They tell us we’re at 7.9% inflation in the US, but we all know that’s just creative accounting.
Prices for everything are skyrocketing. Those prices are not going down any time soon. In fact, most economists are predicting that inflation will only worsen in the foreseeable future. In my last post, I speculated about the possibility of food rationing in our future. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, rising prices will deeply impact food availability and affordability for most people in the coming years. It has already begun.
By this time next year, things could be much tougher. You’ll be faced with reduced choices at the supermarket. Some items that you’ve enjoyed eating on a regular basis for your entire life might be priced out of your budget, and other items might just not be available at any price.
As inflation rises, companies will cut corners in an attempt to keep their prices from rising commensurately. The first step is to cut costs on packaging, which, thankfully, won’t impact consumer stomachs. The next step is “shrinkflation”: the reduction of sizes and amounts. You’ll still be paying roughly the same for a box of cereal or a bag of rice, but the package will contain less than it used to. Then they will make changes to the ingredients, resulting in a lower quality product. Finally, they will start adding bulk, non-nutritive ingredients like cellulose (basically sawdust) to make foodstuffs seem bigger and more substantial than they really are.
The companies that use these strategies will be able to keep prices lower for longer. The companies that choose to keep providing the same quality product in the same size packaging will have to raise their prices more often and more drastically.
Regardless of whether you’re in a lower income bracket and really feeling the pinch right now, or your income is sufficient to withstand this first wave of inflation without much hardship, you need to be prepared. One very good way to do that is to produce your own food.
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. You’re not going to produce 100% of your own food. You’re probably not even going to achieve 50% self-sufficiency in the food department. Even people who have ample land, resources, and the skills to grow crops and raise meat need to supplement their diet from other sources. Being fully self-sufficient would mean raising an enormous amount of meat, grains, vegetables, and fruit. To produce that much food would require more time and labor than most individuals or families could spare, to prepare the soil, plant the seeds, maintain the crops, harvest them, and preserve the excess. Add to that the daily requirements of livestock, and you and your entire family would have to work full-time at this venture in order to supply all of your nutritional and caloric needs. And what happens when a hail storm takes out your vegetable patch, or your corn crop is destroyed by excess rain?
Total self-sufficiency is a myth. You can’t do everything on your own. (With a focused community and local trade, you can do a lot, and we’ll get to that in another post.)
BUT, what you can do is cushion your baseline.
Cushioning your sustenance baseline
As rich as we are in the developed world, most people’s baseline of sustenance is zero. They maybe have a week’s worth of canned and dried goods in the pantry, and that’s it. All of the food they eat must be paid for out of their weekly paychecks. So what if the already-high food prices rise another 30%?
Some folks have enough financial cushion to be able to shift their budgets around, foregoing other necessities and enjoyments to make up for the extra expense of food. Problem is, when the very money supply itself is what’s causing economic degradation and food shortages, your financial cushion becomes an unstable and unreliable layer of security.
Others will find a way to bring in more income to cover the rising prices. This is only going to be sustainable for so long, as prices continue to rise and wages do not.
Some might go into debt to keep food on the table. And for the poorest—if charities and government programs are unable to keep up with food insecurity—the only answer might be to buy less and lower quality food, eventually running on a caloric deficit.
You want your baseline of sustenance to be greater than zero. Even though you’re never going to reach 100%, any cushion you can give yourself and your family—even 5%—could make a huge difference over the next few years. Do you want to be standing in a near-empty grocery aisle, trying to decide between a tiny loaf of decent bread and a large loaf of sawdust-enriched bread, each $14? Or would you rather have a plentiful stock of healthy, calorie-dense potatoes in your basement that you can pull from any time you want?
We’re not at that point yet. Most of us are still at the shifting budgets around and trying to bring in extra income stage. But if (or really, when) that time does come, your future self will thank you for making the effort to cushion your sustenance baseline. Even if you have no gardening experience, there’s still at least a little bit of time to gain these skills before you really need them. Don’t wait until you’re truly desperate to plant your first seeds.
Learning how to garden
There are abundant resources on the internet for anyone interested in learning how to grow food. YouTube is a goldmine. Libraries and bookstores usually have good gardening sections, and local gardening clubs can be a great help. If you live in the suburbs or in the country, you likely have a neighbor or two who have been gardening for years. Go to them for advice and to find out what grows well in your specific microclimate and soil.
Learning how to grow food might feel intimidating at first, but it really boils down to a few main considerations. If you pay attention to those, your first garden will be an overall success even if some individual crops fail.
The considerations are:
Soil fertility
Seed quality
Light
Water
Weed and pest management
Pollination
With each successive year of enriching the soil, planting, growing, and harvesting, you’ll gain more confidence and your garden will produce more bounty. There might be a steep learning curve in the beginning, but that can be easily balanced out by choosing less demanding and more forgiving crops for your first garden.
Think of it as a skill-building opportunity at first. The goal of your first garden is to learn and practice. You will reap some rewards in the form of delicious veggies, but don’t hold yourself to too high of a standard. Just take it in. Try it out. Get a feel for it. At the bottom of this post are a number of online resources to help you get started.
Work smarter, not harder
But isn’t gardening a lot of work?
As with anything worth doing, gardening comes with a time and labor cost. I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’ll be easy or that you’ll barely have to lift a finger.
Yes, producing your own food can be a lot of work, but it’s a matter of priorities. The point of this article is to encourage you, the reader, to consider planting a garden to increase your resiliency in the economic struggles ahead. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re at least a little bit interested in growing your own food. But maybe you’re also resistant to the idea because it doesn’t fit into your current lifestyle.
First, remember that we’re not going for total self-sufficiency here. That would be a ton of work. Too much for the vast majority of people. But for the goal of cushioning your sustenance baseline, the work required is much less.
It comes down to a matter of priorities. What’s more important: giving yourself a layer of food security during the lean years that are now upon us, or whatever else you’re doing with your free time now? Most Americans could stand to binge a few less Netflix shows and spend a few hours less a week scrolling Twitter. Just saying.
Fortunately, there are also a number of labor-saving devices and techniques that can reduce your overall time and energy expenditure in the garden.
Raised beds, mulch and shade cloth can cut down the amount of time you spend weeding.
For the inevitable weeding that can’t be stopped by mulching, tools like stirrup hoes and weeding torches can make quick work of the job.
In addition to keeping weeds down, mulch and shade cloth also prevent water evaporation from your soil, reducing your watering requirements and saving you time.
Adding organic material to the garden—like vegetable scraps, dead leaves, lawn clippings, and cardboard—in small amounts throughout the year can cut down on the labor required to prepare your soil at the start of the planting season. All it takes is stopping by the garden on your way to the car to go to work.
Automatic watering systems can put your garden on autopilot.
Keep a compost bin and your main soil additive basically makes itself.
Building things like raised beds and garden fences may feel like overwhelmingly time-consuming chores, but look at it as an investment. The work only has to be done once, while the dividends will be enjoyed for years.
Spend less
But gardening is an expensive hobby, right? Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose of saving money during a time of unprecedented inflation?
Hobby gardening can be expensive. Survival gardening doesn’t have to be.
The main things you’ll need are seeds, soil amendments, plastic containers, and materials for building raised beds, garden fences, trellises, etc.
Seeds are fairly cheap (although they have gone up in price along with everything else, they’re still affordable and they give you a big bang for your buck.) And for many things, you can even use seeds you’ve saved from vegetables or fruits purchased at the grocery store. If you make friends with some garden enthusiast neighbors, they’ll likely supply you with lots of free seeds, as well.
Soil amendments can get pretty pricey if you buy them packaged from the gardening center, but for almost everything you need, you can come up with a free or very cheap alternative. It might be a good idea to invest a bit more your first year of gardening by buying a few bags of compost or even having a dumptruck load of garden soil delivered, but after that you can typically amend the existing soil using the byproducts of your gardening ventures. It’s also a great idea to buy a package of soil testing kits so you can keep an eye on the makeup of your soil and know what needs to be added, and when.
Building materials for raised beds, containers, garden fences, trellises, etc. can be recycled, salvaged, and creatively sourced.
Here are some ideas to get your garden started without taking out a loan:
5-gallon buckets are a great thing to have around the garden. They can be used as planting containers or for watering and hauling compost and soil additives. You can often get used food-grade buckets for free from delis and restaurants. It doesn’t hurt to ask!
Compost your kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, raked leaves, cardboard shipping boxes, and other organic materials to make rich garden soil for next year.
Check on Craigslist or neighborhood message boards to find free manure to add to your garden soil.
Start planning your garden early in the year so that you can grow the majority of your starts indoors from seed, rather than paying for expensive starts later in the season.
Talk to your local farmers and gardeners. Make friends. If they see your enthusiasm, they will want to help you.
Find out if there’s a local seed library where you can get seeds for free.
Raise chickens or rabbits to supplement your diet with meat and eggs AND your garden with rich fertilizer. (More on that in Part 2.)
Keep a junk pile. Seriously. Whenever you have to replace or repair something in your home or around your property, hang on to any pieces of lumber, metal, pipe, etc. that could feasibly be used in a future project. When you need to build a trellis for your tomatoes or find a container to plant herbs in, go to your junk pile first.
Scan Craigslist for people giving away used building and fencing materials.
Save and bury meat bones, carcasses, and egg shells to enrich the soil with calcium and phosphorous.
Save seeds from this year’s harvest for next planting season.
Find plant pots and containers at Goodwill or other thrift stores. You can also buy used canning jars at thrift stores, typically for 1/4 the price of new, for preserving your harvest.
Calories first
One mistake I often see people make when planting their first survival garden is that they fill it with their favorite salad vegetables and herbs—lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, basil, etc. Not that there’s anything wrong with these crops! For normal times, these are perfectly fine things to prioritize in your garden. It’s just that tomatoes and peppers are very low in calories. They will not sustain you in a crisis.
When planting a garden as an inflation-and-food-shortage contingency plan, you want to prioritize calorie-dense crops. Dedicate the most space in your garden to things like potatoes, corn, or grains. Figure out what grows well in your area to decide which calorie-dense crop to choose.
For most people, you can’t go wrong with potatoes. They are very easy, low maintenance, and prolific growers. Because the tubers grow underground, they are less prone to being decimated by pests. You can grow them in nearly all regions, and they do well in containers for those who have no ground to work. Potatoes are nutritious, and a person can survive just fine on them for extended periods if combined with a good fat source like butter or tallow. Best of all, they keep well in a cool, dark spot, so they can feed your family during the cold season and you don’t have to worry about preserving them.
Sweet potatoes are another great option for those living in warmer climates with longer growing seasons. Depending on your geographical location, you may be able to get in an early spring crop of potatoes, then a summer crop of sweet potatoes, and a second crop of potatoes in the fall. If you devote enough space to these crops, following this kind of planting schedule can keep you in tubers (and calories) all year round.
Once you’ve got your calorie-dense crop figured out, then you can start devoting portions of your available gardening space to other crops that will provide you with nutrition, variety, flavor, and medicinal value.
Thoughts for apartment-dwellers
What if you have no space for a garden? If you have no dirt of your own—if you live in an apartment, for instance—you can take advantage of south-facing windows and balconies to grow a little bit of food in containers, or you can dedicate some space inside to a hydroponics set-up. These are fine options, and, depending on how you go about it, you can probably produce more food than you think.
But maybe the simplest solution is to grow food in someone else’s dirt. Here are a few ideas:
Find someone who has a yard suitable for a garden, but who can’t work it themselves due to age or disability. Offer them a portion of the harvest in exchange for letting you keep a garden on their property. Feed two households!
Locate a community garden in your area. Most community gardens let you have a little patch of ground to plant and grow whatever you want for the season. They also tend to do a lot of educational and community events where you can get to know your fellow gardeners and learn from them.
If there’s no community garden in your area, what’s stopping you from starting one on a rooftop, vacant lot, or neglected green space?
If you live in an apartment complex, get a group of interested tenants together and petition the property managers to let you plant food on top of the useless grassy areas.
Maybe your workplace has some unused outdoor space that could be turned into a community garden for employees.
Schools, hospitals, community centers, churches, office buildings, and technical parks often have extra outdoor space. Approach the owners or administrators and see if you can work out a deal.
Even a section of concrete driveway or unused parking lot can be turned into garden space with raised beds and containers. You just need sunlight and access to fresh water.
Ready to get started?
I hope this post inspired and encouraged you to take a little bit of your food requirements into your own hands. Growing your own food is rewarding work. It increases your economic resiliency and reduces your dependence upon both supermarket and state. The greater the number of people who take up a hoe in hard times, the greater our chances of outlasting dystopia. If you’re ready to get started, check out the resources below.
Resources
Survival Gardening with David the Good
This YouTube channel tackles the ins and outs of learning how to grow food from the perspective of a survivalist.
Zone-Specific Planting Guides
This app lets you enter your zip code to get a two-season (spring and fall) planting guide that will tell you the best dates to plant a wide variety of vegetables in your specific growing zone.
The Blasphemous Pope Podcast
Technate 2051 subscriber, Harry Felker, has this great podcast focused on dissecting the sickness of society as well as outlining methods for the cure. His Meditations series will teach you a lot on your path to greater self-sufficiency. Recent episodes go into great detail on composting as well as planting.
The Justin Rhodes Show
Justin Rhodes is a homesteader who posts tons of educational videos on YouTube about growing crops and raising livestock. His videos often focus on finding more efficient ways to do things, and the viewer receives the benefit of his trial and error.
Free Mulch from Get Chip Drop
This app allows you to get a free dump truck load of mulch delivered to your house by local landscapers and arborists who need somewhere to offload wood chips.
Mini Urban Farm
For those with little to no outdoor gardening space, this YouTube channel has tons of tips and tricks.
The Seasonal Homestead
What I like about this YouTube channel is that it covers a lot of information on what to do after you’ve grown your food: how to preserve it!
Wild Abundance Online Gardening School
These ladies have a whole online gardening school that you can join by subscription. I joined when they first started out and learned so much from their video courses. A subscription gives you lifetime access to the videos and files, and the information is thoughtfully organized by seasonal topics. Plus, they put out new videos every month. Wild Abundance has an enrollment period, which isn’t currently open, so you have to get on their waiting list if you’re interested in joining. Also, fair warning because I know my audience: the material has a slight social justice-y bent, which can be annoying. I found that the quality and breadth of the gardening information more than made up for it.
Find a Community Garden Near You
This handy tool lets you find community gardens in your area, and tells you how to get in touch.
Thank you for reading!
If you love this essay, please share it. If you’d like more essays (and fiction!) in your inbox, subscribe for free! And if you’d like to support this newsletter and my other projects, please consider the options below.
-Starr
Social Links
Follow me on Twitter
Connect with me on MeWe
Follow me on TikTok
Why You Need a Survival Garden
Wow, Thank you 💜💜💜
I am actually going to go in depth on the landless and how we can utilize technology to primarily give the landless an autonomous solution, and as a second point tackle the variables of nature.
But this coming post is all about potato and potato options, inspired by you Starr 😁
I had a second story apartment balcony which I had better luck growing in than my first year with a house. I put planter beds on the patio. It was south facing and got warm sun all day. I grew two pumpkins on the balcony. I have no special skills, experience or knowledge. Anyone can do it.