These are three ways a preppers garden should be different especially if you are looking for gorwing a garden for survival. Sandy Bottom Homestead was started to supplement our food supply. By Gardening and raising chickens we have been able to meet that goal and start to surpass it. Follow us as we continue to build out our homestead and become better gardeners.
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Okay, ladies and gentlemen. So, we got to talk about it. A prepper’s garden is absolutely different than a regular garden. Like a, you know, a hobbyist or something like that. And that’s cool. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Do a lot of things in a garden. And there are a lot of similarities between the two. I mean, in the end of the day, all we’re doing is growing food, okay? So, let’s not over complicate it too too much. Wink nudge nudge. coming soon. But there is an absolute difference. And it’s a mindset that if it’s something you’re really concerned about, we absolutely need to work that into our I guess psyche is the word. I don’t know. You pick whatever word you want. Grand scheme of things though, there’s a lot of similarities. I mean, take for instance these black eyed peas, which are I mean, we’re having this crazy heat wave right now. It was 98 yesterday and it’s going to be 98 again today and you know it’s just going to keep getting hotter and hotter. But these black eyed peas are loving this heat and this is part of this is what I do to ensure because they get so crazy as I have to weave them in to get them to grow over. But this is part of my plan is factoring in heat loving crops so they can continue to produce. Now, the similarity between the two is, you know, either way you want production, right? I mean, that’s just a the fact of it. We’re not gardening for the hell of it. We all want some kind of production from our garden. As a prepper, survivalist, whatever you want to call yourself, it’s more about quantity of production, right? So, we want to get enough out of our spaces and you can’t bend the will of the garden to what you want. You have to find this happy medium between the two, right? So, there are going to be periods like this, like we are in the hottest time of the summer right now. It’s basically miserable. Um, plants are starting to struggle. The garden is starting to empty out. But what a lot of people don’t realize is on the back end there’s a whole another garden being grown getting ready to come out and that’s what we want. So we don’t use and so I let me say this right off the bat prepper survivalist whatever kind of fall like in the middle of everything I guess I always grow my food to feed my family and to say hey you know if we had to survive off of it we could that was the whole reason why we started but in the grand scheme of things I kind of fall now like all over the place and I don’t really consider myself in any camp which is kind of how I’ve always lives lived my life which has made it difficult but whatever. So one thing we have to understand is the frost date is not the end of our garden. As a matter of fact it’s really like the beginning of another gardening season kind of wrapping up into it but our first frost date does not mark the end. And I bring this up for a very important reason. Whole video wasn’t even really planned. um the last one where we talked about surviving out of a garden, like what to grow if there’s no food for fall, right? And there’s a lot of comments in there about certain crops like bush beans, um winter squashes, squashes, and stuff like that. But what we have to realize is once your first frost comes, they’re done, right? Every crop that I mentioned in that video, it just looks at a frost and says, “And it’s time to grow.” And that’s what that’s one of the major differences here is you have to step out of that comfort zone of what we’ve been planting all summer and everything out here that’s like okay yeah we can do this we can do that we can keep this going as long as long as possible but once you remove those things and you you accept for instance if you just take this for instance accept that this bed of I could have absolutely put another bed of squash in and that was my plan but we accept accepted that that would go away. And what we know now is that this bed is basically an clean slate for whatever we want going into fall and into the winter season, which means we are going to boost our production if we plant appropriately two times, right? Dramatically boost our production where we will be getting crops that we would never have an option to get because we made that plan appropriately. And so this is a major major difference. So, understand that your garden’s not going to be perfect the whole time and that there’s going to be times when it’s going to die out and you’re going to replant it and it takes a lot of work. So, when I first started, I you know, we know why I started now at this point. It’s abundantly clear, but I started a tomato plant. I bought it and I wanted that billy goat to grow all through the summer into the fall. And I knew it was going to die in the winter, you know, but I just wanted it to. And I did that for years and years. But once I broke that mold and I started planting those crops that I put in the last video, the five crops, what have you, there was a huge difference in how long I started getting more produce, which raises, if you’re concerned about it, your survivability rate. And even if you’re not concerned about it, it just raises the rate of consumption and production that you can get out of your garden into a an entire another season that I’m telling you when you look at your forecast and you’re coming out here for instance, fall tomatoes, which boy they struggling in this heat. Soon as it cools off, it’ll they’ll kick in. But we look at these tomatoes and we will be out here. Hopefully we won’t be real nervous about it, but every year it’s going to be the same thing. These are our fall planted tomatoes. They are designed to give us tomatoes in fall, but we’re going to be really worried about if we’re going to get the maximum production out of them, if we’ve wasted our space and stuff like that versus we come over here to I can’t remember what’s going to be in here right now. Uh let’s just say that this is going to be cabbages. That first frost date comes, doesn’t even matter. I don’t need to do anything for it. I don’t need to cover it. Nothing. Only reason why I would add cover to it is if it was going to be like a freak frost and then it was going to be nice and warm after that, then we may possibly put a cover on it just to like trick it to keep producing at a faster rate. But even still, nine times out of 10, we don’t do that. We just let it grow because it doesn’t matter at that point. Every crop that we mentioned on there, and there’s going to be more talk of that on this channel, all of them are able to grow into the fall past your first frost date and possibly into the winter depending on where you are. And we’re going to figure all that stuff out and that’s really important. So, that is a major difference in the two. And even no matter what camp you sit in, if you want to switch over into another camp, you know, you want to be a byguarder, let’s just call it that, whatever. um you could do that and just start understanding and start planting it. And it’s it’s a natural progression in at least for me, it was a very natural progression to be rotating my garden out completely into different crops. So like for instance, we’re leaving this corn here. This corn as of this moment has produced all the corn it’s going to get. is the last head of corn, euro corn. So, what we’re actually going to do is we’re going to dry this out and then we’re going to save it. But, we’re going to go ahead and pull all the stocks out at some point. There’s no rush because we’re not putting anything in right away. And then we’re going to mulch the bed and we’re going to let it sit for probably about a month before we replant it. So, we’ve got our rudabaggas started. They’re they’re going to go in this bed and then we’ll come back and we’ll drop those plants in in the mulch. So you can see like this is part of it. And it seems crazy when you’re trying to make a garden to be doing all of this work, but you know, as you march closer and closer to your fall weather into winter, you’re going to start seeing less and less production. And like right now, this heat is really crushing the garden. So you just got to wait it out and understand. But there is a time for it to improve, and you’re going to be able to see that. But you’ve got to be able to make that switch. Don’t hold on to those summer crops as long as possible. If you’re concerned at anything because I can tell you this, okay? And answer this below. If you had to have food, there was no food available, would you rather have a handful of peppers to cut up amongst your family? And I don’t care if you have 50 pepper plants. Doesn’t matter to me. And you say, “Okay, we can we have this and this and this and you’re gonna have to freeze it and preserve it and all that.” Or would you rather pull a 5B head of cabbage out and bring it up and say, “Hey, we’ve got food. There’s more in the garden. There’s no stress. We don’t have to preserve it. We don’t have to do anything.” Or would you rather pull, you know, a handful of 50 radishes out, you know, or 20 radishes out and be like, “Hey, this is what’s for dinner tonight.” instead of like one pepper amongst your family. Like you make that decision for yourself, but be realistic about what’s possible and what you can do. And for me, the other thing, one of the other major differences is a lot of this, like my entire garden is centered around preserving. So preserving is a huge part of it, but at the same time, I want to preserve as little as possible. Almost everything that goes in my garden for the most point is meant to preserve to some extent. Whether it’s canning, freezing, drying, curing, uh fermenting, whatever. Everything is really meant to do that. I mean, we got uh I think we got about 40 Yeah, we got about 40 ears of corn off of here. Do you think I’m going to sit there and gorge myself in 40 ears of corn? Absolutely not. You know, we’re going to get I hope we’ll see. I never count my eggs before they hatch with sweet potatoes. Um, especially when I change what I do each year, but we’re hoping to get about 40 to 50 lbs of sweet potatoes this year. Really hope I don’t have to eat my words. But I don’t plan to gorge myself on sweet potatoes. We parcel those out for the entire winter into the spring. So, we want this to feed us and to keep the nutrition coming in, but we also know that we’re not going to have an endless supply of sweet potatoes. We’re going to run out. But that’s why we grow other things so that we know that by the time we run out of sweet potatoes, we’ll have something else coming out of the garden. Whether it’s our spring cabbages, which are different than our fall cabbages, our carrots, our potatoes, something like that, we will have something else to take the place of that. And that’s a really big difference. So for me, it’s not all about grow as much as I can and preserve it all and then I never have to worry about it. It’s more of grow it, preserve it, use it if you have to, but also know that you’re going to grow it again. And this becomes a cycle. This is just a very big cycle that goes over and over. And that’s a really big difference between the two. And between those two things, all those two things tell me when I think about it is this goes from a hobbyist garden into a survival type garden. And a lot of people who are hobbyist gardens already think like that. So guess what? You’re over halfway there. The third thing, because there are three, is quantity, which I did talk about earlier, I touched on, but quantity is a lot. So instead of focusing on multiple different crops, you know, instead of putting one row of corn in and then one row of squash in front, we wanted to get it all packed into one bed so we could produce more of it. The same over here. with all these tomatoes and peppers. So, we wanted to put a lot of the same crop in so that we got the quantity that we needed to preserve, right? Not necessarily the variety of it. So, we don’t do 10 different types of tomatoes. We do three. We do a cherry, we do a paste, and then we do a slicer. You know, as far as our peppers go, we don’t do a whole lot of crazy peppers. Look at that son of a gun. We do We would normally plant one okra, but this year we planted two because we get plenty of it. And there we go. Our seeds are ready to save. Just like that. So, our green velvet okra seed from 2020 has now given us another seed to grow and we can continue on the lineage. So, instead of trying to pack in multiple different things, I mean, you know, I when I first started in one bed, I’d have eight, nine different crops in there. I’d have a squash, I’d have a zucchini, I’d have cucumbers, uh, peppers, and a tomato plant all in one bed. But then I wouldn’t really be getting as much as I wanted. So, then we had to change the way we gardened, right? So, we just changed our design methods and stuff like that. And that’s why on this channel we really focus and on the Backyard Gardens podcast which I’m the host of uh with my co-host Bavia, we focus a lot on planning and seed starting. Those are very very important. Obviously methods in the garden, but if you don’t have a good, it’s like painting a wall. It’s all in the prep work, right? If you don’t fix a hole, it’s just going to get worse, right? Well, it’s the same thing here. If you don’t plan out your garden, it’s just going to be an uphill battle. And that’s not something you want to do. You want to make sure you have a solid plan. And all of this can be more to help you survive a situation that you want to to live through. Could be whatever. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Can be a loss of a job. Could be a family member sick. Something natural disaster. Could be many different things. So just think about that. These are the differences between a prepper garden and a regular garden in my opinion and how I’ve over the years evolved my gardening to something different. And it doesn’t really have to be spoken about all the time, but I’ve done a couple videos on this type of subject and you guys really like it. So, we’ll talk about it more clearly and I don’t plan to do every single video about it, but I felt like with the comments coming in about, you know, the squashes and beans and stuff like that, I wanted to make a point that if you want to survive, you need to garden within your season. And if you’re not gardening within your season with the plants you’re making, you’re leaving a lot on the table. and your survivability. If you watch that one video and you gave yourself a rating, you can take it down a notch. You know, you can take it down a point or a half point, I don’t know, whatever. It’s all subjective really. Um, but you can definitely take it down because you’re leaving so much on the table as far as what you can grow and what you can harvest that it could hurt you in the long run. Goodbye. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
25 Comments
I'm working on wider spacing so I don't have to water as much.
We've had a lot of rain this year but normally it stops earlier. I couldn't see the results of it in the spring/summer season because of the odd rain year.
But my water buckets and barrels are full so I won't have to use the city water until the end of August or maybe the first of September if it doesn't rain.
I also need to add to the small water catchment system.
I also need to work on the hungry gap food. We don't have basements or cellars here to store things in a cool place. I need to find things to store that us and the birds can eat. We don't eat a ton of greens in a short amount of time. I guess we would if we had to 😂
I actually got more yield when I just gardened as a hobby, instead of trying to do it as a prepper. This year I tried growing winter squash + corn for their pure calories and long-term storage, but it looks like I'm hardly going to get anything off those plants. Compare to last year, I grew a ton of tomatoes and peppers that I could've preserved if needed. So now I think the best prepper crops are the ones that you're familiar with and can get a consistent yield from.
In an ideal world yes I'd rather have a basement full of winter squash and root vegetables. But in practice for my soil/climate/area it's more realistic that I'm choosing between harvesting 3 or 4 squash vs 50+ lbs of tomatoes from one garden bed. Maybe I can try growing squash again for the next 2 or 3 years and figure out what I'm doing wrong and which varieties grow best in my area. But in a survival situation, I don't have time for experimenting.
A big discrepancy here is also established gardeners vs new gardeners… I think a new gardener should probably try 10 different varieties of tomato in their first year to see which performs best for them. Then narrow it down in the following year to 1 or 2 that does well. Long-time gardeners are lucky to already have the knowledge of what works for them and what doesn't. But if you tell a beginner "just grow an entire bed of Cherokee purple tomatoes", that's the definition of putting all your eggs in one basket. It might turn out great, or they might have total crop failure.
This is my third year really making an effort on the fall garden. I've made that mistake of holding onto to summer plants into fall when I could have gotten more production from a cool season plant. So my main goal this year is to go big on the fall garden. I knew this would require me to pull out nearly all my summer garden by early September. But for a crop like peppers, I get my biggest harvest in September into October but those harvested in October are slow to ripen. Knowing this I planted quite few extra pepper plants to make sure I had plenty to preserve by early September. Otherwise I would have been very reluctant to pull a pepper plant before first frost while it's still producing.
Trying to grow things that do well yearly. Asparagus, sweet potatoes, jerusalem artichoke, garlic, tomatoes, okra, squash, green beans, melons, berries, fruit trees
This has been my first serious year as a gardener with good success, but all the rain introduced a fun new fungus called choanephora rot that im trying to deal with. Truly fun times lol
Even in the cold wet climate of northern New England with 120 frost free days I plant a spring, summer, and fall garden. It allows me to fill in one crop fails and extend my harvest season from May to early November.
That was my problem. I kept holding onto my summer plants as long as i could trying to get the last bit of production out of them when I should have just pulled everything and prepped for spring.
I learned the most about figuring out 3 season growing in Northern New England by learning from Market Farmers that grew on small acreage with out the use of a tractor. Elliot Coleman has great books on organic gardening, growing in 3 seasons, and harvesting over the winter. JM Fourtier Curtis Stone are out of Canada and both have good books on crop rotation, weed suppression, and making the most out of a short season. Stefan Sobkowiak is a Canada fruit farmer that has great tips on using polycultures to grow fruits and vegetables together that can easily be integrated into pretty landscaping in a suburban yard.
While gardening in the southern US is very different than where I live there is a lot of useful info from the people I listed that could help you grow and harvest 12 months out of the year. Even though I only have 120 frost free days and our ground freezes solid for 3.5 to 4 months out of the year I still harvest food from my garden from mid May to mid November.
I see a 6 x 8 Harbor Freight greenhouse back there. How is it working out for you? I had one for a few years, it held up pretty well until a windblown tree branch big around as me creamed it.
Started pulling tomato plants this morning. Watermelons and peppers are loving the heat . Cucumber and winter squash round 2 are popping . Popcorn is a foot tall and beans are flowering… waiting for a supposedly 4 day weekend of rain to show up.
Sooo… fall is my time to thrive. It’s my fave season and here where I am in MS we don’t get much Fall.
It’s like summer 90% of the year and we get about 2 weeks of fall and 2 weeks of winter and about a week of spring between the rain and tornado season 😂
Saying all of that to say…. I am so excited to plant a fall garden for the first time! I like lettuce. All the lettuce I started and planted in spring perished. Got none! I’m still salty about it. So I have been looking forward to what does best as we usually have mild winters and warm Autumns that can survive the handful of frosts that we will have as this year I was able to actually walk down to the garden and harvest this or that to finish a recipe and not have to load up and drive to town. That, that was the most amazing feeling.
I think if you are trying to prep, then carbs and proteins need to come first, so potatoes, dried beans, grains for milling, etc. Food that keeps well and is easy to preserve is the way to go.
My Fall garden is waiting in the wings, up potted and waiting for the beds to rest for the month covered in a well balanced fertilizer and a layer of compost. The rest of the beds are finishing up for summer with melons and squash and cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, and okra. It’s too hot here in Arizona to put any Fall plants in until the end of August. I watched your previous video on Fall crops and have pretty much the same vegetables going in, then.
To everything there is a season… cool season crops vs warm & hot season crops and the use of hoops with season extenders like shade cloth, row cover and frost blankets (use two layers when it gets down into the teens) to stretch the growing and harvest on either end.
Be sure to look critically at each crop as the season transitions approach and pull out the old barely productive plants and replace them with something more season appropriate that will be productive.
I love seasonal planting, growing, preserving (and eating!) – not just for preparedness, which is very important, but really to maximize our food independence all the time.
I think I'd rather have that head of cabbage and also have a basement store room full of preserved foods from the summer growing season.
The only way for me to have a fall garden at all is to plant in the high tunnel. Outside of that my soil freeze rock hard. In the high tunnel I fill 20 55 gal barrels with water to keep it from freezing at night. As soon as the last of the chickens are harvested and bottled next week I will start prepping for the fall garden. I've got 200 peppers flanked by sweet potatoes that will stay, spring planted Brussels will produce through the winter, carrots, beets, nappa cabbage, Dutch head cabbage, broccoli (after the central head is harvested I'll have side shoots all winter), collards and kale among other cold weather crops. Last year I started experimenting with the 7 water barrels I had(I now have 14 and will purchase the other 6 used at $10 each). The soil temperature never got below 49° even when temps outside were in the negative. Also in the winter my blood pressure goes up for lack of sun. This didn't happen last year because even though the days were shorter it was enough sun to keep it down working in the high tunnel. So good food and no longer need bp meds that I was on for 15 yrs. Win! Win!
Understand not fitting anywhere!
The first thing I grow is stuff that will come back yearly without too much effort. Jerusalem artichoke, elderberry, muscadines, blackberries, huckleberries and garlic grow wild here in Southwest Arkansas. I also have pecan, black walnut and oak trees on my property. So without to much effort I have food. There are other things that I plant that will also grow for years before having to replant like mint, lemon balm,roses( wild rose hips are high in vitamin C), amaranth, clover, alfalfa, and onions. Things that will regenerate on their own you shouldn't harvest everything. Leave some so it can do it's own thing.I try to let the native things have sway because they are going to survive better than something that is not. I also grow a fall garden and will have food in the garden until the beginning of January. I was taught by my grandparents who were born in 1890 to survive. You aren't saying anything new. They survived world wars, famine, and disasters. You aren't talking about a "prepper" garden. This is normal where I live. I am 54 years old and have done this all my life.
In gardening, timing is everything. Specific times…..keep note’s of a lot of events…. Plan as well with these notes. Thank you for posting this.
It should be more like a Victory Garden, a la Battle of Britain. And i have nice hardy Passiflora vines growing wild here…so i get beauty and medicine to boot❤ Hoping my volunteer Ground Cherries can survive my predation long enough to get a good seed stock going.
Thanks for the info fellow prepper 🙏
My prepper garden is very different, so not all gardens are all the same. My food forest is my calorie dense garden, it's actually a jungle. My prepper garden (rooftop garden) is to grow food year round, it's a completely a container garden…the prepper garden should be able to run without store bought fertilizer, a prepper garden should run without grid water, a prepper garden should be able to produce it's own compost, a prepper garden should include animals to provide sustainable manure for fertilization…it's very different from just simple gardening, everything nature naturally provides , you should be able to replicate.
As a prepping gardener, I have a different approach. I grow thing like parsnips and Turnips that will store in the ground over winter. No need to harvest until you need it. Snow frozen ground, doesn't matter. I also grow things like corn salad that will grow even under snow. Now the gem of the garden is the perennials. Plant, establish, and leave it alone. Its there year after year ,harvest as you need it. I also have perennials planted that will provide nutritious greens early in the spring. Just an idea for you and your listeners. Branch out from the usual.
jerusalem artichokes. i always have them planted in contained area. just in case. you cant get rid of this sh@! and root crops and long storing squash.
in your more or less wild area near tree line. you can grow a shi# ton of jerusalem artichokes and feed forever.