The Best Thing for Your Survival Garden

One of the bedrocks of freedom is private property. A great part of private property’s power is that it allows the owner to grow his own food.

Over the years the state and its corporate cronies have taken charge of much of the nation’s food supply through regulations, taxes, unfair competition and more.

But many of us still own our own land (so much as we can be said to own something that can be taxed away from us) and have the ability to grow much of our own food on a small, decentralized scale, provided we have the skills to pull it off.

As the economy spirals downwards, local food production is poised to jump up.

Growing your own potatoes and kale may very well become a matter of survival, though most Americans are so detached from the process that I fear for our future.

Even most gardeners buy their fertilizers (and sometimes even their soil!) from local garden centers.

What happens if those garden centers close? Or if fertilizer becomes a controlled commodity?

If you have a survival seed bank and some cleared ground but no fertilizer or compost, your gardening career isn’t going to last very long. Once the fertility in the virgin soil is depleted – likely within the first year – crops will fail.

I’ve spent the last 10 years experimenting with composting methods that are so far out of the mainstream that they’d give a government Agricultural Extension agent a heart attack. This spring I finally put them together into my book Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Composting.

In it I cover how to compost logs, junk mail, meat, sewage and lots more. If things get ugly, knowing these skills could quite literally save your life.

Yet many of these composting methods aren’t new. Back when our forefathers worked the soil, they used every bit of fertility that came through their property as food for the soil. Slaughter wastes, manure, bones, fish guts… all are loaded with fertilizing power if properly utilized.

Sometimes it’s as simple as the Native American method of digging a pit, throwing in smelly high-nitrogen materials, ashes, etc., then covering that pit with soil and planting a few scrappy squash seeds on top. We’ve done this in our yard and grown some incredible squashes on top of sloppy kitchen scraps and animal carcasses.

Yes, it sounds insane; but so does the concept of Fractional Reserve Banking. One of these two methods is sustainable – I’ll let you guess which.

Other methods, such as burying mounds of logs and letting them rot into long-term water and fertility reserves (also known as hugelkultur) are adopted from ancient European methods only recently coming back into common knowledge due to the efforts of rebel farmer Sepp Holzer and others.

Maintaining soil fertility maintains your food supply in a crisis. Plants grown on poor soil rarely make much worth eating. If you’re going to be ready for the next crisis, I recommend you learn gardening – and composting – right now. My new book is a good jumping off point for those of us that are tired of being told the “dos and don’ts” and just want some solid – and perhaps revolutionary – ideas for reclaiming fertility from the centralized waste stream and turning it into food. It’s funny, too, unlike most survival guides. I mean… what’s the point of surviving the apocalypse if we can’t laugh a little on the way?

Don’t wait until things fall apart to start growing your soil and your food. By then it will be too late.