Survival Gardening Secrets (That Even Work in Lousy Dirt) - Complete Presentation

hi my name is david the good i am the author of grow or die the good guide to survival gardening i am also the author of compost everything the good guide to extreme composting and about a dozen other books i've kind of lost track of i write gardening books and i practice what i preach i'm standing right now in our garden and over the next little bit we're going to wander around and i'm going to show you what we did on our property this whole system here is less than 11 months old and this entire area was just a big patch of grass and weeds on really bad soil our climate is usda zone 8b we are in lower alabama we get a good bit of rainfall a year probably 60 to 80 inches range depending on the year but we have fast draining grit that is acid and it is absolutely terrible yet we have a productive garden we have a lot of food coming in and today i'm going to show you how i did it and how we keep things simple and we grow our food a lot like our ancestors used to grow food and you could do this too no matter where you are so first of all these are our trellis beans right here these are velvet beans which are a medicinal this is a really weird medicinal plant it is a testosterone booster i have nine children and one on the way it has nothing at all to do with these beans don't look at these beans anymore that's enough but we grow our medicinals and we grow our crops right together they also have dopamine precursors if you want to look the variety up it's called mucuna prariens the velvet bean variety is utilis and uh it is it is a medicinal dopamine precursors mean you feel happy and it boosts testosterone which makes you awesome so that's it for that this bed right here right alongside you can see this stuff growing right this is not actually a crop yeah there are beans on it these are black eyed peas but these are improving the soil this time of year this is the summer we basically get a really good spring growing season and a good fall growing season when it's cool right now it is hot and humid and the bugs and everything are terrible and pretty much most of your vegetables that you plant early in the year kick off so what you do is you throw down cover crops and you build the soil back up in between this way this is going to be carbon and nitrogen going into the ground this is a combination of some sorghum grass and some black eyed peas if i wanted to have a rest a bed take a rest and build up during the winter time of year i would plant cool season stuff like mustards lentils chickpeas fava beans winter rye winter wheat it depends on how far north you get what you're going to plant we have basically a subtropical borderline temperate climate where we do get freezes but it doesn't get super super cold it doesn't stay cold for long enough to kill all of the greenery but the further north you get the harder it is to get cover crops that go all the way through but it's important to build the soil up in between and you'll notice these are not raised beds in the sense of building square you know lumber beds or putting in bricks or something like that we don't have aquaponic systems we don't have complicated gadgety stuff what we do is we dig the ground up we figure out how wide we want our bed this these are about three foot beds with about foot and a half wide paths this is a little tight but this is the area we use to grow small vegetables and then we set up trellises that we can also take down again these trellises are a design from josh satin this is called the trellis to make you jealous and it's a little overkill you don't really need trellises that are this complicated but they are nice and they last for a long time you really i mean if it if it was a grid down type of a thing you could really just go and get sticks and stick sticks in the ground and grow your beans up them or something like that or use your corn as trellises but this sort of a system right here is is really nice when we can get it so these are just for small vegetables right now these guys are pole beans that are going to be coming in again everything is really beat by the heat and humidity so this is not pretty but this is the about the third round of beans that we planted this year and as the season cools off and they uh it gets below the 90s they're going to be a little happier these beds are mostly just cleaned out and waiting for the next bit of season to come along well we while we are waiting for the um the next season to come we kind of make sure that the weeds don't take over and fill everything up with seeds because that's important too and in order to weed these things we have what is called a wheel hoe and i think we left it in the garden somewhere so when we find it i'll show you how it works this is a family garden i have no idea where everything is so come on wander through with me this is the last bed here you can see this bed is again covered with cover crops now i can get a yield of some dry beans out of here if i want to or we can shell these out for real cheap cover crops we just go to the grocery store and we get black eyed peas in the bag dry beans in the bag throw them down and when it's hot and humid and miserable they actually make a really good cover crop and they fix nitrogen they have nitrogen on their roots just like peanuts and other legumes and so these guys here are repairing this bed this bed previously grew summer squash earlier in the year and then before that it had onions in it so it's like rotating through it gets hot it gets miserable we throw the beans down we'll let the beans grow until probably next month chop them down use them for mulch on the ground or throw them in the compost pile and then we'll plant in our fall stuff if you look over here this is the beginning of the fall gardens this doesn't look like much of anything except a patch of bare dirt but this area already grew us cabbages earlier in the year followed by grain corn i grow grain corn because it's storable and sweet corn is like a nice snack but it's not the kind of corn used for flour and you can see there are beans coming in here these are growing up right here this is a new variety we're testing we're looking for dry bean varieties right now that can take the heat the rain and humidity that is a big big problem here so we are we're doing some trials of different varieties at this point to see which things are going to take off and which aren't these are dragon tongue beans those are black cocoa bush beans further down we have some other varieties pink hole let's see pink eyed purple whole beans which should do well because they're a type of black eyed pea but the uh the beans are basically storable calories these are ones that we're trying to get dry beans out of but because of our excessive rainfall it's really hard to get good dry beans they tend to just kind of rot and mold on the pod so you can see this dirt is terrible this you'd like to say it's a sandy loam but it's really pretty much just sandy grit it's powdery the organic matter content when we tested it was less than two percent it was lacking almost every important nutrient the only thing it was somewhat high in was aluminum and aluminum is not great uh so by spreading things out like we have here we've got these bean rows three foot apart you're actually getting a better a better uh you get a better yield for the space because it is pulling the nutrients in water from a large area when you have tight little beds you have to feed them better you have to water them more we don't have to feed this very much we don't have to water it very much and if you want to get food for survival and work with really bad soil go wider spacing there's a reason those wide spacings exist and it wasn't just because people were using tractors or mules and plows and stuff like that it's actually because they were relying on the rain so if you don't have the you can hear the thunder right now it may rain in the middle of this video and then i don't have to water so if you've got this wide spacing the amount of moisture that's in the ground there's like this bank of water and there's this bank of nutrients you've got less plants pulling from the reserve so the food and water in the ground can be way less than if you put a bunch of plants together real tight a lot of modern gardening is make a square out of wood plant a bunch of stuff in it really tight with tons of compost and make it like super amazing and water it regularly and put up sprinklers or even worse make an aquaponics system where you have all these complicated pipes and pumps and all that kind of stuff whereas in traditional gardening in our climate and in most of the united states you had wide spacing use the ground that you have wide that way you're not out here having to go along with a hose or put sprinklers up or anything like that all the time it allows you to take less fertility and less water and get a good yield on plants that well if they were planted tighter in this soil they'd probably just die or fail to yield so this is a this is a really easy simple way and i like to grow organically as you come further along you can see pretty the gardens start to get as we move to the pretty i started with the ugly spot so if you've tuned the first few people were like oh my gosh that guy's gardens is terrible except for those weird testosterone beans otherwise it's horrible i tell you gosh it's terrible as we get further down here it gets better i promise you it gets better but the soil here being so bad from the beginning i mean it really is like construction dirt so it's this constant fight to try and bring yields out of it and we tend towards the organic end of the spectrum i don't believe in spraying pesticides i i think generally if you have big pest problems something is out of balance now sometimes like earlier this year we had an issue with squirrels and the main problem that we found the problem that was leading to so many squirrels was that we had a serious lead deficiency in the garden so once we got the lead deficiency rectified we were able to bury all the squirrels and the squirrels are now feeding the crops there are times when something just comes in but usually uh i don't like to rely on spraying anything we like to go organic as possible but with the soil being this bad and us wanting to get yields of food not knowing how the country's gonna go or how weird things are gonna get having mouths to feed having having work your your ideal idea right of like the perfect you've got perfect compost and you've got animals that are chewing this thing up and they're going through a paddock and then you garden over there and then and then you build this amazing beautiful topsoil and you do this awesome no-till system and and everything is really rich and you're getting the most nutrient-dense perfect food and you don't have any pests because the nutrition levels are so high and it's so awesome that's that's imaginary it does happen you can build those kind of systems but to build a an incredible garden really quickly that way and have it be successful you really got to know what you're doing there's a there's a big learning curve and it really really helps if you start with good soil we started with horrible soil and when we first planted the first few things in here we had pest issues like you would not believe like these itty-bitty little black things they weren't flea beetles but they're similar they look like little tiny crickets and they would chew on the leaves all the time and cut worms were knocking down the sprouts and and it was just like oh my gosh man so we made a mix of micronutrients and macronutrients based on the work of gardening author steve solomon who is a friend of mine he wrote the book gardening when it counts if you don't have that book gardening when it counts definitely get that one after you get my book grow or die the good guide to survival gardening definitely get steve's book he he made a fertilizer called complete organic fertilizer and then later he changed that and added more micronutrients because you realize trying to do everything organically you may be missing some elements that are vital to your health like molybdenum or selenium or silver there's like little little bits of things that you're missing and so he wrote a second book after that one called the intelligent gardener where he expanded on complete organic fertilizer and made it no longer completely organic by the government's regulations but there's a ton of micronutrients in there so what we did was we tilled the ground up we made our beds we marked off where the beds are going to be and we have these gently mounded beds and then we burned we burned piles of wood from all these woods around us with just wood and weeds and then we extinguished those fires which gave us biochar or charcoal we extinguished the fire when everything's starting to get red and glowing and it starts to turn white around the edges you blast it out with a hose then we took that charcoal and we soaked it in barrels with micronutrient solutions so like dyna grow miracle grow whatever all the micronutrients are in there you pour it in there if you could get you could use fish emulsion and urine and all kinds of stuff whatever whatever you want that's got a high level of nutrients in it that that charcoal can soak up and then we took that charcoal and we turned it into the ground all through here so if you look in these beds there's little bits of charcoal everywhere so instead of trying to make enough compost to cover we've got actually about 11 000 square feet of garden space so roughly a quarter acre a little over a quarter acre instead of trying to balance all of that and and make enough compost for this space we wanted to get food quickly but the other problem of having this hot humid miserable weird climate is that compost doesn't stick around if we throw compost on the ground it goes back to sand a short period of time you're looking at sand again and we're fighting geology in some places organic matter sticks very easily in the ground and it's really nice and it looks good but in other places like here where we get lots of rain and it's hot and humid organic matter breaks down really quickly so this is the key the charcoal putting charcoal in the ground is based on what has been discovered in the amazon terra prada soils terra prada or terra preda it are ancient soils that were discovered all over the amazon where the soil over here is really really bad and then you go over here and suddenly there's this awesome soil and it's rich and it's crumbly and it's really black and it grows anything without fertilizer and it looks amazing and as they dug into the soil to try and figure out what it was they found it had lots and lots of carbon in it from fires and it had lots of pieces of broken pottery and bone fragments and all the aspects of having been created by somebody for some reason whether it was a big trash dump or whether they made it on purpose the fertility stuck around in the ground for a long time in a sense the charcoal is kind of acting like a long-term compost in the ground it's a sponge it holds nutrients and it releases the nutrients to the plants so what we were doing was we were fast forwarding by taking a solution of nutrients throwing the burned charcoal into it and soaking it up just letting it soak for two or three weeks and then turning it into the ground and we did a set of test beds over here now you can't see them anymore but this whole area here earlier in the year we had multiple squares five foot by five foot squares and we set up 12 of them and we tested different amendments we put compost and mulch in one of them we put the biochar soaked with nutrients and another one we put just 10 10 10 fertilizer and another one and we took steve solomon's micronutrient mix which is a different thing from the micronutrients that we threw into the charcoal and we put that on another one and what we found was the plots that had the charcoal and the plot that had all the micronutrients both of those had the additional micronutrients in them they both produced excellent flavored vegetables that were larger and sweeter and better than expected we're talking like radishes that are very sweet and delicious growing in some of the worst ground ever and we had radishes growing right next to them with 10 10 10 as a fertilizer and they were small shriveled bitter and disgusting like we didn't even want to eat them got radishes that are this big that are so sweet and delicious you actually want to eat it as a vegetable and that's saying something because radishes usually aren't great turnips that were sweet like fruit it was cool it was really cool but we did it by testing them side by side because i'm always i'm always going okay how can we test how can we make better my last homestead we had beautiful volcanic clay loam that would grow anything and it tasted great and it was wonderful and then i ended up by god's providence ending up on a piece of the worst soil this is the worst soil that i've ever gardened in and i grew up in south florida where we had sand this is horrible stuff not only is it acid and lacking organic matter it's high draining and it also gets hard further down it's terrible stuff but when we put in the charcoal and we put in micronutrients it made a big difference on the flavor so first of all this sort of stuff is going to shut down if everything gets bad you're not going to be able to grab micronutrients so if you look up on my website the survivalgardener.com look up steve solomon and micronutrients and you'll see the mix that he made for my soil and also check out the intelligent gardener and you'll get an idea of how we did it we gathered together all the materials ahead of time i bought bags of extra amendments and some of them are kind of expensive but we want to make sure that our teeth stay intact and our health is high and we're getting the nutrients and building the garden now so in the future if we can't get that stuff well we'll maintain it on compost or manure or whatever else we need to but to begin with we wanted to get everything we could in here for nutrition now right here you'll see that i'm standing on bare soil there are bear pads in the garden and if i could find if i could find that thing where's that thing where's that thing do you know where that thing is the kids maybe took it for a ride somewhere or something we're gonna find it we are gonna find it you know what a wheel hoe looks like kids where's my wheel oh i don't know the kids probably put it away that would be that would be like amazing because it's usually just sitting out here i will superimpose a photo of a wheel hoe right here there that's what a wheel hoe looks like it's a great tool and so when you have a larger garden like we have here we've got these pathways and these are long runs and if you're doing single rows like we're doing in the other parts of the garden having these long runs here if i take a regular hoe and i just go along and i scrape the ground up with a regular hoe and i'm just going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth it takes some effort but with a wheel hoe i just walk it i'll just walk it right down and push it and it's super super easy so it's simple technology uh but it's it's way more reliable than say a tiller and also people will tell you you've got to deep mulch you've got to know tell look it your first priority is getting food don't let the cultists get you there are many ways to get food you can get good food with deep mulching you can do no-till and get good food you can till and get good food you have to pay attention to what your plants want to keep them happy and your results are going to vary from climate to climate to climate to mulch 11 000 square feet is insane i live in a rural area i mean look if there's no neighbors here the tree companies are not dropping mulch chips in my neighborhood you can't get them i mean i guess i could get a chipper and mulch the woods but it's crazy we're talking 11 000 square feet we're talking i don't know like 15 20 truckloads maybe to cover this whole area and then it's just going to rot out but not only that because we have serious heat and humidity and pest issues in the deep south the mulch may become a breeding ground for insects i have a friend and when it rains for a few days she deep mulches her garden when it rains for a few days the bugs come up out of the mulch and they start eating all of her plants she cannot plant seedlings out in her garden like she can't plant from seed because the seeds the seedlings get eaten she's got to wait until they get about this big and plant them out so they don't get completely destroyed by the stuff in the mulch in other climates the mulch is great and it builds great soil i would do it around your fruit trees but i wouldn't do it around this giant vegetable garden first of all it's production so it's not about purity if you have 10 10 10 use 10 10 10 if you got micronutrients use some micronutrients if you can make your own compost make compost we try to come up with simple solutions to fix things this here t post and zip ties and this trellis is not really being occupied by anything but this one single yam vine right now but you can see the structure of this is super simple and not only that these pieces of cattle panel i caught them at about my height slightly higher than me my height and i i leave part of the metal sticking out on the bottom like the spikes sticking out i cut it in the middle of these guys so when i stick it in the ground and i push it in with my feet it just stays still and it doesn't spin around here that way i can use one t-post and it's cheaper right next to me here we've got cassava growing cassava is a staple root crop from the tropics if you're gonna focus on survival gardening the best thing i would say to focus on for sheer calories are roots potatoes turnips yams sweet potatoes those kinds of things cassava if you live down in the tropics dashing you know these things are great roots are big storable calories these things will make huge roots for me this yam will make big roots for me the sweet potatoes down there are gonna make good roots for me if you wanted to try and subsist on grain you've really gotta you gotta know what you're doing and and it's a lot of labor we tried growing patches of grain before to make our own bread we ended up pretty much feeding most of it to the chickens because it was so much labor to get even enough to grind roots are like the key and if you've got some beans for storable protein that's good i would pick beans and um for another grain i would pick corn i'm gonna count beans as a grain they're they're grain-esque they're small corn but green corn not sweet corn so if you wander through here what i've done here again it looks like a mess because this is the summer everything's kind of suffering from the heat i have mixed up species in between this is a combination of an orchard and a food plot it's vegetables and orchard together they're four foot wide beds with three foot wide pathways and there's all kinds of food in here it's not screamingly obvious that it's food but like down here i've got raspberries and i have a cat we can eat if we need to and got raspberries oh you're not getting here um and then up here this is chaya mexican tree spinach mexican tree spinach is a really good green and then over here these are angle gourds which are a relative of squash and cucumbers that is like just amazing for the south it's a southeast asian vegetable so when everything else is kicking off like it is this time of year this is our in between time when everything looks ugly when everything is kicking off these guys are still producing and they are a lot like a summer squash very very delicious i'm sure i've got some over here come on around i'll see if we can find one this one's a little smaller chase the bugs off this is a angle gourd it's in the same family as luffa it doesn't have the multi-purpose nature of luffa but it's a real scrappy plant and you can see i put a ribbon on here because this one is being saved for seed that the amount of seeds produced by this one right here are going to be enough to get us through the entire next year's worth of harvests i mean if we only get one or two of these we're talking like 100 seeds and i think i planted about four or five seeds at the base of this cattle panel trellis just to get this thing going and they're they're kind of spreading this one right here this is eating size you just skin the outside of it and cook it and it's delicious it soaks up whatever flavor or whatever you want this is florida cranberry also known as jamaican sorrel this is both a leaf crop and it makes a tart fruit that makes a really good faux cranberry sauce we can't grow cranberries down here but we can grow these things they're in the hibiscus family related to okra and hibiscus persimmon japanese persimmon so in the other part of the garden those are those were just standard little vegetable gardens the little three foot wide beds where you had some pathetic looking beans coming up right now because again it's the wrong time of year all gardening demonstrations should be filmed at the end of may period but here we go it's august and alabama what are you going to get so these beds here now are different these are a no-till system this is a polyculture this is basically strips of food forest i call this method grocery row gardening and i put a little booklet out on it this year because i'm so excited about how well it works it's a combination of trees and herbs and food and stuff together but this being a polyculture we're not gonna get like a huge amount of one thing out of here like huge production of potatoes if you wanted maximum potato production you better just plant a field full of potatoes but if you want a bit of okra you want some beans you want some spinaches you want some roots you want some fruits and some apples and some berries and some herbs and some stevia and some cut flowers or whatever else this is the system for that this is a polyculture which means there's so many plants in here that the pests get absolutely confused they have no idea what to do in here there's spiders in here and there's butterflies in here and there's bees in here and there's praying mantises and stick bugs and toads and so when the pests come in here they're like ah i think i wandered into the wrong neighborhood and they go over to the roe gardens and they try to eat my stuff there and this is just this huge mix of food and this is based on permaculture ideas and so when i wrote the book on it i kind of explained like there's a time for a method like this and a small backyard where you just basically want to go shopping in your backyard you're not going to get like super maximum production on any one thing unless you deliberately plant a bunch of that into the rows but you're you're going shopping and you're getting a wide range of food all through the year so here we have chase tree which is a medicinal and then we have ochre which is edible and then we have we have our black-eyed peas making pods right here these are fixing the ground and they're making they're making beans they throw them back in we've got hot peppers right in here it looks like a confusing mess so if somebody came into my garden they would get confused they think there's no food in there you know but there's actually tons of food in here jerusalem artichokes we have the angle gourds blackberries eggplants we've gotten a lot of eggplants this little tender white type that i've decided i really really like you pick them when they're small there's chaya these guys are canna lilies canna lilies are a common ornamental plant i use them to grow mulch right in place they get they're just here just to build the system up this is a pear when that gets bigger these things will be pruned to fit into the space and kept small these pears are not getting giant so i know when you say pear people freak out but it's not going to get that big there's more chai in here there were tomatoes in here earlier in the year and cabbages right now we're getting the sweet potato vines starting to run all over the place this up here was a whole set of beans that we grew just for seed you can see some of the remnants of the pods here this is a variety i wanted more seed from so we grew them out more of those right here growing out they're called yard long beans as the canna cannas get big they get chopped down and fed to the ground so we can get our humus back even though we do have charcoal in here it's always good to have more compost this is an easy way to compost just chop stuff up and feed it back into the system there are daylilies in here these are mayhawes which make a nice little fruit more cannas keep getting fed back in there's an apple right here there's an apple right here there are asparagus hiding in here there is a passion fruit right here this actually planted itself i have no idea how it got in there some bird probably dropped the seeds there's sweet potatoes over here and this is not its prettiest i mean earlier in the year this was absolutely incredible let's go around the corner so you can see what the the next row looks like because it's kind of a different experience each row i have given a a round of different things too like right here we've got strawberries growing around the base of some okras and then right here this is a pomegranate so the strawberries and the okra they've got different levels pomegranate a fruit okra a vegetable and then strawberries a berry cassava look at the size of this pepper plant these are cayennes we've been making our own hot sauce because when the apocalypse comes you gotta have hot sauce i think we better get in out of the rain let's go find some place where we could sit okay so i got a sensible sized mug of coffee here and i'm sitting on the porch because it's raining and i'm going to finish this thing up and give you some ideas to take away first of all if you have bad soil you're gonna have to do something to it to make it work for you if it's really acid you should lime if it's really dry you're gonna have to irrigate or space really widely and work with the reins you can make your own compost you can get you know manure from your chickens you can even dilute urine you can throw down ashes whatever you need to do to feed it feed it because plants just don't do well you'll notice you know when seedlings come up and they're yellow right from the beginning sometimes they start to go to seed or to mature really quickly when they're tiny i remember when i was a kid growing up in south florida i grew this cantaloupe plant i planted some cantaloupe seeds like from a store bought cantaloupe probably and this little cantaloupe vine grew and it grew about this long and it made leaves that were about this big and then it flowered i couldn't believe it it flowered it was so cool and it made a cantaloupe the cantaloupe was this big it was the saddest silliest little cantaloupe on this shriveled little yellowy vine and i cut it open when it was ripe or i thought it was ripe it didn't taste particularly good but it had a few full-sized seeds in it which cracked me up the seeds were like that big i mean these seeds are like taking up almost the whole middle i just need to perpetuate myself for another generation so anyhow what happens is if you don't feed in water well right from the beginning the plants sometimes go into what is called senescence that means they reach old age early and that's not good so if whatever you can get to feed just make sure that you feed you can't just throw stuff in the ground usually and get good results and when you're in between if you have bad soil in particular if you're in between crops think about putting down some sort of cover crop you know winter rye rye grain now not just the grass rye that's not particularly good it doesn't have enough roots to it buckwheat beans peanuts it depends on the time of year if it's warm or a cool season but there's tons of information on cover cropping and what you're doing there is you're actually adding organic material to the soil so you might not be able to make enough compost to take a bad piece of ground and cover the whole thing with compost that's actually really really hard to do if you just make piles and try to get enough compost say if you want a good size survival garden forget it but what you can do is go and get yourself some cheap beans buckwheat seeds you know wheat or whatever throw it all over the area fertilize it with whatever you got you got 10 10 10 triple 13 doesn't matter get that stuff growing get that stuff growing keep it alive get it nice and big and thick and then chop it or till it all under or chop it and till it under and what you're doing then is you're adding all that material to the ground and it will rot down into the ground particularly if you do it at the right time when it's good and green and it hasn't started to get browned out yet that stuff will rot down in the soil and all the roots that have gone down into the ground the roots can go three feet four feet five feet depends on your soil and how hard it is those roots now have will rot into the ground and they will put humus in so don't don't think like you're not stuck with tiny little beds you don't have to be stuck with tiny little beds because you don't have any compost to go further grow your compost in place i grow a ton of stuff in my grocery roll gardens that's just there to chop up and throw on the ground like the cannas they're constantly getting chopped up and thrown on the ground to rot i can't keep enough compost on those beds so think about feeding and watering first of all if you don't have adequate irrigation or the ability to irrigate wide spacing look up dry farming techniques it's uh it's incredible you think as a backyard gardener often that you well you gotta have your hoses you gotta have drip lines and all that kind of stuff no if you can break up more ground and spread out wider you will be able to grow uh food in conditions that you probably didn't think you could i mean we could go you know a few weeks without having to go out there with a hose and people that are really good at it they can go the entire season without having to irrigate and if you do get enough rainfall you know take advantage of the rain then you don't have to rely on any kind of centralized system or set up a well or anything like that but learn how to do those things don't be afraid um to bust out of the little bed and go wide and let the plants have tons of elbow room and they can take care of themselves a lot better than when they're crammed on top of each other also you don't need raised beds with lumber i mean look at the price of lumber if you spend the money to put in a bunch of raised beds gosh it would have been much better just buying some old silver dollars or something and burying them in your backyard because really all you need to do is fork up the ground dig your pads out a little bit throw that loose soil on top of the beds make these nice little mounded beds i've got these little mounted beds i've been doing that for years and those just just loose soil all you need is loose dirt i mean you don't see commercial farms with all these i mean can you imagine can you imagine driving through the midwest and it's just a ton of four by eight beds stretching off to the horizon i mean you have to cut down all the trees in the eastern seaboard to grow you know a a bed of corn out there these some of these you know thousand acre farms ten thousand acres oh man we gotta go we can't grow corn we gotta go build some of those raised beds no they don't need it simple simple simple simple um try to keep it simple look to what our ancestors did and grow that way spread things out you don't need complicated systems the simpler is the better another thing to keep in mind is the more you mix species up and the more varieties you grow together if it looks like a big mess to you and it looks like a big mess to your neighbors you know what you planted so there's a couple of benefits to this i've got plants out there that you should cook before eating i've got plants out there that are medicinal i've got plants out there that may or may not be toxic unless they're cooked i have plants out there that are for medicine and plants that are out there that i'm going to dig the roots on and plants that are there that are for whatever i grow all kinds of stuff some of them are just compost it looks like a big mess when people come into my yard they go what is this what is this what is this looks like a forest looks like a jungle yeah it's a jungle of food so it's harder for a thief coming through my yard they might recognize a few things but there's a lot of stuff if things got really bad it would just look like what a mess i have no idea what this is and i'm growing crops nobody's heard of i mean come on angle gourds cassava mexican tree spinach you can plant some niche stuff that people don't know about but the more you mix it up forget human thieves or anything else just in general the more you mix all your crops up and your varieties up the better ecosystem you're creating so you have a very complicated ecosystem if you go into the average woods there's a bunch of different species all living together in the woods it's not just one thing planted in rows when you have a whole bunch of the same thing you end up with big plague events it's like in the city when the black death goes into the city a bunch of people get it they're all packed in right tight next to each other like sardines but the more you spread things out the less these plague issues could become a problem so if say one of your peach trees got infected with a you know peach borer oh my gosh that's terrible if you had a peach orchard it could spread spread spread all the way through but if you have a peach tree and then you have a patch of sweet potatoes then you got some berries then you got a fig you got an apple and you got some more berries then you got your wife's flower garden and then you've got another peach tree the bugs are way way way less likely to jump peach to peach also if you have different varieties of plants you've got a system that's a big polyculture you might have a late frost one year your early blooming fruit trees might lose all their blooms your later blooming fruit trees will still bloom you might get a really cold winter some of the stuff that can tolerate higher chill hours that is hours of cold below 40 degrees they might bloom just fine that year and do great some of your other plants might bloom early and lose all their blooms or may not they might not even come out of dormancy properly so if you've got a bunch of different stuff growing together even say don't just plant one variety of apple oh gosh i love filling blank apple i love fuji apples no no plant a fuji plant a granny smith plant a arkansas black spur plant a northern spy you know plant all these different varieties of apples because some are going to have disease issues some are going to have get damaged by frost other ones won't some will come out of dormancy early some have low chill some have high chill if the earth gets hotter some of them are going to do fine if we go into ice age now other ones are going to do fine so you've got your mix even inside of it don't just plant one variety of beans plant three or four different varieties of beans because some are going to do better certain years than other things you don't know how much rain you're going to get what the disease resistance is going to be how cold it's going to be how warm it's going to be you know so the more you mix it up the better and the more you mix it up the less problem you have with pests so it makes it confusing to everything but it also builds a lot of redundancy into the system i don't try i don't ever grow you know like i'm just gonna grow this one thing i only grow one variety of this thing ever now i'm always mixing it up like right now we've got five or six varieties of beans growing we had five or six varieties of tomatoes this year five or six varieties of peppers i've got three varieties of cassava i've got multiple different types of berries i even planted different types of cantaloupes even though it doesn't really matter and i figured out which one was my favorite and did the best this year and i'm gonna plant more of that one you learn as you go along and again you got bad soil some things are going to thrive in it there's certainly something that can grow in your soil find out whatever is related to the weeds that grow in your backyard and see if you can grow that right i mean there's going to be something that thrives in your area and one of the best ways you could figure out how to garden in your area is to go find old gardeners in your area and farmers and ask them what do you grow what's easy can i grow that do you have extra seeds can i can i you know can i learn from you can i go you know can i cut your lawn make friends share extra seeds go get an idea of what grows in your area because i'll tell you what you can go read a gardening book and the author might be from new york or california and you might be living in arkansas and if you take all the details of well this tomato always grows great for me and this does great for me and you go and you do that it's probably not going to work the same way as it is in the book the book doesn't apply to all climates in all situations you can have different soil from neighborhood to neighborhood or even from house to house so the closer you can get to local knowledge the better off you're going to be i hope that today i've given you some general principles that'll help you out how to get a place into some sort of shape right from the beginning just till get your stuff together to feed plant a bunch of different varieties of seeds see which things do well plant them again don't bother with all the fiddly details use hand tools that make sense keep it simple rely on the rainfall as much as possible these things will get you through and you will learn as you grow because there's no substitute for actually growing you really need to grow don't be afraid just plant a bunch of stuff and see what happens i mean there's a lot of people you can learn from but you also can learn from yourself as you go along so i'm hoping the general principles i give you will give you a bit of a philosophy of gardening that will take you through no matter what happens and i appreciate you joining me today and getting stuck in the rain and then going and sitting on the porch back here with a cup of coffee i appreciate it if you want to learn more about what i do you can check out my youtube channel davidthegood it's up for now and i don't know how the future is going to go or what's going to happen but if you um don't trust that youtube is going to stick around forever which nothing sticks around forever you can also get my books i write more in depth in my books and i try to put in a lot of illustrations and make it simple make it understandable for people so grow or die compost everything free plants for everyone the good guide to plant propagation i've also written a few books from florida gardening i've written a book on my grocery row gardening system it's called grocery road gardening and then you can you don't want to buy a book that's fine you can also check out my website i've got like 2500 articles that i've written there now that is the survivalgardener.com and may god bless you and keep you and your family and until next time may your thumbs always be green [Music] you

Channel: David The Good

Views: 343,020

Keywords: David The Good, survival gardening, how to grow food, food supply, growing all your food, how to garden, how to get enough food, survival garden

Id: iY9FCwIHFns

Length: 48min 2sec (2882 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021