PM's Self Reliance Tools: Victory Gardens-Everyone Can Save

Poor Man Survival

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Victory Gardens-Everyone Can Save

Have you ever noticed that you crave seasonal fruits and vegetables? That's because our bodies need the nutrients that we get from the different foods that are grown in those seasons.

During and after World War II, the concept of the Victory Garden was introduced to the nation. Individual backyard gardeners and farmers produced the same amount of food as did the entire commercial farming industry. It was a great success, and every family that participated felt a sense of accomplishment by doing it.

The current economy is demanding the return of the backyard gardens as a way to ensure that each and every family is self-sufficient in hard economic times. Saving your own seeds from your personal harvest is a way to lower your cost of living. Eating the food that you have grown is the best nutrition that you can get.

To that end, here is some advice from my colleague Peggy Layton on the steps you need to take in order to start your own garden and become self-sufficient:

Getting started growing a garden

First you prepare a plot of flat ground that gets full sun during the day. Figure out how much growing space you have. Turn the soil over with a shovel and add compost or other organic material. Till it with a hand or motorized tiller to mix it up. Rake it to level it out.
Plan out the garden plots and plant accordingly. A garden planned in advance will save you a lot of headaches in the future. Lettuce can be grown in tight quarters, but tomatoes need to be spaced about 2 feet apart. Growing and spacing requirements are provided on seed packets, in catalogs, and on nursery tags.
You can grow vegetables in containers or in pots on a patio or porch. Lettuce is a great pot plant. Certain varieties of tomatoes will grow well in a hanging basket. Plants that climb and have vines, such as cucumbers and pole beans, can be trained up a metal fence, chain link or a trellis to take up less room.
Grow the vegetables you enjoy eating. Some examples of vegetables to plant are beans, peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, onions, carrots, broccoli, potatoes, zucchini squash, cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, spinach, melons and strawberries.
If you are a beginner, you can purchase books on growing vegetables and gardening. Don't be afraid to try growing something.
Herbs such as parsley, thyme, basil, chives and oregano, and any other herbs you like to cook with, can be planted between flower beds.
There are two planting seasons. Cool weather, as in the spring, and hot weather, as in the summer and early fall. The most common cool season crops include beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, spinach and turnips. Warm season crops include beans, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, peppers, pumpkins, zucchini and other squash and tomatoes.
Starting your own seedlings in the spring and transplanting them in the summer is the least expensive way to get plants. However, you can purchase seedlings that are already started at any nursery.
If you are going to purchase plants from a nursery, then these are the best ones to get: eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. These plants tend to do better when started in a greenhouse and transplanted in the garden later.
The following seeds are best started right in the ground. Beans, beets, carrots, chard, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, melons, peas, pumpkins, zucchini and other squash and turnips.
Squash and cucumbers are two of the ones that you can plant as either seeds or seedlings. I have had better results with them by planting the seeds right in the ground. It seems that the plants go into shock and take as long to grow as the seeds do.
Seed packets do have a shelf life. Look for the seeds that have been packed for the current year.
Purchase seedlings when your soil is ready to plant. Keep them watered and don't let them sit around for more than a few days. Buy healthy-looking seedlings. They should stand up straight and be stocky, with green and not yellow leaves or any bug damage.

Choose the best garden seeds

Non-hybrid seeds: The best seeds to purchase are the Heirloom open-pollinated type or non-hybrid. Saving seeds is only possible with open-pollinated seeds. These seeds are also called Heritage seeds. These are the best kind of seeds to buy. You can save the seeds from year to year and dry them out, then plant them the next season and they will grow the exact same fruit, vegetable, or grain. Open-pollinated varieties display certain horticultural traits, such as: fruit color, leaf shape, flower color, etc. This means they are stable withinthe variety and seeds saved from these plants will be the same as the parent plant in subsequent plantings. The variety will not be cross-pollinated with any other plants of species.

Hybrid seeds: These seeds have been genetically modified to only produce one crop that is true to form. The following generations of plants cannot be counted on to produce the same variety. The hybrid is definitely cross-pollinated with another similar species that might have a different trait. The offspring will be genetically different than the parent plant. The scientists that cross-pollinate these plants are trying to come up with a better, more hardy plant, however, the seeds can only be used once and that could possibly create a shortage of seeds. If you save the seed and plant them the next season, you might get some strange fruit that you don't recognize. Most seeds purchased from a nursery or store is the hybrid type. If you are stocking up on these seeds, you will need to purchase them every year.

The advantages of stockpiling non-hybrid garden seeds

Better nutrition: Seed varieties are being bred for many reasons, but typically for disease and pest resistance, their look, transportability and other commercial reasons. Nutritional content is not one of the reasons, but profit is. When you grow open-pollinated (non-hybrid) varieties you are growing original strains with much higher nutritional content than varieties that have been bred for color, storability, portability, etc. Growing your own garden ensures that the food you produce is much more nutritious than commercially-grown produce. When food is grown in Mexico or other countries, we do not have any control over how it is grown, what chemicals are used, what fertilizers and minerals are—or are not—in the soil. We also cannot control whether or how much radiation is used to kill the bacteria. The food
is picked before it has ripened and it is shipped hundreds, even thousands of miles before we purchase it. The plants are sprayed to keep them from ripening too fast in transit, then sprayed again to get them to ripen. Have you ever noticed that the vegetables in the grocery store taste blander rather than rich in flavor like their homegrown cousins?

Variety: We can participate in saving many original varieties of seeds. Once the food supply has been genetically altered to the point that there are no more original strains of vegetables left, we will be at the mercy of the genetically altered seed companies like Monsanto. This won't happen with non-hybrid seeds because we can save many varieties of our own seeds from year to year and we will be in control of these seeds.

Self-sufficiency: In hard times, recessions and depressions, food is security. You will be able to take care of your family and even friends if you have the skills to grow food. You will have better health because you will be ensured the highest nutrition available. You can save foods like potatoes, carrots, onions, apples and squash in a cool, dry garage and they will keep all winter as long as it doesn't freeze.

Shortages of food: If food supplies are challenged and the food cannot be trucked for thousands of miles, home gardening is a way to ensure that your family will have the food to sustain them in a crisis. It can also be looked at as food insurance. The economic crisis facing the United States and the world right now is causing the price of fresh produce to go up. When an economic downturn drives inflation up, the cost of real goods, like groceries, skyrockets. It becomes unmanageable very quickly, with items like a loaf of bread costing 10 times more than normal. It sounds unbelievable but this has actually happened many times throughout history. I have heard a prediction for years that when times get tough and our economy fails, it will take a wheelbarrow full of money to buy one loaf of bread.

Trade or barter: For a self-sufficient person to be truly prepared he must have plenty of non-hybrid seeds available for personal use, storage and bartering. Seeds are an excellent alternative investment to paper money, as well as gold and silver. You can't eat money or precious metals, which means food is the best investment. Growing your own food is a skill that is invaluable. Organic open-pollinated seeds must be in the hands of the organic backyard farmers. There is a huge movement sweeping the country right now. The small organic farmers are banding together to collect, save, sell or trade their seeds. It is called seed exchange. This movement is preserving the hundreds of heirloom seeds so they are not genetically altered or cross pollinated and lost.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter^®

P.S. — If you really want to kick your backyard garden up a notch, Dan "Survival" Sullivan has a wonderful guide on how to turn your yard into a homestead. Just click here to check it out.

Yours for a Socialist-Free America!

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

Postscripts…

The protests have become riots, the riots have become looting... and now innocent people are being beaten in the street.

But as bad as that is, it's about to become worse... because the rioters say they're headed to the suburbs to "take what's theirs."

Outrage is the natural response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. Yet outrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand. An act of police brutality became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood. Protests spilled over into violence and looting. Stores were destroyed; policemen and civilians injured and killed. The truism “black lives matter” was joined by a senseless slogan: “Defund the police.”

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USEFUL STUFF…

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