And the benefits of mass production, quick transportation of products and a one world supply chain continue. In this case it may have come in on a cheap knockoff tombstone I have been told. Don't know for sure though as the man who told me that used to produce tombstones here in New England until he went out of business. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-invasive-lanternfly-eastern.html We have a new bug from Asia to fight now, add it to the other ones killing our Ash trees, one endangering our Oak trees, all the others, including Covid 19, although that is a virus. The invasive fish, plants, etc that are changing our ecco systems, etc. In my area it is becoming more difficult every year to raise a garden the old ways.. There are less bee's, need insecticides and fungicides if you want to reliably grow enough food to make a living off of the land, they may be "natural forms", but you are going to have to use them. If you plan on growing food for your survival, you have to start now as you can still both grow and keep your food. It is not a question of if you are going to have a crisis in your food production, soil problems, drought, flooding, disease, insects, etc, it is just a question of your ability to learn how to control and survive the learning process. It is probably to your advantage to do it now, rather than wait until the failure to handle the problem either kills you or makes you a refugee.
What I've always said about people that have a 'bug out location' and a lot of garden seed.......yeah....if that's your plan, plan on failure. We've been growing food 45 years now (not counting as kids), and every year is a new experience/experiment. The time is takes to learn, develop infrastructure and gather tools is a whole lot longer than you can go without eating.
Mrs. Altoid has planted small gardens for the last five years or so. Growing the plants is the easy part. Seems as if getting them to produce is a real issue. Raising a big healthy-looking tomato plant that has one or two tiny shriveled up tomatoes on it does no good whatsoever. I haven't been much involved in it so can't say what needs to be done differently.
How a plant grows, reaches sexual maturity, reproduces, bears fruit, and dies is beyond my understanding. At each stage of the process it has different needs for light, types of fertilizer, temps, water, everything. Some plants go to seed only after wintering over a year, others will only do well with so many hours of light, most need much more nitrogen for the growth phase, less in the blossom stage, and if they get to much when the fruit sets, will grow leaves and a huge plant, but no tomatoes. If the phosphorus isn't in the correct ratio, it won't develop and reach maturity. If the wind or bee's etc, don't get the pollen right, the fruit will be weird shaped, without the proper amount of calcium, the tomato will rot where the blossom is on the fruit is attached. I have been playing with a garden for about 70 years now and still feel like a novice and nearly every year I run into new problems and have to modify things, often based on the look of the plant, rather than some high tech tool. Insects, blights, deficiency problems, must be caught very early in the game or you will lose everything. A garden has to be checked at least once a day, more often for deer, woodchucks, birds, and other things that want to "share" your garden, and in a greenhouse on a hot dry day, may need to be watered more than once a day. With 100 % humidity, temp in 80 + degree range, poor air movement thru plant, in one day you can lose it all to a blight, in a couple days to white flys, squash stem borers can destroy everything in a couple days. You don't raise a garden, you live with it if you wish it to really feed you.
Amen. Same here. About the time you think you have something figured out, you get hit with a new experience. As we've moved more and more to greenhouse growing, we've found that out exactly. I'm planning on a new 30x50 house next year with waist high beds (which has worked out GREAT based on the present house), fixing some of the mistakes made in the current 20x36' house, to allow us more time growing stuff into older age, and get completely away from ground level anything. Anybody want to buy a low hour, air cooled diesel, Grillo G85 tiller w/multiple attachments ?
Roto tillers have their place, but use it now for major row crops, would use for wheat, corn, beans, but for a lot of stuff the green house and short handled small tools and beds off the ground have totally replaced it. Until things fail, I can't raise most grains etc for several times what I have to pay for store bought. Read a comment about that though, Prepper said he bought eggs from 4 different producers so that no matter what happened he would have eggs.
Or maybe at least sniff the chicken soup cooking...... I've tried some grain growing in the past, didn't work out that well. What I've done along that line is store a WHOLE lot of wheat berries, rice, oats, corn in vac pack buckets and #10 cans. One of the things I remember reading in Kunstler's "World Made by Hand" book was most people ate cornbread because corn was so much easier to raise/harvest/grind into meal....something made from wheat flour was a real rare treat. For anyone that hasn't read his books, I highly recommend them. Books | Kunstler The Long Emergency World Made by Hand The Witch of Hebron A History of the Future
Before my time but old family tales said that cat tails , 3 sisters, corn, beans, squash, sun chokes, etc, would keep you alive. Acorns, soaked to get rid of tanin, lots of weeds, purslane, lambs quarter, nettles, etc, grand ma knew them all.
Used to eat lambs quarters when I was a kid. Not bad boiled with a little salt and butter. Also picked wild asparagus, usually along fence lines where the birds dropped the seeds. Where I live now there's none of that. But there are other plants. . .including acorn bearing scrub oak. My parents were depression era children, as I'm sure a lot of Monkeys' parents were.. They knew their way around a lot of things.
