I would very much like to grow all my own food, but I am a realist, and I'm pretty sure that's never going to happen.
For one thing, I just started learning how to garden. Last year was the first year I got serious about gardening.
Also, I'm in my 60s, so there is a limit to the energy I can devote to gardening.
And, I live alone, so there is nobody to share the workload.
All that said, I have set a goal that I think is achievable over the next couple of years. I might even achieve it this year. That goal is:
- I want to produce and preserve a year's worth of tomatoes, potatoes, and applesauce for myself. For me, a year's worth of each of these foods is enough so I can eat the particular food with at least one meal every other day or so.
- I want to produce and preserve a year's worth of onions for myself. I'm not sure what this equates to, in pounds or bushels or whatever.
If I meet or exceed these goals during the next couple years, I'll set some additional goals. But I don't think I'll ever be able to produce all my own food, even though I own 30 acres, much of which is tillable.
I do have pretty good food-preservation skills, as I've canned lots of applesauce and tomatoes and green beans during the past several years. And this year I will attempt dehydrating.
My wife even commented that it "seems like everybody else grow a lot of tomatoes". My reply was... "yeah, but how are they doing it, and what products are they dependent upon to achieve that volume of growth?". I also remind her (and myself as well when garden envy sets in) that most gardeners aren't growing food with prep skill building in mind, to be able to feed their families using methods like the pioneers, which is what we, as preppers and self reliant folk, would be faced with in a long term, grid down situation.
This is something I've thought about a lot.
For example, last year I had great success growing tomatoes in
Earthboxes. An Earthbox is a container-gardening system marketed to inexperienced gardeners. It is pretty much idiot-proof. The Earthbox company sells the container, the watering system, the fertilizer, and even the soil. If you follow the instructions that come with an Earthbox, you almost cannot fail.
I plan to grow tomatoes in my Earthboxes again this summer, and I am about to order my Earthbox supplies for the 2018 growing season. But of course, in a survival situation, it's unlikely I'd be able to purchase Earthbox supplies.
As I gain experience as a gardener, I'm going to try to decrease my reliance on commercially available gardening supplies, but doing so will definitely be a challenge.
I won't be using any hybrid seeds, BTW, and I do plan to save seeds every year.
If I'm utilizing solar set ups for power, am I prepared for when the parts fail
This issue is a conundrum. I am off the grid, and I can store spare parts for my solar-electric systems (e.g., cables, extra panels), but storing extra batteries is a very big challenge, because batteries don't have very long shelf life.
I do have a manual water pump, but using it to water a garden entails carrying water from the pump, which is in the basement of my house, to my garden. [EDIT: The process of using the manual pump to get water to the garden would be much easier if there were two people involved. The spigot on my manual water pump is threaded so I can attach a garden hose to it; then I could run the garden hose out a basement window and down the hill to my garden. Then, one person could be in the basement, working the handle on the pump, while the other person could be in the garden, pointing the end of the hose where water is needed.]