It’s important to store. But unless you’re in a rare rare situation, few can store for more than a few years or have a varied enough diet to keep themselves from being deficient, or from going crazy from simply eating the same stuff all the time.
If the collapse lasts for a long period, you are going to learn how to homestead and renew your food supply. You need to buy seed and lots of it and learn how to save it. I’ve been gardening that way for about 10 years, here’s what I’ve learned on buying seed:
1. Heirlooms/open pollinated. Forget hybrids, don’t buy anything that can’t breed true. Heirlooms taste better anyway. Saving seed is a must.
2. Buy & store enough seed for each variety for at least 4 years. Crop failures happen.
3. Keep more than one variety of each vegetable. I can say plant out 4 varieties of melons a year, but have 12 more in the freezer and rotate on a 4 year cycle. That way if you do lose a variety for some reason you aren’t denied that vegetable.
4. Calories AND nutrition are key. Calories are good but it’s the nutrients that help convert it to energy efficiently so you are up to doing the chores of surviving. It’s easy to do in the summertime when the garden is green and abundant. Where it gets critical is early spring where stocks are low but no food can be taken from the garden. I read years ago that many pioneers got sick and died in the spring and not the winter, during the in-between time of little, no, or very poor quality food.
5. Buy vegetables for storage. Freeze, can, dry, root cellar - make sure you have stuff that will hold up to those. Root cellar storage is huge, the freshest food has the most nutrition. There are many, many heirlooms that were bred to be put in a root cellar and if taken care of last for a long time. I have had carrots in my fridge that lasted over a year and were still good to eat.
6. Raise plenty of dry goods and things that can be ground to flour. Beans, corn, grains, rice are obvious. Other things like buckwheat, cowpeas, grain sorghum, sesame, soup peas and chufas that aren’t so obvious.
7. Grow things to flavor the food. Sorghum, sugarbeets, stevia for sweetener, herbs for seasoning, onions and garlic, apples for vinegar, etc.
8. Grow perennials and overwinter. Fruit especially. Also things like multiplier onions, horseradish, Good King Henry, jerusalem artichokes. Thing that can be put in a bed and left there and will come up year after year and provide food. Leeks, spinach, carrots, brassicas, etc will overwinter with cover, can be harvest during any winter warm spell.
9. Grow things with multiple uses. Pumpkins with good roasting seeds. Eggplant with edible leaves, topset onions that have a bulb and tops and green onions too. Strawberry spinach - fruit and berries, beets - roots and greens, etc. Things that can be eaten in various stages, like flint corn, beans or winter squash.
10. Extend the perennial idea to planting things in the wild, give yourself forage material.
11. Cut and come again things like spinach, lettuce, other greens, tomatoes, peppers, melons that will keep producing. Things like favas and certain varieties of beans that will go dormant in heat and drought and come back when conditions are better.
That’s just a fraction of it, but it’s a start. My favorite catalogs:
http://www.fedcoseeds.com/
http://www.gourmetseed.com/
http://www.rareseeds.com
http://www.landrethseeds.com/
http://www.johnnyseeds.com/
http://www.southernexposure.com
http://www.seedsavers.org
bump for a great post!
Two more!
12. Emphasize things that produce lots of food in little space. More space to them, less to less efficient things. Pick prolific varieties. Grow things that can do well on bad soil.
13. Use beans, peas, and legumes as cover crops. I plant them all in one plot, pick them, turn them under. That way I don’t need a cover crop plot for soil building that’s not producing anything to eat.
Learn how to forage for wild plants/foods in your state...
What if someone DOES take your storage foods - or, in the case of the gov’t ‘confiscate your hoard’?
And what if you have to leave your home -
or just to supplement...know which plants/foods are edible in the wilds. Ditto, which plants are good for medicinal uses. (Also, learn which herbs/plants you can grow for use as medicinals.)