How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It - James Wesley Rawles [48]
Flashlights and Battery-Powered Lamps
The advent of white light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the 1990s revolutionized flashlight technology. Up until a couple of years ago, I would not have recommended buying an electric camping lantern, since they were such battery hogs. But now, a new generation of white LED lanterns use remarkably little current, allowing batteries to last a surprisingly long time. For example, a Tuff Brite rechargeable LED lantern can operate for up to seventy hours on one charge. These are available from Northern Tool and Equipment and several other Internet vendors.
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GARDENS AND LIVESTOCK
While your larder will help you to get through the tough times, there is no substitute for fresh food and meat raised on your own land. This will be a large investment of time, money, and other resources, but it will pay off when you are able to pair a fresh salad, eggs, and a glass of milk with your cornmeal made from stored grain. This chapter will address basic techniques for starting a garden and raising livestock. My wife is the real expert here, so I’ve relied heavily upon her for the advice on these pages.
Gardening
Sizing a New Garden
As a scant minimum, I’d recommend a twenty-five-foot-by-thirty-foot garden plot for a family of four. By using French Intensive (double-dug; snipurl.com/hrmgo) or biointensive Square Foot Gardening (snipurl.com/hrn4c) techniques, you can get a huge yield out of a small garden space, but if you have the acreage available and can afford the extra fencing material, then by all means make your fenced garden plot two or three times that size. This has several advantages. First, you will have room to maneuver a tractor. Using a tractor disk will save you a tremendous amount of labor, especially the first year that you develop the garden soil. Second, the additional garden space can be used to grow extra crops for barter and charity. You never know how many relatives will show up on your doorstep on TEOTWAWKI+1.
Even if you don’t have the time or the inclination to build and fence now, at least buy the materials for fencing a big garden in the future—when such supplies may be difficult to obtain.
Small-Scale Grain Growing, Harvesting, and Processing
You will want to grow seasonal vegetables in your garden to keep your diet varied and delicious. Some of the hardiest, most nutritious, and easiest to grow are radishes, carrots, turnips, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, summer squash, and Swiss chard. For detailed advice on how to grow these, I recommend the book Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon. Since what you will grow will vary greatly by region and according to personal taste, we will focus on how to grow the most important part of your harvest: grain.
SurvivalBlog reader Adam in Ohio provided a link to Cornell University’s Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (chla .library.cornell.edu), which includes thousands of antique farm references that could prove very useful. Keep in mind, however, that nineteenth-century safety standards were considerably more relaxed than today’s, so old formularies and farm-knowledge books often do not include any safety warnings. Use common sense around chemicals, flammables, unwarded gears and cutting blades, heavy objects, and so forth. Stay safe.
The book Small-Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon, is an invaluable reference that every prepared family should have on their bookshelf. Used copies can often be found at bargain prices on eBay or Amazon.
When growing grain, you need non-hybrid (heirloom) varieties of seed stock, so that the seed you save from each harvest will breed true and continue to produce year after year. Hybrid varieties won’t. Heirloom seed is available from the Seed Savers Exchange,