My Oregon trail relatives lost their wagon and animals in an avalanche and lived on nothing but boiled wheat until they were rescued. A teenaged boy died during this period. I know this because the rest lived to record the tale in a book. The first thing they did after working to repay their rescuers (Natives and Hudson Bay) was plant apple seeds.
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Dang, thatâs bleak. I canât even imagine what itâd be like to lose a child under circumstances like that.
Exactly. It seems the conversation has veered into discussing things I never said due to certain people misrepresenting what I have put.
If yall find it fruitful to discuss those hypotheticals have at it but it is not what I was proposing as @snarfing rightly points out.
I would be interested in getting back to the actual constructive content of how it would be done, as in the logistical matters, not having to defend if it is possible which I have spent most of my time doing.
Other people have posted ways, not prompted by me, that it can be done, such as the biotensive method from this earlier post:
Also @disc4tw 's post:
So it is not a question of if but how with grains being a none negotiable part of the how. 
Btw @disc4tw I am familiar with permaculture. I volunteered for a couple of years with a group which grew and sold produce to the local community so got a good idea of the processes then and they were big into permaculture and adjacent types of methods. That is largely what inspired me to do it myself.
This vertical farming is interesting to me, as by the looks of it it would benefit from surplus solar power, using controlled environment techniques from what the wikipedia is saying because I will have a huge solar surplus in summer since I expanded them greatly for winter to compensate for lack of output during this period. Would be great to make use of that somehow when in times of abundance.
Most of the thread has been nutritional advise, which I never asked for. I have lived for many years on the same diet, with some minor differences, I intend to live on when growing crops, just growing them myself instead of buying. What I want to discuss is growing techniques for making use of the space and expected space required for each crop and how to work within the space I have to achieve the goal.
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@orchardmerc have you considered that in a food crisis situation⌠your food supply would not have to be provided 100% by what you can grow.
Foraging and bartering (with neighbors) should be options that you could use to expand your food diversity greatly past what you can grow yourself.
I have garden space, orchard space, forest space, fields⌠a local wild river, a nephew with 3 well stocked lakesâŚ
I forage for wild blackberries, dewberries, black cherries, persimmons, morel mushrooms, chanterelle mushrooms, hickory nuts, wallnuts, etcâŚ
I hunt for deer, squirrel, rabbits, turkey, dove, quail, bullfrogs, softshell turtle, crawfish, etc
I fish for large and smallmouth bass, blackperch, crappie, catfish, brem, shellcracker, etcâŚ
I could trade my nephew fruit for fish.
If you had such diversity in food supply⌠you would simply support that with what you can grow on your 1/8 acre or 1/4 acre of garden.
It would greatly improve your chances of successâŚ
TNHunter
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Yes sure, the government might collapse and with it international trade and things would go back to local bartering like they were before globalization.
The claim about planning for collapse is hyperbole. I am not stockpiling weapons and tinned food.
There is a large tract middle ground between total disaster and total reliance on supply chains and that is mainly where my interests lay.
I am vegan now (which I am sure you will scoff at given your name and penchant for the carnivore diet) and fully accept it is a diet of luxury and that I would have to hunt for meat and such if it came to it so this is not what I am basing my system on.
It was more that the supply chain issues in the past few years have made me aware that they are not immutable like most would take for granted and so I want to move towards self-sufficiency gradually.
It is not about disaster but more to not have to rely on others and keep to myself if I choose for whatever reason that may be.
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Maybe not this, but preserving the harvest through drying and canning very much improves on the reality of a resilient system where you can be more self reliant.
Permaculture, vertical farming, alley cropping, and all the other systems focused on a smaller footprint for your growing space very much come with the caveat that you will have to actively manage the process more than an annual crop grain farmer going out to plant seeds then come back to spray +harvest +fertilize. It is inherently more labor intensive because the small scale will require smaller equipment or more hand work for the same acreage.
That said, there are people making 6 figure salaries intensively farming one acre farms, so it absolutely can be done.
This is your thread and keeping it on point for a vegan perspective is very manageable.
You can combine nut production from walnuts with sap harvesting for syrup, using the husks as abrasives for cleaning (NASA uses walnut husks in space, Magic Hands puts them in their soaps). Walnuts also leaf out pretty late so you can put earlier spring crops below them to double crop.
Just an example of temporal stacking combined with vertical farming, as well as using creative strategies for value added products to delve into the possibilities.
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This is interesting. Realistically, how much meat would you need to eat? Would, say, a couple rabbits a month (including organ meats), solve this?
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If weâre just talking B12, rabbit is actually one of the better sources. One rabbit has about 300% the daily value, which would imply two or three rabbits a week would be enough. Best I can tell thatâs not including organs though.
Rabbit liver seems to have highly variable amounts of B12 but itâs pretty high regardless, several times more than in the already rich meat. Roughly guestimating, one rabbit, organs and all, every week or two would probably provide enough B12 under normal circumstances.
But thatâs not counting other stuff such a diet would still be dangerously low on like iron, lipids, selenium, copper, iodine , etc.
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Any updates on this? Was just thinking about the guy who eats a ton of apples
fruitnut? who wound up with fatty liver disease?
It depends on how hard you want to work. I like to live a bit like a hunter gather rather than intensive agriculture. I like to raise fish in a 2 - 5 acre pond. Think of it as a giant refrigerator. I like to leave brush piles for rabbit and quail. The orchard is nice. A small garden is great. Keep around some red meat if that means cows, goats, lamb, Buffalo, Beefalo, deer, elk, antelope etc. Is up to you.
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i agree. if you balance hunting / foraging with what you grow youre going to be better off. true survivalists know raising rabbits is one of the best animals to quickly fill your freezer.
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its probably easier but if you dont want to eat animals you dont want to lol
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im talking survival. if you just eat plants , youre greatly putting yourself at risk of starvation. i wont eat bugs and trash fish but in a survival situation , i definitely will. any safe source of protein/ fat is very important. my grandfather was a cook in a remote logging camp in the early 1930âs . they would go in in fall and come out in the spring after the snow melted. those guys burnt 4000 cal. a day cutting timber in sometimes -30 cold. they would fight for the bacon grease and eat big pieces of salt pork yet they were all fit as a fiddle. he used to tell me you barely heard of heart attacks unless they were very old.
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Kind of ironic that people mention rabbits as survival foods, but since the Roman era, and throughout the Americas they knew that eating rabbits as primary protein would literally kill you.
The French voyagers called it âmal de Caribouâ or rabbit starvation.
Are there any vegetables that are high in fat content that can be pressed at home like grains or sunflower seeds?
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Thatâs not quite right. The issue develops when very lean protein is the primary source of all calories, not just the primary protein source. Consuming adequate fat or consuming adequate carbs both alleviate it.
Someone could eat just rabbit and potatoes or just rabbit and lard would be ok, well theyâd have other serious nutritional deficiencies but they wouldnât get rabbit poisoning.
Rabbit poisoning happens when very lean meat is the only or some the only thing youâre eating for an extended period of time. Basically, youâre snowed in in a cabin in Alaska and all you have to eat is salted caribou, thatâs how you get rabbit poisoning.
Someone raising rabbits and growing a garden would be very unlikely to get rabbit poisoning unless they didnât eat enough starchy plants. Theyâd be at high risk of fat soluble vitamin deficiencies, iodine deficiency, calcium deficiency, hormone imbalance, and omega-3 deficiency, and at high risk of being joyless and miserable though.
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If interested in grains, I was looking at Sorghum..cane syrup and grains edible. Produces abundant edible seed. Has anyone grown any?
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What about fatty nuts like hazelnut, chestnuts.
I dont eat meat. Mushrooms are a great meat replacement that grows easily in very little space and provide for many nutritional needs
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I am growing sorghum for the first time this year. I am mostly growing it for the canes though, winnowing is the bane of my existence. Its not hard, but I do not want to do it.
sweet and regular potatoes, jerusalem artichoke and squash can make alot of food in little space.
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