Posted on 08/26/2013 6:20:36 AM PDT by Travis McGee
It might come down to consuming that crop to stay alive. I hope not, but starving people will eat grass, tree bark and old shoe leather. Then they start looking at each other.
I’d say move away from cities, into an area that can feed itself from crops raised inside a 100 mile radius. A lot of America might as well be a moon colony, if it had to feed itself locally. What if the trucks and trains full of food stopped coming, for a number of reasons?
If your family can survive the first year, there’s a good chance that local “farmers markets” will proliferate, even if transportation is primitive. Getting through that first year will be key, and no guarantee, but folks must plan for a year without food deliveries from afar.
I moved from SoCal to North Florida, and the above was a key reason. We have plentiful water, I even have a shallow (35’) hand pump well in my back yard that produces potable water. Everything grows here, so if we make it past a year with a broken national transportation infrastructure, we’d have a shot at establishing a local infrastructure.
yep. It could be.
I think this possibility is why the govn. is going to do a practice in November assuming the country grid goes down. It is the most likely scenario and could happen any day. Don't need a nuclear bomb, just stick some code in the right place and the grid goes down.
Your estimate of three days for stores to be cleaned out, is accurate or maybe it won't take that long in a panic. When a hurricane is going to come through here, after three days before the hurricane gets here, there is no food or water or gasoline to buy. In a panic, it might not take three days. Even when power comes back on, food on trucks can't get here until gas stations have gas as the trucks have to have access to gas to fill up after they get here in order to get back to where they came from.
The last item to get here after a hurricane is bread. Other foods get here but I suppose our bread comes from Houston bakeries and they had to gear up to make more bread to send it here. For whatever reason, bread took longer than other food to get here.
Flour, baking powder, baking soda (whichever one it calls for) will make several kinds of bread, the easiest being tortillas. Tortilla recipes are on the web and I have a recipe for the easiest way to make them; I should send you that.
Sorry the potato, white Sunflower tubers, and Walking Onions got on your thread but a bunch ask me for those websites and now they will have unending food so maybe I'm not sorry it came up here. Your story is about survival in the midst of a country meltdown and I do believe that happening is not far away.
You are a true Patriot.
I need to buy more long-term food! I didn’t mind the potato discussion at all, it’s part of the thread. It will all be about food if the grid goes down.
One thing you are most assuredly not, Sir, is a hack writer. I say that with the utmost respect, while praying that what you have written is a work of fiction, as opposed to a prophesy of what is to come in the not so distant future.
Thanks, but I sincerely hope I’m completely wrong about it.
Start a practice garden now. Just do it.
In the backyard where your neighbors can’t see any failures :P
Moreover, if there’s any landscaping going on near you and you have a place to store them stacked, see if you can score any of the large landscaping pots (the big black plastic ones). You can use those in a sunroom in the winter for fresh stuff to supplement preps with cold sensitive stuff like tomatoes and peppers, and in the rest of the seasons on a driveway or sidewalk where you couldn’t normaly grow stuff. And at least 2 shovels. 2 is one and 1 is none. You could, in a pinch, dig up the median or an empty lot for soil to fill the pots.
You have a 12month growing season. No excuse to starve in your ‘hood. None at all.
The problem will be enough seeds on hand to actually feed people, knowledge on how to save them once the crop is done, and knowledge about growing food itself. Gardening books would help with the latter, and I recommend ‘Seed to Seed’, by Ashworth for a pretty substantive text on seed saving. It even gives information on specific seed saving techniques and planting seasons for different areas of the country. For each plant.
We’re assuming the people have access to some water.
I have a hand-pump water well in my yard, but if I had to depend on growing food, I’d starve. No green thumb at all. I do have some amount of “survival seeds” but I’d need to cooperate with a green-thumbed neighbor.
Nearly every green thumb started out brown. Mine did.
I still lose a shocking number of transplants. Mainly to deer. Course that wouldn’t be a problem after a short while if the power goes out.
Just as important as seeds are tools. Garden implements, something to use as starter pots (I recycle sour cream, yogurt and other small plastic containers for this), and something to turn your soil over, OR a steady supply of something to use as mulch.
Link for you. Print out and save, just in case, and either laminate or put in plastic sleeves and keep with your seeds:
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/vh021
Ping!
You need to read this
And another one:
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/topic_nematodes
Several sub links.
If your soil is sandy, you likely have ‘todes.
“No green thumb at all.”
I had a black thumb but now I know what to do and am growing food plants on my deck. I’ll send you, by Freepmail, how I figured out how to grow food plants. Having fresh food along with long term food makes all the food last longer.
Thanks, the formatting is rough but I’ll fix it and print it.
Matt:
You wrote another winner. Are you just selling “The Bracken Anthology” for Kindle or will it be released on paper? I will need something to read through power outage. Besides the book will look good next to the yellow book, red book, and blue book I have on my bookshelf.
John
Yes, I’ll probably format it for print in a couple of months.
Another question for techies (I used to be one many years ago but am sadly not up on the latest in telecommunication routing architectures) . Short of several worldwide EMP’s, is our communications network really that vulnerable to being taken down nationwide? (I mean without any EMPs. Just local attacks?) I thought there was a lot of redundancy, parrellism, and capability of rerouting network traffic among multiple nodes on the fly in the event of a hit in a certain location.
I can definitely see the economic devastation if our monetary system crashed, can totally imagine the EBT zombie rampages happening, but just wondering if it necessarily implies that our entire communication, Internet etc could be taken down so easily...
Maybe a bit more explanation of what scenario could cause the worldwide communications networks to go down would be helpful. Even just a few added sentences. I’d like to pass on to some family members who are engineers and they will probably ask about that.
That was a great read. Thanks.
Great stuff, Matt. Thanks for your work on behalf of the Restoration!!!
Semper fi, brother!
D.C. Wright
USMC Retired
III/OK
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