In this video we are going to pretend
like the apocalypse has hit us and based on some of the news I think
we've all been hearing lately, sometimes it can seem like that. But let's put the scaremongering aside
and discuss nine crops to grow in a survivalist setting. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where it is my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. Let's talk about this with a survival
setting and this is something I have pretty good experience in. Last year, June 2019 to the end of June 2019, I did something called the
apocalypse grow challenge. I covered it really heavily on Instagram. I have footage that is still sitting on
my archives waiting to edit for you guys here on YouTube, but
the rules were simple. I had to live off of only
what I could grow, fish, forage or barter for at fair market value, and I did that for 30 days. So I've done that in a really urban
setting and that made me really think, okay, what do I have to grow in order to
quite literally survive for a month? Now, the first thing you have to
think about is, number one, calories. So we're going to be talking about crops
that are the easiest to grow for their caloric density and nutritional profile. And nutritional density is another thing. Some of our calorie heavy crops aren't
necessarily the most nutrient rich. They're serving that
caloric energy perspective, but they're not serving the
perspective of nutritional density. So our two categories that we're going
to discuss are going to be our calories and our nutrients. And
before we go any further, stay tuned at the end for a bonus category
of crops to grow to make this whole survival experience a lot more fun.
Let's go ahead and jump into it. Crop number one is the humble bean. It makes sense to look back at more
ancient cultures to figure out what they grew in order to subsistence
farm or subsistence garden, because that's just
how life was back then. And beans were a staple crop
across many different cultures. Now, the reason why they're
so good is number one, they're pretty calorically dense
compared to other things you can grow, but also a good amount of protein, all
sorts of vitamins and minerals in them. But on top of that, you can grow them
in many different ways. First of all, you have your categories of
bush beans and pole beans, and so based on your
unique growing conditions, you can choose which one
you want. This of course, is a vertically stacked
system growing bush beans. You wouldn't want to grow pole beans
in a system like this because of course then you'd need to trellis
all these different ones up, which doesn't make a whole lot
of sense. But then if you wanted, you could go ahead and throw some pole
beans on a trellis arch like this. And you have many, many ways to grow
beans. So as far as growing them, direct sowing is almost always
going to be your best bet. Although I will say they take okay to
transplanting. I've done that many times. In fact, I transplanted this entire thing. And besides the top suffering
from a little bit of spider mites, the rest of these are doing really nicely
and I expect to go to harvest out of those. Beans can be preserved. Beans
can be dried and stored for many, many, many months and years. And then beans can be worked into more
or less almost any type of cuisine and any type of recipe from soups to Mexican
food to all sorts of different things. And so beans are extremely high
up on the apocalypse garden list. Crop number two is going to be corn.
It's gotten a little cold, little windy, little rainy here. So I'm hanging
out under the awning. But corn, if you've listened to number one
and number two, beans and corn, you probably know number three, so
drop it down below if you know it. But let's talk about this. Most of us
are growing sweet corn in our gardens. I did a lot of that last year. Super rewarding to come out to the garden
and grab a stalk and grab an ear off the stalk and eat it fresh off
of the stalk. It's so delicious, but in a survival scenario, you
wouldn't really want to do that. You may want to opt to
grow a Dent corn variety, let it dry on the stalk to
somewhere below 15% moisture, and then what you can do is use it
as a dried corn meal, corn flour, that type of thing. That's going
to be a lot more versatile. It's going to be a lot easier to store
and preserve and you can just use it in so many more different recipes. So corn also plays nicely
with our first one. So if you use the corn stalk as a
makeshift organic trellis, then the beans, if you choose a pole variety,
can grow straight up it. And that leads us right
into our third pick. Apocalypse crop number three completes
the trilogy and that of course would be squash. So yes, for those of
you who guessed it, props, it is the three sisters combination
for our first three recommendations. So you have squash,
specifically winter squash. What that does is if you grow it on
the ground, it's a sprawling crop. And so it's going to be a faux
ground cover, a green ground cover. And what that's great for, if you
combine it with your beans and your corn, both of those are shallow-rooted crops
that really do prefer nice moist soil that's protected from crazy
fluctuations in moisture. And so what you'll do there is then
you'll throw squash out on the ground and you can have your beans climbing up the
corn if you so choose to do a pole bean and the corn of course providing
that support structure. So it's a really good triple threat. And then of course squash on
its own is nutritionally great. Calorically pretty good and
also a fantastic storing crop. Crop number four on our apocalypse
list, I've chosen cabbage. Cabbage is a pretty easy to grow crop
and it's special because it retains most of its nutrients even when it's
cooked. And if you want to preserve it, then you can of course do
that by fermenting it and
creating sauerkraut or other cabbage-based ferments. So it's great raw, it's great cooked and it's relatively
easy to grow and many varieties are pretty cold-tolerant. So you can grow it in
most regions throughout most of the year, barring the hottest and absolute coldest
parts of the year. So it's a really, really good crop. No, it's not the most calorically dense but
pretty nutritionally dense and combined with the fermentation angle, you can
actually do quite a bit with this crop. This next crop is absolutely number one
in my heart as a gardener and that of course is the humble but
really not so humble potato. These are a Norland red variety and
potatoes, right out of the gate, is a staple crop in a
survival scenario. In fact, potatoes and specifically this Norland
red potato right here is the one that provided most of my calories,
my base level of calories, for my apocalypse grow
survival challenge I did, as I mentioned earlier in the
video, June 2019 that entire month. Now these ones right here, you may be
wondering how do you still have some left? Well, these ones grew out of tiny ones that I
had forgotten and just didn't dig up in my raised beds and the other
ways that I grew them. In fact, these ones here came out
of my cold compost pile. Just the pile that I throw a bunch
of different things in. Of course, I guess some of them slipped through the
cracks and now I have a healthy amount, maybe like two or three pounds.
They're not the most sizeable, but they're completely free. And that
speaks to how easy potatoes are to grow. So easy. I've grown them in five different
ways - I've grown them in grow bags, I've grown them in five gallon buckets, I've grown them in raised beds with
hilling, raised beds without hilling, in ground, both with and without hilling. And you know which one performed the
best, surprisingly in the ground, buried deep. And I never hilled
them and I never touched them. I let the natural weather, the rain
throughout the season water them. And I got a massive haul of maybe 25 to
30 pounds just out of one bed of these Norlands on a friend's property.
So from a survival standpoint, potatoes are one of the few foods that
you can eat just potatoes and you won't be deficient. You'll, you'll be okay.
You're not going to be thriving, but you'll be okay. Calorically
pretty good. Good amount of magnesium, good amount of vitamin C. They are a great crop to grow and they
really are a set it and forget it crop that all you have to do is just not
harvest 100% of them every year and you're going to have them coming back
year after year after year. They're just an amazing
crop. So versatile. You can
turn them into hash browns, you can fry them, you can store
them in cool, somewhat humid place. They're going to last
for a long, long time. You can even turn them into
dehydrated potato flakes, whatever. The sky's the limit with potatoes. Clearly they're the favorite of mine and
these are probably gonna make it into a meal tonight. Our next apocalypse
pick is the humble kale. Now, is it the most calorically
dense crop? Certainly it's not, but it is extremely nutritionally dense
and the reason I picked it over many other greens is because
of its cold tolerance. You can grow this in almost any climate
throughout the winter provided you provide some cold protection like
a cold frame or a frost blanket, whatever the case may be. And it
actually surprisingly stores pretty well. If you were to cut it up and you
were to dehydrate it as kale chips, throw a desiccant like silica pack in
the container you're storing them in. This can be a great nutrient dense
little crunchy snack in the apocalypse. So kale, of course you
have this curly style. There's the dinosaur or Lacinato
style, many different varieties, some more cold tolerant than others,
some more, like I would prefer, heat tolerant than others. And
so definitely pick your variety, but kale does make it into
the top nine apocalypse list. Next up we have sweet potatoes, which despite the name aren't really
related to potatoes and grow slightly differently. They take a lot longer
to mature than the average potato. So if you're looking for
expediency of calories, you probably wouldn't choose this. But
there are some interesting benefits, namely that the greens are edible. Whereas with potatoes they certainly
are not edible and in fact potatoes even exposed on the surface you shouldn't
eat. We call those green potatoes. They have a lot of solanine content
in them. You don't want to eat that, but with sweet potatoes, not
only can you eat the greens, but you can just let this keep going and
going and going and you'll be pulling up these gnarly tubers. These are not even close to the max
size you can achieve. Of course, there's definitely a sweet
spot, but a great storing crop, good sugar content in here, good overall calories
and nutrient density. It's really hard to beat provided you
have the climate and the space to grow them. Our final one before the bonus
is the lentil. Lentil is a legume. It's a fantastic crop to grow. It's about 110 days for a dried lentil, so it'll get it all the way
there in just over about, well I guess just under four
months or so. So fantastic. You can grow in at scale. You want to
plant them maybe five inches or so apart. You can put a low trellis on if
you want to, you don't have to. You just want to make sure there's
nice air circulation. And again, these are in a jar and these are
stored. What does that tell you? It's a great dried storage,
food, calories, protein, bunch of good stuff going on with lentils. So make it a part of your
apocalypse survival garden. But those of you who have stayed, you have your bonus apocalypse tip and
that would be growing a ton of herbs. So I've got, what do I have? Rosemary,
lavender, basil, dill, thyme, oregano, sage - all that stuff is popping
off in this tiny little herb garden. And trust me when I say that you will
eventually get sick of eating potatoes, lentils, beans, squash, all
of this stuff, unseasoned. And speaking from someone who
literally did this for 30 days, I went through a love-hate bordering on
true hate of potatoes for a while and it's been nine months since that challenge
and I'm only slowly starting to like them again. So I got sick of them and having a bunch
of herbs that I can dry and dehydrate and mix into spice blends is
going to go a long, long way. What did you think of my apocalypse list? This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you have a suggestion that
you think I really missed out on, drop it down below so everyone else, including myself can learn from your
apocalypse garden recommendations. And what I'd like to say is, first of
all, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video,
cultivate that like button. And the last thing is if you like the
raised beds I have in my front yard, a link is going to be in the description. I now am the distributor in America
for these Birdies raised beds, which I really like. It's
starting to rain really hard. So I'm going to wrap this up. If you
like them link in the description, link in the comment, check
them out. And until next time, good luck in the garden. Keep surviving
and I'll see you on the next video.
