How to Grow Home Vegetables and Food for Survivalists

In the 1960s, fear of nuclear fallout helped create interest in the survivalist movement. These early survivalists built bomb shelters and horded canned food. Today, instead of nuclear fallout, survivalists focus on coping with potential disasters that range from viral infection to nationwide computer crashes by living off the grid and becoming self-sufficient. One major way to do this is to grow as much of your own food staples as possible.

• 1

  Create compost by digging a pit in your garden in fall before spring planting. Fill this pit with dead leaves and garden refuse. By spring, your leaves will have decomposed into compost. Compost keeps your soil healthy in lieu of commercial fertilizer.

• 2

  Break your garden up in spring with a spade and rake to a depth of 12 inches. Spread the compost over your soil in a 4-inch layer. Mix the amendment into the soil. The amendment not only improves the soil, but by piling the compost on top of the soil, you create a temporary raised bed, which improves drainage and plant health, reducing your reliance on commercial products such as pesticide or fertilizer, which you may not be able to obtain in the event of a disaster.

• 3

  Select garden crops based on their nutritional content and suitability for long-term storage as well as whether you will be able to save seed for future crops. In the event of a disaster, you may not have access to electricity to power a refrigerator or freezer. Fruits like apples and nuts, as well as root crops like potatoes, save for longer periods of time. Small fruits such as strawberries and blackberries may be made into jam and jelly. Gourd vegetables and cucumbers have increased pest resistance due to their harder skins and may stand a better chance of survival if your access to pesticides is limited. Select perennial vegetables such as herbs to season your food or for medicinal purposes, wild rice and wild greens can provide variety for your diet and will do well with little attention. If you have no access to commercial groceries, you may also have to grow cereal crops such as wheat, hominy and corn meal as well as beans and sweet corn for canning and dehydrating. In parts of the northern United States where poor road conditions limit access to grocery stores, landowners grow these crops on a regular basis.

• 4

  Focus primarily on crops that will grow well in your area. While citrus is a good source of vitamin C, citrus trees will not grow outdoors in northern states. Instead, grow cabbage and preserve it as sauerkraut for a good source of vitamin C.

• 5

  Choose heirloom vegetables for your garden instead of hybrids. Hybrid vegetable seeds cannot be saved because they do not produce true to type, which means that the plants do not produce seed that grow into plants like the parent hybrid plant. If you save heirloom seed over several seasons, you will develop your own heirloom seed that is adapted to your regional conditions.

• 6

  Plan your garden's layout so that you can inter-plant vegetables. Inter-planting is the process of growing two plants closely together. For example, you can grow beans in between stalks of corn. The beans grow up the corn stalks as if they were trellises. Peppers can grow in between rows of tomatoes. The tomatoes act as windbreaks for the peppers. If you are reduced to hand weeding and cultivating, inter-planting will save space in your garden.

• 7

  Open a furrow to plant your seed that is three times as deep as the seed at its widest point. Place the seed into the soil and cover with soil. Water the soil so that it is as damp as a wrung-out sponge. Plant fruit and nut tree orchards within 200 feet of your home along the north and west sides of a home to provide windbreaks as well as food. Select two of each type of tree for cross-pollination purposes. Open planting pockets in the soil for these trees that are twice as wide as the tree's root ball, but no deeper. Place the tree's root ball within the soil and fill in around the sides of the root ball with soil.

• 8

  Cover the soil of your garden and the roots of trees with a mulch of compost. Compost mulch adds nutrients to the soil, holds in moisture and blocks weeds.