It is a common joke in my household. When we were in Puerto Rico for the baby earthquake the first thing that came out of my daughter’s mouth was “Seriously?!” And for the record that one wasn’t all that big. Judging by the news you would think it actually did some damage.
If you fail to plan you plan to fail. I don’t worry about things, and I’m not surprised when an emergency happens. I may not know what it will be but I know it is the norm to have them every so often.
Please don’t come visit California. Please! 
I really try to pay attention as well to what is cheap and easy to get locally.
We don’t have a huge amount of land or a great storage space so I think about flavourings, condiments and accents.
Growing stuff here, and using it to make the cheap, dependable stuff more palatable not only saves us money, it’s healthier and has a lower footprint.
Things like the small fruits and berries are expensive, they come with lots of packaging and are often heavily sprayed.
Growing your own takes all of that out of the equation so you save lots of $ on top of the other benefits.
I may only end up with under 20 kilos of each type a year. That won’t make much of dent in my overall calorie needs but processed, they can make a ton of oatmeal taste waaaaay better.
Curry pastes, chutneys, sauces, dried herbs and fruits can all dress up things like tofu, legumes, lentils, potatoes and other cheap root veggies.
Food prices are going to keep going up, especially for the fragile and high labour/transport stuff. Reducing how much of that you need will give you a chunk more options.
Potatoes, carrots, corn, cabbages, apples and most wheat and soy products should stay pretty cheap and safe around here so I don’t bother with them. Growing a chunk of our own “luxury” crops means we’ll have more leeway to be able to still afford things like cheese!
I disagree. A person need 2000X365=730,000 a year.
One acre of potato field can produce between 24,500 and 61,000 pounds of potatoes. Let’s say 40000. Pound of potato is 349 cal. 349X40000/730000=19. This is how many people can live on just potatoes and get needed calories for whole year.
Full size mature apple tree can produce up to 800 apples a season. So three trees will provide 6 apples a day for whole year.
And so on…
Add some chicken and rabbits as a source of protein, learn how to pick mushrooms - and yes, you can live from the land.
If you do not spend your time and land on zone pushing, unproductive plants, and decorative things - you really can survive on 1 acre of land . The most difficult part is to keep what you have grown for winter and spring.
I have 0.15 acre, tons of land-wasters(fruit of my ambitions), but I still plant potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic. Some of them feed us whole year long(carrots(frozen),onions, garlic, eggplants(canned), tomatoes(canned)) We eat own potatoes from end of June to November. If it would be real issues with food supply, I would remove all the flowers, some trees and plant potatoes. I know you can survive on it. Our grandparents did.
Found one interesting link:
https://www.localharvest.org/blog/15945/entry/calories_per_acre_with_apples
The average American consumes 3,600 calories a day. That comes to 1,314,000 calories. I like to use the one million calories because it just happen to be half way between 730k and 1,314k and more importantly, it makes mental math super easy.
For instance; 3 apple trees, 4 harvested bushels per tree, 504 pounds of apples, at 230 calories per pound comes to 115,920 calories, or 11.592% of a person’s calories. That round million just makes it super easy, move the decimal four spaces for the percent.
Having said that this is assuming 0 waste.
But if all you have to eat is a field of potatoes it would be extremely easy to cut back on calories; everybody would get pretty sick of them. Nothing closes your appetite more than a monotonous, unfamiliar diet. People simply stop eating, specially small children. The trick is to store what you usually eat, eat what can be easy to storage. During covid we obviously didn’t have a lot of fresh produce but what we ate was the same familiar items so it was pretty transparent.
But the great thing about a field of potatoes (provided you know how to store long term) is that it does make you all sorts of resilient because it gives you something to trade. Right now I need to get back to work but I will expand on what I mean by that.
I’m of the same mentality. I grow what’s expensive to buy in large quantities or whatever I can’t buy reliably. Things that don’t require much input are also very attractive. In terms of fruit, cane berries, figs, Asian pears, pawpaw, and persimmons all fall under this category for me.
In California, to grow most things I need water. To pump water I need electricity. To process what I grow I need electricity or gas. Therefore, if serious problems arise, my orchard will not save me. I don’t delude myself into thinking I can be self-sufficient here.
I am in luck! My familiar item is potatoes! It is probably 1/4 of our diet - it is the most common side dish in our family! I understand what you mean by “something to trade”. I am from Russia. I remember times when it was nothing in the stores but canned see weeds. We survived. We planted food. We got meat chicken that grow fast, we fed them weeds and scraps. My mother left city to live in the summer house with wood stove as only source of heat to grow them and stayed there in winter, so we all could have some meat and some eggs. My daughter was very little at the time, so I had to stay in the city. Every morning I had to go through 4-5 stores, if lucky I was able to get some milk, some bread, and may be oil. So we highly depended on the potato, apples, carrots, greens and chicken my mother grew.
And if you go to my parents childhood, there was literally hunger. People survived on potato skins… Not that skins we order in the restaurant. Actual skins - people who had potatoes traded them for little work the less lucky people have done for them.
Agree, electricity is a key. We store most of the food frozen, the rest is refrigerated. Our landscape doesn’t allow to dig the cellar, so electricity is the key.
People who are really hungry would eat anything. Most people in the US have very little understanding what the real hunger is.
I have been in places where I have seen hunger. You should have seen the skinny cows in Cambodia.
If you want your family to be in good spirits through a long crisis make sure the diet stays as normal as possible. Changes in diet, monotonous diet, will shut down your appetite when you need it the most. This is particularly crucial with small children that will drop weight and weaken their immune system when you could afford it the least. Heck I spent long periods of times in the field eating MREs, after a week of that you would pretty much stop eating. Most of the time the Army makes a point of deploying one hot meal a day because of that.
This is why ‘emergency’ food sold in buckets (3-month supply for only $800!) is garbage. As I said, during covid we spent two months without buying from the super market and certainly without eating ‘emergency’ food. I just bulk up on the essentials (like bulk rice, pasta, grains, canned milk, I can do magic with spam) so my personal grocery store is under my stairs. When the stocks on my personal grocery store start going low I go out and restock it.
Which brings us to the real problem with growing food; On this day an age food is dirt cheap. Shit there are bags of dirt that are more expensive than food. Economically speaking it makes no sense to grow food when industrial farming can churn out a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) for $6.92. From an economic perspective it makes no sense. But from a resiliency perspective it makes all the sense in the world because it is about building a safety net. Not just the food itself but building both the ability and the capacity to produce is the real gain.
Personally I want to ramp up to have the ability to produce 100 gallons of sweet apple cider. This entails not only the number of trees to produce all those apples but the infrastructure, expertise, and efficiency of operation. Here’s where it gets funny; once I build up that capacity I will probably scale down and produce about half, I have other things to do with my time. In the short term I can probably consume about 25 gallons myself. The rest I’ll probably sell or trade for eggs, there are plenty of people with a surplus of eggs around here that are happy to trade. The important point is that I know for a proven fact that if push comes to shove there is no question or wishful thinking about what I can or cannot do in the production and store of 100 gallons of cider, because I have done it and if need be I could do it again.
For the record 100 gallons of apple cider are 192,000 calories, or 19.2% of that million per person target. There is a reason why the consensus is that it takes at least 5 acres of good land, enough water, and long enough growing season to sustain a single individual.
Might be a good thread to ask. Does anyone have good varieties of Jerusalem artichoke and/or ground nuts to trade/sell/whatever?
For more resiliency I would encourage people to grow more perennial vegetables. One of my new favorites is Hablitzia tamnoides. Lots of other unusual stuff at the Cultivairable link too.
Well, yesterday, I would have said, "Check with Ken Asmus at OIKOS Tree Crops… he usually offers multiple Jerusalem artichoke and groundnut selections… but I see from a thread here that he’s closed the nursery. ;>(
I ALMOST got a ton of stuff from cultivariable this past year, but had to stop buying new things at some point and that was the cutoff. I think next year I will plan a raised bed (or some old seed sacks?) to try out Jerusalem artichokes and some of the tubers they sell. I wish some of them weren’t zone pushing for us, they would be cool to keep as normal perennials like rhubarb etc. in ground all winter.
im in the land of potatoes. my area has survived for over a century on this tuber. one of the few things that grow well in our crappy soil. buckwheat is another that grows well here and the locals used its flour in many dishes. a staple called ployes was made as a side like bread that was eaten with most meals and is till eaten today. buckwheat flour is very nutritious.
I think that the more people have a home orchard, the more common sense kids will grow up experiencing the goodness of picking things in their back yard!
And the greater numbers of people that will learn about fruit, and grafting, and growing, and pass it on…
Also the more that varieties can be preserved for the future, think of how old “lost” limbertwig apples and such have been found in some random old orchard…
Also yes the #1 reason I grow fruit is because I love growing. My grandma got me into it when I was a kid…
But yes I do think of the possibility that if our land sees an economic shift and tough times in our lifetime, I may can help spread trees and share fruit in the community and that be a way i can help…
Yeah, during the first agrarian revolution humanity made a huge mistake favoring annuals over perennials. I mean it makes sense; easier to move around and get them started, faster selection for best of breed, but the cost is a shallow root system that requires tons of water which leads to leaching of nutrients and the vicious cycle of over fertilization. perennials know how to dig deep and thus are more draught tolerant. All that energy stored in the root system makes it so you can pretty much chop it to the ground and it springs back like nothing happened.
All my annuals produce far more food per area per year than my perennials