11 Crops to Grow To Survive Difficult Times!

we are living in incredible times i mean even our own government is talking about food insecurity we're going to be looking at 11 different crops that you could potentially grow to take care of you and your family hey everybody chad cruz here with health and homestead we're going to be looking at some of the highest yielding crops so that even if you have a small piece of property you could grow enough food now the first crop that i want to talk about is a crop that's important for storability and to get enough calories and that is a grain called amaranth this is a native of peru amaranth has an average yield of about four and a half million calories per acre and contrasts that with if you have truly free-range chickens i don't mean 40 000 in a barn with a little fenced in area they call free range but true free range if you're only getting the food from that property it is suggested that you have about a hundred per acre and when that will give you about 110 000 calories and then if you contrast that with cattle cattle you get about 180 000 calories per acre but then when it comes to something like amaranth you're realizing you're getting many times the calories per acre you're getting somewhere around 4.5 million calories per acre and this compares well with something like wheat with wheat you're looking at about 4 million calories per acre now i believe potentially you can get a lot more than that per acre if you're using something like i have grown specifically called the golden giant amaranth this beautiful amaranth can get upwards to a pound of seeds in one head this is absolutely incredible another benefit is that it doesn't take as much nitrogen as something like corn and so this is easier for someone to grow who may not have as great of soil it's also very nutritious and it tastes good and some of the varieties do very well at popping like tiny tiny tiny little popcorn another reason that i picked amaranth specifically is because it's easier to harvest and it's easier to process than something like wheat wheat is a phenomenal thing to grow 94 percent of people do perfectly fine with wheat but the trouble is it's very labor intensive to be able to grow it and then make it into bread number 10 is a nut tree now when it comes to nuts people would generally just want to buy a property that already has nut trees because they take so long to grow but there is one nut tree that i know of at least that doesn't take all that long and that is the philbert tree or the hazelnut tree and the fascinating thing about this tree is that you may be beginning your crop somewhere two years into growing this tree so that's incredible two to three years in once you get to six seven years in you'll be getting a you know 20 30 pounds per little tree and so then if you have several of them you're going to be having a great source of nutrition for your family thinking about this this is a nut that you can grow rapidly yes other trees like walnuts or pecans all these things yeah we all love having those and i do too i'd love to have a walnut tree or pecans or these kind of things but since they take so long to grow and hey why not plant some anyway if you live in an area that you can grow them but the good news is if you need some rapid calories growing some filberts is a fantastic way to go they're going to be getting upwards of nearly 7.8 million calories per acre the other benefit to filberts is that for someone who doesn't have a large acreage even just a small area they could be growing a few filbert trees because they'll be getting a lot of calories in a very small space now number nine is a plant that you probably would expect if you're looking for a lot of nutrition and that is kale and we're not growing kale for calories as much as we are nutrition and when it comes to calories per acre you're looking at about three and a half million calories per acre for kale so it's one of our less calorie dense plants for our property some of the plants we're growing we're really growing to get adequate calories this one we're going to have incredible nutrition and one of the things about brassicas brassicas you have things like brussels sprouts cabbage kale and the trouble with these things if you all grow them together and let them go to seed at the same time their pollen will mix and the next year you have no idea you're going to have a franken plant next year and so for me i want to grow just one of the brassicas and allow them to grow to seed at one time and so for me in general kale is one of the easiest of the brassicas to grow and it's probably the highest in nutrition of all the brassicas and so for that reason that's a crop that i want to be growing in my 11 most important foods now on to number eight and that is beets and why do i pick beets beets number one are very nutritious we know that they can help with blood flow in our bodies we know that they've been shown scientifically to enhance our athletic performance so they're phenomenal you can store them all the way until your new crop comes in the next year and some beets are very rapid growing so you may get them in 50 some days other beets like the mammoth mangle beets that i've grown in the past i love these these are the best tasting beets some people just grow them for their animals to feed to their animals but why would you do that when they taste better than any beet i've ever had in my life they're super super sweet super super tasty so you can have the quick ones so that you can quickly get them if you need the food and if you have a longer season you have the time period you have 100 days you can grow some of these giant ones beets are really a double time plant because not only do they give you great nutrition but they're giving you upwards of 10 million calories per acre so these are just one of these phenomenal plants that store well great for your brain they're just good all around number seven is one of my favorite plants to grow and that is sunflowers and the reason sunflowers are so great is because you're getting a nut-like plant to seed obviously but it's like having a nut tree if you can't have nuts grow fast enough in one season you can have an incredible harvest of sunflowers they're a beautiful plant to grow i mean you just love walking by them every day and they're an easy plant to harvest you can just cut the head off and let it dry in your basement if you don't have time to dry it out right on the plant outside and these ones don't have massive amount of calories per acre it's about 5.2 million but not too shabby obviously doing quite well so that one is sunflowers on to number six and that is growing fruit trees perennials and now you say well why well there's a number of reasons one of them is how many calories per acre that you can get you notice that peaches can get maybe eight million calories per acre apples can get nine million calories per acre pears can get 10 million calories per acre they're up there with the beets and another thing that we're talking about in the midst of this is not only do they have great nutrition which they do they'll help you get some calories and by the way they are not a weight gaining food look at people who just eat fruit and they're the skinniest people in the world but the thing is you can dry it so that you can have it all seasoned there's apples that can last upwards of a year if you buy the evercrisp apple it's phenomenally tasty and if you keep it in cold storage you're going to have that thing potentially until the next year when you harvest again or you can can it there's so many benefits and who doesn't like fruit number five is something that is potentially beneficial to your soil and it is also good for you and that is beans and beans are phenomenal because you can have something like well if you have rice we're not growing rice in this situation but you could do amaranth in beans grains mixed with the beans are incredibly nutritious together anyway they give you typically what's called a whole protein and so as you do this beans are something that also have great storability some of the foods we have we want to make sure that you can store them for long periods of time and that's one of the benefits to beans they're also very very easy to grow they do take some effort to shuck off the little shells that come on them one of the things you can do is you can put them in a pillow case and just beat it beat it beat it on the ground and then typically they break off and then you just have to get rid of the debris you should be good to go when it comes to calories per acre beans are not one of the highest at all they're 2.3 million for something like pinto beans or if you want soy 5.6 million calories per acre and i know someone's saying no that'll cause men to have too much estrogen or the research actually shows that's not true that's not true at all i've actually a video on that if you want to watch it and the research shows that women who consume more actually have less breast cancer number four is one that i love for storability and it's a strange crop that gives you two different foods in one plant and that is the squash and why do i say that it has two different harvests in one plant that's because in squash you not only have the what we standardly think of the meat the flesh of the squash that when they're nice and sweet are scrumptious but you have a secondary food inside of them it which is the seeds right and so the seeds are phenomenal to give you plenty of you know fat and protein and the flesh itself is something that is going to give you a wonderfully healthy carbohydrate by the way they're one of the best weight loss foods out there the flesh of a squash they're super good for you some of them can store for one to two years by just sitting in your kitchen table all you have to do is cure them in the sun for a little bit bring them in and they're good to go for one to two years you can be cooking them you can be still eating the seeds one or two years into doing it so if you have a bad year you may still have some squash left over from the year before incredible right now one of the things i'm trying to do is grow every variety of squash that can last one to two years and i'm trying to find the ones that taste the best and have the best store ability and if you want to learn more about that i'm making a video series on that at our website you're going to want to check that out and number three is a crop that maybe you've never grown before maybe you've never even tasted and it is fascinatingly enough it is indigenous to the united states it is the jerusalem artichoke this is not my favorite food when it comes to flavor it tastes okay you may have heard of the other name that people call them it's artichoke with an f in front of it and that's because it's what they said in the 1600s it's very windy today we would say it causes a lot of gas and it might some people actually find that their digestion does better when they consume jerusalem artichoke and other people find that it causes them a lot of gas so you're going to have to try it out for yourself but why do i say that jerusalem artichoke is one of the most important plants number one it's because it has an incredible amount of calories per acre it is one of the top three in my list and it can get upwards to 12 to 15 million calories per acre even the united states government when they had been studying plants during wartime they have said when war and famine afflict humanity the question is always asked why don't people grow more jerusalem artichoke because all the way back in the 1600s in the 30-year war back in thuringia in germany one of the things they discovered was that people who survived were living off jerusalem artichoke meaning it had just gotten there either in the late 1500s or early 1600s this was before they had even had the potato really in that area also this is something that can stay in the ground all winter long so you can either harvest it in the fall or you can leave it in the ground in any time you need to dig it up you just go out in your yard and dig it up you could either lay some ground cover over some leaves and such to give it a little insulation or not but it just gets harder once the ground is frozen but this is a plant that is super easy to grow it grows itself the only trouble is it's hard to get rid of once you've got it and one final point is that for you who maybe like me you have poor soil and i want to have it better and better every year but even if you have poor soil the great thing about jerusalem artichokes is that they can grow in just very very poor soil now number two in our 11 most important crops to grow is a crop that i'm growing not as much for nutrition as it is for calories and you may say i don't want too many calories i'm going to gain weight no no no this is very unlikely to make you gain weight when you eat in its whole form but it is a necessity to have plenty of calories in difficult times and that crop is corn and corn has one of the highest yields of all plants fascinatingly when we look through history we never had corn in europe throughout history until basically the 15 1600s they got it from the new world and a lot of the new world plants like jerusalem artichoke corn and our final crop that we're going to look at all come from the new world and they happen to grow way more calories per acre than the old world plants the great thing about corn and i don't grow sweet corn i grow grain corn so that you can make things like cornbread or or polenta you could grow johnny cakes these kinds of things and so this is a plant that dries right on the plant itself so you don't have to do any special drying for it you just harvest it you do have to once it's dried out you do need to get it off the cob and corn can get as we see 15 million calories per acre if you have very high nitrogen soil and now on to our final crop and that is well potatoes but it's two kinds of potatoes even though they're not even related to each other that's the sweet potato and the regular potato and i say that because some people in the south sometimes struggle with potatoes and sometimes people in the north struggle with sweet potatoes but either one of them is a phenomenal crop to grow that is super nutritious throughout history there have been people who lived completely off of potatoes in difficult times i have a video talking about that but also sweet potatoes there's a culture in papua new guinea that eats 90 percent of their calories come from the sweet potato there was a time in okinawa where they would eat nearly 70 percent of their calories in the sweet potato and they became the one of the longest living groups of humans in history so sweet potatoes are incredibly healthy incredibly nutritious and which one stores better well it kind of depends on what variety you have i have had better success with my sweet potato storing you can get through the hunger gap with a good sweet potato i have them stored right now all the way from last year's harvest and we're already planting this year and so this is a great plant for storage if you have the right variety and you can also find great varieties of potatoes the potato itself may get upwards of 15 some some states might even get 20 million calories per acre that is unbelievable and since it's a crop that you can live off of nearly exclusively this really to me these two crops are some of the most important crops to grow now sweet potatoes you may may not get as many calories per acre 7.8 million calories per acre but what they don't make up in in calories they make up in in both nutrition and taste especially if you get the japanese variety the murasaki variety oh man those things are heavenly i could eat them every day i really think i could eat them every meal and not get sick of it but but i'm like that i just absolutely love them you can you can bake them and turn them into chips or you can just bake them and keep them nice and soft and they are wonderful either way you don't need anything on them i add a little bit of salt and that's just it they taste phenomenal so those are the 10 most important crops for me that i grow and you may find some of the very same benefits if there's a crop that you think oh i think you should have put this one in share it in the comments section down below i would love to hear about it now if you haven't seen my video on corn and the benefits of growing corn why it's so important it's right here you do not want to miss this video god bless and have a fantastic day

Channel: Health And Homestead

Views: 215,074

Keywords: survival foods, prepper garden, crops to survive, food to grow to be self sufficient, self sufficiency, homesteading, what should I grow in my garden, inflation, victory gardens, calories, nutrition, organic, vegan, paleo, diet, best crops, highest yielding crops, gardening, survival food

Id: 8wVbcBZ3vVk

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2022