The Most Important Food for Surviving SHTF

[Music] alright let's get real nobody wants to watch a boring gardening video you want to talk about the apocalypse and fighting zombies tactical $10,000 bug huh pants unfortunately however the reality is if we don't talk about it most of us are gonna die of starvation of it's apparent one of the core pillars of civilization is agriculture on a smaller scale this is called horticulture the only way it's possible to survive a prolonged Tia Waukee end of the world as we know it grid down scenario is if you have the ability and the knowledge to grow your own food this year I took a chance at gardening today I'm gonna discuss the results and I'm also gonna be discussing what I think and what most people think is one of the best crops for the purpose of long term grid down survival trying to water the garden and that happens every 15 20 seconds come on so the plot of land I experimented with this year was very small it was a 10 by 10 plot I call that a micros dead on this microstate I primarily grew potatoes carrots onions and some green beans though oftentimes you see these seeds being sold these heirloom seeds or survival seeds which are a great thing to have in your arsenal but the problem with these is that a lot of the seeds within there they're not staple crops so they don't typically provide you with calorie dense foods although they will provide a nice variety I'll post a link in the description to get some of those if you choose it's a cheap investment and while worth having if only to supplement your primary food source so some of the criteria for a survival superfood would have to be that it's calorie dense that it would be hearty that it would be less prone to disease that it would be easy to grow in all of the plant hardiness zones which are zones that correspond to the latitude and their respective low temperatures and growing season length now among the most popular these are things like corn beans winter squash grains like rice barley wheat sunflower seeds hemp seeds and many different types of perennial fruit trees these crops should be micronutrient rich meaning that you're going to be able to meet all of your vitamin and mineral requirements they should ideally store for a long time without the need for canning or other methods and the versatility for cooking should also be something that's taken into consideration there's only so many things you can do with rice however there's a lot of things you can do with potatoes you can roast them you can mash them can bake them you can slice them you can fry them you can whip them french fries pan-fried steamed potatoes hash browns potato soup potato pleats potato bread potato flakes potato pancakes you can do bout anything you want with potatoes for sorry I'm not sure what the hell just happened there I was overcome by the spirit of Bubba Gump hmmm that's some buttery goodness right there that'll keep you alive if the crap hits the fizzy now the reason why the majority of people feel that the potato is the number one long-term survival food crop is because they are relatively easy to grow they provide the most calories per square foot right on par with corn however corn requires more water and cannot be grown in as many places potatoes also require a lot less labour than grains think about the arduous process of separating the wheat from the chaff granted however grains will store longer so there is some benefit to the labor that you put into it contrary to popular belief potatoes do actually contain all nine essential amino acids so you can get all of your protein needs and met with potatoes however you're not gonna be getting all your micronutrient needs met so you're definitely gonna have to supplement potatoes with something else you're not simply going to be able to live just off potatoes and realistically nobody would ever do that now I was of the belief that potatoes didn't have seeds which is probably the dumbest assumption ever considering that it needs a seed in order to initiate the plant at some point down the evolutionary line so it could have just been potatoes falling off into the ground and sprouting the next year potato plant will actually flower and all those flowers are these little bulbs these tomato looking things which those contain the seeds for the potato climb you can also grow potatoes if you have a really good strain and you want to keep that strain as it is then you can just recede potatoes of that strain and it will continually fractal oh now according to an article that I read online one of the best known potatoes for storage is the russet Burbank because it has a very long dormancy period longest period observed for this potato variety over an observation period from 1999 to 2013 is 200 days at 42 degrees Fahrenheit storing potatoes at lower temperatures causes sugar formation which is generally undesirable when used for consumption so for me 200 days if I were to do the math if I were to be sprouting potatoes indoors to try to keep the chain going it's possible I could do it with the approximate 5 month growing season that we have here but it might be pushing it so I'm likely going to have to learn how to grow potatoes from seed however if you do live close to the equator where it's warmer and there's a longer growing season you may be able to just use seed potatoes in secession growing 2 to 3 even possibly 4 crops of potatoes every year and of course with potatoes and like most crops you're going to have to rotate them so you're not growing the same thing on the same land every year so that you're letting that land rest and regenerate and restore some of those vital nutrients that your potatoes or whatever you decide to grow is gonna be there when you go and put it in the ground now some of the downsides and potatoes is the insulin spike due to the high glycemic index rating however in a crap hits the fan scenario and during the many great famines throughout the ages I have a feeling that the amount of physical labor that you would have to do in a grid down situation would likely offset any negative health effects related to consuming high glycemic index foods this is very dangerous for the sedentary lifestyle of the average North American but in a prolonged grid down scenario you're gonna be moving and you're gonna be moving a lot some people will bring up things like the Irish potato famine as an indicator as to why you shouldn't rely solely on potatoes and indeed there is a potential for blight if you're not diversifying your potatoes so you should definitely have many different types of potatoes in your garden currently this year I was growing 3 different types of potatoes and as most people know the potato famine in Ireland was related to social economic political and land management issues which are things that were not the fault of the potato plant themselves there was a man who ate a diet of primarily potatoes for a year as supplementing with the vitamin supplements and some other fruits and vegetables but 90% of his diet was comprised of potatoes and he actually lost a lot of weight he was in good health throughout the process so it's definitely possible to have potatoes as your staple diet and that should go without saying because it's previously indicated and still to this day potatoes provide a huge share of the world's net caloric intake now if you're growing other vegetables like carrots and onions and beans then these things are going to supplement any deficiencies that you would have just in the potatoes and of course you're gonna be getting vitamins and minerals from meats that you would hunt or perhaps livestock that you would keep like chickens and pigs so personally I would say that if a person was pressed for time and had little space to work with getting yourself familiar with the process of growing potatoes is a great survival strategy you can even make different types of alcohol with potatoes with relative ease I can tell you my experience growing potatoes for the first time ever by myself because I did have family who've had gardens before although I wasn't involved in that process from start to finish as I was in this instance I can tell you that it was quite easy one of the main things I made sure I did was wrote it till the soil really well so those potatoes would have a nice soft substrate to grow into one of the only problems I encountered and I believe it's because I let some of the potato plants sit too long was that there was a fungus that started to develop on some of the potatoes not all I had one row which was afflicted with this kind of fungus now apparently as unsightly as this disease is these potatoes are still edible you just have to cut off the affected portions other than that in the future I think I'm gonna stick to the larger varieties I had better luck with those ones this year around it was the smaller variety that got afflicted with the fungus as for how the rest of my garden fared while the carrots were a little bit small I think that may have something to do with where they were positioned within the garden and how many seeds I planted too many seeds close together so they were clustered in such a way that they were very small but I would say I was very surprised at the amount of food I was able to get from such a small plot of land now no doubt this would definitely not sustain me and my family for a long period of time but like I said this was just an experimental plot in the coming years we were going to scale this up and create a garden which is going to supplement all the food that we already have stored which you would want to use as sparingly as possible if you didn't know if and when the lights were coming back on or if we just entered a long term drawn-out economic depression so let me know in the comments section what you think one of the best crops is for shtf and why I'm going to post a few videos and links in the description which provide very short into the point bite-sized pieces of information that I think will be very useful to a person who is starting out their own microstate thanks for watching don't forget to Like comment subscribe Canadian prepper out the best way to support this youtube channel is to support yourself by gearing up through Canadian preparedness comm or bug out roll CA premium quality gear at the best possible price using the incredibly secure and easy-to-use Shopify platform we offer free shipping to the United States for orders over $200 USD and free shipping to Canada over $75 so support the channel by supporting yourself

Channel: Canadian Prepper

Views: 317,692

Rating: 4.9348769 out of 5

Keywords: doomsday preppers, bug out bag, WROL, doomsday, prepper, preppers, preparedness, collapse, survival, SHTF, grid down, economic collapse, end of the world TEOTWAKI, survive zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, survivalism, survivor, post-apocalypse, growing potatoes, growing potato, potato gardening, microstead, my garden, off grid garden, growing food

Id: s4z5nT1QyYs

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019