Saving Seeds
In a long-term survival situation, viable seeds for food crops are worth their weight in gold. When you’re depending on your greenhouse and garden to keep your family fed, running out of seeds could lead to hunger, malnutrition, and worse. In order to remain viable (meaning they’ll sprout and grow), seeds must be saved, stored properly, and used promptly - usually within a year, or maybe 2. Keeping seeds in a freezer might help preserve certain kinds, but they must be protected from humidity and maintain a very steady temperature (no power outages). Even so, the germination rate will decline over time. Having only 10% of your seeds germinate could leave you in a decidedly untenable position.
When you’re prepping your emergency materials, then, it’s not a good idea to order dozens of packages of seeds and stash them away for “just in case.” It’s much wiser to buy fresh seeds and start growing your crops right away. You’ll learn how to keep them healthy, maximize production, deal with pests and disease, and be able to set some aside for long-term storage. In the meantime, you’ll enjoy saving money on delicious produce with better flavor and higher nutritional value than your grocery store offers.
While you’re earning your chops as a master gardener, learn how to gather, save, and store your seeds effectively. Different types of plants need different techniques, or the seeds can spoil. Test your saved seeds to determine their viability, adjust your procedures accordingly, and keep rotating your stored seeds so that you’re always supplied with the freshest seeds possible.
The Problem with Hybrids
In today’s gardening world, a seed is no longer a good old, reliable seed. In fact, it’s not possible to buy any random packet of seeds from your gardening shop or online catalog, produce your plants, collect the seeds, and be confident that you’ll get the same plant next year. In the quest to produce the perfect beefsteak tomato or the biggest, prize-winning pumpkin, the practice of hybridizing nearly any plant you can imagine has taken over the industry, and this is a problem for survivalists and preppers.
Hybrid seeds are produced by controlled cross-pollination of two different varieties of the same plant in a lab. The seeds produced from this artificial process bear positive characteristics of both parents and can produce plants that are more resistant to certain diseases, produce more attractive fruit (ideal shape, uniform color), or that have a longer shelf life, for example. Some of the best-loved tomato varieties (Better Boy, Early Girl, Big Beef) sought by gardeners every year are hybrids.
Hybrid plants differ from hybridized plants in that there’s no effort to create a true-breeding version. It can take years of inbreeding to develop hybridized seeds with uniform DNA that won’t produce an unexpectedly short plant because of a few pesky recessive genes. Instead, hybrid tomatoes are artificially pollinated from the same varieties of parent plants every year. Seed producers make a lot more money developing and producing new hybrids than they would by painstakingly breeding hybridized varieties that don’t demand new seed sales every year.
So, if the seeds from your beloved Better Boys won’t grow into a new generation of Better Boys, what will you get? Unfortunately, you might get anything. In fact, you’ll get a whole variety of anything, since DNA from different parents combines their genes somewhat randomly. You may get a few plants that are weak and succumb to disease easily, you may get some others that produce very little or that are particularly susceptible to changes in temperature, and you might be lucky enough to get a couple that give you a fairly decent tomato.
Instead of playing the hybrid seed lottery, go for tried-and-true seeds that produce reliably, don’t require artificial pollination, and have stood the test of time: heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. The primary difference between these two types is how long the varieties have been around, but either type will breed true. Many mainstream seed companies now offer heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, or you can seek out specialty heirloom catalogs that even offer a variety of crazy colors and patterns in ordinary vegetables. Purple carrots? Yellow and green striped tomatoes? Who could resist?
Improve the Soil
We’ve seen, throughout our agricultural history, the effects of disrespecting soil and the natural cycles of renewal in nature. Agricultural land that’s been eroded, depleted of nutrients, or even poisoned by excessive use of pesticides and herbicides can take years and even decades to recover. Some simple methods of supporting soil recovery, like allowing fields to lie fallow for a year, were adopted long ago. More recently, farmers learned that rotating crops, especially soybeans, could replace depleted nitrogen and balance the demand on other nutrients. Still, many farmers continue the practice of monoculture, which is continuously growing the same crops on the same fields, year after year. They counter the problems with high amounts of chemical fertilizers and increased use of herbicides and pesticides. These measures may solve some of the immediate problems, but over time nutrient depletion reduces the amount of soil bacteria and microorganisms that are critical to maintain soil fertility and produces pollution that does untold damage to nearby waterways.
As a custodian of the land, a survivalist needs to work to maintain the natural cycle of growth and renewal in order to live in a sustainable fashion. Since you’ll be growing food crops constantly, maintaining soil health requires active management. Here are some important management practices:
- Avoid excessive tillage in your garden and growing areas. Tillage can damage soil structure, cause compaction, speed the decomposition of organic matter, and increase the threat of erosion. Read up on the practice of no-till farming and consider the time saved and improved quality of your soil. Besides, are you going to be able to keep your agricultural equipment running when fuel supplies run low?
- Increase organic matter. Compost and mulch should be added every year to your greenhouse soil and garden. Compost from kitchen and yard waste, animal manure, and crop residue all make excellent compost with valuable organic materials. Be sure to work it into the existing soil gently.
Use cover crops. If you’ve got land that you won’t be using for a season or even for a few years, make sure you protect your soil by growing a cover crop. Soybeans and other legumes add nitrogen to the soil; while clovers, winter rye, millet and others provide plenty of organic mass. Combinations of cover crops, such as a legume and a grass, enhance the value of both individual types, and produce a no-till cover that provides a natural mulch for subsequent crops.
