Prepper Basics for Growing Your Own Garden
Putting aside canned foods for future use is a good idea. But before that food supply runs out, you’ll need another way to take care of you family’s food needs. That’s why many preppers use gardens.
Growing your own food for your family is a great way to stretch the budget, eat wholesome foods and prepare for the future. You don’t have to have acres of land to plant and harvest the foods from a garden.
You can start a garden anywhere you live – even if you happen to live in an apartment. If you live somewhere space is limited, you can start a garden in containers. But if you have a nice plot of land where you can plant, then you need to choose the location wisely because plants have to have sunlight in order to survive.
A garden also has to have good soil. Use organic fertilizer to enrich your soil prior to planting. You can have your soil tested before you start planting if you want to make sure that it’s healthy enough to sustain a garden.
Irrigation and drainage is important. You’ll want to make sure the area where you plant your garden isn’t in an area that holds standing water in heavy rainfall. If the water has difficulty running off, it can drown the plants.
Positioning is everything. Write down the foods you want to plant and how much of it you’ll need. Check out the climate zone for your area. This will help you learn what kinds of gardening foods will grow best in your area.
Make sure the plants you choose can be good neighbors. The types of food you decide to plant need to be placed in conjunction with their compatibility with other plants. Some plants will make it more difficult for other plants to survive, so separate them.
Some preppers plant a garden using seeds while others use starter plants. If you want to be able to keep replanting your garden from seeds, then you’ll need to buy the heirloom ones since they’ll last for many replants.
You can plant your garden using rows or you can use the raised bed method. There are pros and cons for each method. With simply using rows, you don’t have to create the raised beds.
But with raised beds, you can easily keep track of what food is in what location and you won’t have to worry about one food shadowing another food. Raised beds also make it easy to harvest the foods when it’s time for them to be picked and if something goes wrong in one raised bed, it won’t wipe out the entire garden.
