Friday, January 11, 2013

Cheap Food - Gardening Practice Now Can Feed You In A Disaster

In the face of uncertainty about what will happen to you due to climate change, the rest of our lives looks pretty overwhelming.

Don't be discouraged. The number of people who are willing to make the changes in their lives in order to deal effectively with climate change is underwhelming. That does not mean that because you are concerned, and want to do something about this, that you are alone. There are others besides us.

Keep looking. We are starting to find each other. Meanwhile, don't let yourself be paralyzed into inaction. There are concrete things you can do on your own.

Number one is LEARN. Keep up at least in general about what is going on with climate change and how it has, is, and will, affect us.

Two is LEARN how to adapt to the changing conditions on the earth as climate change progresses. High up on this agenda should be producing food for yourself and others. Agriculture should be a high priority. 

It is not possible to learn overnight, how to raise your own food. It can take years to get good at it. 

Don't let the length of time it takes to develop a "green thumb" discourage you either. You will never learn unless you begin. Whatever time you put in now will come out of what you will need to know to survive some day. I want to put that thought into easy to understand words so I don't leave anyone out.

It takes a while for you to be able to eat your first crop. You have to plant it and tend it for a while before tiny shoots come up and get big enough to eat. It will take even longer to get a meal out of those seeds if you do not know what you are doing. If you plant before the last frost, your seeds and the little plants that come from them may even die and force you to start over and plant more seeds. If you don't plant them right as far as spacing and sunlight, etc., they will not grow as fast and not as many of them will grow.

If your knowledge of gardening is good enough, it may lower the time it takes from getting your seeds to turn into food you can eat. Practice growing food from seeds will get you fed sooner than if you are ignorant as you put your seeds in the ground.

If we have a very widespread emergency, that takes a lot of resources to deal with the people in the disaster area will have a greater need to feed themselves. If you not only have seeds and you are in that disaster area, but you also know how to plant and grow those seeds to food, you have a better chance to eat well.

I hope you will not leave your preparedness at buying a can of heirloom seeds and leave them on the back of your preparedness shelf, but will plant some heirloom seeds and get good at gardening now.

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