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.
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.
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
If I don’t crack a tooth eating a salad, it wasn’t a good salad.
You don’t make friends with 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 would go for herbs and spices instead maybe that would be worth the effort
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
To prepare for world collapse learn to at people. There’s plenty of them
@Hikermick
Am I doing it right?
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.
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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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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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.
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.
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.
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.