Suggestion:
Buy enough seed of the cheap stuff for your neighbors to plant gardens too.
When things start ‘making’, let enough go to seed for you and the neighbors. Lots of pages on the net on how to save seed from this or that.
When your tomatoes start making the little suckers, pinch them off and pot them up and give them to neighbors/friends so they can have tomato starts too.
Get a 6 or 8 sweet potatoes from the grocery store. Plant them in containers under a cpl inches of dirt. Water them regularly and put them in full sun. When they start sending up slips you’ll have enough for you and the neighbors too. You can train them up a fence (do NOT let them root along the ground as they grow, you won’t get any if they do that) and they look like an ornamental vine or screen.
If things get really dodgy, the last thing you want is to be well fed in a neighborhood of skeletons.
I save buncho seeds every year, just in case. They don’t take up any room and each year when I get more I feed the old ones to my chickens.
Excellent post—Prep Basics—you and your neighbors must be on the same team.
I definitely support bribery to get them there. ;-)
Also, get a pound bag of several kinds of dry beans. A bag of the mixed soup beans is good too but you’ll have to separate them.
Take 10-15 of the beans, put them on a damp paper towel in a small ziploc bag and put them somewhere ‘bright’ but not in direct sun. If they sprout you’ll know that bag can be used for garden seed. MOST beans you buy in the store are bush beans (harvest is easier for those). Ditto chickpeas, lentils, limas, etc.
I’ve used this as a cheap source of bean seeds for years.
YMMV.