if you are able to eat them fresh they are far better since they have the negatives of shipping.
Not the first few years though as the cost of tools/fencing/etc are an up front cost. But if you do it for a decade it goes down to the cost of seeds, water, and fertilizer which can be pretty cheap in moderate climates.
do you want to eat 20lbs of cucumbers and tomatoes in a week or two?
i love my garden when stuff comes in, but after the 3rd week of harvest I basically throw it all in the garbage because i’m so sick of eating tomatoes. I only consume maybe 10% of what I produce in a year because it all comes in at once, and I can’t eat 50lbs of tomatoes a few weeks as a single person.
And no, I’m not interested in setting up a pickling/canning operation, thanks. Which is always the ‘solution’ people come back at with me, and then they tell me I’m lazy and wasteful.
I had one friend who did setup a huge terraced garden, but then basically gave up because it was consuming his life and his neighbors got so pissed off that it was attracting wildlife. He killed like 8 groundhogs in one year, and he hated doing it but if he didn’t’ the fuckers would destroy his entire crop. So he just gave up because the entire thing was just too much work and too much misery. Now he’s back to growing a few tomatoes and other plants in plastic tubs because it’s simpler and it doesn’t attract wildlife.
Yeah, if you live in a rural are with a few acres, go wild and create your personal Stardew valley, but otherwise, just do it for fun and chill out about ‘cost efficiencies’. Your backyard plot of a dozen plants is never going turn you into a self-sufficient farmer. It’s a novelty for some tasty veg for the summer.
Yes, going overboard with volume is going to make the whole thing counterproductive.
Your friend’s couple of tomato and other plants in plastic tubs still counts as a garden! It is still low cost compared to the store and saves money while they are producing even if it isn’t as much as large scale farming does at high volume with all the labor involved.
It ‘can’ be cheaper for the quality, but it’s still a lot of work.
You need to preserve what you can’t eat outright.
You need to recapture/dry/replant the seeds
You need to compost.
You need to tend / maintain the soil.
You need to deal with pests.
You’re still not cheaper than farmer fred who’s sitting on literally 10 tons of squash.
You can literally work odd jobs and have more food security then trying to garden.
It’s not cheaper or more efficient compared to large scale farming
This professor emeritus disagrees.
To begin with, it takes three acres of land for the industrial food system to feed the average American for a year, compared to maybe 5% of that area—or even much less—to feed a person for a year on a balanced diet of garden vegetables. So how is that three acres more efficient?
https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/home-gardens-vs-farms-efficiency/
That professor emeritus seems very light on sources. And including all sort of hidden costs industrial farming while handwaving the cost of actually running your own garden that could feed you throughout the year etc.
More advocacy for people have gardens than a serious study. And gardening is fun so no disagreement there
I feel personally attacked.
