This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
I’m here in my standard residential neighborhood.
Right here is my neighbors yard with the grass and some other landscaping in there, but today’s
show is an interesting show and what it’s gonna be on is survival and growing food for
survival and why we should grow food for survival and you know just some other tips.
I saw another, a lot of other videos on YouTube about growing food for survival and some of
the things you know makes me kind of wonder so I’m gonna share my tips and tricks with
you.
So this is my neighbors’ yard and you can see how the other neighbors they just all
have grass.
Now you know if you’re growing grass that’s not gonna help you out in a survival situation.
Well you could eat the grass but it’s not gonna be very nutrient rich and it’s gonna
get old eating grass every day.
So you could see my standard front yard has been converted to all raise bed edible garden.
Everything that I’m growing here is all edible including the flowers, the bokchoy,
arugula, chickweed, kale, collards, um, I have some snap peas and snow peas and tree
kale.
So many other things here in my yard so why don’t you come on in and I’ll talk to
you more about it.
So the first thing I wanna talk about when planting a survival garden or survivalist
garden or just to garden your front yard is you know you want to start now.
You want to start today.
Actually you wanted to start yesterday because you know what by the time you plant the plant
the seeds grow the food it’s gonna take a while for it to produce.
You know and you’re gonna have food.
So that’s number one, it takes some time.
So say there’s a incident where you need to have food all of the sudden you can’t
just oh I’ve got some seeds I could throw out and plant well guess what, depending on
the seed if it’s radishes it might be 30 days and leafy greens could be longer.
You know and tomatoes is at least you know 60-70 days out before you’ll have any food
you could eat.
That’s a long time.
So you wanna start now you wanna just start and getting your hands into the dirt and growing
things and trying it out and becoming familiar with it.
Just like shooting a gun right the first time you picked up a gun you probably missed the
target.
I know I did.
But you know with practice and you’re shooting that gun you’re gonna hit that bulls eye
every time.
Same thing with gardening.
Some unique and new skills you’re gonna have to learn to garden to be successful at
gardening and you know my thumbs weren’t always green.
So it’s it’s taken me time and and you know a lot of trial and error.
So just like when you’re shooting the gun you’re gonna miss the target oh I’m to
the right oh I’m to the left oh let’s move over this way and oh let’s aim right
for the center.
You’ll finally get it and you’ll finally know how to do it and it’ll be a skill that
you will have and you’ll be able to use when you finally need it.
And you’ll have all the food growing because you will already have a jump on everybody
else because you’ll have everything growing that you’re gonna need.
So growing where you live or around where you live on your land or your property is
very important because you know if you run out of power or oil or whatever and you can’t
get to the gas station or get to the store what are you gonna eat?
So it’s really important to have food where you live right now and start growing it today.
I mean yesterday actually is a better day to start growing it but growing it today so
that you will be aware and know how to grow these things when things happen if they do
and you’ll be prepared unlike other people that may have you know, rations you know in
cans and MRE’s and other things.
You know what happens when they run out you know they’re not gonna be sustainable because
they’re not gonna maybe have the education and have tried themselves to grow things so
it’s gonna be a definite learning process to grow things and you’re gonna find some
things will grow better in your area than other things.
Then you know what, just focus on the things that grow well and that do good and you know
if something doesn’t grow too well hey no big deal maybe that doesn’t really grow
too well here and don’t even bother because you could spend a lot of effort and time into
growing things that you really want but but don’t grow well when you could just grow
things that grow really well.
So a lot of videos show growing zucchini or tomatoes or cucumbers or you know other summer
crops but you know what you can’t grow summer crops all year long so that could be an issue.
So I’m here in California I could grow you know, 365 days a year I have things growing
here in my garden.
So you may not be so lucky you know what you still can grow things in the winter time depending
on your climate um, you know in a greenhouse or even inside so you could still have your
hands wet and getting them dirty and growing your food year round.
So it’s really important you know not to just focus on the summer vegetables because
we need to live everyday of the year not just in the summer when you can produce big zucchinis.
So, in the summer then maybe you want to grow things that you could preserve.
So some things like winter squashes, uh butternut squash, banana squashes, actually they get
so huge you know., and other squashes that’ll actually just stay good over the winter.
So you wanna grow for the summer and then grow for some winter stuff, so the squashes
the winter squashes and even root vegetables.
So we could start to talk about farming by calories.
So for the basically inputs you put in the soil and effort, the root crops potatoes,
Jerusalem artichokes, yacon, and other roots are gonna give you the highest calorie yield
the caloric density per space.
So if you wanna grow for calories and you wanna know you’re gonna have enough calories
definitely plant some root vegetables.
But you know on the same token, root vegetables while they have a lot of calories I mean they
have some nutrition in there but they’re not very nutritious.
So I recommend everybody to start growing their own greens and that’s the name of
my YouTube show “Growing Your Greens”, because greens are very nutritious.
I have some greens planted here but um, I could go over to another bed which I’ll
go to in a second and we’ll talk more about greens.
So I’m standing next to my bed and this is a 4 foot by 15 foot bed of just greens.
We have kale, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, and even in the broccoli and cauliflower greens
you know they’re edible too just like other greens.
So you know greens and plant matter sustain a lot of animals on earth I mean, think about
a cow.
A cow weighs about a thousand pounds all it eats is grass or I mean you know elephants
they’re so big and they’re very strong or other mammals.
You know many mammals also eat greens for their nutrition and for their strength and
that’s all they eat literally.
So you know what we could get by on eating all greens in our diet without much else,
you’d have to eat a lot of them and that could get tough to do cause I mean if you
look at a cow I mean, what ‘s it doing?
All day it’s either eating or pooping.
But anyways so, yeah so grow some greens really important and as I said you know you wanna
get your feet wet now.
Just have some greens growing year round.
You know in a steady spot inside your home outside your home in a greenhouse and be prepared.
And so greens are some of the most nutritious foods on the planet.
Especially I’m looking at this Red Russian kale, kale specifically are probably one of
the highest nutrition dense foods on the whole planet.
Maybe the highest in my opinion on a good edible food would be something called Egyptian
spinach or molokhia.
And it’s from it’s from Egypt actually and it actually has more nutrition that actually
kale.
So one of the things you could do is you know in the summer time you could grow all your
kales.
I mean I’m lucky I could grow kales year round here but in the summer time and you
grow your kales and if you you know live where it snows in the winter time.
So you wanna harvest your kales in the summer when they’re growing before it gets too
cold for them and then what you’re gonna do is you could basically dehydrate them.
So you’re gonna dehydrate them take out the water and that’s gonna preserve the
kale and the nutrition in your kale for you and you could eat you know basically kale
sprinkles or you could powder it up into a powder and mix it in water or juice or whatever
you wanna mix it in to.
And that’s gonna be super nutritious because it has all the nutrition of the kale that
you grew at your place on your land.
Alright to expand your growing season I have to highly recommend buying a greenhouse.
This greenhouse was purchased at harbor freight tool are approximately around 600, 5 or 600
dollars.
Ten by twelve you could get a lot in here to extend your growing season.
I’m going actually a lot of things in here because it still hasn’t past the last frost
day yet.
I’m having a lot of things in here and I’m gonna plant these out here within the next
two weeks and have a jump on the season.
And the other thing I wanted to talk about is yields.
You know, so if you think you could feed your family with like one tomato plant you know
what you are kidding yourself.
You’re gonna need lots of plants so you’re gonna need to dedicate some good space to
grow you know a lot of plants you know I have over a hundred basically kale plants in the
front in that front bed.
I’ve planted 95 strawberry plants in a 4 by 15 foot section.
So you don’t normally need that much space.
If you have acreage great you could space things out a lot further and have dedicated
land for things like what’s called perennial vegetables.
And the perennial vegetables you plant them once and they keep coming back year after
year after year and you never have to replant them.
And that’s one of the things you know we wanna make gardening and growing our own food
easy for everybody.
So I have tree kales and they grow as a tree and you just plant it once and they keep giving
leaves 365 days a year and I never have to replant them.
Most plants will actually grow up they’ll put leaves off and that’s good for eating
but then they’ll begin to flower and seed and they’ll make seeds and at that point
the plant is nonproductive for food use but what would happen is if you start off everything
and plant it and let it go to flower and seed it’ll actually drop the seeds on the ground
and then hopefully they’ll come up next year.
So once you’ve started getting some of these systems in place and they drop seeds you know
they’re gonna start coming back actually come back with a vengeance.
So that’s a good thing because I want everybody to get into like what’s called hands off
gardening and I’m working on that I’m not quite there yet but theoretically it could
be done where you just grow everything and you get things that are acclimatized to your
climate and are gonna do well in your climate.
You could it do once it’ll grow seeds, you could just water it and nature does the rest
and they come up.
I mean I have tomatoes that we just let go and they dropped on the ground and now tomatoes
are sprouting up and I didn’t even plant them.
And I had a patch back here where I grew tomatoes and some dropped on the ground and they just
the next spring they just sprouted up and I didn’t have to do nothing and that’s
how it should be.
We wanna be working with nature and not against it.
So I hope you’ve learned more about some of my you know ideas and techniques for growing
for survival.
We have up in the front we have some pansies and you know all this stuff is edible so the
pansy the flowers are edible and there’s many flowers that are edible and you could
do an internet search to find what flowers are edible and grow some flowers you know
for their edibility and eating.
Next we have some bokchoy here doing really well the bokchoy is really great.
Next we have broccoli and I let some of the broccoli go too far.
You can see the flowers or the florets here but also what many people don’t know is
that you could eat the leaves of the broccoli and it’s just like a kale or collards.
So be sure to check my other videos if you’re interested in growing at your home and just
you know maximizing the space efficiency of your place and for more tips and tricks on
how to grow your own food I have many other videos over a hundred videos now on how to
grow your own food here on YouTube.
So this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com and start growing those greens yesterday.