Easy to Grow

In survival situations, a good way to know that you have a source of healthy foods is by doing your own gardening. Gardening is rewarding in many different levels. Not only do you get a purpose to keep your mind centered on a day-to-day basis but you also get the benefit of healthy and nutritious food at the end. When you grow enough food, you can jar your food for the winter months. There are many different fruits and vegetables along with grains that can be grown quite easily even for the novice or beginner.

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Growing a garden will give you a sense of accomplishment that you can only get one way. That way is to go out and get some seeds and plant them in the ground. Grow a small garden of your own so that you can see just how fun and easy it really is. Knowing that you have successfully been able to produce a garden on your own will give you the confidence to do a larger-scale garden in a survival situation.

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Corn, squash, and beans are easy to grow plants that can be planted in a unique system known as the three sisters. You can plant corn, squash, and beans in the same hole, and they will grow in harmony together. Your corn stalks will grow tall and healthy giving you corn while the beanstalks will wrap around the corn and use them to grow upward providing you with beans and squash will bloom in the bottom covering the ground giving you fresh squash. This combination is known in many different cultures but was taught to Americans by the Native Indians.

 

I am not really a gardener and I only learned gardening when I married my husband who has the knack for gardening. My choice for plant food is the sweet potato. It is a vine that crawls on the ground, easy to grow and doesn't need fertilizer (as long as the soil is good enough). After 3 to 4 months, the roots will bear the sweet potato that can be harvested by simple digging. Aside from the root crop, the sweet potato leaves, particularly the young leaves, can be eaten raw like a garden salad with vinegar dressing. It can also be cooked and/or mixed with other vegetables in fish and meat dishes. Rural folks in the Philippines rely the sweet potato for their sustenance when food is scarce.

Planting sweet potato is easy. All you would need are cuttings of mature vines. A 1-foot long matured vine can have new leaves in 2 weeks and can be harvested after 1 month. But if you intend to have the root crops, do not pick the leaves for the root crop will be stunted. In farms, there are usually 2 areas of planting sweet potato, i.e. one for the leaves and one for the root crop.

 

Looking at some of the non-traditional but high yield plants is a decent idea if you're looking to produce your own food. Moringa trees are super easy to grow in my area (almost to the point of being a weed) and the leaves, flowers, seed pods, and seeds are nutritionally dense. They provide vitamins c, a, and some of the b complex, plus minerals like potassium, iron, zinc, and calcium. They also have a surprising amount of protein for a plant source, so all around they're a really good choice for a food crop. The downside is that I'm not a fan at all of, I've tried different preparation methods and I just don't like it. That said, if other food sources aren't readily available, I'd be a whole lot less picky about taste.

Another good plant as far as food yielded per square foot of growing space is malabar spinach. It isn't really a spinach, but you can use the leaves in the same way you'd use spinach. It's a vine and again, it grows like a weed here. I like vines because they have a small "footprint", you can plant more plants in a small amount of space than you can with shrubby plants, and extending your growing space vertically is cheap and easy. Malabar spinach has lots of vitamin A and C, and it's another source of iron. Iron's a biggie for me since mine tends to run low. I don't take iron supplements, but I have to be mindful of what I eat to make sure that I get enough. Since red meats and some of the other easy iron sources might be harder to come by in an emergency situation, I like to keep a mental list of plant sources just in case.

Those two are really good options for people in warmer climates like mine here in FL, but I'm sure there are fast-growing alternatives for just about everywhere. They aren't the first ting people think of when they start thinking about food crops, but they're definitely worth growing.

 

I had a great garden growing and then I had to leave town on an emergency. I asked my neighbor to feed my plants and water them while I was gone since I was going to be gone for at least 2 weeks. I come home and they were burned to a crisp. Living in Florida, you have to make sure that you time your watering right and make sure that your plants don't get too much sun or they will cook. Well, she "forgot" to water them and I came back to dead, brown stems. My corn, squash, beans, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, etc. All dead. So, this weekend, I am building a greenhouse with a timed spraying system so I can leave town and not worry about them dying again.

There is nothing more rewarding than being short an ingredient for dinner and being able to go out into your back yard and finding the ingredient that you need. @Tessa, I will have to look into Malabar spinach! Sounds like it's a fun plant to have and healthy at that!

 

When I was growing up, my grandparents who raised me owned a commercial greenhouse and we had about 8 huge garden plots that covered about three acres. We grew a lot of stuff here in Ohio! We sold plants as well as produce on a roadside stand that we had. The easiest things to grow in my opinion are squash, zucchini, tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and cucumbers. However, I have grown almost everything at one point or another. The experience that I gained from growing up in that household was way beyond anything any book or class could have ever taught me. I still garden today because everything tastes better when you grow it yourself!

 

I am learning some great information here. I never thought of eating sweet potato leaves not did I know that they were easy to grow. Thank you Lunasurvor for your information on the "three sisters". It is knew information for me.

I find that every day I want to see how different my garden looks from yesterday and how I can make it better next year. For example, this is only the second year I have tried growing green beans. (My first year was not good.) Now, I want to add sweet potatoes to my garden next year.

 

Thanks Luna Survivor for that gem of information about growing corn, beans and squash in the same hole. Its quite revolutionary and I can't look forward to practice it. I guess the squash will benefit the symbiotic relationship by providing shade to the other plants at the base conserving moisture. I have farmed squash in the past and it is a very easy crop to grow. I should also add that cowpeas are one of the easiest legumes to grow because they are drought resistant and grow very fast. Their leaves can also be eaten as vegetables.

 

What awesome information! Looking forward to putting some of the tips to use. I'm definitely a hardcore gardener. Have been doing it since I was little. Growing up in an agricultural area definitely helped me understand the ins and outs of growing vegetables and fruit. Very comforting to know that in a disaster situation I can at least grow food or know what plants are edible.
Right now I'm experimenting with growing an indoor garden, because where I live in Japan, there isn't the option of setting up a plot outside. So, while there will be no corn stalks, I might attempt a "twin sister" approach instead haha.

 

I think that if you have the space you don't need a survival situation to grow your own vegetables. There is nothing like walking into your garden and picking your greens a few minutes before you eat them. Every thing tastes better and you won't be able to buy anything fresher then what you grow at home.

 

I am definitely a hit and miss type of gardener. I often let the weeds grow and have babies before I get out there and thin them out. I love the idea of having enough time to work my garden to the point of not a blade of grass or weed to be found, adequate fertilizer, making and using a compost heap, etc.

Sigh.

I'll settle for a few good tomato vines. I don't really care for tomatoes, except in salsa, but they're one of the few things I can grow with this thumb that is NOT green.

 

Two things that in my experience are really easy to grow, overall full of nutrients and you can have a bountiful harvest of them.

Zucchini and spinach-type green leafs, like kale and chards. I had a lucky year with my swiss chards. I had so many at one point that I ate nothing but chard and aragula for a few weeks. On pasta, in a salad, or made into veggie soup.