Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

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davedan
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Location: Augusta, GA
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Re: Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

Post by davedan »

Sorghum:

Grain sorghum has high yield per plant, grows like corn, and makes a nutritious flour for flat bread.
Sweet sorghum stocks can be pressed to make syrup and molasses.

You can feed the stocks to livestock (cows, pigs, goats, sheep) and grain to chickens.
You can get 2 crops a year in the South with 110 day to maturation.


Veggies:

You will probably prefer "heirloom" varieties and not "hybrids"

Michelle
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Re: Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

Post by Michelle »

gardener4life wrote: July 19th, 2017, 1:42 pm The best seeds to grow are the ones already re-seeding in your garden. Seriously. These are plants that are adapted to your microclimate. They are the survivors. Additionally, you should be working on building up as much stock of perennial plants as you can. These will continue to grow and feed you year after year with no replanting needed. Learn to propagate the ones that produce the best. Remove the ones that are not productive.
In this way, your plot of land will become lush with food plants.


This guy's comment above was really good and worth more than the others. Sorry to you other people.

I want to point out that trying to save seeds for what you like over what grows in your area well would be disaster for you and for your family if you ever had to really use it. Most people also fall into this thing of picking what they want over what they need and can do. Same concept. :)

Here are some examples where people fall into traps...

A family decides to plant a fruit tree in their yard. The mom loves cherries so they go with cherries, ignoring the fact that in Utah late frosts often will make cherry trees have no fruit at all for sometimes 2 years out of 5 years. Also plum trees in utah are WAY more prolific than cherry trees. Our yard has 3 plum trees, 1 cherry tree, and 2 apple trees. Out of all of those for Utah climate I will tell you straight up that each of the plum trees is WAY more prolific in terms of both fruit and trees than the others are. The cherry tree struggles in this climate for some reason while every year we have a mess of propagated plants from the plum tree shoots coming up to produce new trees. The cherry tree doesn't even propagate new trees under its shade either. And comparing the cherry tree to the plum tees the difference in fruit actually made and harvested is like 5 to 1. And just so you know I don't really favor plum taste over apples or others, but I can't ignore the food production....

Another example is that tomatoes do well in Utah climate, but why don't other vegetables do as well? There are a few I can think of that I can raise in the garden but some of them will realllllly struggle to survive, let alone produce fruit. If I actually had to use those to survive I'd be in serious trouble.

Try to think about what's realistic.

I kind of wish there was a way to make avocados grow in Utah but that's just not realistic...
Good advice.

I didn't order it, but I did find a dwarf avacados they will supposedly grow in Utah IF you bring it in during winter. It is on my list for sure. 😀

gardener4life
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Posts: 1690

Re: Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

Post by gardener4life »

Dwarf avocados? Wow. I hadn't thought of that. It sounds interesting. Thanks for the tip.

On a side note...our stake just started the justserve program recently. I think its interesting that it's happening at this time when our country is having the most trouble. Its wonderful that we're moving forward instead of hesitating.

I wanted to ask this though; is it appropriate to put an 'ad' on justserve to trade garden seeds with people? I want to do this and think it might be a good idea for self sufficiency as well as for some other reasons like being able to next year learn more garden plants that I don't know. (And just so we're on the same page this I think could be legitimate because I have done seeding experiments in the last 2 years gardening so I know it works. I wouldn't just trade away trash. I've done seed experiments making my own seeds from previous year tomatoes, swiss chard, and a few others. Seed experiments are kind of fun actually.)

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Yahtzee
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Re: Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

Post by Yahtzee »

gardener4life wrote: August 1st, 2017, 11:35 pm I wanted to ask this though; is it appropriate to put an 'ad' on justserve to trade garden seeds with people? I want to do this and think it might be a good idea for self sufficiency as well as for some other reasons like being able to next year learn more garden plants that I don't know. (And just so we're on the same page this I think could be legitimate because I have done seeding experiments in the last 2 years gardening so I know it works. I wouldn't just trade away trash. I've done seed experiments making my own seeds from previous year tomatoes, swiss chard, and a few others. Seed experiments are kind of fun actually.)
http://www.seedsavers.org

gardener4life
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Posts: 1690

Re: Best vegetable seeds to have for next Great Depression?

Post by gardener4life »

seedsavers.... from their page;

Step 3: Create requests and send payment
View your Wishlist by clicking the link in the topmost navigation bar. Select the varieties you'd like to request from other members using the checkboxes at the right of the table, then click 'Create Requests' to take you to your Requests page.

Requests are organized by members - one request to a member may include many varieties. Click the printer icon in the 'Action' column at the right of the table to generate a .pdf that you can print and mail along with payment to that member. When you click the printer icon, the request status will change to 'Printed'. Many of our members will only accept seed requests that are mailed to them.

If a member accepts online transactions, a PayPal icon will appear in the 'Action' column as well. Click this icon to start an online PayPal transaction.


From above cut and pasted, you can see that seedsavers isn't free. The point of service is to help people without money.

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