!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what if the cost of food goes up 10x?

Thank you for this awesome post.  I don't often respond but this is a wealth of good info.
I have been planting the seeds that come from the store bought small peppers that come in a package mix of Red, Orange and Yellow for years now and these seeds keep on producing.  You wouldn't think a store bought pepper would be much of a producer but these are.  I live in a tropical climate and put them in pots of dirt on my lanai because any kind of backyard gardening is forbidden in the corporate owned mobile home park I live in.  So for those of us who do not own our own land because we may be in a park like here in Florida where there are hundreds of nice mobile home parks, we can still get around the rules because they can't tell you what to do with your lanai.  Since I keep them on the lanai which faces North, it is filtered sun, not direct and these plants thrive in those conditions year round.  Same with the cherry tomato plants I buy at the Tractor Supply store.  They produce prolifically on the lanai.  Now, maybe I should try that with some onions.  

My neighbor grew parsnips. Gave me some seeds.
So I had parsnips. (Not fond of 'em, but there they were.)
Forgot one in the ground.
Next year it grew into this 6 foot tall monster, bloomed like mad and made tons of seeds.
Parsnips everywhere!

John F Dean wrote: Our biggest frustration is grains.  Growing, harvesting, and processing them has been difficult for us.   I am trying sunflowers and corn again this year.  Maybe I can be more successful.

Come visit. I'll gladly show you how I grow corn.

In the tropics the choice of plants and seeds is very different but the principle is the same. First soil preparation:
Dig a row a couple of feet deep.
Put wood and rotted stuff in a layer at the bottom.
Fill in the hole.
Plant on top.
Mulch over that. In the tropics you can use cut wood as mulch as well as leaves and grass. Probably one of the most effective things you can do to protect soil from torrential rain in the tropics is to put wood against the ground. Branches cut into small pieces works especially well.

If you don't have time to do that just clear the ground and plant cuttings like sweet potato and yams, and plant beans as seeds.

Plants that grow well in the tropics:
Sweet potato (eat the leaves as well as the tubers).
Yams (discorea)...true yams, purple yams, there are a pile of different kinds. More a source of calories than nutrition but they're all close to unkillable.
Madagascar beans (great source of beans that grow year round. They're supposed to last 7 years but I've never seen that. The best crop is usually in the second year but you will get a crop in the first. After the third year it might be best to plant again.
Pigeon peas. They can be eaten green (cooked) or mature (cooked).
Cherry tomatoes
JAP pumpkin
Turmeric
Thai basil
Cuban oregano
Bananas
Papaya
Moringa tree (eat the highly nutritious leaves...can be used as a bean pole for the Madagascar beans)

I believe that all gardens should welcome in some fruit trees. They can produce bumper crops year after year once established. The best one for winter harvesting is definitely persimmon.

How does one balance growing food and keeping wild areas safe from unhelpful nonnative plants?

Some plants mentioned in this thread can act invasively and crowd out much-needed native plants. It might not be a problem in our vegetable patches but if birds and wildlife spread seeds to other areas it can contribute to loss of habitat elsewhere.

So how do we balance our human needs with the needs of other organisms and ecosystems?

And if we limit ourselves to only food that is native to our locale, could we still survive?

Lawren Richards wrote:Wrote a longer post and lost it ‘cause I wasn’t logged in, but in short: what’s so great about sunchokes? Mine were knobby, small, tasteless, and died off in a season or two. Why do sunchokes instead of, say, potatoes?

I am with you on sunchokes. I love the yellow flowers at the end of summer, but no one in my family, including me is happy to consume them as a general rule. I consider them a last resort survival food for the "what ifs", and or a future source of fodder should we ever be able to afford a pig or two. However, growing potatoes, which we do annually, seems to pose a storage problem for us without a root cellar, in a hot summer environment, they resprout or rot in only a few weeks. (we are in the semi desert succulent Karoo in South Africa, where summer temps daytime temps never drop below 30 deg C and are over 40 deg C, about 35-40% of summer).
Our winters are mild, frost, snow on the mountains etc, and we do manage to keep a small patch of potatoes growing/overwintering in a more sheltered frost protected spot, but they only produce again come spring. Either I find a better storage option, or we focus on other staples to get us through winter...

Sophie Sacca wrote:How does one balance growing food and keeping wild areas safe from unhelpful nonnative plants?

Some plants mentioned in this thread can act invasively and crowd out much-needed native plants. It might not be a problem in our vegetable patches but if birds and wildlife spread seeds to other areas it can contribute to loss of habitat elsewhere.

So how do we balance our human needs with the needs of other organisms and ecosystems?

And if we limit ourselves to only food that is native to our locale, could we still survive?

Here is what I do. Any plant that can get invasive, are grown in a raised bed, to keep them under control. If and when they seed, I remove the seeds, so it doesn’t spread all over. It’s one of the reasons I have both a raised bed garden and a food forest garden.
In the food forest I work with nature, to ensure everyone (here I mean not just people and plants, but also critters and insects), get what they need to thrive.  When I planned both gardens, as in how much to plant, I added 20% to that number, so the critters and insects get paid for their work. I still do that with my annuals.
I buy bird feed with chili peppers, so the rats and squirrels don’t eat it all. I also make sure the birds have extra food, when they prepare for migration and when they return. If I don’t leave enough food out, they will take their payment elsewhere, which isn’t good. The birds make sure we don’t get worms in our crops, and they keep the insect population under control. Humming birds does a lot of pollination and predator birds helps with the rodents.
The squirrels do fine, by mainly eating the nuts from our pecan tree, and the rodents find food elsewhere. As for work, they make sure seeds and nuts are seeded not in clumps and clusters, but in a mix so the plants have companions. Experience has showed me, that they often are better than me, when it comes to where the plants thrive.
Rats are the only ones that doesn’t work for their food, so we try to keep that population under control. No free food for rats LOL.
As for gophers, I wrap the things I don’t want them to eat, in metal and plant things they can eat without that. Critters will always go for the most convenient food source.
So, what do they get paid for?
The gophers take care of all of my tilling.
The wild rabbits take care of cutting what grass shows up, so I don’t have to.
Reptiles like snakes also helps with the rodents, while other reptiles helps, so we don’t get overrun with flies and similar insects.
I keep a good eye out for imbalances in the eco system, and if needed I introduce predator insects to help. I also keep track of what insects we have or don’t have, since it also tells me a lot about how healthy the soil and plants have become.
I know it can be hard looking at things this way, but it pays off once the ecosystem is in balance.
As for the native plants, and the spread of unwanted crops. I deal with it, by identifying the toxic/invasive plants and removing them if it’s needed. We have several toxic native plants, that I don’t want in our gardens, but also many that I encourage to thrive. I usually take a walk in the morning or late afternoon, where I look for invasive and toxic plants, and inspect crops to catch problems early. Over the years we see them less, while we see food crops more.
We are stewards of the land, helpers and healers, and if done right there are room and food for everyone. We don’t damage habitats, we encourage nature to make more.

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:
Here is what I do.

That is beautiful. Thank you!

Yeah Ulla:  Thanks for that comment.  

I'm enjoying this thread as a thought experiment.....

  "what if the cost of food goes up 10x?"

Taking the '10X' literally and not as an exaggeration means most everything we buy more regularly becomes unaffordable ........
25# organic oatmeal 29 x 10=290
5# black beans $10 x10= 100
32 oz. ground coffee $15 x 10= $150
cabbage .50 per # x 10= $5 per #
5# organic brown rice $10 x 10= $100
local raw milk $6 a gallon x10=$60
local eggs $5 a dozen  x 10=$50

I think the milk and eggs we buy might not increase ten fold though...depends on the price of their feed and winter hay.

For us, the 'backyard food pump' would be root crops of all kinds along with foraged (within walking distance) fruits and greens and fungi.
Sweet potatoes are our big hope...both greens and roots.
They easily store for more than a year without much effort and are easy to propogate from slips. I grow both purple and orange for more nutrition.
..plus turnips and beets for roots and greens.
We love parsnips and have a few of them volunteering but I want to try salsify as a root where the greens are also edible and more likely to reseed abundantly.
I'm weeding sunchokes. They will never be gone and we enjoy them as a ferment but they will never be a reliable main food crop for us and the space is more valuable for other things.
We grow beans of all sorts, both green and dry
have a large variety of wild greens, mushrooms, persimmons within walking distance.

I think an abundance of saved seed will make all of the difference....that and hand tools.

This year, again, I packaged our extra seed and gave our library's free seed table a big boost.

I'm seeing more worked up dirt for gardens in yards here around town on our walks....lots of empty lots that could be used to grow food.
lots of room for small livestock within the town limits.

people here do help each other in spite of lifestyle, political and religious differences although in extreme circumstances as the price of food and fuel increases, I wonder?

The fruit tree point keeps coming up and it's a good one. Took about four years before my apple trees gave us anything worth picking, but now they just produce every year without much input at all. Potatoes and beans are great for quick calories but the trees are what really change the equation long term. Wish I'd planted more of them sooner.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:.......but let a divisive person show up (this happened while I was woof hosting), and all the dynamics change.  

The older I get, my vulnerability increases.  Once I have taught what I know, and a productive system is in place, there are those who would have no further use for me.

This may be a realistic viewpoint for sure -AND- I like to think people at times can collectively take the high road.  I don't like the idea of making myself invaluable to tyrants, practical and expedient as that path may be.  Rather in the "glass is half full" vein, I hope that the productive and more benevolent approach to living might become infectious and be cause for ostracizing a divisive entity by other members of the community you have mentored.  That 'infection' would be cause for those around you to consider you more in your older years with gratitude for what you have put into motion and have taught them by example.

For a quick, catchy musical morale boost in this regard, have a listen to Mark Knopfler's "Done with Bonaparte"......

Keep sowing, growing, sharing.....caring.

Tim Holloway wrote: There's also blackberries, but while the plants will rapidly take over any unclaimed real estate

Wait, how do I get my blackberry to do that?  :D

I have a thornless blackberry. It makes big canes (6 feet tall), tho rarely grows new leaves from old canes, and makes occasional fruit (so sweet you really have to mix it with something sour) but it is still coming off the same base that I planted five or six years ago. The thornless raspberries have spread out a bit (they are easy to control, just yank up what I don't want), but not the blackberry. That end of the garden tends hot and dry, so maybe that's the secret.

Also, the bus is in the river and the tyrant became an interesting tree ornament. :D

Rez,
Mine spread by tip rooting because I rarely get them pruned well.
Ours only bear fruit on the previous years new growth.  I cut out any canes that have already fruited.
Sometimes the canes are almost horizontal and they tip root 6'-8' away...so they are popping up everywhere.  They bear better with more moisture but survive our hot droughty summers.

 I have a thornless blackberry. It makes big canes (6 feet tall), tho rarely grows new leaves from old canes, and makes occasional fruit (so sweet you really have to mix it with something sour) but it is still coming off the same base that I planted five or six years ago. The thornless raspberries have spread out a bit (they are easy to control, just yank up what I don't want), but not the blackberry. That end of the garden tends hot and dry, so maybe that's the secret.
 

I get that there is no political whiffing allowed, though I will say that one's ability to garden is predicated on one's ability to control land. That is a entirely different subject and will become more or less relevant depending on the nature of the "calamity". In my mind foraging is the ultimate skill-set and one that is completely mobile and not tied to one's ability to secure real estate.

My thornless blackberry usually grows all new canes, then I cut out the old dry ones -- last year was the first time I saw any new growth on the previous year's canes (and then on only one of them). It had all its fruit on a single brand new cane. This was also the first time it had enough fruit to make a bowl worth. Clearly an entirely different variety.

My thornless raspberries only do new canes (old ones always just die and disappear), and the new ones fruit randomly. Some years a lot, sometimes only a few, but not distinctly every other year (the sweet crab apple does that).

If you already have berries or know someone who will give you a “start” excellent!

If you are considering buying berry cane, there’s some vocabulary.  The berries that bear on the new canes are “primo cane” berries.  There’s probably a name for the varieties that bear on last year’s wood, but I can’t say what it is.  Which kind you have affects how you prune it.  I like the primo cane thornless ones!  I like to have both an early and mid season variety.  And rather than prune them, I keep the goats out for a couple years let a thicket develop, then let them eat them to the ground.  If I have 3 thickets and the goats eat one a year, it keeps them from taking over.

Robin Suggs wrote:I get that there is no political whiffing allowed, though I will say that one's ability to garden is predicated on one's ability to control land. That is a entirely different subject and will become more or less relevant depending on the nature of the "calamity". In my mind foraging is the ultimate skill-set and one that is completely mobile and not tied to one's ability to secure real estate.

Foraging also requires access to land. If it is private land and times are tough, landowners may become quite defensive. They do not know your intent. It's hard to know how this would play out on public land in tough times.

Access to land is different from owning land. In North America, the amount of unused land that could be cultivated as gardens is staggering. But access requires a deep level of trust on the part of the landowner (and in normal times, their insurers). That trust, and access, is earned through family connections, community organizations and churches, and "people who know people who will stand up and vouch for you." It's something to be cultivated and earned, like a garden.

One solution to this could be community gardening wherever there are appropriate public spaces. This may not supply food enough to fill everyone’s belly, but it brings people together and helps people to have a space to grow some food. I agree, access to land is an issue and I have a feeling there is no quick solution to that problem.

You can also forage on some public land, and the Nature Conservancy is now allowing foraging on their land, but only for individual, lower impact, subsistence purposes, not commercial or exploitative individual harvesting. If there are any oak forests where you can go forage for acorns where this is the case, it could be very helpful.

Also if there are abandoned private lands, those tend to be places where foraging can take place. Oftentimes these are areas that have no actively maintained trails or roads through them. I can’t say any of this for certain, as it’s up to people to determine where it is safe and suitable to forage.

Oftentimes people will let you forage if they know you even if they have little interest in the plants themselves. They see it as no competition and would rather eat cultivated vegetables.

I know someone who has a fifty-or-so foot row of rhubarb and can never eat it all. Up the hill there is another abandoned patch. These food plants can last for decades or centuries and continue to multiply as they do.

Some people have fruit trees, but they might be elderly, or too busy, etc. and not up for the task of harvesting, and they might let you have some, or perhaps all, possibly if you pick some for them too. Lots of things can be done!

In such a situation, would people recommend considering getting dairy goats, or perhaps sheep, for instance? The price of good milk already is quite high. (Another tangent: small scale dairy farms perhaps might benefit, as they often manure their fields with what their cows poop out, at least on my neighbors’ farm. More and more I’ve seen cover crops being used as well. That or they let the cows pasture.) or perhaps hens? They seem to be the most popular animal to keep, at least on a small scale, but could we feed them self sufficiently if we didn’t have access to feed from the store?

I am living in a suburban place in Mexico. When I moved here out of the Puerto Vallarta area, I found someone who had Moringa seeds. I planted 4 and all came up through the winter. Easy peasy. When I tried to transplant the first one, I snapped the trunk. Three left. I started harvesting the leaves, beans, flowers, seeds in the late second  year and do so every quarter. All of Moringa is edible and when I air dry the leaves and powder them I have all of the minerals and vitamins , protein, and fiber my body  requires and have more to give away. Studies on the nutrition says it supports life on its own and has been used for starving people globally. I keep them at about 10 feet high and they are easy to harvest, hang to dry on a clothes line in my tiny yard, and powder in a couple of days. I gave one to a friend for his birthday and he let his grow. It was 10 feet high when I gave it to hime and now in one year it is 23 feet high and yielding huge amounts of leaves, flowers, beans, and seeds.  My current two  are in big plastic pots because I am a renter and can move every year or so. As soon as I move to a place with enough space to earth plant them, they will go in. I have 3 4 year old papaya trees grown from seed, ealso in pots, and at least 1 will fruit for me this year. I also maintain 50 lb of dried black beans, 25 lb of rice, and about 25 lb of assorted flours, baking soda, vinegars etc.  I will be  planting several shallow window boxes with carrots, beets, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and lettuces in the next new moon.  Zucchini is a plentiful yielder, and great picked young.  Dried beans can grow and provide plentiful green beans. As soon as I harvest a window box, I replant it with its next crop. Compost all scraps in a trash size bucket for replanting with excellent "gold" soil.  Assorted trees well spaced in whatever space you  have can provide assorted fruits. I have discovered that once I kicked the sugar habit, I can live very well on what I grow and buy some dairy, eggs, cheeses. Peanut butter is essential. I share with neighbours especially kids. You have gotta start NOW!  Learn as you go.  

Skirret
Good King Henry
Alexanders
Scorzonera
Rampion
Salola soda (commonly called Agretti or Burill)
Orach (also called mountain spinach)

Anyone see this video that randomly is popping up on youtube? mediaeval vegetables that don't sell well for commerial use and went out of fashion but are easy to grow and tasty, can be harvested again and again through the seasonn, or self-seed, the video claims.  But since it's got AI images the claims may be inflated.  My gf grows orach and had heard of Good King Henry but not the others, they sound more my speed than fussy annuals.  But on the other hand they are not native to here.

My "throw some sunchokes out" has not worked out nearly as well as I had hoped.  My soil is so so so sandy.  What wants to grow here: peach trees (I'll have a crop this year if the late frost doesn't crack them next week...and by late frost I mean normal time frost but after an 80 degree day in early April, @$$#$@#), and sumac trees, mulberries and chestnuts are chugging along but not amazeballs, wild carrots really love it here but cultivated carrots seem to say "you got this, I'll let you be the carrots here" and the wild ones say "I rule this joint, die mofos."  So, that happens.  The sunchokes are few and not deep and tiny and sad this year..trying new soil from a landscape company that he had to drop somewhere (he paid me!), and also mulching the sunchokes a bit.  Raspberry PLANTS grow well but I got almost no berries.  Bittersweet grows well, hazelnut shrubs do OK but again not a lot of nuts. Oaks and acorns do fine.  Some shag hickory, though my trees have never produced.  The apple tree at the bottom of a slope, gangbusters yield, the ones at the top almost nothing.  Same with crab apples in the neighborhood. And groud cherries do OK.  

Since sumac isn't really a food plant I use it like daikon radish--build soil, give some shade in spots, draw nutrients up from deep down.  It's my companion plant and emotional support animal.  Maybe I can coppice them?? I don't know.  Chop some branches off for mulch nearby?  

radishes in the imported soil beds did pretty well last fall, I had greens until December.  Survived under the snow even.

dandelions do pretty well, violets do amazing and I am sick of the flavor now so i will not be eating much more, and one forage chicory germinated out of the thousands of seeds I scattered (and nowhere near where I planted it).  So that happened.  I hope it self-seeded there and I get some more this year...

garlic doesn't do terrible, ad walking onions don't walk.  They don't die but they don't walk either.  I mulched them, I helped them, they still just didn't have enough water.  

Grape vines doing OK, no grapes yet.  Doesn't anything want to fruit around here??  Other than the legacy (conventional, treated with black sludge on the trunk) apple tree, it seems like the answer is usually a resounding no.

And my pond died

I may try to get me some low tannin oaks.  There's a black locust next door and I got some honey locusts from Hershey line, they're surviving but have remained small small.  It was a super drought this last year, but this year is a water year so I think we'll be OK and things can finally get a toehold.

I may sonic bloom some things this year if I'm not too lazy or unmotivated.

Thanks for letting me process.

You can make pasta from boiled sumac bark—I tried it last winter. The one thing to be aware of is that after the outer bark is peeled off, there is another green layer that’s full of fibers that needs to be taken out as well. After that the bark is tender and can be boiled into something good for eating (or eaten raw).

Boiling, drying, and grinding into flour could be another option.

I wouldn’t trust a video like that, but there are plenty of good green vegetables out there. I’ve tried many of those vegetables but they wouldn’t germinate and/or grow, which is not a universal sign of wrongness but maybe an indicator that they aren’t for every situation. I haven’t gotten my hands on skirret, or tried salsola.

Campanula takesimana, or Korean bellflower, is a relative of rampion, and grows very well for me. I harvest the greens for a very long period of time. I am trying to get their cousin, creeping bellflower, to establish, but they seem more delicate comparatively.

Have you tried wild carrots yet? I find them sort of similar to parsnips in texture, interestingly.

paul wheaton wrote:
What if the price of food goes up 10x?

Naturally, if you have a humble home and a large garden, this isn't such a big deal.  In fact, with a humble home and a large garden, all of politics becomes small and far away.

The third leg of the stool that I humbly suggest Paul is missing is storage.  In 2024, I grew a massive garden and had a fantastic yield and watched it rot away as I did'nt have a good way to store most of my produce.  A real bummer, in fact it put me off gardening in 2025.  I share peoples' concerns about food prices in 2026 and 2027    so this year I am biting the bullet and putting in a root cellar. I have seen the MotherEarthNews plans for a new septic tank converted to root cellar and I think thats the most economical way to go.  I can buy a new 2300gallon septic tank locally for C$4800 plus delivery.  If anyone has better ideas for a root cellar I'm all ears as I have nt bought the tank yet.

The other thing I am doing is learning how to bake.  I was that guy who bought too much flour during the pandemic and this might be the time to put it to good use.
If I did nt already have a good supply of flour Id stock up now before scarcity kicks in.  Making your own bread and pasta must be cheaper than buying as you are cutting out the middle men.

I am lucky enough to be in a spot financially where if food prices skyrocketed I'd still be able to make ends meet (was nt always that way--- I have a multi-year war against debt to thank for that) but by providing my own sustenance I reduce the demand and maybe ever so slightly help those less fortunate.  

As a group I have to believe us permies will weather this storm better than most, but I am concerned for those that dont have the physical or informational resources that we have.  

Anyways just my 2 cents.

How long do you want to store produce? Some keeps well enough to winter in your garage (mine stays about 40F degrees in one end and 50F in the other, so works tolerably well), but a lot of it doesn't. I've sometimes had absurd quantities of tomatoes, and I've sliced 'em up, seasoned and dried 'em. I've been eyeing a proper freeze-dryer.

Id want my potatoes, winter squashes & apples to last till May. I dont own a garage and I'd have to heat it if I did.  My woodstove is in my basement so I cant keep my produce down there as its too warm.

paul wheaton wrote:Now we are getting into my favorite kind of conversation.

I feel like the core is:

  - gardening and not farming (farming choices are very different)

  - things that can be harvested in deep winter

Growing a high calories per acre crop is easy.  But it becomes difficult if you have to have a lot of discipline to harvest at the right moment.  And if you miss that moment, it quickly drops to zero calories per acre.  So a large harvest window is handy.

My starter staples are:

sunchokes
walking onions
annual kale (which reseeds itself)

Am I missing a fundamental point here?
I get that those 3 are self propagating, long lasting, low maintenance, storage free. But if we are considering a 10 fold price increase, will those 3 growies be sufficient as a starter pack for a balanced, daily diet in the depths of winter?
Of the 3, only kale is worth growing for me because the other 2 have easy,cheap substitutes .
I know this is climate based and those 3 probably do well in most climates but I still can't see the benefit of focusing on those 3 things to start with. Sure, add in wild/ weed foraging and the occasional fruit in season but I can't see how growing sunchokes, an allium and kale/chard is going to help curb expenditure on food in such a scenario.
I have grown and eaten sunchoke, I can't see it as a staple food source.
Grains (as a staple crop) are out- too much input and too energy intensive. I think Geoff Lawton proved that with an experiment one year. Bread /pasta/pie/seitan are luxury items if you need to grow your own flour.
Animal protein production requires a significant input and external dependency-especially if done on a small acerage- and still has a large "crop failure" risk through disease, predation, slower breeding cycles in winter etc. In a 10 fold scenario a person would be better off eating the feed of the animal instead of converting it into animal protein. I think 2 exceptions  would be eggs and fish- for obvious reasons- but there are still risks involved. They could be very unreliable sources of protein.
Hunting/trapping isn't an option for a large portion of the world's population, and in any case animal numbers would drop significantly if everyone got in on it.
If we're looking at food security, we'd best limit the risk factors as much as possible to guarantee adequate affordable nutrition.
So we're left with growing calories and there has to be a better staple than sunchokes. I'm willing to change my diet to build a better world, but I can't see a nutritional reason to force someone to eat sunchokes every day!

Brian White wrote:The situation is bleak ... because nitrates are the biggest  problem

I responded to this once before, with the usual permie-mindset stuff about using urine and humanure.

But of course the short-term problems are bigger than peeing in the garden can fix.

I made a cider-press thread to talk about one possible solution that big ag crop producers could implement, and the more I look into it the more it seems that it would work to pretty much wipe out the need for nitrate fertiliser - Can changes in crop rotation allow big ag to eliminate the need for synthetic fertiliser?

I found a lot of very useful information in this article.

In short it seems that the USA, India and Canada have it totally within their grasp to replace nitrogen fertiliser with increased legume production, needing to increase the area of legumes grown by around a third.

Whilst China, Ukraine, Pakistan, France and Germany are going to have their work cut out for them if the nitrogen fertiliser supply dries up because they are going to need to increase it by up to 2800%.

If enough of us switch our diets so that we all eat more beans, it might be possible to prevent the cost of food going up 10x.

Jeff Marchand wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:
What if the price of food goes up 10x?

Naturally, if you have a humble home and a large garden, this isn't such a big deal.  In fact, with a humble home and a large garden, all of politics becomes small and far away.

The third leg of the stool that I humbly suggest Paul is missing is storage.  In 2024, I grew a massive garden and had a fantastic yield and watched it rot away as I did'nt have a good way to store most of my produce.  

Which is why I am currently leaning so intently on a garden loaded with foods that can be harvested in winter.  It transforms food storage issues from "necessity" to "nice to have".  

Paul,

I am thinking maybe your ability to harvest during the winter is related to the aridity of your climate? Water has a lot of thermal mass, and in my climate (same hardiness zone as yours but much wetter) the ground is saturated for the duration of the winter, and frozen. If there were less water in the soil it would take less time for that soil to thaw, and even while it was frozen it would not be as rigidly solid. That thermal mass would also to some extent prevent snow from melting, as it sucks in the heat from meltwater and turns it back to ice.

I do know some places (forests and woodlands specifically) where the soil doesn’t get inundated and freezes to a much lesser extent compared with an open meadow or pasture.  I have dug into the soil and gathered ramps in winter. But even then, I wouldn’t rely entirely on thaws—last winter there was only one thaw the whole winter long.

I’ve tried the boiling water to dig sunchokes as well and here it tends to puddle on the ground rather than go down, a result of the soil being an inundated, frozen icecube.

Drying seems like a very powerful technique—I mentioned it before but certain Native people of the Plains dig up prairie turnips every year, peel and braid them, and hang them to dry, and it lasts them as a staple through the winter. On the GOOF podcast I think it was Miranda who mentioned that sunchokes dry incredibly well?

Nettles and apples and acorns are also good foods to dry in large quantities. Unfortunately, last time I tried to dry apples, enough would disappear from the jar that the next batch would fit just perfectly. 😋

"Bread prices will be getting high"...

I was lucky enough to find a used bread machine at the thrift store.  I little experimentation gave me a recipe I really like for whole wheat loaves. Ingredients cost pennies (I'll do a calc if anyone cares), but the machine bakes only one loaf at a time -- takes ~4 hours. About 10 minutes of my time to load the ingredients in the machine, then just remember to take the loaf out when done, so that it keeps its full size. I think my recipe makes about a 1.5 pound loaf.

Hi @ll!

I think food prices do not only change what we buy, but also how we live. When families are under more economic pressure, many life decisions become harder. I do not mean this politically, only as a practical consequence of rising costs.

I also believe it is impossible to produce absolutely everything we consume. But we can consume less, produce a bigger share of our own food, and exchange the rest, either by selling something to buy what we need or by trading directly with other producers. My goal is not total self-sufficiency, but rather to recover sovereignty over what I eat, make it healthier, and reduce outside dependence as much as possible. There are also limits we do not always look at clearly. You can live off-grid, yes, but if the land is small or water is scarce, resources will always be limited. And if the land is large, the work multiplies. So the real question becomes: how much work does it take to produce what I need? Bill Mollison was already pointing in that direction in permaculture design: good design should reduce unnecessary labor and make energy use more efficient.

I am personally in transition toward my own place, and I hope to do it accompanied rather than alone. But today I was thinking about the responsibility of caring for the small piece of the planet that falls into your hands, and trying to leave it more alive, more fertile, and more natural than you found it. As for preservation, I find old techniques fascinating. In Afghanistan, for example, people have preserved fresh fruit in sealed clay containers buried in the ground, and have kept grapes fresh for months that way. To me, that means we have lost many traditional skills because of the convenience of plugging in a refrigerator, but it also means that other ways may still be viable.

And I think that, in the end, this is what many of us in this forum have in common.