Grocery Prices Growing New Gardeners?

One can easily imagine that current issues with grocery prices and even availability getting worse before they get better. Some of my friends and SM contacts are reaching out to me confidentially about putting in a garden, with no idea how to start. Some are genuinely concerned about being able to feed themselves in the months ahead.

Like most things, gardening is easy enough for a six-year-old to do, after twenty years of practice. So how might we advise beginners or hobbyists to effectively negotiate future caloric challenges - assuming they have a strip of land (or a spread of porch containers) available for cultivation?

My advice always begins with saving seeds and re-rooting store-bought produce. When it comes to buying seeds, I find many confidential inquirers are baffled by the wide selection on the seed rack, and the soaring prices of mostly-empty garden seed packets. After nearly a decade of conversation and experimentation, I've started telling everyone who asks (and a few who don't) to go out now and buy the big bags of seeds - the ones not typically found in the garden section. Nothing fancy. Just the basics:

Popcorn.
Beans.
Bird Seed.

To my way of thinking, the 16-bean Soup bag is the best protein starter kit out there. They're all easy to plant. They grow fast. They start feeding you at the green bean stage, and all of them make dry beans for easy storage.

Popcorn sounds silly, but it grows remarkably well and grinds easily into grits and corn meal. (And it makes popcorn!) And while we're on the subject of corn, those fifty pound bags of  deer corn also germinate just fine, and can grind directly into meal as well.

A cheap brand of mixed wild bird seed offers a bounty of produce. From a single bag, you can grow sunflower seeds, wheat, barley, millet, and even milo. Pick the individual seeds out, or simply broadcast the mix over minimally prepared soil. Plant in the fall, and you'll get a crop of winter wheat and summer millet.

Cheap. Easy. Almost naive-proof, and the potential for growing real food in a short time. And who knows, if the beans and sunflowers are successful, folks might be encouraged to try some of the tomato or watermelon seeds they might have saved.

I grow couve galega, which is a perennial kale that seeds freely.

I like to grow extras and keep them in a plug-tray so if anyone shows any interest I can supply them with plants quickly and easily - all they need to do is prepare a bit of ground, which can be as easy as sticking some cardboard over it for a few weeks to clear the weeds and maybe putting dried grass clippings over it to mulch it, then bodge a hole into the cleared land and stick a young plant in and keep it watered until it's found its feet.

I also offer out prickly pear pads so people can grow nopales and fruit.

At the moment I also have spare young lovage plants which will flavour soups and stews for them for the next decade or so.

I usually have a couple of fruit-tree species propagating too, either from seed or cuttings. At the moment I have spare young apple and quince babies that I could donate to anyone showing any interest. I'll probably take fig cuttings this winter, and maybe a few of my favourite plum.

And of course I send them home with basic planting and care advice, and instructions to come back and get more if the first lot don't work or if they want to expand.

Since 2020 the grocery prices have slowly increase with this year being the highest.

Luckily, I have a cupboard full of food storage items so I only buy a few frozen foods.

Your half acre in Alabama might have edible plants that you might learn to identify.

Anne Miller wrote:
Your half acre in Alabama might have edible plants that you might learn to identify.

Indeed!

We allowed the yard to grow on its own for most of the first year to give natives a chance to declare themselves. Since then we have 'domesticated' native onions, garlic, ground cherries, dewberries, dandelion, curly dock, narrow and broadleaf plantains, desert chicory, passon vine, muscadines, and several wild sunflowers, along with at least five species of edible fungi, mainly by either staying out pop their way, or transplanting them into garden beds.

We've also relocated a number of volunteer peach, black cherry and pecan trees from the yard to the surrounding woods, and brought in plants to re-establish blueberries, elderberries and Chickasaw plums in areas where we cleared away invasive species.

We're constantly putting in new garden beds. So far, he easiest, cheapest way we've found to beat the heavy clay soil into submission is to cover it with leaves and sawdust (free from the mill down the road), then add bird seed, popcorn and beans.