Garden Yields for Storage

On request from a fellow Substacker who like me is concerned about the food supply

Theodore Atkinson

wrote a piece recently about the food supply.

I hope you're paying attention to this

In short, the food supply is increasingly stressed, due to inflation, labor shortages, a radically shifting climate (for many reasons, not just humans) general mismanagement (and widespread indifference) and not a little globalist malfeasance. Increasingly the future of the food supply according to technocrats is more centralization, more control, more regulation, more chemicals/pharmaceuticals, more high tech, more land controlled by billionaires and institutions. You will never hear these people talk about land reform, decentralization, local production of essential foods, assistance for young people to return to the land. They want to automate farming, and lock us up in cities. They want to jack up our feed animals with mRNA and DNA jabs. They might just want to get rid of feed animals and replace them with feed insects they can jack up with mRNA and DNA gene manipulation.

Theodore is a Canadian setting up a homestead, looking to grow as much food as he can. He is so far north his growth zone is somewhere between 2-3. I thought I was far-north here, somewhere between zone 4-5. I commented on his post, pointing out that the media is increasingly fearmongering about bird flu. Most people probably don’t recall, there was an “outbreak” in 2022 globally and they culled 38million birds. One bird gets the flu and they slaughter tens of thousands and bury or burn them.

US bird flu outbreak: millions of birds culled in ‘most inhumane way available’

Mon 6 Jun 2022 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 19 Sep 2022 19.48 EDT

The US poultry industry has increasingly switched to “the most inhumane method available” to cull tens of millions of birds during the latest outbreak of avian influenza, according to government data.

Outbreaks of the disease, also known as bird flu, have wreaked havoc across Europe and the US this year, with 38 million birds killed in the US so far.

See, they are going to fix that problem, with gene manipulation aka mRNA and DNA jabs. Except they have done no research to see if this is effective, nor on what effect that might have on people who eat the animals, nor do they have any real intention of doing any research. There is no intention to label food from animals this tech is used on. The “experts” have effectively decided they are so brilliant and so infallible, testing in this regard is not necessary. They have no intention of even telling people they are using this tech on animals. The media isn’t letting us know.

They don’t have to tell us anymore when they are experimenting on us, the FDA and CDC have effectively cancelled informed consent. IDK, I guess they are nazis.

The Era of Informed Consent is Over

(It is generally my opinion these experts and their overlords should be fed to wolves, bears, maggots, worms and bacteria to make compost, and to whatever is at the bottom of the Marianas Trench - but that is not the point of this post.)

Anyway, Theodore asked me to write about my root cellar, what I put away, and how long it lasted. He thinks people might find such info useful.

I ate the last of the stored cabbage on the 15th of April. We stored about 20, cabbages that are bred specifically for storage. My mom just bought a grocery cabbage and it is crap compared, very unsatisfying.

This is what we stored, plus about five not in this picture already in storage, for three of us. This does not include the 8 cabbages we had already turned into sauerkraut. We eat cole slaw on the regular.

Conditions are such the root cellar will be effective for a little while yet, though it has been warm and conditions have degraded. Presumably if you had artificial refrigeration or a more traditional root cellar underground, such cabbage could last until early summer.

We still have a few carrots. I stored about 40lbs. The carrots are still at least as good as store-bought. That was the toy box my mom made for me when I was a kid. I probably could have stored another ten lbs; this side is denser with carrots than the other.

I tried to store eleven stalks of brussels, but that was a mistake. I should have blanched the heads and froze them. They dried out quickly in storage.

This is how much squash I put in storage. It is truly excellent squash, but we simply did not eat much of it. We eat potatoes more regularly. Though, if the grocery stores were empty we surely would have eaten squash every day.

I grew about 350lbs of potatoes, and put about 200lb in storage.

We ate potatoes probably 3-4 days a week or more. There are still a lot of potatoes left, more than I can plant. I don’t mind growing a lot more than we would normally eat. Again, if grocery stores had been empty we could have eaten potatoes every day.

I grew 35 tomato plants. We put away 40 pints of salsa, 40 pints of stewed tomatoes and 25 quarts of pasta sauce. I gave away probably 50-75lbs of tomatoes. We ate raw tomatoes every day from mid July to early October.

I am going to grow a lot more onions this year. I harvested maybe 15lbs for storage, and we didn’t have any left by Christmas. I would rather have closer to 100lbs to store. Also I am going to try to find storage apples and pears locally, up to 100lbs of each, instead of squash. I have apple and pear trees in the orchard bred for storage fruit, but it will be a few years before I grow 200lbs worth.

I also canned about 12qts of pickled peppers (12 more I canned without pickling went bad.) I pickled 12 pints of green beans (more of that for sure this year). We canned 50 pints of sauerkraut. My mom canned about 12 qts of pickles (I am going to grow more cukes and pick them smaller this year.)

Everything we stored I grew here. the space is about 5000sq ft, less than half of that is garden beds, but then there is probably 1000sq ft of vertical space for melons, squash, tomatoes, peas and beans.

All the 2023 garden posts are here:

The only things I put away that I didn’t grow were 24 pints of sweet corn (which I am very glad I did), the cuts from two deer, some ducks, pheasant and fish. Wild game however cannot be counted on, for sustenance, because in the near term there are strict possession limits on how much you can store, and long term if civilization does collapse, people would probably harvest wild animals to near extinction. As to grocery stores being empty, security would be just as much of a concern as how much food you have in storage - perhaps more important. But I don’t worry about that anywhere near as much as I am focused on the quality of the food I and my parents eat now. Good health begins with whole foods. The best whole foods are what you or people near you grow.

One thing I am not growing a lot of here are spice and medicinal herbs. My intention is to spend more of the rest of my life studying herbalism, because that seems like a growth industry, and it interests me. I know a fair amount already, but I intend to make it a regular practice.

All that said, 50-60% of what the three of us ate this year, we grew, gathered or killed. That is a long way from being self sufficient, but we are much further along that curve than most.